There has been much written about the impact of polarization on elections, political parties, and policy outcomes. But Keith Payne’s goal is more personal: to focus on what our divisions mean for us as individuals, as families, and as communities. This book is about how ordinary people think about politics, why talking about it is so hard, and how we can begin to mend the personal bonds that are fraying for so many of us.
Drawing upon his own research and his experience growing up in a working class, conservative Christian family in small town Kentucky, Payne argues that there is a near-universal human tendency to believe that people who are different from us are irrational or foolish. The fundamental source of our division is our need to flexibly rationalize ideas in order to see ourselves as good people.
Understanding the psychology behind our political divide provides clues about how we can reduce the damage it is causing. It won’t allow us to undo our polarization overnight, but it can give us the tools to stop going around in circles in frustrating arguments. It can help us make better choices about how we engage in political debates, how policy makers and social media companies deal with misinformation, and how we deal with each other on social media. It can help us separate, if we choose to, our political principles from our personal relationships so that we can nurture both.
A lot of writing has analyzed what polarization means for electoral horse races. Because the country is evenly divided, news stories and essays tend to focus on events and ideas that might tip a close election. That means they focus on factors like inflation, gas prices, how well the economy is doing, candidate messaging, and how much candidates have spent on political advertising. The intense news coverage creates the false impression that those are factors that drive politics for most people. In reality, those factors might only shift ten or twenty thousand votes. They are important for election outcomes, but in a country that is divided nearly fifty‑fifty, every tiny factor that influences 1 or 2 percent of the votes matters for election outcomes. Elections are obviously important, but the factors that swing close elections are not the factors that explain why the vast majority of people vote the way they do or believe the things they believe. This book is about why we are evenly divided in the first place, and that has little to do with how the economy is doing or political ads.
Plenty of essays and books have delved into the differences between progressivism and liberalism. Or neoconservatism and traditional conservatism. Or why traditional conservatism is really classical liberalism. All of the isms turn political and social life into a complex web of ideologies that might be important for academics and journalists but don’t mean much for the average person. Abstract ideas like socialism, racism, or fascism have become a primary way scholars go about understanding politics, and I think that’s a shame. The problem is that isms take interesting things that human beings do and turn them into abstractions with fuzzy boundaries. Then, when we want to talk about people doing interesting things, we have to argue that this particular thing is an instance of the general abstraction. Is this policy a case of socialism? Is that decision an instance of racism?
Throughout the book, I try to avoid using abstract isms. My goal is more personal. I want to focus on what our divisions mean for us as individuals, as families, and as communities. Whenever I encounter an ism, I want to take it apart and ask what people are actually doing, why they do it, and what it means to them. This book is not about politicians or political strategists or party organizations. It is about ordinary people making sense of their world in the best way they know how.
Sometimes it is shocking how differently people make sense of the same world. It has become more and more apparent for many of us in recent years that other people we thought we knew don’t just disagree with us; they see the world in a deeply different way than we do. The question is: Why? In this book I try to answer that question by understanding how people think about politics, the deeper meanings and identities behind our political worldviews,and why talking about it is so hard.
Most psychological accounts of the differences between liberals and conservatives focus on personality traits. They produce explanations in the form of “Liberals are like this, but conservatives are like that.” One popular theory argues that liberals, but not conservatives, are high on a personality trait called openness to experience. People who are open to experience like to try new and different things. They like to travel, to eat strange new foods from cultures around the world, and to listen to kinds of music they’ve never heard before. They like to do all the things that people low in openness to experience call weird. People who are low on the trait have more conventional tastes. They like traditional food, art, and entertainment. They like to do things they consider normal. It is easy to see how being open to experience fits our stereotyped mental images of cosmopolitan, epicurean liberals, while being less open fits our images of buttoned‑up conservatives. According to this theory, the liberal mind is a playful mind, and the conservative mind is a cautious mind.
