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In my last post I argued that our present politics have been so divisive because they are based on identity. This is not a new idea. For some time analysts and politicians have been using the word “tribal” as a descriptor of our politics. Red tribe vs. Blue tribe, divided not only by policies but by culture; Red America is largely white, rural, socially conservative and church-going; Blue America is diverse, largely coastal and urban, socially progressive and unchurched. This political divide has been amplified by a number of sociological, psychological, technological and political factors that not only increase the social distance between the two tribes but also harden the differences.
Confirmation Bias occurs from the direct influence of desire on beliefs. “Once we have formed a view, we embrace information that confirms that view while ignoring, or rejecting, information that casts doubt on it. Confirmation bias suggests that we don’t perceive circumstances objectively. We pick out those bits of data that make us feel good because they confirm our prejudices.” Thus, once we’ve arrived at a specific belief it becomes difficult for us to change this belief. We dismiss evidence that our belief is incorrect and embrace evidence that we are right. In the present political environment we hold onto our beliefs with all our might. It takes a storm of contrary evidence to chip away at the position we have reached.
In fact, there is evidence that Americans have, to some extent, shifted parts of their core identities (ethnicity, religion and sexual preference) to better conform to their political identity. A study by Patrick Egan using data collected between 2006 and 2014 from the General Social Survey (GSS) found that
- “Liberal Democrats were much more likely than conservative Republicans to start identifying as Latino or saying that their ancestry was African, Asian or Hispanic.
- Conservative Republicans were much more likely than liberal Democrats to become born-again Christians and to stop identifying as non-religious; liberal Democrats were much more likely than conservative Republicans to leave religion and stop describing themselves as born-again.
- Conservative Republicans were more likely than liberal Democrats to stop describing themselves as lesbian, gay or bisexual; liberal-leaning Democrats were more likely to start identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual.”
To be sure, these shifts are small (from 1% to 4% of each category), but they are statistically significant.
Echo Chambers. Early in the development of the internet, analysts began worrying that rather than bringing us together (creating a global village), the internet had the potential to separate us into groups of people who read the same things, believed the same things and communicated with each other. This “balkanization” was written about in 1996 by two economists at MIT’s Sloan School of Business, Marshall van Alstyn and Erik Brynjolfsson. They write that because of “bounded rationality,” a limit on the human capacity for calculation, “a citizen of cyberspace still has a finite set of “neighbors” with whom he or she can meaningfully interact, but these neighbors can now be chosen based on criteria other than geography.” In fact, they are very likely to be chosen on the basis of “other criteria such as common interests, status, economic class, academic discipline, or ethnic group.
What this means is that in the on-line world as well as the real world, like tends to keep company with like. What this means is that Blue America gets its news and opinions from liberal websites, while Red America gets its news and opinions from conservative websites. For example, Slate, a liberal news outlet, ran a story on November 25, 2019 entitled “Watch Devin Nunes Refuse to Answer Whether he met Former Ukrainian Prosecutor in Vienna.” On the same day The Washington Times story about Nunes was entitled “Nunes lawsuit to accuse CNN, Daily Beast of being accessories to conspiracy to obstruct justice.” Same issue, very different points of view.
Filter Bubbles. Eli Pariser, in an excellent TED talk, discussed “filter bubbles.” Even if a person wasn’t actively choosing an echo chamber, the key social media and information web sites, such as Google, Yahoo News and Facebook, direct that person to news outlets and websites with information they are likely to approve of. Thus, a Google search by a conservative and a Google search by a liberal on the same exact subject will pull up very different results. Pariser showed two different 2017 Google searches for “Egypt.” Scott’s search led off with an article had a Wikipedia article and a tourism article, but also articles about the “Crisis in Egypt.” Daniel’s page did not mention the “crisis,” and mainly featured non-political general articles about Egypt.
Watch Pariser’s TED talk
Even worse, YouTube’s (owned by Google) algorithm tends to direct people to extreme websites. As Zeynep Tufekci found out when you seek out videos about Trump you soon are provided recommendations for white supremacy videos; when you seek out Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton you soon are shown videos of a left-wing conspiratorial bent. In fact, “Videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism. Videos about jogging led to videos about running ultramarathons. It seems as you are never ‘hard core. enough for YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. It promotes, recommends and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes.”
In April, Blomberg posted an article by Mark Bergman that detailed YouTube’s struggle with extreme content. He writes, “For example, YouTube’s inertia was illuminated again after a deadly measles outbreak drew public attention to vaccinations conspiracies on social media several weeks ago. New data from Moonshot CVE, a London-based firm that studies extremism, found that fewer than twenty YouTube channels that have spread these lies reached over 170 million viewers, many who were then recommended other videos laden with conspiracy theories.”
Our social institutions and organizations are dividing us. Our tribal identities are dividing us. Our wanting to hang out with our own kind is dividing us. Our economy is dividing us. The next post will examine how our political institutions and practices may be critical to amplifying our social differences into hard-core political divisions.
