← Proxy with Yowei Shaw
Proxy with Yowei Shaw
Is there anything we can actually do about polarization?
00:41:48
Whoever wins the election, Americans will still want to rip each other's heads off. Social psychologist Jay Van Bavel helps us understand why we should care about polarization, how we got here, and what, if anything, we can do about it. ...
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- [00:00]
Host
Living at Odds is a new series from how to. About coexisting in American politics, our families. And in one Oklahoma school district, people started asking, hey, have you considered running for school board?
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Jay Van Bavel
I mean, duty called.
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Host
So of course I was. What was your reaction when you heard she was running for school board? Oh. To find Living at Odds, make sure you're following Slate's How To Podcast.
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Co-host
New episodes are available now. At the time of this recording, the election is just a week away. Holy shit. I don't know much about politics, but one thing I know is that whoever wins, Americans will still want to rip each other's heads off. I'm talking about polarization, of course, how we're more divided than ever. And yes, I know it's a problem that people are disgusted with the other side, that every issue gets politicized and weaponized, sometimes to the point of violence. But every time I hear about polarization in the news, a little part of me rolls my eyes because I'm like, well, what are we supposed to do about it? Like, are you telling us to calm down when the stakes are this high? Maybe this is me being dumb, but I feel like polarization is one of those terms the media assumes everybody knows and so never slows down to explain it. So for today's we are investigating one emotional dynamic of this current political moment. What exactly does it mean when we say polarization? Is there anything we can do to get less angry at each other? Is that even what we want? Hello?
- [01:45]
Host
Hello?
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Co-host
Hello?
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Jay Van Bavel
I can't hear you.
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Host
Damn, this is so annoying.
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Jay Van Bavel
So messed up.
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Co-host
Jay Van Babel is a social psychologist at New York University who has really good and surprising answers to all these questions.
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Jay Van Bavel
He.
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Co-host
He runs the center for Conflict and Cooperation and studies how social identity and group affiliation affect how we move through the world and interact with each other, including our politics.
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Jay Van Bavel
How much of our politics is based on our ideology and policies, and how much of it is based on this psychology of us versus them and teams.
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Co-host
I wanted to talk to Jay because he wrote a paper with a bunch of co authors on this thing they call political sectarianism, which is essentially polarization, but, like, turbocharged with negative feelings for the other side. I learned so much from talking to Jay, and I walked away from the interview with a new way of thinking about how I might want to engage with others in this political moment. Here's our conversation.
- [02:44]
Host
I have to say, when I read stories about polarization, I don't really understand why it's so bad. Don't we want people to like, disagree and, like, have strong feelings about policies and the state of their country. And I'm curious, like, do you get that a lot questions about, like, why we should care?
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Jay Van Bavel
Yeah. I mean, so I'm in an academic universe, which is mostly very liberal. A lot of people on the far left, and when they hear polarization, the most cynical interpretation of it is both sidesism, and they don't want both sidesism, especially at a moment where they feel like democracy's under threat, largely from Trump and his supporters, which is coming from the right. And so I hear that. But I would say here's why you should care about polarization or political sectarianism. The pandemic. There was over 1.2 million Americans killed during the COVID pandemic. The single biggest predictor we found of whether people follow public health guidelines was partisan affiliation. And we found it at every single stage of the pandemic whether or not you believed that Covid was a risk, whether you got vaccinated. Single biggest predictor by far was whether you're in a district that voted for Trump or not. And then those things predicted infection rates and mortality. Now, let me go to the threats to democracy. So let's say you're worried about Trump and his a genuine threat to democracy, or you're worried about fascism. Why should you care about polarization? Well, here's why you should care about it, if that's you. One reason you might care about it is Trump did not create polarization. He rode to power in part on the wave of polarization that existed. The other thing is he was able to get away with all kinds of things, including criminal behavior. He's a convict indicted for many, many crimes at this point, and people look the other way and will continue to vote for him in part because of polarization. He will always have a base of about 45 to 46% support, and he right now has about a 5050 chance of winning the election based on the best poll aggregators, entirely because polarization, what happens with polarization is it means that every election until we change, this is going to be a toss up. And so finding a way to get people to get a little less attached to their party and get a little more open minded so they're not in an echo chamber and so they don't hate the other side is actually in the best interest of having a vibrant democracy. So it's just like there's so many reasons why we should care about this and finding ways out of it.