One version of the openness theory argues that these personality differences are rooted in biological differences in sensitivity to threats. Studies show, for example, that conservatives are more revolted than liberals by the sight or smell of disgusting things. They also may have a stronger biological fear response to threats. Everyone shows an involuntary startle response when a sudden loud noise rings out, but conservatives jump a little higher than liberals do. Emotions like disgust and fear have evolved to protect us from threats. Disgust motivates us to avoid rotten food, excrement, and other things that might carry infectious disease. Fear prompts us to avoid physical threats to our safety. But we rely on emotions to manage not only physical threats but also social ones. This emotion‑based theory says that the reason liberals are more open to new experiences is because they are less emotionally sensitive to threats. Or stated differently, people who have highly sensitive emotional reactions to threats will be attracted to conservative ideas as a way to manage threats.
Another popular theory argues that liberals are flexible thinkers while conservatives are cognitively rigid. Studies show that conservatives score higher on a trait called need for structure, and another called need for closure. The idea is that conservatives want neat and simple answers, whereas liberals are comfortable with the messy gray areas of life. Other studies have found that liberals perform better on cognitive tests that require changing your frame of thinking. Conservatives perform better on cognitive tests that require sticking to a script and doing the same thing over and over. These findings are often interpreted as being flattering to liberals (freethinkers!) and unflattering to conservatives (dogmatic!), but they can just as easily be interpreted as saying that conservatives stick to principles and think decisively, whereas liberals are wishy‑washy. According to this theory, the liberal mind is limber, but the conservative mind is unbending.
The most popular theory for explaining ideological differences is the Moral Foundations Theory, which argues that liberals and conservatives have fundamentally different moral values. Both conservatives and liberals care about avoiding harm and being fair, but that is about all they share. Conservatives care much more than liberals about other values, such as loyalty to one’s group, moral purity (that is, protecting the sacred), and authority (that is, respect and obedience to social hierarchies). These foundations are described as modules, like little switches in the mind that turn on or off to trigger different mental reactions
These theories all capture something real about the psychology behind politics. Lots of research shows that liberals really do score a few percentage points higher on openness to experience than conservatives. People’s political orientation is correlated with their thinking styles and emotional reactions. And conservatives do report valuing purity, authority, and loyalty somewhat more than liberals do (about 1 point more on a 6‑point scale). But ultimately, I believe these theories are not very helpful in explaining why we see the world differently, for two reasons.
First, the differences are tiny. Personality traits, thinking styles, and values can explain only a few percentage points of the differences between partisans. They are just not large enough to explain the giant gulf separating us.
Second, and even more fundamental, these theories don’t tell us what we really want to know. They describe some of the differences between partisans, but as we will see in the chapters ahead, they are limited in their ability to explain how and why our political divides have come to take the shape they have. The sentence “Opium induces sleep because it is a soporific” is a classic example used in teaching the logical fallacy of circular reasoning. At first glance, it seems to explain something. But “soporific” just means “sleep‑inducing.” So the sentence doesn’t really explain anything; it just relabels it. The same thing happens with explanations based on isms, or those based on some inner property of the person. What makes these theories appealing is that they promise, at first glance, to give us insight into the ways that conservatives are essentially different from liberals. They play into the human desire to explain events by appealing to an inner essence that makes them what they are.
Essentialism is appealing because it is simple. Children come to understand the world by essentializing, because it helps track features that regularly go together. But it leads to errors. Preschoolers, for example, predict that a baby switched at birth will speak the language of its biological parents, not the parents who raise it, because of the kind of baby it “really” is. If asked, they think caterpillars have a different kind of blood than spiders do, because a caterpillar seems like a very different kind of thing than a spider. Tomatoes, young children will insist, have juicy vitamins, but carrots have solid vitamins.
Our tendency to focus on inner essences even extends to objects associated with people. We value a Picasso painting much more than an exact copy because it is the real thing. People will pay a lot of money for gum that was chewed by Britney Spears, or a sweater once worn by Marilyn Monroe, because it was connected in some way to the real people. But most won’t buy a sweater once worn by Hitler. They won’t even try it on. Evil and goodness are not contagious infections, and a sweater is nothing but woven threads. But it seems to carry with it some traces of the inner essence of the owner, transferred by touch as if it were some magic talisman.
