0:07

Hello and welcome to the

0:09

Political Orphanage, a home

0:11

for decent folks who don't

0:14

neatly fit in boxes. I'm

0:16

your host, Andrew Heaton, and

0:18

I would never put you in a box unless

0:21

I was smuggling you to a

0:23

different country we both wanted

0:25

to send you to. I've

0:28

got a fun guest today. We're going to talk about a lot

0:30

of things, ranging from misinformation

0:32

to tribalism to journalism, but

0:35

it's all going to revolve around

0:37

one's sense of identity,

0:40

the great tether which binds politics,

0:43

policy, ideology. Identity

0:46

seems to be the emotional animus

0:49

of politics. So before we

0:51

get started, I want to prime

0:53

you on the topic of identity.

0:57

Here's my question for you.

1:00

What are you supposed

1:02

to believe? What I mean by

1:05

that is, if a political consultant

1:07

were looking at your various demographic

1:10

boxes,

1:11

would they assume you're a reliable voter

1:14

for a particular party? Let's

1:16

say

1:17

you're a gay Hispanic woman who lives

1:19

in Brooklyn.

1:20

Chances are good you're a staunch Democrat,

1:22

right? That's what I mean. Think

1:24

about what you are supposed

1:27

to be, what box a political consultant

1:29

would put you in. If

1:31

you don't fit snugly

1:34

in that box, if you break the mold,

1:38

I'm curious as to what factor

1:40

you think derailed that

1:43

otherwise congruous, monolithic

1:46

sense of political identity. Our

1:49

community of political orphans right here on

1:51

The Political Orphanage is actually a pretty good

1:53

test case for this because most of

1:55

the people who listen to the show are not lockstep

1:57

partisans for any particular team.

1:59

Presumably, we all have some

2:03

instigating factor in our lives that

2:05

has cleaved us

2:08

from the two big parodies. If

2:10

that's you, if your thinking

2:12

forts what your identity would otherwise

2:14

naturally roll into, why

2:17

is that? What made you different? Your

2:19

loyal host, Andrew Heaton May, is

2:22

a straight white male from Oklahoma

2:25

reared as a tepid, same

2:28

temperature Presbyterian in

2:30

an affluent suburb of a largely

2:32

rural, overwhelmingly conservative

2:35

state.

2:36

Knowing that,

2:37

a demographer would reasonably predict

2:40

reliable Republican, because

2:42

all of those identities reinforce

2:45

one another. There weren't a lot of atheist Republicans

2:47

knocking around Oklahoma City. If you were

2:49

a conservative, you were a Christian. Much

2:52

of my high school was of Northern European

2:54

descent, also conservative and Republican.

2:57

So you'd be forgiven for thinking of that set

3:00

up as a kind of mega identity,

3:02

shared along various axes rather than

3:04

a grab bag of disparate

3:06

attributes. Years later,

3:09

when I worked for the US Congress, most

3:12

of the people in the Pennsylvania office I worked for

3:14

and a significant amount of the voters that we represented

3:17

were Irish, Catholic,

3:20

and Democrat. And in that particular

3:22

part of the country, those attributes were

3:25

also largely interchangeable. I

3:27

said Irish, Catholic, but

3:29

I could have just easily said Irish Catholic,

3:32

because the identities were one and the

3:34

same. The ethnicity and the religion were the same, Irish

3:36

Catholic, and folks of that mold in that

3:39

part of the country probably voted Democrat.

3:43

When did you go off the rails?

3:46

I think for me. I've been

3:48

thinking about this in preparation for today's interview.

3:51

I think it was because in high school

3:53

I converted to Greek Orthodoxy. For

3:56

reasons I don't need to go into at this time, but after

3:59

that, after I converted, I diverted, my religious

4:01

identity was completely distinct from

4:03

my ethnic identity, from then and for the rest

4:06

of my life. Most of the people

4:08

at my parish were Lebanese.

4:10

Our priest was Palestinian. Because

4:13

my religious identity was more important to me than

4:15

my ethnic identity, white people

4:17

would never again be the automatic

4:20

home team for me. There might be a certain

4:22

level of familiarity or

4:24

cultural comfort that could be there, but

4:27

no presumed ideological overlap.

4:30

And shout out to St. Elijah's

4:33

Antiochian Orthodox Church over there by

4:35

Quail Springs Mall, at the parish

4:37

there were significant numbers of both Democrats

4:39

and Republicans. So my newfound

4:42

religious identity couldn't cohere

4:45

around a particular political party, the

4:47

same way that my future Irish Catholic

4:49

Democratic friends from Pennsylvania could.

4:52

From that point on, my ethnicity,

4:55

my spiritual beliefs, and my political

4:57

beliefs would be, to me, completely

5:00

separate things. I would never

5:02

again see them as interchangeable. I

5:05

think that moment, that

5:08

conversion, propelled me

5:10

towards healthy, compartmentalized

5:13

thinking for the rest of my life. I'm

5:17

curious as to what happened

5:19

to you. Patrons, if

5:22

we want to get some group therapy going on

5:24

this episode, feel free to drop in your own

5:26

moment of cleavage

5:29

in the comments on today's episode. For

5:34

folks whose various identities

5:36

are one identity, the

5:39

lines of ethnicity, religion,

5:41

politics, culture are largely

5:44

interchangeable, what

5:46

might the world look like to them? How

5:48

do they look at outsiders?

5:52

And if that monolithic sense of identity is bad,

5:54

and I contend that it's not just bad but dangerous,

5:58

what do we do about it?

9:54

head

10:00

on to a lot of those drivers there, we

10:03

want to feel a part of a group. We

10:05

want to feel like we have control over our lives.

10:08

I would posit, I think that some amount

10:10

of conspiratorial thinking revolves around

10:12

status, where

10:15

if I feel as though I am in the periphery

10:18

of the world, I do not have a lot of impact

10:20

on the world around me, I am not

10:22

on the inside, I am not taken seriously, a conspiracy

10:25

allows me to feel like, no, I'm on the bleeding edge.

10:27

I am very much in the thick of it. And so by engaging

10:30

in the theory, I'm able to feel as though I have

10:32

more import.

10:34

That's great. And that is not great. It's horrible.

10:36

However, it is great because

10:38

it is accurate. When

10:40

we think about a lot of the conspiracy

10:43

theories that folks believe in that have

10:45

to do with status, I would argue

10:47

that that's sort of a combination of social

10:49

motivations, but also control.

10:51

Because think about, for example, the

10:54

very popular racist, great

10:57

replacement theory, that is the conspiracy

10:59

theory that says that Democrats

11:02

are actively

11:03

trying to bring in people

11:06

of other faiths and other races

11:08

and ethnicities.

11:10

I can't pronounce my words

11:12

today, and they're doing it with

11:14

the goal of diluting

11:17

the white population in

11:19

the United States. That is the great replacement

11:22

theory. And it's trying to replace white

11:24

voters with more liberal, diverse,

11:27

likely Democratic voters. Well,

11:30

part of what that is doing is part

11:32

of that is a response to a perceived status

11:34

threat on the part of

11:36

perhaps white working class Americans who feel

11:39

that they are being left behind, who

11:41

feel a sense of status loss.

11:44

And

11:46

that kind of conspiracy theory

11:48

offers them a sense of order

11:51

and control that, oh my gosh, it's not in my mind

11:53

this is happening. Someone is orchestrating

11:56

this. And the reason that there are folks who

11:58

are able to come to the table and say, this country

12:00

and get ahead is because it has

12:02

been orchestrated by folks behind

12:04

the scenes. So therefore, it's

12:07

not the fact that I'm not working hard enough.

12:09

It's not the fact that it's not even

12:11

the fact that I'm unlucky. It's because there

12:13

is this orchestrated conspiracy.

12:16

We find that a lot in the context

12:19

of

12:19

racially charged conspiracy

12:21

theories, this notion that

12:24

there are actors behind the scenes

12:26

who are powerful people who are doing things

12:29

in the shadows

12:30

to advance their own agenda

12:33

and keep us down

12:35

and keep us in the dark. And a lot of times

12:37

those quote unquote conspiracies

12:40

have to do with justifying

12:45

aspects of social status.

12:47

Okay. Well, okay. So here already

12:49

I can see a tie in with the political landscape

12:52

in that I

12:54

would broadly speak. I would broadly define

12:56

populism as an insider

12:59

versus outsider dynamic. If

13:02

you want to make it as reductive as possible, insider versus

13:04

outsider, if you build it out a little bit more, it

13:06

is the pure people

13:09

who are whatever I am generally, but

13:11

the people and the corrupt elites

13:14

and they're the ones screwing it up for all of us. If

13:16

I have that worldview of the

13:19

pure people that are downtrodden being stepped

13:22

on by the corrupt elites and the insiders,

13:24

I would think conspiracy theories would

13:26

comport with that worldview with

13:28

less friction than maybe what

13:31

I would call a progressive libertarian or conservative

13:33

worldview.

13:34

And you would be correct because we do find

13:36

that for folks who are more sympathetic

13:38

to populist ideologies and

13:40

more supportive of populist leaders defined

13:43

just as you said, right? This distinction

13:45

between the corrupt elite and the pure people.

13:48

We do find that the individuals who have

13:51

those views tend to be more

13:53

receptive to conspiracy theories. And

13:55

part of that is because both of them are predicated

13:58

on a lack of trust in institutions. institutions

14:00

as well. So think about what

14:03

happens if you are someone who believes that

14:05

all elites are corrupt, whether it

14:07

be political leaders or folks in higher ed

14:09

or science or medicine.

14:11

You are

14:13

fundamentally distrusting of

14:15

the people in those institutions and therefore

14:18

the information that comes

14:19

from those institutions. And

14:21

that is at the heart both of

14:23

populism and belief in conspiracy

14:25

theories because conspiracy theories

14:28

come about because the answers that have

14:30

been provided are

14:32

dissatisfying or don't

14:34

go far enough or you just do not

14:37

trust the folks who are providing those answers.

14:39

So those two things are very closely tied

14:41

together.

14:42

Okay. So in addition to economics, one of

14:44

the other things that I love for people to do is explain

14:47

things to me in terms of whiskey. And

14:49

in your book, you have a concept

14:52

of identity distillation. So

14:54

to tie this in, one of the things

14:56

that people are attracted to information on is

14:59

social identity community. I want to be part of

15:01

a community and I want to tether

15:04

into that group and have my group defended

15:06

and promoted, so on and so forth. So social

15:08

identity is a really big part of it. So what is identity

15:11

distillation? To

15:12

explain this, I have to first explain

15:14

that the book is

15:16

divided into two parts, right? The first half

15:18

looks at the psychology

15:21

of belief and misinformation. Why are we drawn

15:23

to misinformation? What are some of the needs that

15:25

it satisfies? I also talk about

15:27

the political history

15:28

of the United States that has caused

15:31

our two political parties to increasingly

15:33

overlap with

15:34

socio-demographic categories. So it's

15:37

not just like

15:38

the two parties have different ideas, that

15:40

they contain different kinds of people along

15:43

these primal dimensions of like race

15:44

and religion and geography.

15:47

So the second half of the book looks

15:50

at how key aspects of our political

15:53

and media environment exploit

15:56

those identities, exploit

15:58

those social psychological identities.

15:59

dynamics that are already happening.

16:03

And the way that they exploit them,

16:05

and well let's say why, why do they exploit them?

16:07

The reason that they exploit them is because social

16:09

identity is a huge driver

16:11

of emotion

16:13

and action.

16:15

We are social animals by definition.

