Why We Can’t Get Along

The Battle for your Brain

By Brian Resnick on the National Journal Magazine, 20/09/2014.

Extracts:

“I'm lying in the metal coffin of an MRI machine (…). Above me, faces flash on a screen. Some are human, others are dolls, and some are digitally blended to be something in between. It's my job to figure out which are which. And as I do, researchers at New York University's brain-imaging center are tracking what goes on in my head. I'm a subject for research on a bigger question: Is the human political brain broken?

The NYU team is trying to show that our brains are hardwired for partisanship and how that skews our perceptions in public life. (…) Once this partisanship mentality kicks in, the brain almost automatically pre-filters facts — even noncontroversial ones — that offend our political sensibilities. "Once you trip this wire, this trigger, this cue, that you are a part of 'us-versus-them,' it's almost like the whole brain becomes re-coordinated in how it views people," says Jay Van Bavel, the leader of NYU's Social Perception and Evaluation Lab.

Our tendency toward partisanship is likely the result of evolution — forming groups is how prehistoric humans survived. That's helpful when trying to master an unforgiving environment with Stone Age technology. It's less so when trying to foster a functional democracy. (…)

WHAT DOES ANY OF this have to do with photos of dolls? The researchers are testing one of partisanship's more frightening features: It allows us, even pushes us, to dehumanize those we categorize as "them".

I'm tasked with distinguishing humans from nonhumans, and it's not as easy as it sounds. While some of the faces appear to be normal photographs of men and women, others are warped into something that would have scared me as a child—faces that look like masks. They have no creases in their plasticky skin, and their big, anime-style eyes shine death stares. They are distinctly nonhuman. It's the ones in between that pose the problem, however. A face that's 90 percent human and 10 percent doll is plainly seen as human. But when the face is 50 percent doll and 50 percent human, that's where partisan perspective takes over.

For the first trial I am just shown a set of faces, but for the next run, Van Bavel introduces a twist: The faces are divided into two groups. Before I see the first group, the American flag flashes, and I'm told I'm looking at my countrymen. Before the second, a Russian flag appears. These are faces of Russians. As I try to assess which faces have a soul behind them, a dark facet of partisan psychology surfaces. If the face belongs to a team member — in my case, an American — I'm more likely to assign them humanity. I'm less inclined to do the same for Russians.

(…) When Van Bavel looks at the brain scans of people in his dollhouse experiment, he finds that the brain regions used to empathize with others aren't as active when a person is evaluating faces he or she has been told belong to the other team.

HUMANS' WILLINGNESS TO dehumanize is often mentioned alongside some of the darkest chapters of history — the Holocaust, genocide in Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge — when regimes went to great lengths to build anger against "the other". In my case, the experiment relies on a national identity reinforced since birth.

But to create the base "us and them" structure, none of that is needed. The brain is so hardwired to build such groups that Van Bavel says he can turn anyone on the street into a partisan. (…) All it takes is a coin flip. "Somebody comes into your lab and you tell them, 'You're part of the blue team,' " he explains. "The next person who comes in, you flip a coin, let's say it comes up the other way. And you say, 'You're on the red team.' "That's it. The teammates never have to meet. Or interact. There doesn't need to be anything at stake. But within minutes, these insta-partisans like their teammates better than they like the other guys. And it shows when Van Bavel puts his subjects through his MRI dollhouse.

Red-team members are more likely to see humans when they're told they're looking at fellow red-team faces. Blue-team members respond the same way. Other tests reveal that red-team members remember red-team faces more accurately, and if Van Bavel asks subjects to allocate money, red-team members will pay out more to their own. Team members also have less sympathy for those on the other side, and even experience pleasure while reading about their pain.

I'm not just inside the MRI to be stumped by Russian dolls. The researchers are also checking to see if my brain has a conservative or liberal shape.

