In a 2006 commencement address at Xavier University, then-Senator Obama discussed how easy it is to pursue dreams that take us away from the needs of others, to maintain an inward focus on ourselves and those like us. He encouraged students “to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us—the child who’s hungry, the steelworker who’s been laid off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town. When you think like this—when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers—it becomes harder not to act, harder not to help.”1
As I have observed time and again in this book, that’s certainly easier said than done. In many ways, it’s easier to identify the myriad ways people are different from you than it is to embrace the ways they might be or feel or think the same as you. Our collective instincts seem to have shifted toward this acknowledgment of difference and Mr. Obama is right: focusing on difference can be a problem. Inherent in such an argument, or perhaps a logical extension of it, is the idea that the real problem isn’t emphasizing the ways are different. We are a diverse, heterogeneous country and in lots of ways, we speak, look, think, pray, and live differently. No, the real problem is failing to remember the many ways in which we are the same.
This chapter tackles the concept of sameness in political conversations. The approach is less about ignoring our differences and more about emphasizing our sameness in important and strategic ways. First, however, I address some of the root causes of our divisions before offering concrete suggestions about how to frame issues and actors in ways that cultivate a sense of shared identity or humanity.
The last half-century has endured a widespread decrease in trust in political institutions and many social institutions. For example, according to a 2018 Edelman report, only one-third of Americans trust the government to “do what is right,” 14 percentage points lower than the year prior. There was declining trust in other institutions too: a 5-point decline in trust in media; a 10-point decline in business organizations; and a 9-point decline in nongovernmental organizations. Edelman, which has been conducting surveys about trust in institutions for 18 years, remarked that they have never seen such steep declines in trust in the United States, particularly year-to-year drops like the ones evident between 2017 and 2018. In the past, these surveys regularly showed a trend in higher levels of institutional trust among a group they call “the informed public”—Americans age 25 to 64 with a college degree who regularly consume news and are in the top 25% of household income for their age group compared to the general population. In 2018, however, there was a massive 30-point drop in trust in government among this so-called informed public.2 In fact, the United States now has the least-trusting informed public among the 28 countries surveyed and distrust is increasing most rapidly among younger, high-income Americans.
Lower levels of institutional trust and social attachment tend to lead to Americans feeling more isolated and independent, with somewhat loosened political attachment to political party; they also, however, have led to increased disengagement with other social and civic institutions.3 These changes come at the same time we are seeing a broader phenomenon known as social sorting. As Bill Bishop argues in his book The Big Sort (2009), there was a widespread decline of trust in government among Republicans and Democrats in the 1960s and 1970s, one so profound that it led to a detachment from political parties themselves.4 Some political scientists leapt to the conclusion that party politics was over in America; esteemed professor Walter Dean Burnham wrote about the coming “decomposition of the party in our electoral politics.”5 While that was a bit premature, it was a part of a larger trend in distrust in our political and social institutions. In his famous book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam documents the myriad ways Americans have become increasingly disconnected from those around us—family, friends, neighbors, and even democratic institutions. His argument is that social capital, the basis for our interconnectedness, is plummeting, pointing to our declining willingness to sign petitions, to join civic organizations, to engage socially with our friends and neighbors, and true to the title of the book, to bowl alone instead of in bowling leagues.6
Wanting to differentiate yourself from others isn’t inherently bad. Social psychologist Marilyn Brewer, well known for her theory of optimal distinctiveness, suggests that humans have two competing social needs: individual differentiation and group belonging.7 The optimal orientation, according to Brewer, is to have salient social identification with clearly distinctive, moderately inclusive units. In other words, we like to fit in to our groups but we don’t want to disappear within them. However, social sorting over the last several decades has not supported this kind of optimization of social inclusion and distinctiveness; in fact, it has often complicated it.
As Lilliana Mason wrote in her 2018 book Uncivil Agreement, the ability and desire to filter divergent people, ideas, and politics from our lives has resulted in fewer cross-cutting social ties, ones that in the past had increased the likelihood of political compromise. She writes, “Decades ago, social divisions between Americans over time, ideology, religion, class, race, and geography did not align neatly, so that particular social groups were friends in some circumstances and opponents in others.”8 These cross-cutting cleavages are far less common today and this change has led to some stark and harsh consequences. You may recall, for example, in chapter 3, I shared a graphic that suggests that Democrats and Republicans have formed increasingly hostile (or at least cold) feelings toward each other over time. Partisans are trending toward finding their out-party counterparts less agreeable, less attractive physically, less trustworthy, and even more of a threat to the country’s well-being.