16:17

People are really not able to survive

16:19

alone, so when it comes to how we think of ourselves

16:22

in groups, it's really

16:24

central to what's going to guide

16:26

us. Because thinking of ourselves as members

16:28

of groups is what helps us survive. I

16:30

had David McRaney on last year, I don't know

16:32

if you know David McRaney. Great

16:34

guy, and we spent the whole hour talking

16:36

about motivated reasoning, and the idea

16:39

that human beings are not designed

16:41

to understand and perceive an undiluted

16:44

objective reality, we're designed to

16:46

mate and not be eaten by tigers. And

16:49

if I, all

16:51

of my tribe believes that the

16:54

world is on the back of a turtle, and

16:56

I don't believe that, and they cast me out, it was not

16:58

an advantageous belief for me, so my brain's gonna take

17:00

me away from that. And it's, I'm

17:03

gonna be attracted towards group membership

17:05

and promoting myself and avoiding

17:08

censure far more than I am in terms of

17:10

reality. Think

17:11

about how beneficial it is to

17:13

believe things that your group believes,

17:16

and especially if you think about that in the context

17:18

of like thousands of years ago in terms

17:20

of our ancestors.

17:23

If there's information that's empirically true,

17:26

but the people in my tribe

17:30

do not believe it, what

17:32

is the benefit to me in believing

17:35

that empirically

17:35

true information? It's probably

17:37

a much greater cost for me to believe

17:40

that information

17:41

than it is for me to believe what my tribe believes.

17:44

That, to me, when you boil it down

17:46

into those terms, it's like, I get it, yeah,

17:48

I understand why community is so important

17:51

in

17:52

determining how

17:53

we view the world. So when it comes

17:56

to these social dimensions that fuel

17:58

our perceptions

17:58

of the world,

18:01

How we think of ourselves as part of

18:02

a team is going to ignite

18:04

our passions because we cannot

18:07

survive without our team. So

18:09

threats

18:09

to our social identity, threats

18:12

from outgroups, activation of

18:14

our social identity, tapping into our

18:16

pride in who we are as a team.

18:18

Those things are always going to get us

18:20

to be, to pay attention,

18:22

to be engaged, and to

18:25

act. So let's think,

18:26

what are the motivations of our

18:29

political and media elites?

18:31

Well,

18:32

to get our attention, to get us engaged,

18:34

and to get us to act.

18:36

So now we have this super

18:38

salient concept of

18:40

political mega-identity. And

18:43

you can threaten it, and you can tap into

18:45

it, and you can get us to watch your show,

18:48

click on a thing, share it, make

18:50

an angry face on Facebook, you know,

18:52

pay attention to your tweet, etc.,

18:55

etc. So as

18:57

political and media entities tap

19:00

into our social identities,

19:02

they anticipate who we think

19:04

we are, or how they think we think

19:06

of ourselves.

19:08

And then they offer up on a platter

19:10

content that threatens it, or

19:13

reminds us of it, or reinforces

19:15

it.

19:16

But it's always caricatured, right? Because

19:18

it's not actually tapping into who

19:20

we really are.

19:22

It's a construction. It's like

19:24

a caricatured construction of our team.

19:27

It's not who we actually are.

19:29

So as they do this, and as we

19:31

then look at that content that they've delivered

19:34

up for us, whether on social media, or

19:37

in a political speech, or

19:38

even regular journalism,

19:40

we are constantly being

19:43

distilled into like the

19:45

most

19:45

caricatured essence of these

19:47

social identities. And we're also called

19:50

upon to perform them all the time, especially

19:52

on social media, where the social pressure

19:54

to perform in accordance with

19:56

our quote unquote social identity is pretty

19:58

intense.

19:59

So this creates this process of

20:02

whiskey distillation, but we're

20:04

the whiskey.

20:06

And we're really high

20:07

quality whiskey, Andrew, because

20:09

the distillation process goes on over and

20:11

over. I don't really know a lot about whiskey, actually.

20:14

Okay. I'm not sure. Is

20:16

that something that's super well distilled? This is

20:17

perfect. I know a lot about whiskey,

20:19

sadly firsthand and academically.

20:22

You know a lot about social identity. We could

20:24

meet in the middle for a vaudeville

20:26

routine at some point. Perfect. Sure,

20:29

a malt. I don't know. A

20:31

malt. I would think that one of the other

20:33

things that would happen is I was talking

20:35

to a friend of mine a couple of days ago, and I am

20:39

topic for another day. I'm very opposed to

20:41

the whole paradigm of left and right.

20:44

I think it is counterproductive and

20:46

not helpful. And my friend went, you

20:48

know, but there are things that are strongly correlated.

20:51

Like if you're for lower taxes, you probably want

20:53

guns and things like that. And I went, they are correlated,

20:55

but I don't think they're causal. I think what happens is

20:57

I care deeply about

20:59

guns and I go watch Fox News because it's

21:02

pro guns, and I learn while

21:04

I'm there that people that like guns also hate

21:06

tariffs. Previously I had no

21:08

thoughts whatsoever on whether I was a protectionist

21:11

or a free enterprise person. Not really

21:13

sure what that means, but I know my team hates

21:15

tariffs. And so I now hate tariffs,

21:18

and I can learn these various

21:20

traits that would not otherwise be native to me by

21:22

virtue of getting stuck in it.

21:24

I think that that's provocative.

21:28

That's how I'll respond sometimes. I'll take that. I

21:30

think that's provocative. I think that there

21:32

is something to be said for the way

21:35

that partisan media can suggest

21:37

to us kinds of issues

21:40

that should be on our radar and how we should think

21:42

about them and signals to us, okay, here's

21:44

how our team is thinking about this thing. Here are

21:46

some other issues that we're thinking

21:47

about and how we're thinking about them.

21:50

I actually think that there

21:53

are even

21:55

psychophysiological roots to

21:57

some of these beliefs.

21:59

I really do. I mean that the

22:02

literature on

22:03

kind of the biology and even genetics

22:06

of Especially

22:08

cultural ideology on issues

22:10

that are social or about like sex

22:13

or race I

22:16

think that that literature is pretty interesting in terms

22:18

of how it suggests that these things are

22:20

all rooted in a

22:22

similar

22:24

or a shared Archaeological

22:26

system in terms of how we respond

22:28

to threat, right? I think that we may have talked

22:30

about this with my first book because

22:33

there are these these traits that do

22:35

correlate with social and cultural ideology,

22:38

and

22:39

I think that if you're someone who for

22:41

whom interpersonal threat is on your mind

22:43

and

22:44

You're always monitoring your environment

22:46

and you have a high mortality

22:47

salience you think about your own

22:49

death a lot

22:51

You're gonna care about guns

22:53

and you're going to care about immigration

22:56

and you're going to feel like you

22:58

want the world to be predictable and you're

23:01

going to be maybe not super comfortable

23:03

with gender fluidity and

23:04

That makes sense to me

23:08

It does but can I can I yield a counterpoint

23:10

on it? Let's say we are living

23:12

in the year 2018 and we're

23:14

having this exact same conversation Based

23:16

on what you just said if we were to

23:18

learn that a large pandemic we're gonna come

23:21

through the country in two years I would say

23:23

clearly the group of people that would be freaked

23:25

out by it would be the conservatives that

23:27

they are the threat based group And

23:29

they are going to respond by immediately

23:31

girding themselves with masks and

23:34

that effective polarization will cause the Democrats

23:36

to not do that And the Democrats will be considered

23:39

Freewheeling free-loving hippies when

23:41

they ought to be girding themselves against this battle

23:43

we have but it didn't play out that way So I see

23:45

that as a counterfactual to your thesis

23:47

Except oh, I so love this

23:49

except

23:51

Think about the fact that the

23:53

threat detection system that we see among

23:55

cultural conservatives is

23:57

one of It's about

23:59

hostile

23:59

coalitions and interpersonal

24:02

physical threat

24:04

Covid 19 is a virus.

24:07

It's not people

24:07

attacking people

24:10

Right.

24:10

So because of that

24:12

I think that the detection system was different

24:15

and instead we had

24:18

Messages from elites that

24:20

suggested that the real threat

24:23

is a threat to our freedom a threat

24:26

to our bodily autonomy People

24:28

are trying there are there is a threat and

24:30

the threat is there

24:32

are people who are trying to tell you

24:34

what to do with your body

24:37

I think it's different in the same way

24:39

that that if

24:41

it were just about Conservatives

24:44

are more cognizant of threat Then

24:47

why the hell wouldn't the right

24:49

be more responsive to

24:51

and taking action on climate change?

24:54

Because climate change is not about

24:56

inter personal threat

24:58

It's like an existential threat. I

25:01

Respectfully disagree on

25:03

all counts Yeah,

25:06

okay, so so let's let's do Covid

25:08

and then let's do let's do climate change.

25:10

Hey, so Covid again,

25:13

let's alternate reality situation

25:17

Covid has breached our shores We're

25:19

in the early days of this one or two cities have shut

25:21

down and Then president

25:23

Donald Trump holds a press conference

25:26

at the base of Mount Rushmore And as

25:28

he's talking he puts a mask on and says

25:30

conservatives care about their families and they care

25:33

about protecting the community I am a wartime

25:35

president I'm declaring war on Covid and

25:37

then he reveals that all of the presidents have

25:40

masks on them Which is a very Trumpian thing to do

25:42

and they're all red by the way They're bright red like

25:44

and everybody starts talking about

25:45

my god these things are huge How

25:48

big are those masks? They're very

25:50

large masks and people are going so big

25:53

Everybody freaks the Democrats freak out because he's

25:55

using the monument as a magazine.

25:57

This is advertising all day in this

25:59

instance, if Trump would come out with a mask and said that

26:02

this is what conservatives do, I think the

26:04

mag of faithful would have become masked people. And

26:06

I think you would have seen a greater

26:08

amount of Democrats that wouldn't have done it out

26:10

of antipathy to him. So like for me,

26:12

I think effective polarization is a bigger

26:15

causal factor in this than

26:17

physiological basis.

26:19

It's fine. But Andrew, why

26:21

didn't he do that?

26:22

I think because

26:23

Timmy, that counterfactual to

26:26

me is so cuckoo pants because we know

26:28

he would not have done that.

26:30

And then when you say, well, why, how do I know that

26:32

Trump would not have done that? Then you got to

26:34

be like, well, because that's antithetical

26:36

to Trumpianism. So what is Trumpianism?

26:40

It is not someone who is going to wear

26:42

a mask to protect other people.

26:44

It's going to be someone who's going to say, hell no,

26:46

I will not do that because I do what I

26:48

want.

26:49

I think that he

26:52

decided that it was a better political calculus

26:54

to run a culture war campaign than a wartime

26:56

campaign, but I will, I

26:59

will concede this point and move on to climate

27:01

change. If we go back to, okay,

27:04

this is great. Cause in the book, you bring up Morris

27:06

Fiorina, one of my favorite thinkers who talks about

27:08

political sorting, right? So Morris Fiorina talks about

27:10

how were we to go back to 1970? Uh,

27:14

parties had no meaning, uh, that, that,

27:16

you know, a, a Jim Crow Democrat in the

27:18

South was very different than a labor Democrat

27:20

in Massachusetts. Nelson Rockefeller,

27:23

who's like speaking Spanish and high

27:25

fiving gays at rallies in New York city, very

27:27

different than Barry Goldwater out in the West, uh,

27:30

who's, you know, maybe we should nuke Vietnam.

27:32

You know, like there's, there's, the parties have very little meaning,

27:34

right? If you, if you,

27:36

I'm always sorry to interrupt, but my favorite is

27:38

that in 1950, the American

27:41

political science association put out this

27:43

call that the parties had to be more distinct

27:45

ideologically because they were doing the

27:48

voters no favors by not actually

27:50

standing for anything. So

27:51

the architects of our misfortune,

27:53

the American political science association. I

27:56

know. I know. I digress. I digress.

