-I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide
but unify,
who doesn't see red states or blue states,
only sees the United States.
-Biden says as president, he'll be a healer and uniter,
but it's not that easy.
We can't fix what we don't understand.
So, here's what I know about division.
Political differences are good.
They actually make our democracy stronger.
But we've been getting more polarized for years.
People talk about political tribalism.
That's when you feel connected to or protective
of your group or your tribe.
But we're past that now.
Now we're in the realm of political sectarianism.
This is when you hate the other group
even more than you love your own.
That's what I know.
For the rest of it, I had to call a political scientist
who studies mass media and a neuroscientist
who studies social identity.
Okay, explain to me what are the ingredients
of political sectarianism?
-The first one is othering so that we see people
as different from us, as part of an out-group.
-Inevitably, you develop a favoritism for the in-group.
-Another one is aversion.
So, this is like this distaste that we have for these people,
this deep dislike or hatred.
-And it's not just cheap talk. It's real animosity.
-And then the third one is moralization,
that we see people
as on the other side of a moral divide,
that they have fundamentally different values from us.
And, so, if they have power, it means people you don't like
and potentially hate are doing things
that are potentially gonna challenge
or overturn your core values.
And, so, in a moment of an election,
where you're facing some other group,
and the potential that they might take control
and have power,
that can be incredibly threatening to some people.
-When we feel threatened, our brain shifts to protect us.
The part that deals with emotions
sends out signals to release stress hormones,
and those hormones prepare our body
to either fight or run away.
And it can play out in really extreme ways.
Political polarization doesn't always look like that.
It shows up in quieter forms, too.
I know Republicans who don't want to talk to Democrats
because they feel like they're arrogant know-it-alls
who want to take away their guns,
and I know Democrats who don't want to talk to Republicans
because they think they're backwards and racist.
So, I asked Shanto how did we get so hostile.
-Well, it's complicated.
One is the altered information environment.
In the old days, you had ABC, CBS, and NBC news,
and that was it, and they were all carbon copies of each other.
So, it was an information common.
Today, you can go to Breitbart, you can go to Talking Point,
and more and more Americans are indeed
occupying these information silos
in which the Republicans are simply tuning into Fox,
and the Democrats are tuning in to Rachel Maddow,
and so on and so forth.
Number two is the fact that the party divide today
coincides with a variety of other significant divides,
so much so that you get the white versus non-white divide
is now also the Democrat versus Republican divide.
Democrats are the party of non-whites, Republican party
is the party of whites.
And then a third potential factor that I consider
would simply be the rhetoric of political elites.
-Shanto told me there's a lot of evidence
that people follow higher-ups.
Here's a good example.
While Trump has used every possible platform to spread
lies about election fraud,
election workers around the country
have been getting death threats.
A Trump campaign lawyer
even insisted that the cybersecurity chief
who disputed Trump's claims of fraud should be killed.
-Okay, good news, most Americans are not sending death threats
or getting into street fights
because of political differences,
yet social media can make it seem that way,
and it's because the emotional content is what goes viral.
-So, the average person who's using social media
is scrolling through 300 feed of messages each day.
That means if you have a 6-inch smart phone,
and you scroll down to look at what's on Facebook
or Instagram or Twitter,
every time you swipe your thumb down, it's 6 inches.
So, imagine you do that 600 times a day.
Now, what we found is that when people use moral
or emotional language, it pops out to you,
and it captures your attention.
The next step is, do you click on it,
do you share it, do you write a nasty response,
and that's when it's connected often to your identity
that it drives you to do that.
-So, how does the loss of common facts
and common reality contribute to this?
-This is something that keeps me up at night.
It's that once you have the capacity
to erode a shared sense of reality,
it is something that authoritarian leaders
have used as a tool to confuse people
and make them rely on them.
Cult leaders do this all the time.
They get suppressive people out of your life
so they can feed you a version of reality.
And as people have lost trust in traditional institutions,
now they're able to go down a rabbit hole
and watch a series of YouTube videos
or go to a hyper-partisan website for their news.
-Will this change? It could.
-In the last election, people over 65
were about 7 times more likely to share fake news on Facebook
than young people under 25.
And, so, we think of young people
as these hyper-partisan protestors on campuses,
but the reality is old people are much more polarized,
and they're the ones who are susceptible
to a lot of this misinformation and sharing it.
We need to hold social-media companies accountable
so that they can't just profit off conflict
and division and violence.
-I think most people who are partisans don't realize,
it's subconscious,
that if people were made more self-aware,
I think they would moderate.
There's a lot of evidence in the field of racial prejudice
that when people are made conscious
of their racial biases,
they actively try to minimize them.
-So, we can help each other become more aware,
and protip, it doesn't help
when you try to shame somebody for their political preferences.
Instead, try de-escalating the conflict
by talking about values that they care about.
-So, if you're a liberal trying to convince a conservative,
you support US environmental regulation,
you might talk in terms of purity,
or you might get them to think in terms of tradition,
the tradition of the country and previous presidents
preserving national parks.
If you're a conservative trying to get through to a liberal,
instead of talking about loyalty or patriotism,
you might be able to get through
by talking about fairness or justice and harm,
and saying you might want to support the military
because they take great risks for you.
-If we want someone to be open-minded,
then we have to be open-minded, too.
So, if you're scrolling through Facebook,
and you're outraged by your dad's conservative diatribe,
or your horrified by your aunt's liberal rant,
take a minute and gut check.
Are you looking at them as a caricature?
Do you dislike them because you think they dislike you?
Is the threat you're feeling real or perceived?
-Okay, it's time.
I'm working.
Mama's working.