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Host
I'm convinced you use the word Political sectarianism to describe the polarization we're seeing today, which you argue is more emotional and less ideological than the polarization of years past. How is political sectarianism different from polarization?
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Co-host
Exactly.
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Jay Van Bavel
Okay, so first let me say what polarization is. Polarization, the way we thought about it for a long time, the way most people think about it is political differences. That there's differences between conservatives and liberals. Liberals want an expansive set of policies and use of government to reduce inequality. Conservatives tend to want smaller government, lower taxes, more economic freedoms around those types of things, and they're less concerned about inequality. And so there's debates, and that leads to a bunch of different debates around a number of different policies. Okay. Political psychologists and political scientists have realized is another element of polarization, and it seems to be more of a problem, is affective polarization. So this isn't just ideological disagreements of a policy. It is just a feeling of negativity towards certain groups or a feeling of positivity towards your own group. So it's really about feelings, and that can be broken down into in group love or out group hate. Now, when we wrote this paper on political sectarianism in America, when we looked at the data over the last 40 years where researchers have been tracking it, we found that in group love in America has not changed in 40 years. Republicans feel just as positive towards the Republican Party as they have for 40 years. And Democrats feel just as much love for the Democrat Party as they have in 40 years. What has changed and has changed dramatically is outgroup hate. Democrats hate the Republican Party and Republicans hate the Democrat Party, and that has grown dramatically. And in fact, that is now a stronger source of emotion than in group love. And so that determines who you vote for. That means that you might vote for a leader you don't even like or that you think is corrupt simply to stop the other party from winning. And where we think it has kind of tipped into political sectarianism is because it comes with a bunch of other things. It comes with a feeling of morality, that this side is not just wrong and I don't just dislike them, but they are evil, and that they are fundamentally different to me, that they are other in some way, and that makes it impossible to cooperate. That means that you're not willing to cooperate with your neighbors, even if you could do something together that would make your neighborhood a nicer place. That means members of Congress aren't willing to cooperate and cut a deal, even if it would help Americans overall because it is just morally wrong to cooperate. With the other party. And so that's the problem with political sectarianism, that it starts to look like one of the classic cases of sectarianism was Northern Ireland, where it was a religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants, and it spilled over into violence. And so that's the concern, is that if this continues to go along this pathway, that at some point it could tip into violence and threats to democracy.
- [08:34]
Host
I feel like it's very easy for Democrats, people, the left, whatever, to be like, oh, it's a them problem. This is the Republicans. They're the ones who have the political sectarian problem, not us. Like, they're the ones who believe fake news. They're the ones who don't believe in vaccines. They're the ones who wouldn't wear masks. You know what I mean?
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Jay Van Bavel
Okay, so let me say here's a bunch of things that Democrats get wrong, and I'll pose them to the audience. What is the percentage of Republicans who make over $200,000 a year? What's your guess?
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Host
Well, I read your paper.
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Jay Van Bavel
Okay, so you cheat. Okay, so if you ask an average Democrat that and study has been done, I think they say like 30% or so, but it's actually like 2% because, you know, only like, 2% of the population makes over $200,000 a year. And so you have a stereotype of Republican as, like, a rich, fat cat that doesn't necessarily line up with the average republic Republican. That study's a few years old. Maybe there's a new stereotype of Republicans, but that's part of it. Okay, a lot of Democrats think Republicans don't support democracy and counting the votes, and the vast majority of Republicans do support it. A lot of Democrats think Republicans support political violence. Most Republicans do not support political violence at all. Very, very few support it. And then Republicans have dissimilar misrepresentations of Democrats. One of the questions in that study was they asked Republicans what percentage of Democrats are LGBTQ, and they say, again, like, 30, 40%. And the reality is it's like 5%. And so the way the media represents Democrats and Republicans, they bring out the people who look most unhinged and fit a really specific type of stereotype and put them on TV or hold them up on social media and says, look at what this crazy group of people are up to. And that miscasts the other side. I'll say another example, this Fox News used to have this series called Campus Crazy. So I'm a university professor, and they would trot out something crazy that happened on one campus in the country that week. Like someone banned yoga because it was cultural appropriation. One campus did this. And they hold this up as how crazy liberal students have gotten. And it's like if 99.99% of other campuses still have yoga, but they will hold that up as if that's what's going on across campuses and the average Fox viewer is not thinking about it. From, oh, that's the extreme. Out of 4,000 campuses on campus that's happening at the one most extreme version. The other 3999 are not doing that. Again, it's not misinformation, it's not a conspiracy theory, but it misrepresents what's going on on campuses.