27:58

Okay. Keep going. Okay.

27:59

So if we were to go back in time

28:02

to 1950, so

28:05

to take a random thing to kind of put

28:07

where my head's at, I think you could have made a

28:09

good pitch that the Democratic Party would have been the pro-life

28:12

party. Because in 1950, I

28:14

would have gone, who are the Democrats? Well, they're Catholics

28:17

and they're Baptists in the South. Who

28:19

are the Republicans? Well there's a lot of them in

28:21

New York City and on the West Coast that are more

28:24

coastal urban people. So obviously

28:26

that didn't happen. But with the environment, that

28:29

was in the air until like 1995 or so. Who

28:33

creates the EPA? Limp-risted

28:36

liberal cock Richard Nixon of the Republican

28:39

Party creates the EPA. You

28:42

have Teddy Roosevelt, who everybody agrees

28:44

is a progressive, creates the Department of the Interior. But

28:47

then the Clean

28:50

Air Act, that's signed back, that's the last,

28:52

up until the infrastructure bill recently passed by

28:54

Biden, Clean Air Act's the last big environmental

28:57

bill. That's George H.W. Bush. And

28:59

I think that, I don't know what the exact

29:01

thing was where it decided to go Democrat, but

29:04

I can see an alternate universe where instead of saying

29:06

environmentalism, we just say conservationism

29:08

and it's a lot of guys in cowboy hats wandering around

29:10

going, I love the country

29:13

of America. I love the woods.

29:16

I love the beauty of it. These

29:18

urban Democrats that never get out of their

29:21

goddamn city, they never see the streams

29:23

and rivers that we Republicans are trying

29:25

to protect. They don't care, they care about

29:27

factories and all that. I can see that easily

29:30

going that way. So I think it's just effective

29:32

polarization. One team picks it and the other team goes,

29:34

well, I hate you, so I guess I'm the opposite.

29:35

Do you really think it's that simple, though,

29:37

Andrew? You really think it's that simple.

29:39

I do. I do. I

29:41

think the, I think the coalition impulse to

29:44

support a team and find a team to oppose is

29:46

so strong. And particularly

29:49

right now where the arguments

29:51

in America are so centered along,

29:53

I just have to defeat

29:55

the other team. It's not even that I like my team, but I want to

29:58

defeat the other team. I think we key off. each

30:00

other much faster than we should otherwise.

30:02

I don't think that you're wrong about your underlying

30:06

proposition, okay? I think

30:08

that there's truth in that. However,

30:10

I also think when you're looking at

30:13

why it is that the Republicans and Democrats

30:15

came to look at the way that they do now

30:18

as opposed to what they look like in 1950, 1960,

30:21

a lot of that is about, again,

30:24

the sorting of different kinds of people

30:26

into these parties, that it's not just

30:28

about affective polarization. It's

30:31

not just about

30:32

seeing the other party as lesser than

30:34

or different from. And

30:36

for example, if you look at what happened

30:38

in the 1970s where there was an opportunity

30:42

that

30:44

Republicans took advantage of to

30:47

tie together the fact

30:50

that there were white parents who

30:53

felt very frustrated by the fact that

30:55

they had sent their children to these schools

30:57

that were de facto segregated schools,

31:00

racially segregated schools, but they were Christian

31:02

schools.

31:03

And then under the Nixon administration,

31:06

they had their tax-exempt status revoked,

31:08

right? What

31:10

ended up happening through that process

31:13

was that Paul Weyrich, who

31:16

founded the Heritage Foundation, created

31:19

a movement that wedded

31:22

a

31:24

conservative Christian identity

31:26

and a white identity

31:28

and deliberately courted white evangelical

31:30

Christians, activating what

31:33

was kind of a latent untapped

31:35

political force in the United

31:37

States and brought them on board

31:40

into the Republican coalition,

31:43

which suggests to me that this isn't just

31:45

about affective polarization.

31:47

This is about different kinds of people who

31:50

come to the party with different kinds

31:52

of values and

31:54

not just different kinds of values, but I also argue

31:57

different epistemological

31:58

approaches to the world.

32:01

When you look at what drives evangelical

32:03

Christians and how they understand

32:05

their world, I would say it is fundamentally

32:08

different from how secular,

32:10

agnostic, or atheist people

32:13

understand their world. So

32:15

I think that you do have a

32:17

point about the tit for tat.

32:20

If you say left, I say right. You

32:22

say up, I say down. But I think

32:24

it is deeper than that.

32:26

Yes. I don't think it's merely affectation.

32:29

I think it's a bit like in

32:33

foreign policy and international relations theory, kind of everybody

32:36

agrees power is the really big thing and the debate

32:38

is, is it 80% or 90% or 70%? That

32:41

kind of thing. So I prioritize it much

32:43

higher. I don't disagree that there are other factors at work.

32:46

Like epistemologically, I brought

32:48

on Matt Grossman a couple of years ago who you also referenced

32:50

in the book. Grossman's thesis

32:53

is that Democrats think coalitionally,

32:55

Republicans think ideologically or

32:58

in terms of ideological purity. I

33:00

do think Trump is a big counterfactual

33:03

to that. But overall, I agree with that thesis that

33:05

generally speaking, the Republicans, all the primaries

33:08

up till Trump were who is reincarnated

33:10

Reagan and who's a Reiner. Whereas the

33:12

Democrats are thinking in terms of, well, we got the teachers

33:14

union, we've got African Americans, we've got LGBTQ,

33:17

and they're thinking, and so it does show they

33:19

are approaching and relaying information differently. I don't disagree

33:22

with that. I

33:25

think that it's so, I think

33:27

the parties are so large that it's very difficult to make

33:29

them reductive. So like, I

33:32

don't disagree that the evangelical Christians

33:34

that are part of the like Asa Hutchinson,

33:36

Mike Pence caucus are going

33:38

to have a different epistemological view than

33:43

Biden Democrats. But there's also a

33:46

bunch of Romney people that are just, you

33:48

know, they're still part of the coalition. There's

33:50

like the Rand people that are still part of the coalition.

33:53

So from my vantage point, the Republican Party is like

33:55

eight parties that are stacked

33:58

up like children in a trench coat. trying to get

34:00

into a rated R film. Uh, and same

34:02

with the Democratic Party. Are

34:03

they, I thought that they were like,

34:04

there were Teddy bears in a trench coat. They

34:06

could be that, well, I don't, I don't like the Republican Party

34:08

that much. I'm going to give it kids. It's

34:11

kids trying to sneak into a porno. Okay. Okay.

34:14

Okay.

34:15

Yeah. I, what

34:17

do you do with this though, Andrew? Like I

34:19

respect what you're saying. There's nothing incorrect

34:21

about, about these assertions, but

34:24

in terms of the extent to which they are

34:26

driving some of these

34:27

processes, again, I think that's

34:29

where we disagree. Um,

34:32

what really transformed my thinking

34:35

in this area,

34:37

you know, I, I have been looking

34:39

at this from the standpoint of political psychology

34:41

for, for a long time and

34:43

political psychology, I find a compelling

34:46

body of literature to explain or account

34:48

for some of the fundamental differences

34:50

we see between the social left

34:53

and the social right. Okay.

34:54

However,

34:55

when you look at the literature

34:58

on that social sorting into the parties,

35:01

the work of Liliana Mason and others.

35:03

And you look at how different

35:06

kinds of people who worship different kinds

35:08

of ways who live in different kinds

35:10

of places and sorted themselves into

35:12

these parties, I

35:15

find it

35:16

first of all, I think it's very dangerous. I think it's

35:18

not great. And I think many people agree

35:20

it's not good. It's not what we

35:22

want. We do not want our political parties to overlap

35:24

with religious sex. It's just

35:26

a recipe for democratic disaster.

35:29

But I also think that that helps to account

35:31

for

35:31

some of these

35:33

really polarizing

35:35

forces that we see that are happening.

35:37

So what do you do with that? What do you do with the,

35:39

the identity? Cause that's what at the heart here, right?

35:41

This identity

35:42

piece.

35:43

Uh, okay. Now we're back on common footing

35:46

because I'm very much with you. I do think it's very dangerous,

35:48

right? So like, um, I've, I've mentioned this

35:50

on the show before, but to me, a very healthy

35:52

way of approaching partisanship is my

35:55

elder relatives in Oklahoma, all

35:57

of whom were conservative growing up and it turns out all

35:59

of them were Democrats, and I was very surprised to learn

36:01

that when I was in high school. But as I got

36:03

to talk to them more, they were like the

36:06

political party I registered

36:09

with was, I just registered with, with everyone

36:11

was the biggest one in my county because it's so, it

36:13

is so unimportant to me. Like I care

36:15

much more about like, I'm an alve gold

36:18

bug and I'm, I'm, I'm a Baptist

36:20

and like, and other things that may not be good, but

36:23

the politics was secondary to it, right?

36:25

And I think politics has become much more forefront,

36:28

which I do think is really disturbing. And I do think when it

36:30

becomes lockstep, it becomes very disturbing.

36:33

And I don't know what's causing that acceleration

36:35

to it. And so I will yield to you

36:37

what are there particular

36:41

personality types or situations

36:43

that compel someone to prioritize their

36:45

political identity over their other identities, such

36:47

as, you know, husband, firefighter,

36:50

whatever the thing, we're all a bunch of identities, right?

36:53

Or is there a particular thing that's accelerating this on a macro

36:55

level? And are there particular people that are

36:57

more inclined to put politics front and center

36:59

in their personality? Great question.

37:01

Let me start with the micro level. We know

37:04

that when a particular

37:06

social identity is threatened is

37:09

when it is salient in our mind.

37:11

So if somebody comes

37:14

to, for example, when I

37:16

go to my local high school football

37:19

game, okay, and

37:21

the other side, the parents

37:23

are shouting obscenities at

37:26

my town's team. That's

37:29

a threat to that social identity.

37:31

So then that social identity, me as a fan

37:35

of the Haddon Township

37:36

Hawks,

37:37

that is go Hawks.

37:39

Go Hawks. Then I am super

37:42

that's like ignited. So

37:46

when I am at the football game and I'm a member

37:48

of the Haddon Township Hawks, and I feel that

37:50

there's a threat from that opposing

37:52

teams, parents, they're so nasty

37:55

with their expletives. My identity

37:58

is as a Haddon Township Hawk fan. is

38:00

so activated. Okay? So

38:03

what are the things that cause a social

38:05

identity to be activated other than Alkub

38:08

threat, which we know is

38:09

the easiest way to activate an identity?

38:12

Well, if we have really good fit,

38:15

if we look like the

38:17

members of our social team, if

38:20

we, you know,

38:21

talk the way that they talk, if

38:23

we live the way that they live, if we

38:25

think the way that they think, if we dress the way that they

38:27

dress, all of those things are gonna make

38:30

our sort of status

38:32

as a member of this social

38:34

team really salient

38:36

in our minds because we have what's called good

38:38

fit.

38:39

So the example I give in the book is, you

38:41

know,

38:41

I live outside of Philadelphia and

38:43

so I'm sort of a de facto Eagles fan-ish

38:47

and so if I go to an Eagles game

38:50

and I'm wearing my Eagles garb

38:52

and I see fans

38:54

of the other team, I immediately

38:56

think that they are very different from me. I will

38:58

tend to exaggerate the difference between myself and

39:00

them and I will,

39:03

you know, especially if I'm wearing the Eagles garb, I fit.

