How the DMV Saved Christmas

Shared irritation brings us together

This week, as Christmas approached, my wife and I stood in line outside the DMV, waiting for a new license plate. We were about sixth in line on the sidewalk of a strip mall. In front of us was another couple, maybe slightly older. The wife lit up a cigarette and power-dragged it, reducing it to a stub in under a minute. She threw the butt on the ground, stepped it out, and then started making out with her husband. I wondered if he enjoyed the smoky kiss.

Behind us was a man wearing a fleece jacket over medical scrubs. He was jittery and clearly annoyed by the line. Speaking to no one in particular, he mentioned he’d been up for 16 hours at the hospital. After a few more minutes of waiting, he said aloud, “All this will change in January. Things will be more efficient.”

I assumed he meant Trump’s incoming administration would somehow streamline the inefficiencies of the DMV in the Food Lion Plaza in Carrboro, North Carolina. I wasn’t sure how exactly that would work but gave a quick nod.

The DMV line strikes me as the perfect site of intergroup contact, where people from different classes and political persuasions interact to find common ground. There are other places like this too, like the Beer Store in Pennsylvania, where folks from all walks of life converge to grab a case of Yuengling.

Interactions at the DMV are often superficial—a quick mention of the length of a line—but they can be deeper. When I talked with my wife about an upcoming medical procedure I was dreading, the pro-efficiency man in scrubs behind me perked up. He reassured me the procedure was both important and pretty easy. Despite his exhaustion and irritation, he was genuinely compassionate.

In fact, I wonder if our collective irritation at the line might have nudged along our mutual connection. Work by Stefano Balietti and colleagues shows that connecting over shared interests and identities increases cooperation, even when we disagree about politics. In an online platform, the researchers paired people who politically disagreed but shared some other interests. For example, Joseph and James might be told that they have opposite stances on wealth redistribution but were told (truthfully) that they were born in the same city, liked the same types of movies, and both really enjoyed hiking.

The study found that people who shared lots of “incidental similarities” (bottom right pane below) felt much closer to one another compared to people who didn’t share common identities (bottom left pane). These commonalities helped situate their political views as just one difference among many similarities, which made them more open to interacting.

Figure 1. A 2021 paper found that people who disagree about politics can often bond over “incidental similarities,” like common hobbies, identities, and interests (Balietti et al., 2021).

My own research, led by Curtis Puryear, highlights how recognizing moral similarity is particularly powerful. Democrats and Republicans consistently overestimate how different their moral values are, thinking that the other side approves of basic moral wrongs, like infidelity, embezzlement, and even animal abuse, when virtually nobody does. Our studies found that reminding participants that another person also condemned an obvious wrong (like animal abuse) improved their perceptions of one another. Emphasizing moral similarity also made political opponents more willing to work together.

Recognizing similarity between two different people can be more minimal. It can even be downright banal—like the shared irritation of waiting in line for car tags. Boredom and annoyance are just as "human" as sweeping emotions like love, hope, and sorrow. Yet, they rarely get the same recognition as universal connectors between people.

The problem with these grand emotions is that people can feel them in opposite situations. After the election some people might feel sorrow and another joy. Highlighting these emotions can divide us instead of uniting us. But everyone gets annoyed when someone in line blares a dumb TikTok without headphones. And we all hate it when someone hogs the shared armrest on a plane.

And we can use this common humanity to make the holidays more understanding. Over the next week, as we’re encouraged to focus on joy and love while talking to people we often disagree with, perhaps pick a different starting point: irritation. Talk about the irksome people or situations that get under your skin, like your pedantic cousin, or your parents’ back-maiming pullout bed.

The article Bitching Is Bonding makes a compelling case for the power of complaint to connect, highlighting how discussions of annoyance can validate feelings and showcase mutual vulnerability. As I discuss in Outraged (out in January!), validation and vulnerability are essential for bridging divides in political discussions.

The added beauty of bonding over minor irritations is that these topics aren’t contentious and are unlikely to get anyone’s hackles up. And—in a neat twist back to the research—these complaints can also reveal some moral similarity. If you’re both condemning someone for talking rudely to a server, you are finding moral common ground.

Of course, there’s a limit to the power of complaining—no one likes a constant downer. But just a touch of shared kvetching can remind us of our common humanity during the stress of Christmas and other winter holidays. We might celebrate different traditions or lean toward different political parties, but we can all agree: waiting at the DMV sucks.