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Host
So I have a confession, Jay. Okay, so back in college I used to work at a progressive think tank where part of my job was to find unsavory news items about Republicans and make jokes about it. And I hated this job for obvious reasons. Maybe that's not obvious to everyone, but like it was soul crushing work. And like the turning point was one morning where my boss sent me an email about some small town mayor who had been accused of child molestation and she was like, find out if he's a Republican. And I was like, I gotta get outta here. And so anyways, that's like why I left politics. I got into radio journalism. But 16 years later, I feel like I can trace a direct line from that kind of work to the chaotic, politically divided moment we're in. Do you have any initial reactions to that story? I feel like for a journalist who was at NPR for seven years, that's like a really big admission I'm making.
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Jay Van Bavel
Okay, well, so the first thing when you told me that, what it reminded me of is when you see in the last couple months these cases where there's been these people who've attempted to shoot Donald Trump. The first wave is, oh my goodness, there's someone trying to shoot the President. The second wave is there's an immediate attempt by partisans to dig up any evidence that this person's either a Democrat or Republican so we can immediately find someone to blame it on. And then so they're digging through like past voter registrations, voting patterns, things they've said on various social media platforms. And these people are often like seriously mentally deranged individuals that often don't fit very cleanly in, like your standard political prism of classic Democrat or classic Republican. They're people with severe mental health issues. But, but the instinct of so many people is to Try to, like, find someone, one party to blame rather than to understand actually what's going on here, what triggered this person, and understand them in the full richness of, like, what their motivations are. And that's just like, such a great example of what you're talking about is like, what we still see at the highest levels when the stakes are things like we're talking about, like, you know, attempted assassinations of a president that if they had been successful, could have like, tipped us into like a violent, borderline civil war type of situation. And so that's such a scary instinct that people have to go and look for those kind of rationalizations that demonize people.
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Host
Yeah. Every time I hear about a shooting, like, definitely in the case of those assassination attempts, but like, any kind of like, big shooting that is written about, I just, like, take a deep breath, wait for the news of were they a Republican, were they a Democrat, what were their leanings, what race? Are they just waiting for all the identity markers, wishing that they'll fall one way or the other? Because I know of how these things get weaponized because of the very thing you're talking about.
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Jay Van Bavel
Yeah, exactly. The other way they get weaponized. And I'm going to tell you, like, what the downstream outcome of this. So we'll go back to your original story of what was it a child mayor was accused of child molestation.
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Host
Yes.
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Jay Van Bavel
So that's, you know, one of the worst crimes you could commit in society. Okay. So just think about how that's weaponized. That has been something that has been alleged towards Democrats and Republicans since you were forced to dig it up kind of as a political propaganda campaign. But also more recently, this has been used, the language that Republican propagandists have been using against Democrats, like the language of groomers. This is a huge theme with QAnon and Pizzagate. Hillary Clinton is running a sex trafficking ring in the basement of a pizza parlor. And of course, this stuff sounds insane and we think of the people who believe it as unhinged. But there was a study done recently by colleagues of mine at the University of North Carolina, and they looked at how many Democrats and Republicans think that each party actually supports things like child pornography and child molestation. And Democrats believe that something like 15 to 20% of Republicans actually support this stuff. And Republicans think 15 to 20% of Democrats support this stuff. How many people actually support this stuff? Less than 1% of Democrats are into this stuff. Less than 1% of Republicans are into this stuff. This is, like, universally despised, as I said, lots of evidence that people universally oppose this type of behavior in society. And yet because of these, the way these stories get framed and these conspiracies and the way they get misrepresented in the media, it frames that as if a huge proportion of the population supports these things because they've been politically weaponized when that is simply not true. And so we've created these caricatures of the average Republican, average Democrat, what they believe and what they support, and they're simply not true. And that's actually really dangerous. When you start creating a caricature of a group as if they support child molestation, that's a horrifying thing in society. And it really can turn people against their neighbors if they think their neighbor supports a sex trafficking ring run out of a pizza parlor. Of course you would despise people if they supported that, but of course they don't. It's all a lie. It's all based on a myth and misinformation.