Mason points to three explanations for the ways in which Americans have socially sorted over the last few decades.9 First is geographic sorting, prodded on by increasingly mobile partisan and religious Americans moving to locations or churches that suited their specific social requirements. As a result, our country has seen increased segregation along race, education, and income level. The second is ideological sorting such that parties had increasingly clear cues (e.g., Republicans are more white, religious/Christian, middle and upper class; Democrats are more nonwhite, more secular, and less wealthy). These cues from the political parties helped Americans clarify among whom they feel more comfortable in a partisan sense. The third source, as I have already discussed, is media sorting, the idea that with an increasing ability to choose a (partisan) information source, partisans are increasingly able to protect themselves from exposure to divergent partisan views and to inoculate themselves by hearing only the narratives from people like themselves. These three sources of social sorting paint the picture of an American populace that is geographically, culturally, and informationally isolated.
As Mason so aptly writes, “We have gone from two parties that are a little bit different in a lot of ways to two parties that are very different in a few powerful ways”.10 Beyond mere differences in policy preferences, these social shifts and the ease with which we can satisfy a desire for homogeneity leads to an overly simplistic “us vs. them” mentality in American politics because we’ve created situations where that is often the case. We like to win and we like our opponents to lose, sometimes at the expense of sound public policy and rationality, all based in a desire for “our team” to win and “their team” to lose. Let’s dive further into what social psychology has to say about that rigid group mentality: social identity theory.
Social psychologists suggest that we create a sense of self in terms of those with whom we interact.11 Identity refers to our internalized and stable understanding of who we are, including attributes like personal characteristics, social categories, and expectations of roles. Henri Tajfel, one of the most prominent social psychologists studying prejudice and intergroup relations, conducted dozens of studies in the 1970s and 1980s. His work suggests that we see ourselves largely based on social group membership; the way we view and treat others is highly dependent on these memberships. He writes that social identity is “that part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from [her or] his membership in a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership.”12
Our social identity is how we see ourselves based on the social groups to which we belong (in-groups) and to which we do not (out-groups). The latter part of this formula is often the most important: we derive self-esteem by positively differentiating our in-group from out-groups, the famous “us” and “them,” and therefore tend to categorize our social environment into groups, privileging our in-groups over our out-groups.
To test the effects of group membership, Tajfel conducted what have become known as his minimal groups experiments. In these studies, test subjects were divided into groups based on an inconsequential and almost completely irrelevant characteristic, like the color of the shirt they were wearing.13 Participants did not know the other members of their group and had no reason to expect that they would interact with them in the future. Still, members of each group began to identify themselves with their respective group, preferring other members of their own group and favoring them with rewards that maximized their own group’s outcomes. Subsequently, Tajfel and his student John Turner developed what they called social identity theory.14 They proposed that people have an inbuilt tendency to categorize themselves into one or more in-groups, building a part of their identity on the basis of membership in that group and enforcing boundaries with other groups.
They suggest this phenomenon comes about because we try to give ourselves “positive self-identity” to increase our self-esteem. The theory suggests that first, people derive their identity from the group to which they perceive they belong. Then, to gain a meaningful and positive identity, people categorize both their own group and other groups, perceiving their own to be superior to other groups. Tajfel and Turner propose four stages of social identity group formation: Categorization, Identification, Comparison, and Distinctiveness.
First, categorization is when we put ourselves and others into social categories. This isn’t necessarily judging others; it’s simply creating categories and filing people or identities into the categories we’ve created. The second is identification, where we take the extra step of establishing which of the groups or categories are “ours” and which are “theirs.” After creating the categories, we decide which are our in-groups and which are our out-groups. Psychologists suggest this step boosts our self-esteem and helps us create our self-concept; how we see ourselves is largely based on our perceptions of those around us. The next two stages are where biases and stereotypes potentially enter into the process. Comparison, the third stage, is where we compare and contrast in-groups and out-groups and make an assessment, tending to find a favorable association toward the groups to which we belong. The final stage, psychological distinctiveness, is our attempt to create clear, concrete differences between our in-groups and out-groups so our in-groups are distinct from and positively compared with other groups.
