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How do we make our political choices? We stand in the polling booth weighing up the different policies of the various parties and then select according to taste, don’t we? Like picking clothes off a rack. Ooh, I need something medium in red, I’ll take Stella Creasy, that sort of thing. Or, perhaps more accurately: I believe in gender equality and the redistribution of wealth, Labour agrees with me on those issues, so I’ll vote Labour.
We might think that’s how it works. But this sort of sifting is only part of the story. We also – and to a greater extent – shift our political views to align with our political parties, and – importantly – to also distinguish ourselves from our political opponents.
During the 2016 presidential election, American voters were more divided than ever on questions of race and gender. But, as Matt Grossmann points out in a piece for the politics-stats-nerd site FiveThirtyEight, research using ‘panel studies‘ found that, for instance, white Democratic voters became took harder stances on race and sex discrimination in response to Donald Trump’s inflammatory comments on those topics, rather than already having those stances and then being appropriately appalled by the comments.
It’s not only political parties that have this effect. We also align ourselves with more loosely defined tribes, such as Leave and Remain, or centrist, or conservative, or socialist – and we change our views to match our alignment.
We already know this, though. We know that our views are a product of more than just reasoned reflection. We know that even though we feel like our logical brains are in charge, they’re not. In the words of Jonathan Haidt, they are more like a press secretary than a president, justifying our emotional decisions in rational language. And part of our emotional response is socially mediated: say, my in-group is Democrat voters (or Labour voters, or Remain voters), so I want to signal that I share views with them. My out-group is Trump/Tory/Leave, so I want to signal that I have very different views to them. So I plant my flag deeper into the territory to remove any ambiguity.
But that knowledge doesn’t make it any less unsettling. I don’t like the idea that my views on, say, the #MeToo movement or trans rights or Black Lives Matter are not fully my own. Worse, it undermines my confidence in my own opinions. If I know I’ll probably change my political opinions – have already changed my opinions – because of a subconscious need to fit in with my in-group, then I might not be so certain that I went for the right ones in the first place.
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