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Host
Wow. I am just putting together that I might have had a tiny, tiny role in where we got to with Pizzagate.
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Jay Van Bavel
I'm so sorry. You never would have thought that you were involved in Pizzagate. This is like your confessional. This podcast is going to be like the confessional booth for you.
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Host
Do you look at me differently, knowing this about me as a journalist?
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Jay Van Bavel
What I'm going to tell you is, like, how we all get hooked into this terrible thing, right? It's like the way the system works and especially things like the media. And I would say social media is kind of turning a lot of people into propagandists who are pushing misrepresentations of entire groups. And now we all have these, like, scary caricatures in our head.
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Host
So January 6th is another obvious example of what political sectarianism can lead to. So we know it's bad.
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Jay Van Bavel
Yeah.
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Host
How did we get here?
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Jay Van Bavel
Well, there's lots of theories, so I'll. I'll tell you, like, three or four of them. One, polarization tracks inequality. As America has become more unequal, polarization's increased. And those are pretty tightly correlated. And I don't fully understand why that is. The other thing that seems to be a factor is Democrats used to control Congress all the time. So even though the presidency switched between parties, the president, if they were Republican, had to cooperate with Congress, which usually meant cooperating with Democrats. And so it meant if you were elected, there was an assumption of cooperation. But that has changed when it was under Newt Gingrich. And ever since that time, Congress has kind of been 50, 50. And what that meant was that there was no longer an incentive to cooperate because it meant that Republicans were likely to win 50% of the time. And if they could just win the House and the presidency, they could just write all their own legislation. And then when Democrats won, they would just delete all the Republican legislation and write their own legislation. And so that has changed the nature of decision making. Instead of trying to optimize cooperation, it's trying to just do whatever you can to gain power plus one. And that incentivizes things like gerrymandering and things like that. Gaming the system to just get a win plus one. And then the other thing is the rise of Fox News and the getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine. There used to be some rules about, you know, broadcasting that you had to like present both sides and do it in a fair way. And when that was gotten rid of and Fox News rose to prominence, it just created kind of like echo chambers and two systems for news. And then the last one that's more recent is social media. There is mixed evidence on this, but there's some evidence that social media seems to be polarizing people. So the algorithms seem to be slightly amplifying a little bit more polarizing and divisive content and spreading misinformation and things like that.
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Host
So, you know, just a couple reasons why we're here.
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Jay Van Bavel
They're hard to fix.
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Co-host
When we return, I make Jay answer my million dollar question. What the hell do we do about polarization now that we're here? That's after some ads, so we've covered why we should care about polarization. Maybe you were already there. Now for the part I get stuck on what can we do about it? Like what can I do personally? What can you do? What can our country do?
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Jay Van Bavel
Yeah, I mean it's a hard problem to solve, needs solutions at lots of levels. Like we need to reduce gerrymandering and money in politics and all that stuff. We need better leadership. Who's not going to pull us apart? Who's going to find ways to bring us together. So I think all those things need to happen. But I would say at an individual level, what can I do is like think about ways you can engage your community and be open minded to people and create an inclusive environment and try to understand people. I know I've changed like my social media behavior based on my own research. Like I used to be someone who tried to like generate engagement, be provocative. I do that less now. I get less engagement probably. But I like don't quote, tweet somebody and pile on them. I will, like, post a question below or be more subtle or like, reach out to them privately or share a comment that doesn't tag them in it in case other people get critical because I don't want them to feel stressed out if other people are criticizing them. So I try to do subtle things that make it less stressful for people when I engage with them. I try to run a community that's more inclusive. I'm careful about how I publicly weigh in on things because at work I run a social psychology program of almost a hundred people. I'm mindful of what I say online might impact the complex community that's very diverse in a lot of views that I oversee. And so I'm constantly thinking about those things and how it impacts people. And I teach a class of 400 people Intro Psych, and my politics are something that I actually try to keep out of the class just so that I don't alienate all of these students. They're there for Introduction to Psychology. So I do my best to teach them that in a way that is the best possible way to keep them engaged and motivated and be open minded with them. So I think we all have a world that we live in and we have to figure out how to navigate it.
