Why People I love learned to hate each other (such as Republicans and Democrats)

Something I wrote February 19, 2021

Why people I love have learned to hate each other (such as Republicans and Democrats)

Have you ever tried to convince someone that their boyfriend/girlfriend is not someone whom they should be dating? Perhaps they don’t treat them well, or they aren’t faithful, or they are just mean and cruel.

I’m guessing that if you tried to convince them then they weren’t very receptive to your message. They probably said something like “you don’t know them like I do” or “you just hate them for no reason. You probably wondered why they were so blinded. A lot of that has to do with confirmation bias as well.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to focus on and exaggerate things we want to believe and ignore or dismiss things that we don’t. Once your friend has decided that they want to be with someone then confirmation bias kicks in like this:

(See also my video on this)

Let’s say an average person has both positive and negative traits,

Once your friend decides that they love someone then confirmation bias kicks in, in a big way. Positive traits are exaggerated, negative ones are ignored or reinterpreted as positive (He’s not controlling, he’s a good leader)

This can happen with groups or affiliations. Other biases start to kick in to reinforce this bias as well such as ingroup and outgroup bias. Groups that we belong to (such as a political party, race or religion) we will treat the same way as the example above, focusing and exaggerating positive traits while ignoring negative ones. (this is called ingroup bias)

(See also my video on this)

The opposite, or outgroup bias can kick in with groups that we dislike and hate. Confirmation Bias kicks in and you exaggerate and focus on any negative traits while Ignoring or reinterpreting positive traits as negative. (see picture) In one study where they did brain scans they found that some of these responses are preconscious and happen automatically.

Groups that you compete with or are rivals with will have a stronger effect on the distortion. This happens with political parties such as Republicans and Democrats. This starts to distort reality such that you are seeing things through a fun house mirror again and not reality as it is.

One study highlights this when they studied Republicans and Democrats as well as Israelis and Palestinians they found

“each side felt their own group is motivated by love more than hate, but when asked why their rival group is involved in the conflict, pointed to hate as that group's motivating factor.”

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141104083946.htm

As I mentioned in the last post this is worsened by the media that we choose as most people choose media that plays to their distortions. We choose media (online sites, podcasts, talk radio, news channels) that will show us all the great things about our own groups and the worst things about the other groups. Bias blind spot kicks in here as well in which everyone thinks that this happens only to the media from the other side and not their own.

Add in fear and anger to the mix and things only get worse and worse. Studies show that anger exacerbates this tendency as shown here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201809/anger-exacerbates-political-bias

So this is getting worse as you can see in some interesting studies online.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/10/10/partisan-antipathy-more-intense-more-personal/

Ingroup and Outgroup Bias

We have a tendency to see people in our group as better than they are and people in groups we dislike as worse than they are. This causes all kinds of societal problems.

Teacher Resources