39:06

I look like a good member of my team. Now

39:08

if I happen to be tailgating

39:11

and there's like a Cowboys fan who's

39:14

in their Cowboys garb but they're

39:16

grading college exams,

39:19

now all of a sudden I have a bit of cognitive

39:21

dissonance, don't I? Because I'm like, oh,

39:23

they're just like me. I grade college exams.

39:26

We're a college professor.

39:27

So that then I don't have good fit

39:30

and they don't have good fit.

39:31

When you don't have good fit, your social

39:33

identity as part of that team is not

39:35

going to be as pronounced.

39:37

Why am I saying all this? Because

39:40

right now in the United States, as

39:43

these different kinds of people have sorted

39:45

themselves into the two parties,

39:48

you end up with a whole lot of Americans

39:50

who have exceptionally good fit

39:52

with their political parties.

39:55

On the right, that means if you

39:57

are white,

39:59

Christian,

40:00

rural, traditional, cultural,

40:03

conservative,

40:04

you have really good faith, right?

40:07

You live and worship and look just

40:10

like the members of your team live, worship,

40:12

and look. On the

40:15

other side, with Democrats, the sorting process

40:17

has been different. It

40:19

is now a very diverse party. So

40:21

there is racial and ethnic diversity, there's

40:24

agnostic and secular folks, and obviously

40:27

there's outliers in all of these.

40:29

But by and large, and I think

40:31

Ezra

40:32

Cline put it succinctly in his

40:34

book, Why We're Polarized, that the Democratic

40:36

Party has become a party of difference

40:39

and the Republican Party has become a party of seamness.

40:43

Part

40:44

of that too is that a lot of

40:46

the folks for whom political identity

40:48

is not super salient, I think they

40:51

now

40:52

call themselves independent.

40:54

There's a big purple mountain in the middle,

40:56

right? That's me. I

40:59

actively do not, it freaks me out on Twitter

41:01

when everybody puts in their bio what they are politically.

41:03

I'm like, that's what you want to live with? I own

41:06

a hat and a dog and all sorts of things that are...

41:08

Right, and you're like, I would not put that as one

41:10

of my number

41:11

one things.

41:12

But, so to answer your question

41:14

about why the rise in this, I

41:16

think that the social sorting

41:19

of the parties really does help explain

41:21

from a psychological standpoint, why

41:23

it is that political

41:25

identity would come to be so salient. And

41:27

it's because they are big umbrella

41:29

categories that have come to overlap

41:32

with all these more primal fundamental

41:34

aspects

41:34

of how we think of ourselves.

41:37

It's like a proxy. Okay, that's

41:39

fascinating. And one of the things that really

41:41

made me reconsider some stuff in the book,

41:44

so my working thesis that I

41:46

still have, but I'm less confident in it, is

41:49

that I think I'm going to import some

41:51

Robert Putnam for a minute as civil

41:54

intermediate institutions. That is to say things that

41:56

aren't government, like, you know, or businesses, just

41:58

your church or your... your Elks Lodge or

42:01

your local gardening club, whatever. Bowling. Bowling's

42:05

great, as if you're bowling alone. Almost.

42:09

As those multitude of identities

42:11

that the average American had have collapsed, I've

42:14

theorized that the last identity

42:17

standing is politics. And so people have increasingly

42:19

gravitated towards that. However, it

42:21

seems like, based on your data, I'm confusing

42:23

correlation with causation, because you

42:26

point out in the book that Republicans,

42:29

as the sorting has happened, Republicans, I think,

42:31

who are already religious, have gone to church more,

42:34

which would indicate that they're

42:36

going, I'm a Republican and all the Republicans,

42:38

oh, we're a religious party, therefore I will

42:40

go to church more. That it was not, it

42:43

wasn't that lack of church made them Republican,

42:45

it was that Republican made them churchy. Obviously, that's

42:47

not everybody, I realize there's lots of people that are very

42:49

religious regardless of their place, but your

42:51

data would indicate that, I think.

42:54

It is very hard, I'll be honest, it is very

42:56

hard to figure out these very reciprocal

42:59

relationships. I think that they are

43:02

mutually reinforcing. And as

43:04

a person who studies the effects of media, and

43:06

that's sort of how I came to these questions in the first

43:08

place, people are always like, so what's the effect of media

43:11

here?

43:11

And I was never really satisfied

43:14

with either answer of,

43:16

you know,

43:17

media effects are super strong or media

43:19

effects don't exist at all, and hence

43:21

the whiskey distillation metaphor, because

43:24

it really is this mutually

43:27

reinforcing system.

43:28

And I think that's what we're witnessing here as

43:31

well. And

43:32

you know, Putnam's work is,

43:35

I

43:35

think Putnam's work is crucial

43:37

because it does tell another

43:40

part of the story, which is about those aspects

43:42

of civic life, of shared civic life

43:45

that have fallen by the wayside, that we

43:47

do not have any more. And I don't

43:50

necessarily agree

43:52

with the verdict. I mean,

43:53

he lands on television as like a

43:56

big source of the problem

43:59

that people now...

43:59

just stay home and watch TV.

44:01

TV is bad for many things. I think

44:03

it has turned citizens

44:06

into spectators. But

44:08

I believe that there are other reasons

44:11

why this has occurred. And I think that just huge

44:13

shifts in social trust

44:15

and institutional trust, which you cannot discount.

44:18

But that

44:19

to me has been exacerbated.

44:22

All of this dementia you're talking about, this

44:25

decimation of these civic spaces and

44:28

these other spaces,

44:29

that has been exacerbated by the death of

44:32

local independent journalism.

44:34

One place that I see hope

44:38

is when you look at the data from

44:40

some of my friends who are at Syracuse University,

44:43

Josh Dar, Joanna Dunaway, they've

44:45

done some work on

44:47

examining what happens to affective

44:50

polarization that is hatred of the other

44:52

side

44:53

in communities that have no local

44:55

independent

44:57

journalism.

44:58

And affective polarization gets way

45:00

worse.

45:02

And it's

45:02

because if you do

45:05

not have local independent journalism

45:06

to turn to, then

45:09

your choice is either, okay, am I going to

45:11

like not pay attention to politics at all? Or

45:13

am I going to pay attention to nationalized

45:16

culture war politics,

45:18

which is inevitably going to reinforce

45:21

all of these divides we've been talking about.

45:24

But if you have a local

45:27

independent press, you're going to read

45:29

your newspaper and you're going to read about your

45:32

high school football team, go Hawks. You're

45:34

going to read about the PTA, you're going to read

45:36

about businesses on Main Street. There

45:39

are going to be these sort of cross cutting identities

45:42

that aren't about those

45:44

left, right dichotomies.

45:47

That's where I see a pathway for

45:49

hope. Granted, money for

45:52

local independent journalism is not

45:54

easy to come by, but I still feel like that

45:56

is a mechanism

45:58

that can help us.

45:59

I agree. I think that that would be ameliorative. And

46:03

I suspect that real quick,

46:05

I just want to make sure I understand this, that when

46:07

we talk about the increase

46:10

in salience of political identity,

46:13

you're saying that as identities

46:17

become more tightly correlated,

46:20

so like Republicans, I

46:22

am rural, I am Christian, I am traditional,

46:24

I am Republican, and we all share these attributes, so

46:26

they become interchangeable, so attack on one is attack

46:28

on the other. If you're questioning cowboy hats, you're

46:31

also questioning my religious identity, you're also

46:33

questioning my political identity, something like that, right? That

46:35

the reinforcement is exacerbating. Okay. And

46:37

so then the next bit is that if

46:40

we're focused more on local things, it

46:43

takes us away from wedge issues at the national level,

46:45

which also makes sense to me. Like the more

46:48

I'm trying to get Newt Gingrich on the show, I've

46:50

invited him to come on the show to talk about zoos.

46:52

He agreed to do it, and he's never come on. He's a huge

46:54

fan of zoos, incidentally. Did you know this? No.

46:57

He actually, he kept his campaign

46:59

going in 2012 longer than

47:02

when he knew he was defeated because there were zoos he wanted

47:04

to visit. So I sneaky, I tried to invite

47:06

him on to talk about zoos. Anyway, he wrote a book

47:08

recently, I wanted to talk to him about it. I don't think he's going to come on so I

47:10

can say this. The more I read about Newt Gingrich,

47:12

if I had to pick a villain in terms

47:15

of sort of institutional

47:18

collapse in Congress and effective polarization,

47:20

I think I'd probably put him as

47:22

the top guy. And one of the big things is part

47:25

of his strategy was don't

47:27

focus on local politics. That old maxim, all

47:29

politics is local. Don't do that. Focus

47:32

on national wedge issues. And that the

47:34

older model we had where Oklahoma

47:36

Democrats really had very little to do with

47:39

Massachusetts Democrats, they only came together every

47:41

four years when there was a presidential candidate. And then in

47:43

fact, it was really multiple unrelated

47:45

parties picking a standard bearer that time

47:48

that could switch that we shifted

47:50

from that point in the mid 90s from coalitions

47:53

of local parties with disparate interests

47:55

to two big national parties that have

47:57

to pick national issues to fight over which are generally... culture

48:00

war issues. And so you're saying if we have better

48:02

local journalism, it sort of draws people out

48:04

of that. Again, and let

48:07

me just say I see,

48:10

go ahead, have Newt

48:13

on to talk about Zeus. Good luck. I would be

48:15

excited to hear what his favorite animal

48:16

is. I would sneak

48:18

you as I would then talk to you about the other stuff too, but the Zeus

48:21

would be the bait.

48:21

Good. Okay. Okay. So

48:24

in the book, I talk about how, you

48:26

know, a lot of times these processes happen slowly,

48:28

right? The sort of partisan sorting

48:31

and this, you know, the

48:33

stalemate

48:33

in Congress, etc, etc,

48:35

the lack of compromise. A lot of times

48:38

these things are very slow to unfold

48:40

and you're like, Oh, how did this happen? But

48:42

sometimes it happens really fast like

48:44

it did in 1994.

48:47

It's just so bizarre when you get to the point

48:49

where you're old enough that the years

48:51

that you're referring to as historical

48:53

moments are also like 1994 was

48:56

like an awesome year

48:56

for me. I graduated high school, life was

48:58

great. But I

49:01

digress. Newt Gingrich in 90.

49:03

It really, it really bugs

49:05

me that more time has passed between now

49:07

and when Back to the Future came out,

49:10

then Back to the Future and where Marty goes. That

49:12

to me is very disturbing. That's so okay.

49:14

You want to hear something even crazier?

49:16

That my, so

49:18

I have a 13 year old daughter who was

49:21

kind of like, you know, watching a Harry

49:23

Potter movie and saying how he's handsome. And

49:25

I did the math about when the movie came out

49:28

and how old she is. And I realized that

49:30

her crushing on Daniel Radcliffe

49:33

was like me crushing on Elvis

49:36

Presley

49:37

watching old Elvis movies.

49:40

Weird. I know. So 1994,

49:43

okay, big banner year.

49:47

And that is the year that

49:50

Newt Gingrich, like to his credit,

49:52

I mean, he really, he whipped the

49:54

party up and he created

49:57

contract with America. And he said, okay,

49:59

all these folks. who are going to run for the House

50:01

of Representatives, you're going to stand on the steps

50:03

of the U.S. Capitol and pledge

50:06

to all of these issue positions

50:09

at the national level that you are going

50:11

to work for all of these specific

50:13

issues, and you're going to hold up your

50:15

right hand and say, and if

50:18

I fail, you can kick me out. And

50:20

they did. They

50:22

all did.