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Co-host
Yeah. But I think for a lot of people, they feel like they have a moral responsibility to call out the policies they find abhorrent and the people who support those policies. And these are policies that are, in a lot of cases, life or death. It's hard to feel just chill about it. You know what I mean?
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Jay Van Bavel
Yeah. Okay, so let me clip that on you. So you might think there's a moral duty for me to say, let's go on social media and in the most forceful terms possible, call out a policy I don't like or bad actor that I don't like. But if I were to show you evidence, research showing that that alienates people and is ineffective at persuading people to do anything, then maybe you would say that there's actually a moral duty to rethink your strategy and find more persuasive ways to use your time for political action. And that might be okay. Shouting on Twitter in the most extreme way possible might alienate people that I could otherwise reach. What is the messaging and language that I could use to get them to open their mind to engage more with this issue? Maybe I should be calling my local member of Congress or city councilor where they have some leverage. They're going to listen to a local constituent. And if I call and write enough letters and coordinate like 10 of my neighbors to do that, that's going to be where like we're going to actually affect change. And so this is actually a really cool theory in political action. This is a book about political hobbyism by a political scientist. And what he argues is that a lot of people treat politics like team psychology and that's how we treat it. So we go online and yell at each other just like we go online and argue about whether LeBron James is better than Michael Jordan or whether Taylor Swift's album is better than Beyonce's or something like that. And it's like fandom and we yell at each other and use harsh terms and take get really intense about it. But what he argues is like politics is supposed to be about power and power is, is operationalized differently. It's about going out and turning out in local primary votes, it's about running for local office. It's about like phone banking, it's about registering voters, it's about knocking on doors. And the other thing, this is an interesting case where you see a huge gender difference. Men are far more likely to be political hobbyists where they're screaming at each other online. Women are actually far more likely to do the actual real work of politics or power now where they phone bank and knock on doors and drive people to the polls. And so this is something where like, I think like we have a instinct and maybe it's easy to see people doing this online, the yelling and the I'm resisting fascism or whatever. But is that going to change anything? Or is it better for you to invest your time like driving three people to the polls and getting their vote out. And that doesn't require any anger. It requires you like getting to know your neighbors and being warm and friendly and showing up the morning of the vote with like a warm cup of coffee and just like driving and chit chatting with them while you take them to the poll. And so that's like a very different set of emotions and a very different approach, but it's probably 10 times more impactful in terms of like affecting political outcomes. And I'll give you an example of this. I just ran a study, global study on climate change and we tested 10 different interventions to see what effects support for climate policy, climate change beliefs and climate action really actually like working hard to like change, like plant a tree or take action. And what we found is the best thing for getting people to share on social media was a doom. And Gloom message like, the world's gonna burn up and all die, and we're all gonna. And it's way worse than, like, polar bears, like, getting stranded on icebergs or whatever that gets people to share. That's actually the single best intervention we found for people to share online because they're outraged. But it's actually the worst intervention possible to change their behavior and the worst intervention to change. Get them to support policy changes because it demoralizes them. And so we have these instincts about, what, calling things out and shouting and all this stuff. But I'm just telling you, this was a study ran with 60,000 people in 60 countries. By the way, this is about as good of a study as you can run. What? The kind of language and rhetoric that mobilizes us to share something and call something out is the opposite of what it gets to take. Get us to take action and get us to change policy.
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Co-host
Huh.
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Host
I always thought moral outrage could be a useful tool for getting people to protest and organize.
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Jay Van Bavel
It can. Outrage can be great for protesting and organizing. I would just simply say, what is the most effective way to protest and organize?
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Host
Hmm.
