Human Psychology And Politics

Political polarization dominates the global news today. Take the debate on climate change. Sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg recently gave an emotional speech at the U.N. General Assembly calling for immediate climate action. Liberals around the world sent out enthusiastic messages of support; conservsatives, in turn, barraged the liberals for supposedly using a child with Autism Spectrum Disorder to advance their political agenda. When President Donald Trump tweeted an ironic dig about Thunberg, liberals were disgusted by his response. Within minutes, the topic of conversation had shifted from the core of the matter—climate change—to partisan mudslinging and fear mongering.
How did our political world become so polarized? This is a question on the mind of many psychologists today. And as with any scientific question, there are multiple approaches to answering it, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.
The Individual Differences Approach
One increasingly popular approach focuses on individual differences—or the stable psychological differences between people. People may have different levels of intelligence, empathy, and creativity, for example, and these differences can be linked to many types of behavioral patterns, including altruistic behavior, learning outcomes in school, and most recently, voting practices.
Compelling new data suggests that those who are cognitively inflexible—who tend to think about the world in terms of strict rules and categories—voted at higher rates for Brexit in the latest U.K. referendum, suggesting that committed nationalists have more rigid thinking and are less likely to change their mind than people in the middle of the political spectrum.
Others have found that a psychological trait called metacognitive skill—the process of thinking about your own performance (imagine, for example, taking a math exam in high school, and being either really good or bad at estimating how well you did)—appears to be predictive of polarized political beliefs.
One set of researchers found that people who hold radical political views, on both the left and the right of the political spectrum, score lower on metacognition, have less insight into their own performance on a simple unrelated perception task, and were slower to learn from their own mistakes. One takeaway from this research is that polarized individuals may simply be less good at considering evidence contrary to their own views, and are more apt to swiftly disregard the opinions of their opponents.
The Contextual Approach
This set of individual differences research echoes a long tradition of thought about political polarization. In 1951, the philosopher Eric Hoffer published his famous essay "The True Believer," in which he dissected what motivates followers of mass movements like communism and Nazism. He wrote: “All movements, however different in doctrine and aspiration, draw their early adherents from the same types of humanity; they all appeal to the same types of mind.” The individual differences approach to political polarization empirically tackles this very notion, pointing out which psychological traits may cause us to hold radical beliefs.

By - Abhishek Singh
Content - https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/social-learners/201910/the-psychological-roots-political-polarization