In 2011, a team of British scientists published a paper that found that brain structures correlated with political orientation. Specifically, conservatives tended to have larger amygdala areas — brain matter that plays a role in fear conditioning — than liberals. The results added to a body of research that finds conservatives and liberals have different physiological responses to the environment, and even perceive the world differently. (…)

With just a hint of partisan priming, an Arizona State University researcher was able to instantly blind Democrats to a noncontroversial fact, leading them immediately to fail to solve the easiest of math problems. In the 2010 experiment, political scientist Mark Ramirez asked subjects two similar questions. The control group saw this question: "Would you say that compared to 2008, the level of unemployment in this country has gotten better, stayed the same, or gotten worse?" A separate group saw this one: "Would you say that the level of unemployment in this country has gotten better, stayed the same, or gotten worse since Barack Obama was elected President?"

The key difference between the two: the first mentions the time period for assessing unemployment, while the second frames the issue around President Obama. When asked the first question, Democrats and Republicans responded similarly, with most saying unemployment had remained about the same. But among subjects who got the second question, opinions shifted along partisan lines: Around 60 percent of Democrats said unemployment had gotten better or somewhat better, and about 75 percent of Republicans said the opposite.

In fact, the unemployment rate increased between Obama's election and Ramirez's study. One can argue about whether this is a fair frame for evaluating this or any president's economic record, but from a raw-numbers perspective, the rise in the unemployment rate between 2008 and 2010 is indisputable.

But even giving Democrats that information did not increase the accuracy of their responses. Ramirez's study asked some participants the following question: "The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows unemployment has increased by 4.6 percent since 2008. Would you say that the level of unemployment in this country has gotten better, stayed the same, or gotten worse since Barack Obama was elected President?"

Clearly, the answer is in the sentence that immediately precedes the question. But the mention of Obama launched a partisan mental process that led many astray: Nearly 60 percent of Democrats said unemployment had lessened since Obama's election.

Essentially, once Democrats focused on Obama, most of them largely ignored the facts. (About 80 percent of Republicans got the answer right when it was spoon-fed to them, but Republicans tempted to cry victory should be cautioned that researchers have found them to be similarly off base in assessing the economy when one of their own is in the Oval Office.)

Ramirez's experiment also reveals that our biases don't completely blind us to information, however. When he gave Democrats the correct unemployment statistics, it did not change their answers, but it did make them less confident in those responses, as reported in a post-test questionnaire. "It tells me that people might actually be processing the information in an unbiased way," Ramirez says. The question, then, is how to amplify that unbiased processing to overcome the partisan blindness.

BRENDAN NYHAN KNOWS just how hard it is to move that mental needle.

"I had the dream of, if we give people the right information, it'll make a difference," says Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth and contributor to The New York Times's The Upshot.

But after 15 years of throwing facts in people's faces, Nyhan has found the matter to be much more complicated. In the early 2000s, he co-founded the fact-checking website Spinsanity to combat the "he said, she said" coverage he saw in the media. "I'm very proud of the work we did, but it did illustrate how hard it was to change people's minds, even among the select group of people who were willing to take the time to read a nonpartisan fact-checking website," Nyhan said.

More recently, Nyhan attempted to debunk an argument that is growing in popularity but utterly lacking in scientific support: that parents shouldn't have their children vaccinated. Nyhan and his collaborators wanted to convince parents who were against vaccinations that their opposition was unfounded. Working with a large sample of 1,759 parents, the team sent them a variety of material, including pamphlets that explained the lack of evidence linking vaccinations with autism, explanations of the dangers of measles, photos of sick children whose diseases could have been prevented, and a story about an infant who almost died from infection. Some were appeals to pure reason; some were appeals to pure emotion.

Nothing worked. One of the interventions — the pamphlet explaining the lack of evidence — actually made anti-vaccination parents even less inclined to vaccinate. "Some of the conclusions of that research people find pretty depressing," Nyhan says. "Myself included." (…)

THERE'S AN EASIER WAY to help people look past their innate partisanship: Pay them to do it.

A 2013 study out of Princeton found that monetary incentives attenuate the partisan gap in answers to questions about the economy. The researchers designed an experiment similar to Ramirez's unemployment study but with a modification: Some participants were plainly informed, "We will pay you for answering correctly." All it took was $1 or $2 to dramatically improve the chances of a right answer, cutting the partisan gap between Republicans and Democrats in half — half!