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Jay Van Bavel
And by the way, nonviolent protest for the last 50 years has been the single most effective political strategy we've had. You get people to the streets, it's how we overthrow dictators. It's how we push for major policy reforms. Civil rights researchers who study it have found that it no longer is the most effective strategy.
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Host
Oh, that's so interesting. Why?
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Jay Van Bavel
Here's some of the current theories. One is that used to be so, like, American civil rights movement, taking to the streets usually was the end game. Now it's the first thing people call people to the streets. And I'm. And I've done this. I've gone to a lot of marches. You get a cool Instagram photo, you post on social media, and then everybody goes home. And a lot of times, there's no policy platform. There's no network actually built. There's no actually, like, concrete plan for change that's baked into it. And what I mean by that is, like, tractable, pragmatic set of policy actions that you're going to negotiate and a set of people that are going to talk on behalf of your group to negotiate with people in power to get them. And so our level of political action now is, like, very superficial. I'll say. Another thing is, again, this is, like, the social media world I worry about. I see climate change, people throwing, like, cans of soup at, like, Picassos, and I'm like, what they're trying to do is how do I maximize attention for climate change? Okay, that's really good. If, if you're trying to gain the attention economy, which is win the social media world, which operates on an attention economy, it's not good for persuasion, it's not good for mobilizing action, it's not good for laying out like a concrete plan of policy change or helping educate people about what are the specific actions that they can take to make this better. It does none of those things. It just draws attention to Stonehenge and then alienates a huge amount of people who think that's dumb. And then now suddenly, like, if that's the most attention getting action in the climate change movement, you've now alienated like 80% of the population who just now associates climate change with like weird dumb stunts. You know, it used to be that, like, I'm old enough to remember, like Greenpeace, where they would like go like shut down an Exxon plant or something, you know, like the stunt was designed to draw attention to the specific thing that was the problem. And so, like, by selecting the wrong metric, I worry that, like, we're getting even worse at this.
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Host
Okay, so I want to talk about how we should treat our political opponents instead. Every time I hear experts talk about it, I get my hackles up because I feel like there's this implicit suggestion.
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Co-host
That we should all just get along.
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Host
If only we just understood each other better, if only we listened to each other's stories, then we'd all be able to come to a compromise. Our democracy would start working again. We'd hold hands in Kumbaya, which feels very naive.
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Jay Van Bavel
Yeah.
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Co-host
So if we should not have such.
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Host
Negative feelings about our political opponents, how.
- [29:37]
Co-host
Should we treat people we disagree with.
- [29:39]
Host
If we still want to be politically engaged?
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Jay Van Bavel
So let's go to the climate change thing, which is polarized. I think the first thing you need to understand is there might be people on your side and you just need to like actually talk to them and find out what are the messages that work. So on the climate change thing, turns out that solar energy is one tenth the cost that it was 10 years ago. And so there's huge solar plant growth in all these red states. And it's just being sold to red state governors, Republican governors, as job growth, especially like blue collar job growth. And they're all into it because they're just trying to create jobs because that's all they care about. They're not into it for like the clean energy. They're into it, like, for bringing jobs to their state that they can brag about. One lady who runs a company like this says, like, she went in and, like, one town, they had sheep grazing issues. And so, like, they needed to, like, set the solar panels up high enough so that the sheep could graze under them. And once that was solved, the locals were like, okay, great. Like, our. Our sheep can graze under, like, the solar panels, and it protects the sheep from, like, rain and stuff. And so the level of, like, discussion here is not the symbolic, moralized issue that we normally are talking about it at. And so it's like, you can get people on board, but you're gonna have to meet them where they're at. Okay, so that's most people, and then there's these other people that are at the extremes. For example, there is a segment of society that is. That is authoritarian or fascist, and we're not gonna meet them on the middle. On issues of diversity. They're through and through racist. And so I don't necessarily think, like, there's a compromise to be found with those people on that issue, but what I'm trying to say is there's a lot more people that you can talk to than you think, and you have to listen to them to understand what their issues are and find out how you can meet them. And that's actually supposed to be what politics is. The whole point of a democracy is not that we all agree on everything. The point of democracy is so that we can find compromises politically that bypass our disagreements.
- [31:43]
Co-host
After the break, what we can learn.