50:23

And the victory was sweeping

50:25

in those midterms.

50:27

And when you look at partisan,

50:29

bipartisan compromise in Congress

50:32

through

50:32

these beautiful data visualizations, and

50:34

you look at,

50:35

you know, the extent to which

50:38

elites in each party were willing to work with the

50:40

other side, et cetera, 1994,

50:43

everything changes.

50:45

That kind of compromise, bipartisan

50:48

legislation, it gets less and

50:50

less and less. And again, it was kind

50:52

of slowly starting to look like that. But 1994

50:54

is like something

50:56

massive happened.

50:58

And it was Newt Gingrich and his affection

51:01

for zoos, apparently. Yeah.

51:04

Well, and just I add a lot of other

51:06

things too, like he

51:08

like, you know, he was a Rockefeller Republican when he got started.

51:11

Like he was on like he's not even ideologically

51:14

that conservative, but his the

51:16

rhetorical and interactional elements of his

51:18

politics are extremely exasperatory. So

51:21

when he was running, he was saying things like the

51:23

Democratic Party is a bigger existential threat to

51:25

America than the Nazis or the Soviet

51:27

Union quote from Newt Gingrich, you can look that I'm

51:30

not exact quote, but I'm getting all of the nouns

51:32

right. Right. Well, now

51:32

what now you just described all of Twitter.

51:35

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Wait, hold on.

51:37

So, okay, a couple

51:39

of questions. So local journalism, I

51:41

agree that could be a military. I'm not sure how to

51:43

do it. Like I completely I

51:45

love like, when I like

51:47

I went, I was eating at Torchy's Tacos the other

51:50

day, and they had like the Austin Chronicle

51:52

or something. And I read it, and I'm reading letters to the editor.

51:54

And I was like, this is fantastic. I really enjoy. And

51:56

I also found that my hackles were

51:59

less pronounced. and reading people I disagreed

52:01

with if they were local. Largely because

52:03

a lot of the stuff was just local stuff that

52:05

was somewhat procedural, so it wasn't really

52:07

like a cosmic me versus you battle.

52:10

It was about like parking spaces and things. It was like

52:12

the quality of the local prison and stuff

52:14

that I enjoyed. Generally

52:17

when people are favoring trying

52:19

to boost local journalism, they want to do it through

52:21

federal subsidies. My concern with

52:23

that is twofold. One,

52:27

the data that I have on journalists is

52:29

that journalists are like 9 to 1

52:32

Democrat leaning versus conservative, right? Even

52:36

if we go, well, they're parts in the right place and they're

52:38

good people and they're trying to be objective,

52:40

even if we concede that, you could make the

52:43

argument that the way to solve this is really just

52:45

to give the power of media

52:47

apparatus to one of the two sides until it

52:49

can have conclusive epistemological victory.

52:52

So it makes me slightly concerned about basically

52:55

subsidizing one political viewpoint as

52:58

a way to try to lower

53:01

the political rank.

53:01

I'm not sure that those statistics

53:04

apply to local

53:07

journalists.

53:08

I think that that is true when we're talking about

53:10

the legacy outlets, right? Where

53:13

you're talking about legacy, Washington

53:15

Post, New York Times, et cetera. I am not sure.

53:18

I mean,

53:19

that's an empirical question that we

53:21

could answer. I would imagine that – Well,

53:23

you know what? Actually, now that I think about

53:26

it too, I'd forgotten about this, but a stat I learned recently

53:29

was that part of why I'm now

53:31

correcting myself – thank you – part of why

53:33

the legacy media

53:37

leans a blue team so hard

53:39

is in part because all of the old regional and

53:41

local newspapers have dried up. So

53:44

it used to be when you had the Muscogee

53:47

Minuteman Tribune that that was going to have

53:49

40 Republicans on it. And now that those have all

53:51

gone away, it's just the coastal – Coastal elites. Yeah,

53:55

coastal blue team places that are

53:57

running all the media now. So maybe you're right.

53:59

I see it so problematic when you look

54:02

at the research on the consolidation

54:04

of media ownership and the fact that a lot of these

54:06

local newspapers just get hollowed

54:08

out and dried up and there are places

54:10

that either only have one local newspaper

54:12

that's just a weekly or they have none. Think

54:15

about what happens to the folks who live there who

54:18

then only have the

54:20

elite coastal press.

54:23

Where is their experience represented?

54:26

How do they see their lives represented

54:29

in the

54:29

newspaper? I

54:31

think the role

54:32

that a lack

54:34

of local independent journalism

54:37

plays in feeding a lack of trust

54:39

in institutions

54:40

and in feeding conspiratorial thinking

54:42

is

54:43

huge.

54:44

If you don't have a local

54:47

press that is holding your political leaders

54:49

to account

54:50

or talking about the world the way that you would

54:52

talk about the world or your life.

54:56

Instead you're being told

54:58

what the world is at

55:00

the level of nationalized culture

55:03

wars by folks

55:05

on the coast. I just see

55:07

that that's a recipe for disaster.

55:10

Yeah, I mean it could be. Back

55:13

in like 2016 I was watching,

55:15

I was still active on Facebook at the time and I was watching

55:18

a lot of my relatives that were in Oklahoma respond

55:20

to things and the thing that struck me was not

55:23

so much that they were pro-Trump

55:25

or they liked Trump, it was that they felt a

55:28

constant visceral patronizing

55:32

element from the coastal media. There

55:34

was a distinct hey

55:37

hillbillies eat your vegetables kind

55:39

of vibe that they really, and I don't, I get it,

55:41

like nobody likes being talked down to. So I

55:43

can understand how that would become an exasperatory.

55:46

Wait, can I back, can I backtrack on

55:49

something that just popped in your mind? You

55:51

mentioned earlier and you say in the book that there's, I'm

55:54

going to forget the terms here, but there's like tightly correlated

55:56

political social identity and loosely correlated

55:59

political social identity. So I don't know the terms,

56:01

but Republicans,

56:04

because traditional rural conservative

56:06

white, are more tightly interconnected

56:08

in terms of their identity. Democrats,

56:11

as you point out, diverse party. But

56:13

if you start looking at the individual groups,

56:16

do you not have this done on a refractory level?

56:19

And what I mean by that is African Americans are,

56:21

I think 90% Democrat, are largely urban

56:26

and are more religious than the average Democrat. So

56:29

are they the same epistemological model as Republicans,

56:31

just with different variables?

56:33

I think that these same dynamics happen

56:35

within those subgroups.

56:36

Yes.

56:37

Right? Because then you have that identity

56:40

alignment. Yes, that can happen.

56:42

But because we have

56:44

a

56:45

two party system, and

56:48

because the Democratic Party

56:50

is the quote unquote big tent

56:52

party, and it has all these different

56:55

groups within it. It

56:57

does

56:58

reduce

57:00

the salience of

57:02

that political mega identity

57:05

of the left

57:07

for them. Because

57:10

when Democrats look around, like what do Democrats

57:12

look like? It's like, well, they look like all kinds of things.

57:14

They worship all kinds of ways. They do all kinds

57:16

of things.

57:17

This is, I know you had

57:19

Yasha Monk on a couple weeks ago or last

57:21

week, and this is my biggest

57:24

issue with

57:26

his writing and his most recent

57:28

book is that

57:29

I think that the dynamics that you refers to are

57:32

correct. I think that some of them are problematic.

57:35

I

57:37

find it oddly conspicuously

57:41

absent

57:42

the lack

57:44

of reference to a white conservative identity

57:47

because we know that

57:49

it is so hyper salient.

57:51

Because my work is looking

57:53

at

57:54

beliefs in empirically

57:56

false information, and I'm

57:59

looking at the political. information environment.

58:03

The issues that we've had over

58:05

the last like five years are highly

58:07

asymmetrical

58:09

and they're worse on the right than the left.

58:12

And a lot of that is coming from

58:14

this identity alignment that is driving

58:17

a

58:18

strong appetite for mis and disinformation.

58:21

And I think if you just look at what Fox

58:24

News has done, like the economic

58:26

model at Fox News, which is very much steeped

58:28

in identity threat

58:30

and how you get

58:32

your social identity of like

58:34

white conservative Christian traditionalism,

58:38

you get it whipped up into a frenzy and you

58:40

make it believe that its entire way of life

58:42

is under threat.

58:44

You're going to end up

58:46

having painted yourself into a quarter like

58:48

what happened with the Dominion lawsuit

58:51

where they ended up really

58:54

in a pickle where reality

58:57

was not what their viewers wanted to

58:59

know. Reality was that

59:01

Donald Trump had lost. Reality was that the

59:04

voting machines had not switched any

59:06

votes, but their

59:08

audiences had been steeped in this

59:10

content, had super hyper salient

59:13

political identities and

59:16

felt like it

59:18

was an existential threat to have

59:20

lost that election. So they believed

59:22

this misinformation for comprehension

59:25

control and community. So

59:29

when we look at the misinformation

59:32

landscape, it is asymmetrical

59:34

and it runs very fast and furiously

59:37

on the right. I believe

59:39

that some of these dynamics are problematic

59:42

within the smaller

59:45

identity communities on the left. I

59:47

think that Monk is correct that Trump's

59:50

election

59:51

posed an existential threat to the

59:54

identities on the left, which made

59:56

folks really double down. And I found his

59:58

treatment of the question.

59:59

question of, you

1:00:03

know, how you have these activist groups and nonprofits

1:00:05

who really suffered from infighting

1:00:09

during that era because of the

1:00:11

perceived threat to identity. So yes, these

1:00:14

fundamentals of these dynamics

1:00:16

happen within aligned identity

1:00:19

categories.

1:00:20

But when you're looking across the left and the

1:00:22

right in the US,

1:00:24

the engine is running very fast and furiously

1:00:26

on the right.

1:00:28

Got it. And identity alignment, I think, is the

1:00:30

term that I was growing for. And so

1:00:32

like with African Americans, again, Africans, they're

1:00:35

strongly correlated with a party and strongly

1:00:37

correlated with urban environment. But that

1:00:40

party itself is not correlated with

1:00:43

racial identity. So I two

1:00:45

of the three things might be very similar and

1:00:48

have identity reinforcing things. But one of them,

1:00:50

this would be like if theoretically Republicans were all

1:00:53

tradition, I'd say all were broadly

1:00:56

traditionalist, conservative, rural,

1:00:59

but ethnically diverse. Exactly. If that were the

1:01:01

world we lived in, then that reinforcing

1:01:04

mechanism would be dropping one of the legs of the world. Exactly.

1:01:07

Yeah, that's all I had then. Yeah.

1:01:10

So OK, out of curiosity, two

1:01:12

scenarios are run by you. One likely,

1:01:14

one very, very unlikely. The unlikely one is this. This

1:01:16

will never happen. But theoretically, let's say

1:01:19

a law is passed that state

1:01:23

parties can't be the same parties as national parties.

1:01:25

There's now a firewall between them. Like

1:01:28

New York kind of almost sort of did this

1:01:30

a few years ago, like a long time ago, where there's a

1:01:32

conservative party and a Republican party.

1:01:34

There's a working families party and a progressive

1:01:36

or in a Democratic party. But let's

1:01:39

say we do that differently. So Oklahoma now has

1:01:41

the the Farmers and

1:01:43

Soil Party and the the Pitchforks

1:01:46

and Pitchforks and Values

1:01:48

Party or whatever it is. Right. And

1:01:51

meanwhile, Nebraska has, you know, whatever.

1:01:53

We could go through all of this, right. But but if

1:01:55

the parties were then split where you actually had

1:01:57

a firewall between state party versus

1:02:00

National Party, would that have

1:02:05

a, would it introduce some friction into these

1:02:07

self-reinforcing identity alignments?