If someone disagrees with us, the easiest way to explain it is by appealing to something about the inner qualities of the person. We often assume that they must be ignorant, unintelligent, or arguing in bad faith, because deep down, anyone can see the truth as we do if they have the right facts. Modern psychology theories are a bit more sophisticated than that. They don’t usually assume ignorance or unintelligence, but they often assume underlying personality traits or values that make some people like this but other people like that. By essentializing, we hope to gain a glimpse of the liberal mind and the conservative mind at work. But to me, essentializing theories ultimately leave us disappointed, because there is no liberal mind or conservative mind. There are only human minds trying to make sense of the circumstances in which they find themselves.
Personality differences have a hard time explaining the biggest predictors of partisanship. For example, about 90 percent of Black Americans and two thirds of Hispanic Americans support Democrats. About 60 percent of Whites support Republicans, and the Republican Party is more than 80 percent White. The likelihood that differences that large would happen by chance is impossibly small. In the social sciences, it is exceedingly rare to be able to account for 80 or 90 percent of any aspect of human behavior with a single variable, because human behavior is so complex. Any theory of political identities that does not grapple with these enormous differences is ignoring the elephant (or donkey?) in the room.
Are Black and Hispanic people really that much more open to experience than White people? Do they think so much more flexibly? And how in the world did innate modules for valuing social hierarchies end up primarily in the minds of White people? These personality‑based theories don’t do a very good job of explaining why our politics is so fractured around social groups.
The same problem holds for other sources of division. Why do about two thirds of people with an advanced degree support Democrats, whereas a similar majority of high school graduates support Republicans? Why did more than 80 percent of evangelical Christians support Donald Trump in 2020, while two thirds of the non‑religious voted for Joe Biden? The few percentage points that separate Democrats and Republicans on personality traits or values can’t come close to accounting for the chasms between the educated and the less educated, or evangelicals and the nonreligious.
The circumstances that push us in one political direction or the other are not only demographic. As we will see, the history of the particular city or town where people live casts a long shadow. We can predict the political leanings of residents today based on the systems of racial segregation and inequality that were set up decades ago. And we can predict with chilling accuracy where those systems were built by knowing how many people were enslaved in that city or town on the eve of the Civil War.
Arguments over history and race have become a political flashpoint. But they are often framed around whether the United States is “fundamentally racist.” This is just another version of essentialism, which is as misguided when talking about a country as when talking about individuals. A country isn’t “fundamentally” racist or not. There is no inner essence that makes a country what it is. Instead, there is a complex web of causes and effects. Our job, as I see it, is to understand how the facts and choices of the past have led to the circumstances in which we find ourselves today.
As a social psychologist, I study the ways that people respond to their social circumstances. My research suggests that our political tribes are primarily the result not of our inner essences but of our circumstances. Our political divisions result from basic facts about how all human minds work, when those minds find themselves in different situations. These circumstances, partly chosen and partly beyond our control, set us on very different paths. Once we start down those paths, we bend our view of the world to make sense from where we are standing.
My task in this book is to try to explain how people make sense of the world from these different circumstances, and therefore why the world looks so different from their various points of view. So we need to understand the history that has led us to our present circumstance, and the ways that the human mind goes about sensemaking. The degree of conflict and animosity around politics really has become much worse over the last two decades. But the people haven’t changed. Our minds haven’t changed. What has changed, as I argue in the final chapter, is our political environment.
To many people, the idea that liberals and conservatives differ not in our minds but in our circumstances feels unsatisfying. When we get into arguments with people on the other side, they certainly seem deeply different. When I give talks about my research, audience members will often come up to me afterward and tell me about a relative or a high school friend on the other side who is so irrational that there must be something deeply wrong with them. I think the simpler explanation is that there is something in all of us that desires—maybe even needs—to see them as utterly alien from us. Because if we are not essentially different, and our differences follow from the hands we are given to play in life, then that means that you or I could easily have been on the other side if things had shaken out a little differently. That is an uncomfortable thought for many people. Although this book is about the psychology of our political divisions, it is not about what is wrong with the other side. It is about understanding our own minds, our own circumstances, and our own blind spots as much as understanding those of other people.
In the chapters that follow I will explore how history, race,class, religion, and urban versus rural living set us on different paths, and how we come to rationalize our own point of view as the only right point of view. We will see how the same psychological responses that sort us into partisan groups attract us to a range of other ideas we fight about, from what counts as “fake news” to conspiracy theories. Those very same psychological responses blind us to our own logical contradictions. And they make it hard to have civil conversations about any of it, because we see our own side as arguing in good faith, but we see the other side as intentionally trying to do harm.
