Groupthink: a clear and present danger to the republic

"Do you think DJT is a racist?"

Based on how this question is answered, just about anyone can predict a person's views on a variety of unrelated issues including:
  • Gun rights and second amendment
  • Right to an abortion
  • Gay marriage and LGBTQ rights
  • Global warming
  • Black lives matter and police defunding
  • Confederate statues
  • Is the economy doing well
  • Should people wear masks
Maybe this person won't be aligned on every one of these issues 100% of the time, but the correlation is very high for most people.

Think about this for a moment.

Each of these are highly complex issues, every single one has a vastly different set of assumptions and none of them have clear answers.

And even though none of these issues has anything to do with each other, people are pretty much choosing a set of responses that are highly correlated with one another.  For example:
  • If John supports the right to an abortion, he probably wants to tighten up gun control.  And he almost certainly thinks DJT is a racist.
  • If Mary doesn't believe in global warming, she is probably very conservative on marriage being between a man and a woman and doesn't think people should wear masks.  Oh, and DJT is not a racist.
Not 100%, but probably.

Why?

Common sense!  some would argue...  Its only common sense!  The people on the 'other' side have no common sense, and have lost their minds, they are racists and not patriots and only want to destroy this wonderful country!  We folks on 'my' side see everything so clearly, it is only common sense that we answer the same way.

Unlikely.  I only wish the world was that simple.  

These are not clear cut issues with easy answers.  If they were simple enough for 'common sense' to prevail, these topics would have been resolved with little argument a long time ago, most Americans would agree and they would not be in the news every day.  

It didn't used to be this way.  

Back in 1988, for instance, people held a wide variety of opinions on these cultural and religious issues just like today.  But differing views on these topics didn't sort them into democrats and republicans (Reference #2).    

Instead, people generally picked a party (or a candidate) that aligned with their views on policy issues.  Some examples are social security spending, support of national health care, guarantee of jobs / standard of living.  

Like today, there were ideological cleavages, but in 1988 they were within parties not across parties.  The parties themselves knitted together people of vastly different social and ideological beliefs.  For example, there were conservative democrats and liberal republicans.  Religious democrats and secular republicans. And so forth.

Since about 2004, things have changed (Reference #2).  What was once healthy cross cutting, ideological cleavages occurring within parties now are aligned along party boundaries (Reference #1).  

Republicans now generally consider themselves conservative. Democrats are generally liberal.  And everybody is pretty much aligned with their party on social issues.

This is bad for our country.  

It means people have trouble communicating with folks in the other party.  They have almost nothing in common.  Deep, thoughtful discussions with both sides bringing forth their best arguments are rare.  Compromise and actual change of opinion almost never happens.

It means that people are not thinking deeply about issues.  They are, instead, spending their intellectual energy figuring out how to align with 'their people'.  

Here is a datapoint (Reference #1):
  • In the week before the 2016 election, 16 percent of Republicans and 61 percent of Democrats believed the US economy was getting better. In the week after the election, 49 percent of Republicans and 46 percent of Democrats believed the economy was improving (Gallup 2016).  
Quite obviously, the economy didn't shift in a week.  People's perceptions did.   These perceptions were inaccurate and lacked conviction.  And they were correlated not to truth, but to who won the white house.  How can these folks make good decisions, especially those that depend on an accurate assessment of the economy?

Here is another datapoint... a peer-reviewed journal article cites strong evidence that people are prioritizing partisanship over good health practices during the Covid-19 pandemic (Reference #4):
  • Rampant partisanship in the United States may be the largest obstacle to the social distancing most experts see as critical to limiting the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Analyzing a total of nearly 500,000 responses collected daily between Mar 4 and June 6 reveals not only that partisanship is more important than public health concerns for explaining individuals’ social distancing, but also that the effect of partisanship has grown over time – especially among Republicans. All else equal, the relative importance of partisanship for the increasing (un)willingness of Republicans to engage in social distancing highlights the challenge that politics poses for public health. 
Our democracy is founded on the principle of free thinking individuals.  Our capitalist economic system depends on people making well-informed, non-biased decisions, with good data and a clear view of the issues.  It simply can't work otherwise.

If conforming to what the 'tribe' thinks is first and foremost, quality decision making will be impossible.

On both sides.  Right or left.  Conservative or liberal.  Republican or democrat.  Maddow fans or Hannity fans.

We are suffering as a result of this groupthink.

I will explore this more in my next post.

References:





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