1:02:09

That's interesting. I think it would, but

1:02:11

I don't know that it would really matter

1:02:14

until we had a more robust

1:02:15

local and state-level

1:02:19

journalistic infrastructure,

1:02:21

because I don't know. At

1:02:23

the end of the day, the role that those

1:02:26

state parties would play and

1:02:28

how they would influence politics

1:02:30

would be contingent on the media environment. And

1:02:32

if there were no media infrastructure to

1:02:35

highlight those distinctions, I'm not sure

1:02:38

how much they'd matter. Yeah.

1:02:40

Plus, you know what, plus on top of that too, like

1:02:43

I'm over in Britain all the time, and I can tell you there's constitutive

1:02:46

differences between Tories and Republicans. Like

1:02:48

if we were to put policy on a spectrum

1:02:52

of state to no state, like I'd

1:02:54

put Tories about like at

1:02:56

a mainstream to progressive Democrat level

1:02:58

in the United States. Like if you're an Obama Democrat,

1:03:01

you're basically a Tory over in the UK. But

1:03:04

we tend to, the way our media system

1:03:06

works is no, the red team ally

1:03:09

is the Tories and the blue team ally is

1:03:11

the Labour Party. So that may not have

1:03:13

any effect anyway. Okay, next question. There's

1:03:17

strong identity alignment going on within the Republican

1:03:19

Party, but at the same time

1:03:23

in the last two elections, while

1:03:27

African Americans and Hispanics remain

1:03:29

a reliable voting block for the Democrats,

1:03:32

Trump made gains with both over Romney

1:03:34

and then he made gains with himself over himself

1:03:36

previously. So if that trend

1:03:38

continues, will the Republican Party not

1:03:41

become a broader ethnic coalition and thus

1:03:43

alleviate these problems? I

1:03:45

mean,

1:03:45

obviously, yeah, that's what would

1:03:48

happen. I mean, if the Republican

1:03:50

Party became more racially or ethnically

1:03:52

diverse,

1:03:53

I think that would alleviate some of these problems.

1:03:56

I'm not...

1:03:57

Convinced

1:04:00

that that is the path that

1:04:02

we are on that could be a trump

1:04:05

phenomenon. I don't know. Okay

1:04:06

Uh, what about like

1:04:08

I realized that it's not emblematic? It's it's

1:04:11

at the elite level, but when you look at the

1:04:13

the republican presidential primaries you've

1:04:15

got nikki haley who's indian american

1:04:18

um, you have uh Ben

1:04:20

karson in the last election you've got ten scott now both

1:04:23

of whom are african-americans So at

1:04:25

the elite level where they're running for president.

1:04:27

It is ethnically diverse Does that have

1:04:29

a? Immulative effect

1:04:31

on this identity alignment or is it is it?

1:04:34

How does that work?

1:04:35

I think that it would if they won.

1:04:37

Okay. Okay So so theoretically

1:04:40

if we get like if there's a nikki haley

1:04:42

ten scott ticket, uh in this next election

1:04:44

seems very unlikely But I think that that would matter

1:04:46

i'm not putting money on it. Got it. Okay,

1:04:48

you'll appreciate this one I've had this conversation

1:04:50

this thought experiment with some political scientist friends

1:04:53

Because of the concern

1:04:55

about the far right and the mega movement and

1:04:57

this sort of

1:04:59

You know move into authoritarianism

1:05:00

and populism

1:05:03

If

1:05:04

if in a weird alternative alternative

1:05:07

universe Nikki

1:05:09

haley were to get the republican

1:05:12

nomination

1:05:16

Should

1:05:17

democratically minded

1:05:19

small d democratically minded americans

1:05:22

even progressive ones

1:05:24

vote for a nikki haley

1:05:29

Taking a

1:05:30

simply because someone

1:05:33

like nikki haley is

1:05:35

More is less authoritarian

1:05:38

is slightly more moderate but not even

1:05:40

about her political Ideology more

1:05:42

about her respect for the institutions themselves

1:05:44

Her respect for democratic norms

1:05:47

how she talks how she treats the system

1:05:49

how she treats the institutions Um,

1:05:51

what

1:05:52

do you think of that one andra?

1:05:54

Uh, I think that it's a great idea

1:05:56

for people to quit treating political parties

1:05:58

as a religious affiliation I

1:06:00

was at Burning Man here four

1:06:03

years ago, three years ago.

1:06:05

I thought you were going to say this year

1:06:07

and I was going to ask if you got stuck. No,

1:06:09

I did. I have friends that were there and apparently they had a fine

1:06:11

time. They actually got engaged so I don't

1:06:14

think it was because of the flooding. I don't think that the flooding

1:06:17

compelled them to propose to one another. They

1:06:19

thought they were never going to get out and they were like, you

1:06:21

better do it now. We're going to die. Who

1:06:24

cares about fear of commitment? We got three days before the

1:06:26

toilets run out. Let's do this. Let's

1:06:28

do it.

1:06:29

No, I was there in 2019 and I was living in

1:06:31

Texas. I

1:06:35

had not moved to LA. I was in Texas and

1:06:37

I met a guy. By the way, he kicked out the conversation

1:06:39

by going like, hey man, yeah, take a seat. Just so you

1:06:41

know, took three hits of acid. It's probably going to kick in at

1:06:44

about 10, 15 minutes. So if I get weird, that's what's going

1:06:46

on. But yeah, like what do you

1:06:48

want to talk about? He was cool. So we were just

1:06:50

talking and I mentioned I was in Texas and he went, man, because

1:06:52

Beto O'Rourke was a phenomenon at the time. And

1:06:56

he went, I have half a mind to just

1:06:58

like move down to Texas to try and like, you

1:07:00

know, help the blue team, push out the red team

1:07:02

in Texas. And I was like, well, why don't you, where

1:07:04

do you live? And he's like, you know, Oregon or someplace.

1:07:07

And I went, well, why don't you just become a Republican, like where you live?

1:07:09

Because then what you can do is you'll be able

1:07:11

to push your ideology within

1:07:14

the Republican primaries and you'll

1:07:16

have more effect on being able to

1:07:18

nudge the Republican Party to where you want it. And

1:07:20

like just the visceral disgust

1:07:23

he had at like, no, I am I'm

1:07:25

a Democrat. And I was like, OK, well, for me, these are

1:07:27

just vehicles to get policy done. I don't

1:07:29

want to treat political parties as

1:07:32

a conversion scenario where,

1:07:34

you know, I leave the God of my fathers to

1:07:36

join your tribe. I think that's a horrible. So

1:07:38

for I don't know that I would I

1:07:41

would vote for Nikki Haley based on what

1:07:46

I a Democrat am going to vote for Nikki Haley

1:07:48

because I she's she's an ethnically

1:07:50

diverse Republican and maybe that will change things. I don't

1:07:52

know that that would be enough for me. But but

1:07:56

the idea of could

1:07:58

there be a scenario where I as a Democrat. vote

1:08:00

for a Republican for the greater good, sure. I

1:08:02

think that that's entirely possible. Yeah. Right.

1:08:04

And just to be clear, my

1:08:06

thought experiment is not because I see

1:08:09

her as like the ethnically diverse candidate

1:08:11

that will change the calculus of the party. It's

1:08:13

because of how she abides

1:08:16

by democratic norms and institutions

1:08:19

and

1:08:20

that it would change the

1:08:22

character of the party because elite

1:08:24

cues matter. I would want

1:08:26

to know though at the end of

1:08:28

that conversation with that guy, I would love to

1:08:30

have seen like an artistic rendition of how

1:08:32

he saw you through that acid trip,

1:08:35

having disgusted him in that way. Yeah.

1:08:36

I would love to see his artwork.

1:08:40

I looked amazing. I had on this gold

1:08:43

and black brocade blazer,

1:08:45

no shirt with this like turquoise

1:08:48

necklace dangling down and I was bearded

1:08:50

but like really sunburned in my hair. I

1:08:52

looked like a villain from Sonic the Hedgehog

1:08:54

and all of the photos of it. I looked really cool. Did

1:08:57

you just

1:08:57

describe a bolo tie?

1:08:59

It wasn't quite a, no, no, think more like

1:09:01

Hawaiian type things somebody gave to me

1:09:04

because I was just I was just plunging into

1:09:06

all the tropes while I was there. It was a really good time. Love

1:09:08

it. Okay, so

1:09:11

another question for you because we've talked about media and we've

1:09:13

talked about identity. Let's bring these together.

1:09:15

A lot of

1:09:17

the presumed rancor within American

1:09:20

politics over the last 15 years has

1:09:22

been fear of echo chambers that

1:09:25

conservatives watch Fox and progressives

1:09:27

watch CNN or MSNBC and

1:09:29

it is the lack of information that they're getting from

1:09:31

the other side that makes

1:09:33

them extreme. Alternately,

1:09:37

there's this identity alignment phenomenon

1:09:40

and I gather that you were more concerned about identity

1:09:42

alignment than you are about echo chambers.

1:09:45

Yeah, because it turns out that empirically echo

1:09:47

chambers don't really happen.

1:09:50

That people, even people who for

1:09:53

whom political identity salience is

1:09:55

very high, like they think about themselves

1:09:57

in terms of their party and their politics.

1:09:59

from the consumer

1:10:02

diverse information.

1:10:04

The issue is that the

1:10:06

kinds of information they consume, the

1:10:08

frame that's around it is

1:10:11

often a frame that does

1:10:13

seek to discredit it. So echo

1:10:15

chambers, even though they're possible,

1:10:17

even though, and I was in that camp too, I was

1:10:20

concerned about filter bubbles and how

1:10:22

algorithms would lead us into

1:10:24

these little dens of sameness. It

1:10:27

doesn't actually seem to happen. And

1:10:29

the people who have the strongest

1:10:31

political views,

1:10:33

yes, they end up kind

1:10:35

of seeking down information that

1:10:37

favors their side, but they are also

1:10:39

exposed to information that contradicts their

1:10:41

views.

1:10:43

Right. Okay. So this is like, I'm

1:10:45

on Facebook, and I'm actively looking

1:10:48

for the dumb stuff

1:10:50

that the other side said so I can dunk on

1:10:52

them. So I'll read it so I can say how stupid they

1:10:54

are, but I'm being exposed to stuff, but the

1:10:57

mere exposure is not sufficient. On

1:10:59

that same level, do what

1:11:02

are the habits of people for whom political

1:11:04

salience is high on their identity versus

1:11:07

people that are low in terms

1:11:09

of political salience? So for example, for

1:11:11

people that don't prioritize politics and

1:11:13

their identity, if you ask them, who are you as a person?

1:11:16

They don't tell you they're a Democrat or Republican. They tell you

1:11:18

they're a firefighter, whatever, right? Do they just

1:11:20

opt out of politics? Are they not reading political

1:11:23

news? Are they balancing it? Are they consuming

1:11:25

as much as the politically salient people? What are their media

1:11:28

habits like?

1:11:29

What listeners can't see is that my head is

1:11:31

nodding and shaking and moving. Yes.

1:11:33

So this is the real issue is that

1:11:36

the normal people, the

1:11:38

normal people for whom political

1:11:41

identity is not the first thing they say,

1:11:43

when you say, Hey, introduce yourself at a party.

1:11:45

Hi, I'm data. I'm

1:11:47

a liberal Democrat. Yeah. Those weirdos,

1:11:50

unfortunately, are the ones who are consuming

1:11:53

the political information.

1:11:56

The folks for who political identity is

1:11:58

not,

1:11:58

you know, front and center.

