3 Ways to Avoid Them-and-Us Thinking This Election Season

Source: PIRO4D / Pixabay

In Fall of 2016, when the electoral race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was heating up on the world stage, several people in my community boldly expressed a belief that I personally found disturbing. The belief can be summarized very simply:
There is no such thing as a good Trump supporter.

This phrase (or variants thereof) was uttered by good friends of mine. And not just behind closed doors. This sentiment was espoused boldly in public meetings that I attended during that tumultuous time.

According to this CNN article, 62,979,879 Americans voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. With all due respect to my friends and colleagues who identify as on the left (as I do, by the way), I'm hard-pressed to paint each and every one of these 60 million-plus Americans as 100% bad. In fact, I'm actually closely related to a few of them. And if you identify as socialist or progressive in your values (as I do), I bet you've got some Trump-supporting relatives as well.

I have to say that while I am a strong believer in the importance of freedom of expression, I think that the divisive and polarizing discourse that surrounds American politics is deeply damaging. It gets in the way of us all working together for the benefit of our shared future. There is no denying this fact.

Why is Them-and-Us Thinking So Prevalent?

As is true with most common psychological phenomena, them-and-us thinking does not characterize our behavior out of the blue. Under ancestral conditions, humans lived in small, tight-knit groups in which prosocial and kind, helpful behavior toward ingroup members had long-term benefits for both individuals and the groups themselves (see Billig & Tajfel, 1973; Wilson, 2019). Further, xenophobia and negative attitudes toward outgroup members, who quite often represented members of competing tribes during times of resource scarcity, came, for evolutionarily adaptive reasons, to characterize the psychology of ancestral humans. Skepticism and mistrust of strangers was often adaptive under ancestral conditions. And our minds today betray this deeply ingrained tendency toward ingroup/outgroup thinking, often with catastrophic consequences.

3 Ways to Avoid Them-and-Us Thinking During the Current Election Cycle

One thing about ingroup/outgroup reasoning is this: It is incredibly easy to elicit and incredibly hard to eradicate. Yankees fans and Red Sox fans show ingroup/outgroup psychology toward one another. Alumni of UCLA show outgroup attitudes toward alumni of USC—and vice versa. And, relevant to the current reasoning, liberals and conservatives (and derivatives thereof) show ingroup/outgroup reasoning in spades (see Frimer et al., 2017).

Based on what we know about basic social psychological processes, following are three suggestions on how you can avoid the ingroup/outgroup (them-versus-us) trap during this election season.

1. Don't fall prey to the outgroup homogeneity trap. Outgroup homogeneity, or the tendency to think that members of other groups are all the same, as compared with members of our own groups (see Haslam et al., 1996), is a deeply entrenched psychological bias. In short, we tend to think that people in our group vary quite a bit from one another while we tend to think that people in that other group are pretty much all the same. Given how deeply rooted outgroup homogeneity is in our psychology, it's no wonder that political leftists may literally believe that there is no good thing as a Trump voter. At the end of the day, realize that outgroup homogeneity is a bias in our thinking and not a fact about some groups being comprised of members who are all the same. Such thinking is, to put it simply, an illusion that goes back deep into the evolutionary history of the human experience.

2. Realize that our minds did not evolve to even think about large-scale politics. Under ancestral conditions, when the human mind was being shaped by evolutionary forces such as natural selection over millennia, our ancestors dealt with all kinds of politics. But the kinds of political situations they ran into were of the small-scale variety. Ancestral humans had to deal with issues of leadership and status within groups. They had to deal with being slighted or betrayed by friends, lovers, and family members. They had to deal with being excluded by others from time to time. Sure, our ancestors dealt with politics. But they did not deal with large-scale politics, such as having to think about best economic policies on an international scale or issues related to campaign finance reform in national elections. In fact, while many of us these days spend a lot of time thinking and talking about political situations that exist on a national stage, at the end of the day, the human mind didn't evolve for such thinking and there is some evidence to suggest that, as a result, we're actually not always very good at it (see Geher et al., 2015).

3. Remember that, at the end of the day, we're all in this together. As I have written in multiple posts, we all have a ticket on the same ride. And we should never forget this fact. Conservative or liberal. Rich or poor. American, Chinese, Persian, Turkish, Bolivian, Canadian—at the end of the day, we're all human and we're all descended from the same ancestors. At the end of the day, our similarities, based on a universal human nature, overshadow our differences profoundly.

In classic research in the social behavioral sciences, Sherif (1958) showed that when people from different groups are presented with superordinate goals—goals that matter to members of both groups—ingroup/outgroup reasoning falls by the wayside. So while you may well have strong political opinions (as I do), don't ever lose sight of the fact that, at the end of the day, we're all human and we're all in this together. We've all got a ticket on the same ride. And we're lucky to be here at all.

Cognition Essential Reads

Thinking About Kahneman’s Contribution to Critical Thinking

Why We Get More Impatient When the End is in Sight

Bottom Line

Some people say that there is no such thing as a good Trump supporter. I'm guessing that some may say that there is no such thing as a good Biden supporter. (I just don't happen to hear this in my particular circles.) At the end of the day, we're all part of the same shared experience—the human experience.

Using an evolutionary social psychological perspective, we can understand the large-scale adversarial relationships between the left and the right. We can understand the deep origins of ingroup/outgroup reasoning. But with this understanding comes the ability to actually step back and see people who don't share your identity or your beliefs in a more universal and benevolent context. This approach to understanding the human experience, presented in my and Nicole Wedberg's new book Positive Evolutionary Psychology, has the capacity to help bring people together by using an approach that is rooted in the work of Charles Darwin himself.

This election season, there is going to be a lot of arguing. A lot of finger-pointing. A lot of outrage. To some extent, this all is unavoidable. This said, I'm hoping that the suggestions outlined herein will help give people some pause and encourage some kindness and empathy during what is a famously and historically difficult national situation.

Let me end with two simple suggestions: 1. Be kind. 2. Vote.