This process has some wide-reaching implications, particularly that we privilege people like us and we find information coming from those people more trustworthy and relevant; we’re more likely to listen to what they have to say. People who identify with a social group, ethnoracial groups for example, tend to feel closer and more similar to other in-group members, a feeling made even stronger when there are appeals made to that identity in social situations.15 Taken a step further, when a social identity is emphasized or highlighted in some way, say in the media or in a persuasive appeal, people are more likely to think and to act like stereotypical group members and to rely on that in-group identity to guide their thoughts and behaviors.16 An in-group identity, particularly one that is featured in some way, leads us to think like a member of that group and to use that identity in making sense of the world around us. It also means that we’re more likely to assess an in-group member as more trustworthy and to think what they’re saying is more legitimate and important because of that common identity.17
Not only do we create categories of people and privilege the information coming from “our” categories, we like to feel consistent in our beliefs; arguments that challenge that consistency make us feel uncomfortable and threaten our self-esteem. We resist attitude change to maintain cognitive consistency, often going to great lengths to preserve and to protect existing attitudes and identities, what is known as the belief perseverance principle.18 We tend to choose to expose ourselves to information that validates what we already believe. Not only do we like “friendly” information but perhaps even more problematically, we are inclined to process new information in a way that supports the way we already see the world. We have a tension among three distinct, conflicting motivations: efficiency, accuracy, and belief perseverance.19 Generally, we like decision-making to be quick and correct but we also like to balance those priorities with our need to protect the way we already see things. As we know, reliance on existing predispositions carries a major liability: it provides citizens with a biased view of the world.
In many ways, it makes sense that our country is fragmented: we are astoundingly diverse and heterogeneous in an equally astounding number of ways. As mentioned in chapter 1, that diversity of thought was anticipated by the Framers and currently it is explicitly encouraged in many ways. That diversity has also come with the unintended consequences of vitriol and rigid social division; however, they need not continue to go hand-in-hand. The trend toward social sorting that we continue to tolerate and to foster does not need to continue. While there are ample explanations for the division we all see and feel, less attention is paid to what to do about it. There is no panacea for the situation we’re in but there is one overarching concept that can help: interpersonal connection or at least the perception of it.
As political and social psychologists acknowledge, once attitudes become hardened and crystallized, achieving persuasion in the traditional sense is very difficult.20 As discussed earlier in the book, that effort is made even more difficult—particularly if you are aiming for strong, long-lasting attitude change which, as we know, is more predictive of future behavior—if a person is not motivated to process new information. Often this phenomenon exists because people simply don’t think an issue or policy is relevant to them. If you don’t have a mortgage, why would you know the current interest rate and why would you care? If you’re not a parent, you probably aren’t up-to-date on the latest daycare policy or the importance of a local school levy. And why should you be? Rationally, those things don’t affect you.
The thing is, those policies and issues affect people around you and likely people that you care about. That brings us to the importance of interpersonal closeness: if you can convince someone that an issue is relevant and important, even if it doesn’t directly affect them, it makes that issue more prominent in their mind. The more closeness felt between the persuader and the target of communication, the more likely that issue will be seen as personally relevant. In turn, that closeness means the conversation will be more likely to lead to attitudinal and behavioral change. By increasing the level of interpersonal closeness between the sender and receiver of communication, the conversation is more likely to lead to change because the person feels like they have a vested interest in the outcome. There are several ways to increase personal closeness and issue relevance but I want to focus on three concrete strategies here: interpersonal contact; personalization and empathy; and priming an identity in common.
It is remarkably easy to allow yourself to resent and to misunderstand people with whom you don’t come into regular contact, either in person or in virtual life. In a 2019 report about the state of pluralism in the United States, Maxine Malje and Robert P. Jones presented findings about the degree to which we are coming into contact with others. Specifically, their work found that a large portion of Americans report infrequent contact with people who are different from them.21 A large segment of Americans say they “seldom or never interact” with someone who does not share their race or ethnicity (21%), religion (22%), political party (23%), and sexual orientation (31%). Unsurprisingly, people in a majority group are more likely to be able to avoid people outside of their group (e.g., straight people can more easily avoid nonstraight people than the converse).
Digging into the results a bit more, there are interesting differences between various groups in terms of their frequency of contact. In terms of race, similar percentages of white people (64%), black people (63%), and Hispanic people (60%) report they interact at least once a week with someone of a different race or ethnicity. However, higher proportions of white people (25%) and Hispanic people (21%) say they “seldom” or “never” interact with someone of a different race or ethnicity compared to black Americans (14%). Among white Americans, there is a significant difference in responses according to education level: those with a college degree are significantly more likely to interact with someone of a different race or ethnicity at least once a week compared to those without a college degree (78% compared to 56%). Only 10% of white people with a college degree say they seldom or never have contact with other races and ethnicities compared to 26% of white people without a college degree.
