Some days ago, I happened upon Adam Mastroianni’s piece about US Democrats and Republicans. The following stood out to me (emphasis mine):
“But here’s something funny—according to a bunch of recent research, Democrats and Republicans don’t seem to know who they’re hating. For example, Democrats underestimate the number of Republicans who think that sexism exists and that immigration can be good. In return, Republicans overestimate how many Democrats think that the US should have open borders and adopt socialism. Both parties think they’re more polarized than they actually are. And majority of both sides basically say, “I love democracy, I think it’s great,” and then they also say, “The other party does NOT love democracy, they think it’s bad.”
In other words, Democrats and Republicans are much more similar than they think. Yet, they fixate on their differences.
However, US Democrats and Republicans are not the only ones who do this.
I am currently reading through Apostle Paul’s first letter to the early Corinthian church. I’m amazed at how tribal they also seemed to be. Members of the Corinthian church likely lived in the same city. They probably also had the same ethnicity. And, at the very least, they shared the same faith in Jesus. Yet, for all their similarities, these church folk chose to create factions based on something as mundane as who had baptized them. Instead of just being Christians, they wanted to be Paulians, Apollians and Peterians!
So, why do we humans have a tendency to be tribal?
In psychology, there’s a decision-making heuristic called the isolation effect (p. 271). When people have the opportunity to choose between two options, they develop a kind of selective blindness to what those options have in common. For instance, when you go to a supermarket for cereal or toothpaste, the similarities between the brands fade away from your consciousness and their differences stand out. Perhaps the very same process is hijacked when we’re deciding on where to pitch our tents ideologically.
