Last month, Nichola Raihani — British psychologist and author of The Social Instinct, a book about the history of human cooperation — published a fascinating story on Medium. It made me think differently about why (in the U.S., at least) we’re so divided politically.
A Gallup poll released in January reveals that Republicans’ and Democrats’ ideologies have grown more extreme in the last 30 years. Even if you compare polls from the last 2–3 years, the number of people who label themselves “very conservative” or “very liberal” is increasing.
Raihani sees political division through a specific lens: circles of trust. We mentioned this briefly in issue #261, but essentially, political differences (in Raihani’s view) come down to how we envision our obligations to people who are not close family or friends. She cites a behavioral study which found that political conservatives “profess greater love for their family, but less love for humanity as a whole (with political liberals showing the opposite pattern).” Conservatives’ circles of trust are smaller (family + township come first); liberals’ circles of trust are larger (love for humanity writ large). By extension, conservatives trust institutions less than liberals, because institutions (e.g. banks, schools, governments) are basically manifestations of care for people beyond your core family/friend group.
For an institution to exist, its users must have a pretty wide circle of trust.
More interestingly, our circles of trust expand and contract over time. If we perceive our institutions as untrustworthy, our circles of trust shrink; if our institutions serve us well, they expand. Raihani concludes: “Our moral boundaries are, therefore, determined as much by the society that we live in as they are by our own personal values and beliefs.”
Source: Harris Sockel
https://blog.medium.com/how-circles-of-trust-explain-the-political-divide-d51a058a16ac
