Origin of political hatred is in humanity’s past and even explains fight in reality show

Children fighting at school over the presidential election, families divided, old friends who even shoot each other for voting for different candidates: situations like these have multiplied throughout the 2022 election campaign, but there is nothing particularly unexpected about them. .

A wide range of studies show that human beings of all times and places tend to behave this way in the face of staunch political opponents. The dynamics that lead people to see themselves as members of groups separated from others often also lead to the dehumanization of those outside these groups. Between that and physical violence, the distance is relatively small.

According to Paul Bloom, a specialist in developmental psychology at Yale University (USA), provoking this feeling of “us against them” in laboratory experiments is very easy, with the most banal pretexts. He says that, in a classic survey, this was done by showing the participants modernist paintings that would have been painted by two different artists, the Russian Wassily Kandinsky and the Swiss Paul Klee.

People had to say which painter was their favorite, being separated into groups of “Kandinsky fans” and “Klee fans”.

In fact, however, the assignment of the paintings to the artists was done randomly, so the groups of supposed fans had nothing to do with the real taste of the participants. The volunteers, however, had no idea.

When researchers asked, say, a “Klee fan” if he thought other members of his group were smarter than “Kandinsky fans,” he usually answered yes. Worse still, people were also said to be more willing to lend money to an alleged fan of the same painter than to members of the other group.

According to Bloom, similar effects occur even when the groups are formed by flipping a coin — and with the experiment participants knowing that the split was made that way. It’s the same phenomenon that often happens in “little cliques” of allies formed on reality shows, when people who have never seen each other before in their lives develop a fierce loyalty to each other after just a few days of the show.

Everything indicates that the origins of this mechanism are in the remote past of humanity, when relatively small groups (with at most a few hundred people) corresponded to independent political and social units. As there were no police, judges or any other formal apparatus in the current states, any group could be attacked by another without legal reprisals.

Therefore, the internal cohesion of each group, as well as an “us versus them” mentality, were essential for the self-defense of these small-scale societies during tens of thousands of years of human prehistory. To reinforce the links between the members of these societies, elements such as characteristic clothing and adornments, customs, myths, legends and religious beliefs began to emerge and became increasingly complex.

Although party politics is an extremely recent phenomenon in most parts of the world, it is capable of functioning as a cognitive “pull”. In other words, it is built on top of this type of more basic tribal instinct, taking advantage of its infrastructure, to reinforce identities and foment conflicts.

A study published in 2020 in the specialized period Science, coordinated by Eli Finkel, from Northwestern University, showed how this has been happening in recent decades with Democratic and Republican Party voters in the US.

As both parties have existed since the 19th century, there has already been a lot of ideological convergence between them, and even exchanges of positions. 150 years ago, the Democrats, now linked to the banners of social equality, were against the abolition of slavery, while the Republicans defended the right to vote for former enslaved people, for example. In the 20th century, until the 1960s, the flags of the two parties were only slightly different.

However, post-1960s cultural changes initiated a growing divergence, causing today most Democrats or Republicans to reject the idea of ​​having a neighbor from the rival party, or having their children marry children of people from the other group. political.

Furthermore, according to the study, both sides have very distorted views of the other’s nature. Republicans believe that 30% of Democrats belong to the LGBTQIA+ community, for example (true number: 6%). Democrats think 40% of Republicans are wealthy, earning more than $250,000 a year (actual data: 2%).

According to the researcher, three elements make the two groups increasingly closed within themselves. The first is the so-called “othering”, the tendency to think that the political opponent is the Other with a capital O, strange and alien. The second is dislike and distrust of adversaries, and the third is moralization—the idea that the other not only has misconceptions but is essentially evil.

The role of political leadership in this cannot be neglected. Several recent studies point out that, in countries where political leaders employ violent rhetoric in their speeches, the distance between speech and action is small, with an increase in domestic terrorism and aggression against immigrants.

Was there an antidote? On an individual level, becoming aware of what is happening is the first step.

“An effective way to combat this, according to some studies, is to emphasize the moral similarities and commonalities between ‘us’ and ‘them,'” says Marco Antonio Correa Varella, a postdoctoral researcher and visiting professor at the Department of Experimental Psychology at USP. . “Emphasize that we are all human, we have families, friends, proper names, language, dreams and the will to survive.”