Age is another significant factor in frequency of divergent contact. For example, Americans ages 18–20 are more likely to say they frequently interact with people of other races and ethnicities (62%) compared to senior citizens (50%). Young people are also more likely to interact with someone who doesn’t share their sexual orientation, with 18- to 29-year-olds nearly twice as likely as seniors (by a margin of 49% to 27%) to say they interact at least once a week with someone of a different sexual orientation. Americans who are not affiliated with religion are more likely to interact with someone who does not share their sexual orientation (57%) compared to white mainline Protestants (47%), Catholics (37%), nonwhite Protestants (35%), and white evangelical Protestants (32%). Finally, there are divisions based on partisan affiliation as well. Democrats (50%) and independents (42%) are also more likely than Republicans (28%) to say they interact with someone who has a different sexual orientation at least once a week. In terms of ethnoracial interactions, 70% of Democrats report interacting with someone of a different racial or ethnic background at least once a week compared to 60% of Republicans and 57% of political independents. Roughly one in five Republicans (21%) say they seldom or never interact with someone of a different race compared to 13% of Democrats.
The reason these numbers are so interesting is that one of the classic ways to increase personal relevance and to reduce antagonism is relatively simple: come into more contact with people in different demographic and/or sociopolitical groups. Stemming all the way back to a book from 1954, Gordon Allport’s intergroup contact theory predicted that contact can reduce intergroup prejudice and antagonism.22 Allport’s original work suggested that a variety of conditions were required for contact to have an effect, including things like perceptions of equal status, explicit common goals, and perhaps most importantly, in-person contact. However, social psychologists more recently have found that while these “optimal conditions” lead to even greater prejudice reduction, contact effects still work under less-than-optimal conditions. For example, research has shown that contact can still be meaningful if it is via the Internet, video, or telephone, and in many cases, these modes of contact are preferable because they eliminate any anxiety that might exist by virtue of physical closeness.23 Further, while Allport’s contact hypothesis was originally understood as a way to reduce stereotypes surrounding race and ethnicity, researchers have found the theory also applies to a variety of other contexts as well, including positive effects from contact with gay and lesbian people.24
Data show that certain populations have a propensity to have the ability and/or the desire to limit their interactions with those who don’t share their race and/or ethnicity or sexual orientation. Stigma and antagonism toward outgroups lingers and flourishes when there is limited understanding of the worldviews and needs of minority groups; when contact is limited to people who look, live, love, and worship the way you do, it becomes easier to feel like the rights and needs of others such as disabled individuals, those who live with mental illness, or people who are or have been incarcerated, are irrelevant to you and your in-group.
Increased visibility and contact is one way to combat these problems. Introduce your sphere of influence to people with different views from yours or theirs. When you can, make a point to introduce your kids, your family, and your friends to people who are marginalized. The key is to genuinely engage with the lives of people who are different from you, not in an effort to promote tokenism or to feel woke and proud of yourself but because social science research shows the power of out-group contact and exposure. If you have friends, coworkers, or neighbors who differ from you in terms of race or ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, or, yes, partisan affiliation, invite them to your dinner party. Include them and their children in your child’s birthday celebration. Invite your neighbor to a block party and then make sure they feel comfortable and welcome when they attend. Use social media to share the accomplishments, challenges, and perspectives of those who may not have the opportunity to reach your social circles. The point is not to draw attention to their differences, necessarily, though that may be appropriate based on context. The point is to increase the degree to which we interact with people who are different from us, particularly those groups that may not have an easy time breaking into your social, political, and work environments. We are all becoming more sorted in geographical, partisan, and informational standpoints, and efforts big and small to prevent that will make a difference.
Next, one of the reasons many feel an “us vs. them” mentality is that it’s so easy to demonize the “them” because “they” are faceless, nameless abstractions; sometimes opposition can be lessened by focusing on an individual rather than an unnamed source of support or opposition. In some cases—but with some important caveats that we will discuss—personalizing an issue can be a powerful tool. The term personalization is widely used but can be conceived differently depending on context. In the realm of persuasive messaging, the simplest definition is including information that applies to an individual or a subset of individuals but not an overall population.25 One reason personalized messages that focus on individual attributes can work is that these messages can add to the credibility of a speaker.
In an innovative study from 2009, Hahrie Han found that appeals including self-disclosure from the person making a fundraising request triggered what’s known as a likability heuristic, causing people to be more likely to comply with their request for action.26 Her study asked people to buy a one-dollar bracelet to support a national environmental group, Clean Water Action, on the street in a major metropolitan area. In one instance, people selling the bracelet asked for money using a typical script, with language about how endangered lakes and rivers are in America and how there is bipartisan support to roll back the damage done by pollution. In the second instance, however, the requester posed more like a friend than a stranger. This script was the same as the first except for an important addition: the second type of appeal included a sentence in which the requester said they grew up in that state, near a specific lake where they played with their siblings and learned to swim and canoe. They continued to say they have seen firsthand how this lake and many like it have been damaged by repeal of parts of the Clean Water Act.