- [31:44]
Host
About emotional dynamics from Steve Bannon. And Jay spills the tea on what really happened with his former colleague Jordan Peterson.
- [31:53]
Co-host
That's after some ads.
- [32:05]
Host
So Proxy is on the emotions beat. And one emotional dynamic that I've been thinking about is I recently read Naomi Klein's book called Doppelganger. And part of the research that she does is she listens to an entire year of Steve Bannon's War Room podcast. And she concludes by the end of her research that Steve Bannon is an incredibly emotionally savvy person. She argues that he is watching the mainstream media and sort of the mainstream left, whatever, and watching very closely who they are ejecting, ridiculing, demeaning. And then he is waiting to welcome them in and then to validate them and be like, I respect you. I see you. They don't get you. And basically, Naomi Klein argues that Steve Bannon understands this very basic, fundamental thing about humans, which is that we all need to belong we are social animals. We need to feel validated, to be recognized. And she argues that that would be, you know, an emotional dynamic, that it would serve the mainstream left or whoever who are not in the Steve Bannon camp, rather than pushing groups of people into Steve Bannon's arms.
- [33:32]
Jay Van Bavel
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a profound insight, which is that one of the most basic needs that humans have, other than our need to eat, drink, breathe, and be safe, is to belong. We're the ancestors of generation after generation after generation of people who fit in. And the people who did not fit in did not survive. And so their ancestors are not here. And it's very upsetting. Tons of research finds that when people get excluded, they get aggressive, they get angry, they withdraw, and they also look to find another way to fit in. And for another group that's going to accept them. I will say that, like, I had a postdoc visiting from Spain who studied extremist groups, and she would join online chat groups for far right extremists and far left extremists. And. And she said that the far right extremist groups were always more welcoming. I'm just thinking about this now. Yeah. And she said, of course they were racist, so I don't want to, like, paint over that.
- [34:32]
Host
Right, right.
- [34:33]
Jay Van Bavel
But she said as long as you didn't disagree with that, everything else went, and they were very kind to you and would embrace you no matter anything else about you. And she said she was in, like, these very far left groups, and they were extremely judgmental, and if you didn't agree with X, Y, and Z, that you would immediately be judged and called out publicly and then kicked out of the group. And so she was shocked by that because she thought, like, these far right groups are gonna be, like, the most harsh and most judgmental and meanest and nastiest. And she was absolutely shocked by how the dynamics were the opposite of her expectations.
- [35:03]
Host
Well, it's just like a smarter, more strategic way to bring more people to your side.
- [35:08]
Jay Van Bavel
Yeah. Yeah.
- [35:09]
Host
Okay. I cannot leave this interview without talking about Jordan Peterson.
- [35:13]
Jay Van Bavel
Okay.
- [35:14]
Host
We had a conversation before, and you told me that you used to be colleagues and friends with Jordan Peterson and that you saw some of these emotional dynamics that we're talking about at play.
- [35:26]
Jay Van Bavel
Yeah. So when I was a PhD student at the University of Toronto and Jordan was on my dissertation committee and was a wonderful committee member and was one of the coolest faculty members, he was the most popular faculty member in the whole department, I would say undergrads loved him when he was looking for research assistants, they would have a lineup outside his lab. He had a really diverse and interesting set of graduate students who all really loved him and he was super open minded and let them pursue whatever research interests they were interested in. And he was very anti authoritarian, which the grad students really respected because he was always challenging the authority of the faculty. And it was really terrifying to see him kind of go down this rabbit hole of increasing anger and isolation and extremism and spreading misinformation. I've seen, and he's lost a lot of friends, but I will say what I've heard from people who know him well is he, I think originally did some YouTube posts that went viral about this law about like that you were required to use someone's preferred pronouns. If not, it was considered hate speech. And he said that that was a violation of his rights or something. I forget, I never watched these videos.
- [36:38]
Co-host
Okay, jumping in real quick to just say I looked into this. And legal experts have said that Jordan Peterson was misrepresenting Bill C. 16.