Understanding the psychology behind our political divide provides clues about how we can reduce the damage it is causing. To be clear, the message of this book is not a mushy “let’s all just get along.” There are good reasons for today’s partisan divides. I believe that some ideas are better than others, and that those ideas are worth fighting for. But the beautiful thing about the fragile experiment we call democracy is that it allows us to fight with words and votes, not guns and blood. Understanding the roots of our division can give us the tools to stop going around in circles in frustrating arguments. It can help us make better choices about how we engage in political debates, how policymakers and social media companies deal with misinformation, and how we deal with one another on social media. It can help us separate, if we choose to, our political principles from our personal relationships, so that we can nurture both. This book is part science, part history, and part memoir. The only way I know to tell this story is the way I learned it myself. So I’d like to introduce you to some places and people you ought to know.
ONE
THE ROOTS OF OUR DIVISION TIME, PLACE, HISTORY
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
—William Faulkner
Half an hour’s drive outside Lexington, Kentucky, you’ll pass a sprawling castle. It’s an honest-to-God castle made of stone, with turrets and a wall. The castle is in a town called Versailles. It’s pronounced “ver-sails.” If you try to pronounce it like the place Marie Antoinette lived, you will immediately be dismissed as an ignoramus and, worse, an outsider.
The landscape in that part of Kentucky looks like the postcards. There are rolling green hills with miles of white fences that let you know you are in horse country. This is the part of the state that has money. Nearby, in Bardstown, they distill bourbon. They run the Derby next door in Louisville. And all over the state, they raise tobacco. A place built on whiskey, smoking, and gambling is bound to have some colorful characters. But I want to show you that this place also holds clues to understanding our divided cultural moment, when cleavages of politics, race, class, and religion are making us rethink the world we once understood, and making us reconsider the people we thought we knew.
East of Lexington, the hills twist and yaw into the Appalachian Mountains. The Appalachians are so ancient that they formed when North America and Africa were still moving toward each other. It was before the dinosaurs, when plants ruled the earth and the best the animal kingdom had come up with were insects and scorpions. The continents plowed slowly into each other, pushing up the Appalachians like the wrinkle of metal when two cars collide. The highways in that part of the country cut straight through mountains, where sheer faces in the rock on both sides of the road were cut by explosives. You can still see the vertical lines in the rock where men drilled holes and dropped sticks of dynamite to send the sides of mountains tumbling down. In the middle of those rock faces, little streams of water pour out. There’s no hole, no tunnel. It just streams through the rock itself. In the winter they form slow-motion waterfalls of ice. To the people who live there, the mountains define their world. Towns exist only in the valleys between them, and they are not like in other parts of the country, where towns are square grids of streets. Here, a town is a single winding road at the bottom of the valley, with a line of weathered buildings on either side. From the air they look like dirty ribbons a child left behind.
But I did not grow up in the mountains. I grew up on the other side of Lexington, as the hills give way to the flat ground of western Kentucky. The landscape looked more like the plains and farmland of Illinois than the mountains to the east. A drive through that country is a flickering reel of corn, tobacco, and soybean fields. Here and there, a red tobacco barn. A curious number of the trees along the highway are slumped, even in summer, from the winter ice storms. The ice thaws quickly but leaves its marks long after on the trees’ hunched backs.
Our house was one of thirteen houses along Highway 60 in Maceo, population 400. The speed limit was 55, but it was a straight shot through the country, so the cars and eighteen-wheelers barreled through much faster. One summer day my brothers and I were playing in the front yard when a car ran off the road. As its right two tires left the road they sunk into the small drainage ditch separating our yard from the highway. The car flipped over and dug a trail through our yard, coming to rest upside down, halfway into the neighbor’s driveway. I didn’t see anything after that because my brothers and I were shooed inside. When we asked what happened to the people in the car, Mom said they would be fine and then changed the subject. We were not allowed to watch at the windows, so I could only see the blue and red lights flashing on the walls of the living room.
