Why Americans Hate Political Division but Can’t Resist Being Divisive

No one likes polarization. According to a recent poll, 93% of Americans say it is important to reduce the country's current divides, including two-thirds who say it is very important to do so. In a recent Five-Thirty-Eight poll, out of a list of 20 issues, polarization ranked third on a list of the most important issues facing America. Which is… puzzling.

The puzzle is this: How can we be so divided if no one wants to be? Who are the hypocrites causing division and hatred while paying lip service to compromise and tolerance?

If you ask everyday Americans, they’ve got their answer. It’s the elites. Tucker Carlson, AOC, Donald Trump, and MSNBC. While these actors certainly are polarizing, it takes two to tango. We, the people, share some of the blame too. Even us, writing this newsletter, and even you, dear reader.

But this leaves us with a tricky question, why would we contribute to a divide that we can’t stand? To answer this question, we need to understand the biases and motivations that influence how we answer the question, “Who’s at fault here?” And more importantly, we need to understand the strategies that can get us out of conflict.

The Blame Game

The Blame Game comes in two flavors: either/or. Adam or Eve, Will Smith or Chris Rock, Amber Heard or Jonny Depp. When assigning blame in bad situations, our minds are dramatic. Psychology studies show that we tend to assign 100% of the blame to the person we see as the aggressor, and 0% to the side we see as the victim. So, what happens when all the people who are against polarization assign blame for polarization? You guessed it. They give 100% of the blame to the opposing party and 0% to their own. They “morally typecast” themselves as 100% the victim of polarization and the other side as 100% the perpetrator.

We call this moral “typecasting” because people’s minds firmly cast others into roles of victim and victimizer in the same way that actors get typecasted in certain roles. In the world of politics, if you’re a Democrat, you cast Republicans as victimizers, as consistently as Hollywood directors cast Kevin Hart as comic relief and Danny Trejo as a laconic villain.

But why do we rush to this all-or-nothing approach when the world is certainly more complicated? It’s because our brains love simplicity. In the realm of blame, we want one simple cause. In his recent book, “Complicit” Max Bazerman, professor at Harvard Business School, illustrated just how widespread this “monocausality bias” is. Bazerman gave a group of business executives the opportunity to allocate blame after reviewing a case of business fraud. 62 of the 78 business leaders wrote only one cause. Despite being given ample time and a myriad set of potential causes, these executives intuitively reached for their Ockham’s razor. In the same way, we all rush to blame a sputtering economy on the president, a loss on a kicker’s missed field goal, or polarization on the other side.

If you follow politics online, you may be familiar with these two images, each of which demonstrates a single cause for polarization—the other side. The first shows that liberals have turned into extremists over the last 13 years. The second shows that it is conservatives who are the extremists! In other words, they argue exactly opposite points, casting blame on the rival party for polarization in America today.

These graphics are good examples of typecasting the other side as the villain and show that people seem to have an allergic reaction to the topic of our side’s divisiveness and fixate upon their extremism. Political pundits call this behavior “whataboutism.” When the topic of our own polarization comes up, our minds go straight for “but what about the other side’s nasty behavior?!” As soon as someone mentions how our side might have contributed to our polarized climate, we feel compelled to clarify that the other side is the true villain, and our side was merely balancing the moral checkbook.

Moral typecasting and whataboutism help to define our current political moment, where misperceptions of political opponents abound, entire industries thrive off political villainization, and our legislature is bound by polarized gridlock.

Why is it so hard for us to accept even a little bit of blame for our own side?

If I’m to Blame…

Taking blame is hard because we worry that accepting any responsibility will tarnish our moral character. Taking blame feels bad because protecting our image as moral people is what gave us access to the protection of the group throughout evolution. We worry that if we are seen as even 5% culpable, our friends and colleagues will reject us.

But although we think that taking some blame makes you a bad person, taking a bit of blame makes you seem good! Acknowledging that you are wrong demonstrates humility, and humility is a virtue—it shows that you’re a thoughtful person who can be reasoned with. Conflicts, whether in a marriage, a friendship, or in politics, are rarely 100% someone’s fault, so being willing to accept some blame is evidence that you want to connect across divisions - a moral good!

If you’re asking “how can we stop” contributing to polarization, the answer is that we must learn to share. We need to learn to share blame and victimhood. That process starts by looking in the mirror. Jesus said in his famous “sermon on the mount”, “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”, and recently, one of our collaborators in the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding, Dr. Jake Womick, has been collecting data on how being critical of your own side can bridge political divides. If people recognize that you can sometimes see your own side as fallible, then you seem like an independent thinker, someone worthy of respectful discourse.

The power of accepting some blame works in our personal lives too. The best way to mend a dispute with your spouse is to offer a humble “I’m sorry”. In fact, deflecting blame is so hard on relationships that marriage researcher Dr. John Gottman describes defensiveness as one of his “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” — the four signs of trouble in relationships. The situation in American politics today mirrors the underlying dynamics of the toxic couple in your life. Each partner says they want the relationship to change for the better, but they prevent that change by constant defensiveness, failing to take even a little bit of blame.

Like an old married couple, Republicans and Democrats are stuck with one another. The logistics of splitting up are near impossible. We need to search for ways that we’re responsible for conflict and apologize. Researchers studying bigger conflicts than ours (like disputes between Hutus and Tutsis or Israelis and Palestinians) have found that moving from the idea of “you as 100% victim and them as 100% villain” can turn down the temperature on conflict. This idea is called “inclusive victimhood” and simply requires recognizing that your political opponents are also suffering. 

And it's clear that we’re all suffering from the climate of division today. In a recent poll, 85% of US Adults said that they thought the country was heading in the wrong direction, and many of these concerns are rooted in dissatisfaction with our polarized politics. It’s important to recognize that both liberals and conservatives are victims of this climate, but it’s even more important to recognize that we are all to blame. Instead of leaning into whataboutism and moral typecasting, we need to cultivate an ethic of responsibility. But this won’t be easy. Our moral instincts are to defend our moral righteousness.

But we know from our personal lives and from scientific research, that learning to share blame is the first step towards escaping a conflict. And after all, we do say we want out… Don’t we?