Of course, a mass "pay Americans to pay more attention to facts" campaign isn't happening. So the question, then, is how do we get people to be more objective, without throwing money at them?

Jimmy Carter discovered one answer during the 1978 peace negotiations between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The talks were on the brink of collapsing in their final hours, and the prime minister was prepared to walk. That's when Carter directed his secretary to find out all the names of Begin's grandchildren. Carter autographed photos for them and personally gave them to the Israeli leader. "He had taken a blood oath that he would never dismantle an Israeli settlement," Carter later recalled in an interview. "He looked at those eight photographs and tears began to run down his cheeks — and mine — as he read the names."

A few minutes later, Begin was back at the negotiating table. By appealing to a nonpolitical idea Begin cared about — his family — Carter was able to bring him to a place where he could bend.

The technique works even when world peace isn't on the line. Kevin Binning, a University of Pittsburgh psychologist, used it to reshape the way partisans reacted to a 2008 presidential debate.

Just two days before the election, Binning assembled 110 self-identified Republicans and Democrats—60 Rs and 50 Ds—to watch a recording of a recent debate between Obama and Republican nominee John McCain. Before they viewed the debate, however, one group of participants was given a list of nonpolitical values such as "social skills" and "creativity," and then asked to write briefly about an instance when their own behavior had embodied one of those values. (The other group also wrote about nonpolitical values, but they were asked to write about how those might be important to other people, not about their personal experiences.)

By having one group write about nonpolitical experiences, Binning wanted to get participants thinking of themselves as individuals rather than partisans. The idea was that affirming the human identity would make people feel more receptive to ideas that didn't align with their worldview.

It worked. When Binning asked the participants to judge the candidates' performances, members of that group were more likely than those in the other to give a favorable rating to the opposition candidate. (…)

Yes, we wall ourselves off from unappealing truths. But when motivated — by money, by the right environment, by an affirmed sense of self, by institutions that value truth and civility — those walls come down.

Outside of the laboratory, people are putting that research into practice, developing civic forums with our mental shortcomings in mind.

After a dispute over a coal plant divided Tallahassee, Florida, into furiously partisan camps, Allan Katz, then a city commissioner, decided he had enough. "It was very nasty, it was very contentious, it was very personal," Katz recalls of the 2006 debates. "Facts didn't matter."

Katz, who is also a former U.S. ambassador to Portugal, joined with other community members to create the Village Square, which hosts events where the public is invited to discuss ongoing issues with experts and activists. Incivility and non-truths are not tolerated. During debates, the Village Square employs fact checkers to keep people in line. "So people couldn't make s--t up," Katz says. There's also a civility bell: If people start yelling, the bell is rung to remind them of their better nature.

For the first meeting, 175 people showed up. Now the Village Square is running 20 programs a year in Tallahassee, and it has expanded into St. Petersburg, Kansas City, and Sacramento. In Tallahassee, city officials ask the Village Square to host public forums on divisive issues.

"You're not trying to turn liberals into conservatives or vice versa," Katz says. "But the only way to get people to see the other point of view, even if they don't agree with it, is to do it in person."

Katz and his fellow organizers are relying on people finding a common humanity, and in so doing, he is playing to one of the brain's great strengths: The same tribal cognitive processes that make it easy to turn people against one another can also be harnessed to bring them together.

When people consider themselves to be part of the same team, be it as Village Square participants, as fellow Americans, or even — one might dream — as fellow members of Congress, they do a much better job of dropping their combative stance and processing the world through a less partisan lens.

And we make those identity jumps all the time, as our brains are wired to let us do.

Sometimes, in the middle of his red team/blue team exercise, Van Bavel will switch a participant from one group to the other. "We say, 'Listen, there's been a mistake, you're actually on the other team,' " he says. "And the moment we do, we completely reverse their empathy. Suddenly, they care about everybody who is in their new in-group. Suddenly, they see the other side.”