Highway 60 was a critical part of our lives, an artery connecting us to everything else. People who grow up in a town or a subdivision are not so dependent on a single piece of road, because their streets connect to other streets a block away. If one road is blocked, they can easily take another. But out in the country, if the highway was closed for some reason, we had to drive a half hour or more out of the way to get where we were going via the back roads. I knew our stretch of blacktop in minute detail, like the place where the white lines went wavy because the truck that was painting them swerved to avoid hitting a dog.
It was the road we took “into town” each day for school or church or the grocery. Going into town meant driving twenty minutes into Owensboro, a city with a population of about sixty thousand today. Almost every trip took us toward Owensboro, until sometime in the 1980s, when Mom stopped attending the Catholic church that we had always gone to. She started going to a Baptist church that was in the other direction, farther away from town. That was the start of a lot of conflict in my family, as Dad had not converted with her. We didn’t know it at the time, but the schism we were experiencing in my family was part of a trend happening all over the country. Some Protestant denominations were becoming aligned with conservative politics in a way that had not happened before. Now Christians who were called “born again,” “fundamentalist,” or “evangelical” were pulling away from mainline Protestant and Catholic churches. Mom didn’t like those labels. Her favorite was “Pentecostal,” named after the time the Holy Spirit appeared as tongues of fire above the heads of the disciples to distinguish the true believers from the infidels. My parents started to argue about what religion the children would be brought up in. Their arguments got angrier than they had ever been before, because now they had the edge of God’s Truth, and the stakes were eternal hellfire.
Still, the highway was our only connection to the rest of the world. My siblings and I would ride our bikes along the shoulder to the truck stop a mile away. We could buy candy at the gas station. Sometimes my parents would send me to pick up a pack of cigarettes. I was nervous the first time, thinking that the clerk wouldn’t believe me that they were for my parents and I would be in trouble. But she just put the Winstons down on the counter next to the red hot jawbreakers without asking any questions. Sometimes we would buy french fries and cokes at the diner and pretend we were in a city where you could just leave your house and walk into a restaurant. The waitress called us honey. The truckers ignored us. And in the parking lot you could find treasures, like plastic cigarette lighters and discarded issues of Playboy.
My parents, Mitch and Paula, bought the house on Highway 60 for $30,000 on a thirty-year mortgage, now long paid off. It has white aluminum siding, three bedrooms, and one bathroom. They raised seven of us in that house. My oldest brother, Jason, moved out on his own while I was still a baby. The next two oldest were my sisters, Shannon and Vicki. They shared one of the bedrooms. I shared the boys’ room with my younger brothers, Brad, Eric, and Mark.
My most vivid memories of that house are from the perspective of a child, looking up from the floor. I remember the baseboards and the electrical outlets in detail, and the bottoms of the gold-colored drapes that covered the picture window looking out onto the highway. I remember the thick loops of the brown shag carpet in the living room, where I would sit to play or watch TV. We had a big television, with the screen enclosed in a faux wooden case. One day it stopped working, so Dad came home with a smaller one that he stacked on top of it. It stayed like that for years. My sister asked when he was going to get rid of the bottom one, because it looked tacky. Dad said, look how lucky we are, we have two TV sets when some people don’t have any.
To relieve the tight space, Dad added on a room. He built it from the carport, a slab of concrete on one end of the house that the roof extended over. Dad and some of his friends framed the walls and floor themselves. They put up wood-grain paneling on the walls and linoleum on the floor. It was the biggest room in the house. And yet, it never felt like a part of the house. Instead of furnishing it with a couch or some chairs like a living room, Dad hung a porch swing from the ceiling. He installed a wood-burning stove to save on heating bills in the winter. That meant there was always a pile of split wood in the room, and just outside the door in the yard was a pile of logs waiting to be split. In the spring it was a hothouse for tomato plants waiting to be set out in the garden. In the summer it was a greenhouse where hundreds of tomatoes sat ripening. And in the winter, it was a cellar storing musty-smelling potatoes. Somehow that room always felt half finished and half outdoors. To this day, we call it the carport.
I can’t think about the house I grew up in without thinking about that room. It’s the physical embodiment of the way we lived. The house itself was small but tidy. Mom was constantly cooking and cleaning up after her brood, never caught up but never entirely overwhelmed either. The front yard had flower beds with neat borders that Mom tended with care. We had one hand groping toward the middle class. But chaos was always one step away.