- [36:47]
Jay Van Bavel
That was the thing that like triggered him to get some popularity, but not much. But it also triggered him to be socially excluded at the University of Toronto at first. And then he would go give talks at other universities and people would put up like posters with like kind of like weird cartoons of him and try to like boo him so he couldn't talk. And. And that was actually the thing that started him down this pathway of more and more extremism. There was also, I think, an interview where the New York Times Magazine did an interview with him and he brought them into his house and tried to interact with them and he felt that he was badly misportrayed in the actual interview. They pulled some quotes out of context or something. And he felt betrayed by people that he was open to and trusted and respected and excluded. And as he got excluded, he got embraced really aggressively by the right and then increasingly the far right and like Turning Point, I think, had him out for a talk and these, these types of communities. And he went further and further down that road. Then he started getting paid a lot of money from Patreon, I think, I'm sure very quickly outstripped what his salary was at the University of Toronto and eventually like did a leave and then retired from his University of Toronto job because he couldn't go back to his job. And so this was one of these things where it was almost like a perfect example of what you talk about with, I don't know if he knows Steve Bannon but it was almost a perfect example of someone that I knew. And a lot of former students of Jordan's who really liked and respected him, saw him go down this pathway. And we're all really sad when we saw it because he no longer resembled the person we knew. But it was like he got excluded by his community. And then really the only community that was embracing him, he accepted that embrace and leaned into it and had a whole new community. And in many ways his reach and his earning power and all those things are orders of magnitude larger now. So also the reward structure for him is. Is much better. But it was sad to see him go that way. And I do wonder if people had been willing to engage him in his community at the university and have conversations with him, if that would have happened. I suspect that it would not have.
- [38:53]
Host
Really.
- [38:54]
Jay Van Bavel
That would be my prediction.
- [38:55]
Host
Do you think that could happen to any of us?
- [38:58]
Jay Van Bavel
I think it's a person by situation interaction, so it's obvious. I don't think it would happen to everybody the same way. A lot of people have been canceled or whatever and haven't gone the same way as Jordan. But you know, as I said, there's lots of experiments on social exclusion. And when people get socially excluded, they look quickly to find some way to fill that need. And if other people are willing to adopt them into their community, into their groups, into their organizations, and they're getting positive, warm feedback and affirmation and they feel valued and connection, then they're going to. That's going to resonate with most humans.
- [39:35]
Host
Well, Jay, thank you so much for this interview and conversation. I feel less dazed and confused, I think.
- [39:44]
Jay Van Bavel
Good. I'm trying to help just shed light on it. It's all complex.
- [39:52]
Co-host
Thank you to Jay Van Bavel for giving me a lot to think about. I hope he gave you a lot to think about too, even if you don't agree. Jay is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at NYU and he's the director of the Social Identity and Morality Lab. He has a new book out called the Power of Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation and Promote Social Harmony. In our show Notes, you can find a link to Jay's book and links to the polarization dictionary he created as well as the paper on political sectarianism he co wrote that I Think Everyone should read. This episode was edited by Tim Howard and produced by me, a former propagandist, with help from Anna Karan Santana. It was mixed by Kyle Pulley and her theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder Special thanks to David Destano, Daniel Kelly, David Pizarro and Justin Landy. As always, our email is proxythepodmail.com, you can follow us on Instagram ProxyPodcast and you can find me Oueshaw Proxy is a completely independent production. If you want to support season one, go to patreon.com ProxyPodcast to become a member. You'll get main feed episodes without ads as well as exclusive bonus episodes. Thank you to everybody who's already signed up. You are on the Proxy team and I definitely have more in group love for you. This month you'll hear more of the interview I did with Jay Van Bavel. He reveals which age group is the most polarized. What is the sweet spot of polarization? Turns out at one point experts were arguing for more polarization in America. Plus we get into some juicy listener questions.
- [41:29]
D
Hello, this is Nico from Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada and my question is about the sports team mentality that people seem to be applying to politics. Just feels like everyone treats it like a sports team. So can we actually change people's mind in this scenario? It doesn't feel like it. I've never heard of someone cheering for the LA Lakers instead of the LA Clippers. People have their team and just stick to it. Thank you.
- [41:56]
Co-host
To hear the bonus episode, you can sign up@patreon.com ProxyPodcast See you next month. Please vote and make sure everyone around you votes too.
- [42:18]
Jay Van Bavel
Radiotopia from PRX.