1:12:00

Many of them just opt out of our news

1:12:02

environment altogether. Because

1:12:04

it is so left versus

1:12:07

right, it's so conflict centered, it's so culture

1:12:09

war centered, it is not

1:12:12

a pleasant space to be if you do not

1:12:14

define yourself in terms of your politics. So then

1:12:17

think about, you know, the tail

1:12:19

wagging the dog. Yeah, tail wagging the dog. I

1:12:21

was going to say dog eating the cat. That's not

1:12:23

it. It's the tail wagging the dog because now

1:12:26

you have these media producers that

1:12:28

are trying to appease the folks

1:12:30

who are already watching in the first place or

1:12:32

reading in the first place. And so they're

1:12:34

kind of doubling down on these hyper

1:12:36

polarizing narratives because

1:12:38

that's what,

1:12:40

you know, activates their identity. In the meantime,

1:12:42

normal people are watching

1:12:44

HGTV. Right. Okay.

1:12:46

So like if we go back 50 years

1:12:49

when there's three channels, the channels

1:12:51

are broad establishment and tepid,

1:12:54

but they're big tent as a result. There

1:12:57

is now there's a fractured media landscape

1:12:59

that is exacerbating social

1:13:02

threats to my sense of identity

1:13:04

because that's how I capitalize on all of this and

1:13:06

the people that don't want to key into it. A minority

1:13:08

of them listen to this show, but the

1:13:11

most people that go, I don't want to deal with this, just go,

1:13:13

I'm going to watch that really

1:13:15

nice British cooking show where they all help each

1:13:17

other. I can't remember what it's the great British Bake Off. Like

1:13:19

they go watch that or they watch NASCAR. Great

1:13:21

British Bake Off.

1:13:22

Or they watch something that is

1:13:25

just not screaming and they pull out of the

1:13:27

political environment entirely. Correct.

1:13:29

Or they watch Love is Blind. Okay,

1:13:31

nice. I'll check that out. Okay. No,

1:13:34

you won't. You're not going to. You're not going

1:13:36

to watch Love is Blind. Probably not. I'll probably forget

1:13:38

about it. It's really, really good. What is it

1:13:40

about? It's about people who are

1:13:43

dating in these pods and they can't see each other

1:13:45

and then they propose marriage after

1:13:48

like a week and then they get to live together for three

1:13:50

weeks and decide if

1:13:51

they're going to go through with it or not.

1:13:52

Oh wow. Okay. I

1:13:55

might check that out. That sounds interesting. Like

1:13:57

just given how dating works, I might check that out.

1:13:59

It's really it's it's

1:14:02

super fun. Okay, and when I watch it

1:14:04

my political identity is not salient But because

1:14:07

my political identity is always around

1:14:10

I'm always fascinated

1:14:11

That they

1:14:12

don't talk politics in the pods

1:14:15

although there was one the pods are the

1:14:17

blind dating places There was one a

1:14:19

couple seasons ago. I'm in deep.

1:14:21

Okay. There was one a couple seasons ago where The

1:14:25

what broke them up was that the

1:14:27

girl was Christian and the guy

1:14:29

was an atheist And they ended up

1:14:32

and I was like, well, that's the closest

1:14:34

we've gotten to some kind of political

1:14:36

rift

1:14:36

I I bet you they do talk about

1:14:39

politics in the pod I bet you the producers cut that

1:14:41

shit out because they want it to be a big broad

1:14:43

program is my guess

1:14:45

You're probably right. Wait a minute.

1:14:47

Are you saying that production is

1:14:49

I know framing these I Sometimes

1:14:53

suspect that reality television shows

1:14:55

by virtue of the fact that they employ multiple writers

1:14:57

might Actually write it advanced.

1:15:00

Okay, I'll put it. I'll put a pin on that. I

1:15:02

know we're running out of time Can I ask you a a

1:15:05

big question and then a quick lightning round on just

1:15:08

some terms and then we'll finish up Yeah, that's

1:15:10

super intimidating go great. Okay,

1:15:12

so let's get into cognition in

1:15:14

terms of how people approach Politics

1:15:17

and identity and all of these things you

1:15:20

talk about gut-based intuitionists

1:15:23

and evidence-based Rationalists who

1:15:26

are these two groups and what does that mean?

1:15:27

Well, most of us use both all

1:15:30

the time Okay, human beings use both the

1:15:32

systems are not super distinct intuition

1:15:35

and Intuition is you

1:15:37

know going based off of your

1:15:39

gut not necessarily needing empirical evidence

1:15:42

to come to a decision Because

1:15:44

you feel it you feel what is

1:15:46

true

1:15:48

Empiricists are those who

1:15:50

or rationalists are those who

1:15:53

need evidence Before

1:15:55

they make a decision they need

1:15:58

some kind of data to verify

1:15:59

what they

1:16:00

think might be right.

1:16:03

Now, these two ways of knowing are actually not,

1:16:04

you

1:16:06

know,

1:16:12

bipolar ends of the same scale. It's not like

1:16:14

you're one or the other. Most

1:16:17

of us are both, okay? But when you look

1:16:19

at folks who tend to favor one way of

1:16:21

knowing over another, they're

1:16:24

correlated with political

1:16:26

identity, and they're also correlated

1:16:29

with belief and misinformation.

1:16:31

So people who say that they go based on their

1:16:33

gut and intuition and emotion are

1:16:36

significantly less likely to

1:16:39

hold accurate beliefs. And

1:16:41

it makes sense because they are

1:16:44

downplaying the importance of empirical

1:16:47

evidence in their belief system.

1:16:49

If you're not going to update your beliefs in light of empirical

1:16:52

evidence because your intuition says, screw it,

1:16:54

that's not true, you're going to end

1:16:56

up being empirically

1:16:58

wrong. Sure. Yeah.

1:17:01

Okay. All right.

1:17:03

Well, next question, how do these correlate with

1:17:05

the political system? This

1:17:06

is where it gets tricky. So

1:17:09

we do, my research has

1:17:11

shown that people who report

1:17:13

having faith and intuition

1:17:15

and emotion over evidence and data

1:17:17

are more likely to be

1:17:20

conservative and Republican. But

1:17:23

most importantly, and the strongest relationship

1:17:25

is with support for

1:17:27

President Trump,

1:17:28

which I see as sort

1:17:30

of an artifact of populism

1:17:33

because Trump is a populist who would often

1:17:35

say and demonstrate intuitive

1:17:38

thinking, right? He would say, you know, I

1:17:40

feel it in my gut. I don't need your pita.

1:17:43

You know, I know what's right. He

1:17:45

has these amazing quotes where he's like, sometimes

1:17:48

my gut tells me more than anyone's brain

1:17:50

could ever tell me, you know. So

1:17:53

that is interesting. And the

1:17:56

work that I've been doing recently proposes that.

1:17:59

Perhaps. Most populist authoritarians

1:18:01

perform intuitionism and

1:18:04

value intuitionism

1:18:05

because it's strategically

1:18:07

advantageous for them to do so.

1:18:09

Because if they get their supporters to

1:18:11

have faith in their gut,

1:18:13

in their emotional responses, over

1:18:16

evidence and data, well then, they

1:18:19

can never be wrong,

1:18:20

right? Then you can never have

1:18:23

disconfirming information that is

1:18:25

going to take you down because you don't ever

1:18:28

have to believe in it because you can tell you it's

1:18:30

false. So I see it as a strategic

1:18:34

authoritarian populist

1:18:35

spew patch to

1:18:38

promote intuitionism.

1:18:40

Right, okay. I could, okay. So

1:18:42

from a strategic standpoint, if

1:18:45

I am promoting thinking with your gut and I'm attracting

1:18:47

gut thinkers, then I am

1:18:49

bulletproof to empirical evidence and

1:18:52

all I have to do is be able to activate your gut.

1:18:54

I would also be really curious as to how the

1:18:56

self-reporting is phrased and the reason I ask

1:18:58

that is, rightly

1:19:02

or wrongly, I think of myself as an evidence-based

1:19:04

rationalist much more than I think of myself as

1:19:06

a gut thinker. So if you were to ask me in

1:19:09

a survey, would

1:19:11

you describe yourself as more rational or emotional?

1:19:13

I would put rational. My guess is that most people,

1:19:15

if you ask, are you more rational or emotional

1:19:18

in your thinking, most people would say

1:19:20

I'm more rational. But if you phrased

1:19:22

it as do you trust your gut and your intuition,

1:19:25

that sounds positive. So I feel

1:19:27

like if you had, I don't know, I'd be curious as to how the polling

1:19:29

was done because I could see people like keying

1:19:31

off of different concepts there. So

1:19:33

to answer your question, Andrew, so here

1:19:35

are some of the items we used to measure epistemic

1:19:39

beliefs rooted in intuition and feelings.

1:19:42

People were asked to report

1:19:44

how much they agreed with each statement

1:19:47

on a scale of one to five, like strongly disagree

1:19:49

to strongly agree.

1:19:50

Okay, I trust my gut to

1:19:52

tell me what's true and what's not.

1:19:56

I trust my initial feelings about

1:19:58

the facts.

1:19:59

Okay. My initial

1:20:01

impressions are almost always right.

1:20:03

Okay.

1:20:04

I can usually feel when a claim is true

1:20:07

or false, even if I can't explain how

1:20:09

I know.

1:20:11

Right, so they're not actually, those are pretty even-handedly

1:20:14

balanced.

1:20:15

Yeah, I would say neutral to positive,

1:20:18

but definitely not negative, yeah. Right,

1:20:20

yeah. Anybody that

1:20:22

said no is, I think, clearly

1:20:25

doing it because they, yeah, yeah,

1:20:27

okay. Right.

1:20:27

In another one, the epistemic

1:20:30

beliefs rooted in evidence, evidence

1:20:32

is more important than whether something feels

1:20:34

true. A hunch needs

1:20:36

to be confirmed with data.

1:20:39

I trust the facts, not my instincts,

1:20:41

to tell me what's true.

1:20:43

Does this, do you

1:20:45

get more granular on

1:20:49

the axes that we're discussing? What

1:20:52

I mean by that is, I was just talking to

1:20:54

my friend Ayla, who's a sex worker,

1:20:56

and she was relaying to me consternation

1:20:58

that she has with conservatives about

1:21:02

her line of work and being judgmental,

1:21:04

and she feels that she is much more rational

1:21:06

in her approach to all of this, and they're much more emotional, and I

1:21:08

will concede that, that makes sense to me. Conversely,

1:21:11

when I'm talking to my progressive friends about economics,

1:21:13

I feel that I'm generally the Vulcan, and they're

1:21:15

the emotional ones. So I wonder if,

1:21:18

when people are rational, is it along

1:21:21

a particular axis, or is it for everything?

1:21:24

Is it emotional about social things, but rational about

1:21:26

economics, or vice versa, or

1:21:28

is it the personality attribute that's applicable

1:21:30

across the board?

1:21:31

That's a great question. I don't know the answer to that. I

1:21:33

haven't done that research. I don't know the answer to that.

1:21:36

But I'll tell you, because

1:21:38

these are not contextualized within

1:21:41

a certain topic, or with

1:21:43

some kind of attitude object

1:21:46

at the heart of it. These are just thinking

1:21:48

about, in general, how you orient to

1:21:50

the world, and how you come to truth.

1:21:53

I'll tell you one thing I did learn from

1:21:55

the applied epistemologists in

1:21:58

philosophy,

1:21:58

is that

1:22:00

how people report

1:22:03

coming to truth, whether it's your feelings or through

1:22:05

evidence, may have

1:22:07

very little to do with how they actually

1:22:10

do. Like, what's actually going in on

1:22:12

under the hood. Which

1:22:16

is fascinating, and neuropsychologists

1:22:19

haven't really ironed this out either. It's hard to tell

1:22:21

which process is actually taking place.