A few years ago I sat visiting at the kitchen table with Mom and Dad, now a clean table in a quiet house. “It’s not as fun as it used to be,” Mom said. I was surprised, because I never thought she was having fun in those harried days of changing diapers, wiping noses, and washing dishes. I wondered whether she had in mind parts of life that a child doesn’t see. Or whether, with time, even the hectic parts had taken on a shine, the way we come to miss even the things that annoyed us about a lost love.
We moved into the living room, where the carpet of my youth had been replaced with hardwood floors. I remembered the time I sat up all night on the carpet with a toothache. I started on the couch, but a little kid can’t sit still with pain. With all the squirming and flailing, I kept ending up on the floor. Mom sat up with me, her crying on the shag carpet too.
A toothache isn’t an emergency when there is no insurance, so we had to wait until we could get an appointment at the country dentist, who charged lower rates and extended credit. I learned that night that certain kinds of pain come in waves. When a wave comes on you can fear it and try to avoid it, but then it just hurts worse because you feel both the pain and the fear. Or you can lean into it and pay attention to how it feels as it washes over you. It diminishes a little, the way that a faint star seen in the corner of your eye disappears when you look straight at it.
Mom never talked about her childhood at all, except to say that she preferred to be an adult. One of the only stories she told me was that when she was in school, she was drinking from a water fountain when another girl-whose first and last name Mom remembered-pushed her head down into the fountain and knocked out her front tooth. There was no money to get it fixed, so she endured the missing tooth for years, careful to hide her smiles. When she turned seventeen and could get a job, the first thing she did was get the tooth fixed.
We were all healthy, so one of our biggest medical expenses was childbirth. Each one would take a couple of years to pay off, just in time for the next one. Dad joked that he had the house paid off before he had the children paid off. He would lie awake worrying at night, and he slept worse at the beginning of the school year, when we all wanted name-brand shoes and clothes. Buying the more expensive brand for one meant someone else had to make do with less. Vicki and I both needed braces, but they could afford only one. Vicki got the braces, because Dad said that looks mattered more for girls.
Our house was an enormous step up for Dad. He grew up a few miles away, in Knottsville, in a farmhouse with dirt floors. In the winter, snow would blow in under the wall planks. It was the 1940s, and the Tennessee Valley Authority was still in the process of bringing electricity to the rural South. Mr. Roosevelt’s New Deal took a long time to reach our county. So Dad grew up without electricity or indoor plumbing. If we complained about sleeping two to a bed, he said we were lucky, because he had slept four to a bed. If we complained about waiting for the bathroom, he said try getting up in the middle of the night to go to the outhouse.
Dad can be a world-class bullshitter, but he did not exaggerate or romanticize his upbringing. He avoided talking about it, the way that some veterans avoid talking about their war. One story Dad told me stuck with me though. As a kid, he and a brother were at the general store. Other kids were hanging around there, eating peanuts and drinking bottles of Coca-Cola. A young man saw Dad looking longingly at the snacks and asked, “Are you Payne’s boys?” They said they were. He said he knew they “had come up rough.” He bought them a Coke and some peanuts, which Dad remembers the taste of today. I would think about that story when I hung around the truck stop. Dad always made sure I had a dollar or two for candy and fries.
If the highway defined our place on one side, it was the Ohio River that defined it on the other. Our backyard was a long strip of grass that turned into an acre of vegetable garden, where Dad spent all his time off. Beyond that was a little creek where I spent my time off. The creek had minnows and frogs, and now and then we would startle a rabbit and watch its white tail bound off through the woods. We learned to identify the hoofprints of deer that would drink from the creek, but they were too sly, or we were too noisy, to ever catch a glimpse of them. The neighbor kids and I used hatchets to chop down small trees and build log cabins the size of tents. One hot day I took a drink from the creek, but it tasted like shit and motor oil so I never did that again.
Copyright © 2024 by Keith Payne. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Keith Payne is a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an international leader in the psychology of inequality and discrimination. His research has been featured in The Atlantic and The New York Times, and on NPR, and he has written for Scientific American and Psychology Today.