Her findings were remarkable: people who were asked to donate using the personalized appeal were twice as likely to donate. And remember, this was a difficult ask: it was on a busy urban street with people asking for money out of the blue, fighting with all of the distractions of a bustling street. In explaining her hypothesis, Han noted:
[P]olitical appeals which disclose some information about the person making the appeal should be more effective because they trigger a liking heuristic that makes strangers treat each other more like friends or acquaintances. Because people are more likely to comply with requests from people they like, appeals with self-disclosure should be more likely to generate acquiescence with a request for political action. (107)
These findings, along with other research that explores message effects and issue framing, suggest that personalized appeals can have an important effect because they can change individual motivation to get involved. Han has argued, “Insofar as politics is about the interaction of human beings to achieve a set of collective goals, motivation is at the heart of all of our theories about politics.”27 If we can motivate someone to become personally engaged in a way that speaks to our collective goals, we’re on the right track.
There is a downside to too much personalization, however: if a story or speaker is too personal or triggers a question about credibility and common interest, personalized messages can backfire. Perhaps more importantly, a poorly executed personalized message can shift the focus away from the larger question or problem onto the personal attributes of the communicator, limiting the ability to generalize from that one specific instance. It may result in warmer feelings toward the individual communicator but will not also produce warmer feelings for the group that individual is purported to represent.28 Further, the personalization attempt has to be reasonable in context (e.g., what you might say to close friends and family vs. a person on the street); otherwise, it can have the opposite effect from the one intended.
With my coauthor Melissa Michelson, I published a study in 2010 about strategies to increase monetary donations to an LGBT rights organization.29 In telephone solicitations to known supporters of LGBT rights, callers asked if people would be willing to donate money to help efforts in that state. There were two scripts asking for money, identical in every way except for one aspect: the second one included a sentence where the caller came out as a person who is lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, however they identified. This language was based on anecdotal accounts from California, where similar scripts were used in the ultimately unsuccessful No on 8 Campaign in 2008 to stop a ban on same-sex marriage. Our findings were surprising: when people came out as LGBT, they were less persuasive in soliciting donations, both in frequency and amount. In this instance, the too-personal disclosure about sexual orientation or gender identity, at least in 2010, limited how people perceived the caller, likely as self-interested or simply as a member of an out-group. Callers were possibly viewed as less trustworthy due to their personal stake in the outcome of the call; some research suggests that if contact is perceived as interpersonal rather than intergroup, the result might be more positive feelings for the person but not for the larger cause.
Communication efforts to personalize can have an effect on people’s willingness to process information and to conceive of a member of an out-group as a specific person who has needs and wants just like they do. Humanizing a problem or issue can trigger a liking heuristic and personal storytelling that emphasizes common background, upbringing, or goals can be incredibly powerful—that is, as long as the personalization doesn’t distract from the issue itself and weaken a connection between a singular instance/communicator and the larger situation at hand. Sharing a personal story and connection to an issue can be an important strategy in helping people see the importance of a political issue, even if it isn’t directly relevant to them—but there are limits to how far that strategy can go.
As we know, the way people feel strongly colors the way they behave and process information about outgroups. Applying the concepts of emotional diffusion from chapter 5, a second strategy to neutralize attitudes toward out-groups is to appeal to positive-valenced emotions like joy, happiness, and empathy. Empathy, the process where two or more people share emotionally significant experiences, is vitally important in shaping positive affect toward “others.” It is even thought to be widely common in the animal kingdom.30
To engage with people on important political issues and problems, one strategy is to encourage them to take the position of someone who is negatively affected or to consider a time when they themselves were negatively impacted or stigmatized. The concepts of empathy and position-taking have been tested by some recent political science research. One study by David Broockman and Joshua Kalla tested the effect of empathy and position-taking on attitudes toward transgender people and rights.31 Concerned about backlash from a 2014 ordinance protecting transgender people from discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations in Miami-Dade County Florida, LGBT volunteers and staff from the Los Angeles LGBT Center and SAVE, a South Florida LGBT organization, embarked on a door-to-door canvassing effort with Miami-Dade voters. Canvassers knocked on doors unannounced to test the efficacy of a variety of communication strategies, with the goal of actively engaging people in conversations they may not have had otherwise. After defining the term “transgender” and explaining that voters might have to face a decision on the issue later in the conversation, canvassers asked voters to explain their views about transgender people and rights. They then showed people a video that presented arguments both for and against transgender rights.