1:22:25

But

1:22:26

the belief in misinformation

1:22:29

that we find among people who

1:22:31

report being high in

1:22:33

intuition and

1:22:36

low in evidence in

1:22:38

terms of their motivations, those correlations

1:22:41

are real. So I'm not sure if it's because

1:22:43

there's a different cognitive process going on

1:22:45

in their minds or if it's just,

1:22:48

I want to believe my gut, so

1:22:50

that's what I say I'm doing. And

1:22:53

then I believe stuff that's

1:22:54

not true.

1:22:55

I want to be able to disregard evidence,

1:22:57

so that's what I'm doing, and then I believe

1:23:00

stuff that's not true.

1:23:02

We're not really sure which of those

1:23:04

processes

1:23:04

is taking place.

1:23:07

Okay, fascinating. Thank

1:23:10

you. All right, can I do a lightning round at you? So

1:23:12

this is just a quick, I'm going to throw out

1:23:14

terms at you, just

1:23:16

explain them reasonably succinctly and then

1:23:19

I'll let you go.

1:23:20

Okay. Pattern seeking, what

1:23:23

does this mean in terms of personality types?

1:23:25

Pattern seeking, people who

1:23:27

are always looking for patterns in their

1:23:29

environment, always looking for cause and effect relationships,

1:23:32

this is a personality

1:23:35

trait that varies from individual

1:23:37

to individual,

1:23:37

and people who tend

1:23:39

to see patterns in the world will

1:23:42

also tend to believe conspiracy

1:23:43

theories. Okay,

1:23:46

I think I'm probably very high on pattern seeking.

1:23:49

Same. But I

1:23:51

can see if you are constantly looking

1:23:53

for patterns, if

1:23:55

I drink way too much coffee, I see patterns

1:23:57

where there are none and I become paranoid, right? And I'll start.

1:24:00

calling people and I'll say, hey,

1:24:02

you said you really liked Henry VIII

1:24:05

in that film and I said he was a bad actor and

1:24:07

I feel like I have offended

1:24:09

you and it's like, nope, my brain is making connections

1:24:11

where there need not be. But

1:24:14

people like me and like you that are pattern seeking

1:24:16

oriented, we are more likely to

1:24:18

fall prey to conspiracy theories because we will imagine

1:24:21

a pattern where there is none? Correct.

1:24:23

Okay. I was,

1:24:25

it was right after Russia

1:24:28

had invaded Ukraine and then the

1:24:30

United States had put all these like

1:24:32

embargoes in place against Russia and

1:24:34

Russia said that they might do some kind of cyber attacks

1:24:37

and I'm watching the news in my living room and the

1:24:39

power goes out. And

1:24:41

I say without a doubt in my mind,

1:24:44

I say to my husband,

1:24:45

it's a Russian attack.

1:24:47

It wasn't. Okay. The

1:24:49

power has just gone out. That is pattern seeking.

1:24:51

Okay. We're like...

1:24:53

So conspiracy theory belief.

1:24:55

We're like at a very like root evolutionary

1:24:58

level. As I understand

1:25:00

it, human beings are designed to,

1:25:02

we have an overactive

1:25:05

fire alarm when it comes to external

1:25:07

threats. So like if you're in the woods, you're very

1:25:09

likely to see what you thought was a person

1:25:11

or a bear or something because your brain

1:25:13

would rather you have a false alarm than not see

1:25:16

the bear at all. And so we extrapolate that

1:25:18

outward and we get overactive pattern seeking. Okay.

1:25:21

Next, need for closure.

1:25:22

A for closure is another psychological treat

1:25:24

that when people

1:25:26

are really in need of predictable

1:25:29

certain situations and they

1:25:32

want concrete endings to

1:25:34

stories and they need

1:25:36

their environment

1:25:37

to be fixed

1:25:40

and predictable. We tend to find

1:25:42

this on the side of cultural conservatives.

1:25:44

This is correlated with threat

1:25:47

monitoring. People

1:25:48

who are high in threat monitoring tend

1:25:51

to be very high in need for closure because

1:25:53

if you're high in need for closure, it also speaks to

1:25:55

the fact that you want to be able to make decisions

1:25:58

efficiently and quickly.

1:25:59

and consistently.

1:26:01

Okay, that makes sense to me

1:26:03

and it makes sense for social conservatives as well.

1:26:06

Like I feel like a lot of the animus

1:26:08

that goes on with transgender elements, I think is just,

1:26:11

there's an ambiguity there that's cognitively

1:26:14

uncomfortable for people where instead

1:26:16

of having a clear like, this is male, this

1:26:18

is female, it's like, well, there's not really

1:26:20

a clear definition of this or it's kind of

1:26:22

fluid and that is what, a lot

1:26:24

of what animates it, I think.

1:26:27

Andrew.

1:26:28

You should be co-author on the paper that

1:26:30

I published five years ago with my

1:26:33

colleagues at Delaware, where we did look

1:26:35

at tolerance for ambiguity as a predictor

1:26:38

of transgender attitudes and

1:26:41

that was a significant

1:26:43

predictor for exactly the reason that you're saying

1:26:45

and I can send you that site.

1:26:47

I'm not gonna put you on it cause we already did it. Damn

1:26:49

it, okay. But I'll send you that site.

1:26:52

Okay, thank you, please do. All

1:26:54

right, next question. Agency detection.

1:26:56

I think we talked about this a little bit earlier in the podcast, but

1:26:58

what is agency detection?

1:27:00

Agency detection is looking

1:27:03

for and identifying agency

1:27:06

in those where it doesn't actually

1:27:08

exist. So agency

1:27:11

detection is related

1:27:13

to like anthropomorphism, for example,

1:27:16

like people who will tend to anthropomorphize

1:27:18

animals and give them like human motivations

1:27:21

and needs and desires. That's a form of

1:27:23

agency detection. We

1:27:26

think of everything, we think

1:27:28

of our world in terms of people

1:27:30

because we are people and we know how people work.

1:27:33

And so some of the research on this

1:27:35

is so cool. There are videos that people watch

1:27:37

of like shapes moving and

1:27:41

the researchers will ask the viewer, okay,

1:27:43

what's going on with these shapes? And people who

1:27:45

are high in agency detection will say, well,

1:27:47

it's clear that that triangle offended that

1:27:50

square. And so the circle is coming to their

1:27:52

defense.

1:27:53

That's agency detection. I think I'm really

1:27:55

high on all of these. Like, I'm, I'm, I'm.

1:28:00

I would say I'm very tolerant and hedonistic

1:28:03

but need for closure is important for

1:28:05

me so like I went to this. Event

1:28:08

I was I was gonna be a performer in an event

1:28:10

here in austin at the new year's eve thing years ago and

1:28:12

it was like a barn but

1:28:14

also a hippie commune but an airbnb

1:28:17

but a restaurant and like i kept going. What

1:28:19

is this thing like very important to

1:28:22

me i need you to find what kind of building

1:28:24

i'm in and be like well like doug lives

1:28:26

here but also like we do. Our shockers

1:28:28

and i'm like god damn

1:28:29

it where am i so it was very important to me to

1:28:32

know that and then the agency

1:28:34

detection like i don't this is about

1:28:36

this doesn't drive me crazy at a regular basis but

1:28:39

i suppress it like objects have

1:28:41

definitive personalities to me so like. I'll

1:28:44

look at like a plant i'll be like look at that smug

1:28:46

goddamn cactus that cactus is

1:28:48

so fucking cocky and i like

1:28:51

like a lot of like i don't know what is a lot of

1:28:53

things that if what a screw does and i'm like so

1:28:55

cocky really it knows that i the toaster knows

1:28:57

i need it. It's taking that for granted

1:28:59

now you look at that that kettle over there that is a

1:29:02

stout dependable can just get

1:29:04

things done it's a work like i project

1:29:06

i'm aware they're an animal objects but they have

1:29:09

definitive like all like put stuff

1:29:11

based on personality type when i'm arranging my kitchen

1:29:13

cuz i'm i don't wanna have to look at that cocky mug i

1:29:16

prefer the humble bug. They're all

1:29:17

arrogant this is this is the drawer of arrogance

1:29:20

i think i am huge in this as well

1:29:22

and my my big example comes

1:29:25

i play the piano from the time i was like six

1:29:27

and i'm still the b flat is

1:29:29

still a hussy.

1:29:31

I mean the b flat.

1:29:34

The horn out. I

1:29:39

like

1:29:41

that yeah yeah you know like you know e

1:29:44

minor you know a little bit

1:29:46

little bit. While that her college days but she

1:29:48

settled down to that that b flat

1:29:52

she's just every night she's just limping

1:29:54

over to smokey joe's looking for strange

1:29:57

that you know exactly what i

1:29:59

mean. Okay, final

1:30:02

one for you. AOT, actively

1:30:04

open minded thinking.

1:30:05

Oh, love this. This is this

1:30:08

is a treat of

1:30:10

people who

1:30:12

prioritize new

1:30:14

information from outside in the

1:30:16

world over

1:30:17

what they already believe to be true.

1:30:20

And they're actively constantly

1:30:23

looking to update their beliefs in

1:30:25

light of new information. It's like, they

1:30:28

don't hold what they believe very

1:30:30

tightly. They're always looking

1:30:32

to challenge and update.

1:30:35

This, this construct is related to one

1:30:37

called intellectual humility, which I'm

1:30:39

a huge fan of as well, which is being

1:30:42

open to the possibility we might be wrong.

1:30:44

And it turns out that people who are actively open

1:30:47

minded thinkers who are are

1:30:49

open to the possibility they might be wrong,

1:30:52

tend to be more likely to be empirically

1:30:55

right. Because they're always updating

1:30:56

all the time. Yeah, they can course correct. Yeah,

1:30:59

like, you're like, I think this one thing and they're like,

1:31:01

look at this data. And they're like, oh, wow, thank you. I

1:31:03

was wrong about that. As opposed

1:31:05

to you have threatened my ego, or

1:31:07

my sense of identity, or I just don't like change

1:31:09

or whatever. Okay. Great.

1:31:11

Well, then we should all strive to be I don't

1:31:14

know about the other ones. The set the set like various

1:31:16

forms of neurosis that we both stumbled into

1:31:18

or been born with. But actively open minded

1:31:20

thinking, let us let us

1:31:22

recommit ourselves to AOT. All

1:31:25

right, well, I will go ahead and end it there. Dr. Danagal

1:31:27

Goldfweit-Young, it was a pleasure talking to you. Your

1:31:29

book again is wrong. Wait,

1:31:32

hold on. I can look this up. Wrong. How

1:31:34

media politics and identity drive our appetite

1:31:36

for misinformation. And you were always such a delight.

1:31:38

Can you write a new book every

1:31:40

six months or so and just come on the

1:31:42

show?

1:31:42

Yeah, let's do it. I love

1:31:44

coming on your show. We're both a little we're both

1:31:47

a little crazy. And it's fun.

1:31:49

Nice. Well, thank you so much. Bye. Okay.

1:31:51

Thanks.

1:31:54

That's the show. Thanks for listening.

1:31:57

Thank you. Danagal Goldfweit-Young for triumphantly

1:31:59

returning.

1:31:59

to the show to discuss your book wrong.

1:32:03

Thank you Eric Stipe who edited today's program.

1:32:06

And thank you patrons who make the whole thing

1:32:08

possible. Until next time, I've

1:32:10

been Andrew Heaton, and so have you.