The next part of the study was key: canvassers encouraged the voters to engage in “analogic perspective-taking.”32 They were asked to discuss an instance when they were judged negatively for being different; then they were encouraged to think about how that experience offered a window into the experiences of transgender people. The study asked people to reflect on a time when they felt discriminated against and to actively relate that experience and feeling to how transgender people might feel. Respondents were then asked to reflect on the exercise and to articulate ways the experience may have changed their mind. In total, these conversations lasted around 10 minutes.
The researchers compared the results of the survey administered at the door with another survey they conducted as a baseline and the results were strong and clear: those who had the “transgender perspective” and empathetic conversations were considerably more accepting of transgender people on several different measures. For example, one question involved a scale known as “thermometer rating,” where people were asked about their feelings toward transgender people on a scale of 0 to 100. There was a difference of roughly 10 points between the baseline measure and the conversation group. For comparison’s sake, that increase is larger than the average increase in positive feeling toward gay men and lesbians in the United States between 1998 and 2012. Due to the research design, the researchers were also able to conclude that the attitudinal change toward transgender people endured over time and was even resistant to subsequent counterarguments.
These experimental results are pretty remarkable. Randomly chosen people were confronted at their door, engaged in a 10-minute or so conversation, and afterward exhibited markedly more positive attitudes toward a stigmatized outgroup . . . and those attitudes tended to last over time. The key here was empathy: encouraging people to think of a time in their lives when they felt a certain emotion or a time when they were discriminated against; then, they are asked to explicitly connect that memory to a marginalized group to which they do not belong.
Invoking and encouraging empathy isn’t something you need a million dollars and an army of Florida canvassers to do: try the technique for yourself. Normal caveats apply: it doesn’t work all the time, on every person, for every outgroup, and not everyone has experienced a time when they have been discriminated against, for example. However, it’s a bit of a combination of chapter 5 and personalization: get someone into an empathic headspace; ask them to personalize it to an experience when they felt a positive emotion; and then draw meaningful ties between that emotion and personal experience to an outgroup.
For example, as mentioned last chapter, disgust toward certain groups of people is an increasingly common emotion, particularly toward LGBT people, due in part to rhetoric by certain contemporary politicians. At best, disgust can lead to feelings of repulsion for out-groups and the people in them; at worst, disgust can lead people to see certain out-groups as inhuman.33 Further, contemporary studies have found that sensitivity to disgust is related to greater sexual prejudice.34 An interesting question arises: if you can induce disgust to invoke greater sexual prejudice, can you induce the opposite of disgust to decrease sexual prejudice? And what’s the opposite of disgust?
Research suggests that moral elevation is the opposite of disgust.35 As mentioned last chapter, moral elevation is what is felt when people encounter acts of moral beauty like charity, gratitude, loyalty, or generosity.36 When people feel disgusted—including morally disgusted—they tend to close themselves off to others and to feel socially or physically degraded.37 On the other hand, when exposed to or encouraged to think about experiences of elevation, people report feeling inspired, uplifted, more open to others, and more motivated to engage in positive behavior that is to the benefit of others.38 Moral elevation is a strategy similar to empathy but rather than focusing on the specific, it focuses on a more general sense of positivity and inspiration. This one is a little more difficult to pull off in a casual setting but it’s helpful as a general principle: if you can think of ways to highlight the goodness and benevolence in people and the world (as concretely as possible), that feeling can lead to openness to out-groups and even to lessened prejudice against stigmatized groups like LGBT people.
The final strategy to combat intergroup conflict and social sorting is the concept of shared identity priming. Priming theory suggests that communicators can alter the criteria for evaluation—context, images, and cues—that people use when forming an opinion.39 In terms of identity priming, for example, if you can emphasize or cue an identity a person holds, that emphasis increases the salience of that identity and identity-based interests and overall, it plays a larger role in how that person comes to a decision. For example, in a 2013 article, Samara Klar demonstrated how being a parent can change preferences for prison reform. When a person considers their political preferences on incarceration, she might support policies that introduce rehabilitation rather than mere long-term incarceration. However, if encouraged (or primed) to think as a parent, her concern for her children’s safety may induce her to oppose the shortened prison sentences that may result from policies that focus on rehabilitation.40 Klar also identifies three strategies or types of primes: (1) basic (simply mentioning the identity); (2) efficacy (appealing to an identity group’s efficacy); and (3) threat (invoking a perceived threat against an identity group). The introduction of identity in these three ways has the potential to affect attitudes and behavior, sometimes in drastic ways.
Shared identity priming was also the theoretical basis for my first book with Melissa Michelson.41 In that book, we introduced a new theory called the Theory of Dissonant Identity Priming (TDIP), focusing on the strategic use of common identities to encourage attitudinal change. As you can see in Figure 6.1, priming a common identity increases the likelihood of in-group closeness. It’s essentially the “people like us” effect”; when you emphasize a shared identity with someone else, it increases an interpersonal connection and also highlights identity-based interests. From there, we tested different message strategies (e.g., stereotypical messages, more or less plausible messages, etc.). The key to the theory, however, was increasing salience, closeness, and likelihood of information processing through the concept of shared identity: we found that people could be persuaded to rethink strongly held attitudes when they received a message or information from a source with whom they share an in-group identity.
Figure 6.1 The Theory of Dissonant Identity Priming Attitude Change Process Model
Source: Harrison, Brian F., and Melissa R. Michelson. 2017. Listen, We Need to Talk: How to Change Attitudes about LGBT Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 20.
We tested our theory using the data from 17 randomized experiments, each testing the impact of shared identity priming across four main identities: race and ethnicity, partisanship, religion, and identity as a sports fan. Two experiments in particular demonstrate how shared identity works as an influential tool in political persuasion.
First, we conducted several experiments testing the effects of identity as a sports fan. Loyalty to a sports team is a remarkably strong in-group membership for many Americans, with fans spending millions of dollars and countless hours cheering on their favorite players and teams. Further, our sports allegiances can lead to us falling into typical in-group, out-group behavior (e.g., liking and trusting in-group members more, listening and agreeing with what they have to say more often, etc.) but it can also lead to positive behavior that is seen as socially desirable.42 Perhaps taking their cue from this research, LGBT organizations have often worked with professional athletes to tap into sports fan in-group identities to improve attitudes toward LGBT rights. For example, in 2016, Athlete Ally, a LGBT activist organization, launched a campaign called #EveryFan in an effort to encourage leagues, teams, athletes, and fans to engage in a dialogue about LGBT culture in sports. They welcomed 35 then-current or retired professional athletes and teams in partnership with the campaign, including Chris Kluwe, Megan Rapinoe, Ali Krieger, Jason Collins, Robbie Rogers, and Michael Sam.43 In 2018, 25 Major League Baseball teams hosted LGBT Pride nights at their stadiums, including in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Detroit.44
Knowing the strong relationship between sports fans and their beloved teams, we thought that when fans heard about an issue stance from an in-group leader—even a controversial stance—they would be more likely to agree because the in-group leader offered a sense of social belonging and permission. In one study, we compared how people received messages of support for same-sex marriage from LeRoy Butler, a Hall of Fame professional football player for the Green Bay Packers and popular radio host in the area, versus from Jay-Z, a non-sports-related celebrity. People were randomly assigned a survey that included a quote allegedly from Butler, a cue for sports fandom, or Jay-Z, someone who didn’t cue that identity. We found that an in-group cue from a powerful in-group leader like a professional athlete made a big difference. The levels of support for marriage equality among non-Packers fans did not significantly differ between the Butler script or the Jay-Z script. However, Packers fans who saw Butler’s photo and quotation were 14 percentage points more supportive of marriage equality than those fans who read the Jay-Z script, an increase that’s both substantively and statistically significant. Hearing that a Packers fan, former player, and icon was supportive of same-sex marriage induced fans to be more supportive as well. It follows logically that such a cue wouldn’t have an effect if you weren’t a Packers fan.
In a similar experiment, we tested the power of in-group identity activation on religious identity, knowing that there is a strong but imperfect correlation between intensity of religious identity generally and support for LGBT people and rights. Religion is a core aspect of US identity: the United States is seen as the most religiously active country in the world on a variety of measures, including church attendance, self-reported importance of religion, and self-reported belief in God. In 2017, 37% of Americans could be classified as highly religious based on their self-reports of church attendance and the importance of religion. In 2012, 8 out of 10 surveyed Americans identified with a religion and 7 in 10 said that religion was important in their daily life and that they attended religious services frequently.45 In sum, religiosity is one of the most robust in-group identities in our country: it has been shown to be one of the most important aspects of many people’s self-concepts.46
To test the effect of a religious cue on support for same-sex marriage, online participants read one of two paragraphs, identical except for the source attribution: it was either an anonymous citizen or Reverend Richard T. Lawrence, pastor of St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1973 to 2017 (though his title was not introduced in the study). Similar to the Packers experiment, we thought that religious people would be more supportive of same-sex marriage when primed with information about support for marriage equality from a religious source (compared to a nonreligious one). The source of the cue, again, would not matter significantly for those who are not religious.
What we found mirrored the Packers experiment. The source of the paragraph that nonreligious respondents read didn’t matter: support for LGBT rights didn’t differ significantly whether they thought the quotation was from an anonymous citizen or a Reverend. However, religious participants who read the op-ed attributed to Reverend Lawrence were much more likely to say that they supported marriage equality, more likely to say that they would likely vote for a ballot measure in their state establishing marriage equality, and more likely to approve of gay men and lesbians being parents. There was a roughly 11 percentage-point difference in support for marriage equality between two groups who had read two nearly identical paragraphs. The only thing that differed was who the people of faith thought had written the words they were reading.
In both of these experiments, we saw how effective in-group cues and shared identity can be. These studies show that attitudes on divisive issues like same-sex marriage and same-sex parents can be moved in a meaningful way by priming in-group identity and using identity-salient elite cues. Hearing that “someone like you” in a meaningful way supports a particular cause or issue like sex-same marriage— and by extension, presumably, other important causes or issues—can trigger shared identity to induce people to change their minds as well.
What was most remarkable is that these cues were not particularly complicated: in the sports experiment, the difference was one photograph and the words “Green Bay Packer Hall of Famer LeRoy Butler.” In the religious experiment, it was the very short phrase “Reverend Richard T. Lawrence” instead of “a citizen.” Literally everything else was the same. And this dynamic is something that can be easy to replicate on an interpersonal level. One of the keys to this strategy is that you have to appeal to people on a meaningful level and to a meaningful identity. Emphasizing to someone that you are both left-handed and therefore should share the same views on climate change probably isn’t going to work. Highlighting the fact that you are both wearing red shoes in order to make yourself more credible on issues about nuclear proliferation probably isn’t going to fly. The identities that you prime need to be central to someone’s core identity, something that drives who they are as a person. It’s unique to each person, obviously, so it takes a little reflection and thought. We all operate with different identities concurrently and we have the ability to make an impact by appealing to someone based on a shared sense of a meaningful identity as a parent; a professional; a resident of a particular neighborhood, city, or state; a member of a shared racial or ethnic background; or a fan of a particular activity.
This chapter identified several new strategies to meaningful engagement with others, all under the common goal of personal closeness and interpersonal connection. Given the level of social sorting in our country and the ease with which we can achieve it, techniques to help people feel connected and invested in each other is a logical antidote. Consistent with the more complicated psychological models from earlier in the book, this everyday kind of connection has multiple benefits: increased feelings of trust, perceptions of likability, and increased likelihood of engaging with the information provided. Connecting with people feels good, even if nothing concrete comes from it in terms of political persuasion.
There are several strategies that can heighten personal connections and encourage folks to break out of their socially sorted ways. Engaging with people who are outside of your everyday social circles and encouraging meaningful interpersonal connections is incredibly important. The key, again, is genuine attempts at connection and not engaging in mere tokenism. Ensuring that you’re surrounded by a group of diverse friends and family is a worthwhile goal, especially for kids and people who are just forming their attitudes toward groups they may not encounter on a regular basis.
As we know, the words we choose have the ability to encourage this kind of closeness as well. Strategic and thoughtful use of personalization can be a subtle but meaningful way to show why something is particularly relevant and important, as long as it doesn’t detract from a person’s ability to see the larger picture. Appealing to empathy and encouraging people to link their own experiences of discrimination with those that out-group members might experience has been shown to be very helpful in changing perceptions and policy preferences. A related tactic of moral elevation, reminding people of benevolence and kindness in the world, can be useful as well.
Finally, emphasizing shared identities with those around you—particularly those identities that are important to a person’s sense of self—can be an incredibly powerful motivator for people to engage in political discussions with people with whom they might not otherwise. We all live with different identities at one time; they are emphasized and made more relevant in different situations and around different people. In this case, reminding another person about a shared, meaningful identity can help break down thought silos that many people create. Emphasizing something that we share can sometimes open a door to a discussion about the important ways we differ.
It can feel like social sorting and the “us vs. them” mentality are insurmountable obstacles in contemporary American life. In many ways, it has become easier to sort ourselves based on geography, partisanship and ideology, and information sources. As a result, we can either avoid confrontation or, conversely, realize how poorly equipped we have become to handle it properly. Thoughtful changes to how we approach political conversations and small tweaks to the words we use can have a disproportionately large impact on how we relate to each other and, in turn, the outcomes of our political discussions. The change might not be instantaneous but finding ways to interrupt the vicious cycle of identity sorting has all kinds of positive benefits that are worthy of the effort it requires.