Good Reasonable People

A leading social scientist explains the psychology of our current social divide and how understanding it can help reduce the conflicts it causes There has been much written about the impact of polarization on elections, political parties, and policy outcomes. But Keith Payne’s goal is more personal: to focus on what our divisions mean for us as individuals, as families, and as communities. This book is about how ordinary people think about politics, why talking about it is so hard, and how we can begin to mend the personal bonds that are fraying for so many of us. Drawing upon his own research and his experience growing up in a working class, conservative Christian family in small town Kentucky, Payne argues that there is a near-universal human tendency to believe that people who are different from us are irrational or foolish. The fundamental source of our division is our need to flexibly rationalize ideas in order to see ourselves as good people.; Understanding the psychology behind our political divide provides clues about how we can reduce the damage it is causing. It won’t allow us to undo our polarization overnight, but it can give us the tools to stop going around in circles in frustrating arguments. It can help us make better choices about how we engage in political debates, how policy makers and social media companies deal with misinformation, and how we deal with each other on social media. It can help us separate, if we choose to, our political principles from our personal relationships so that we can nurture both.

Auteur

Keith Payne

Résumé
“An eye-opening analysis of why our politics have become so polarized….Keith Payne illuminates one of the biggest problems of our time and lights the way toward some promising solutions.”
—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again
 
"Good Reasonable People challenges each of us to drop the weapon of demonization and replace it with something more powerful: a framework for understanding—and for being understood by—people who see the world differently from us."
—Margot Lee Shetterly, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Figures

A leading social scientist explains the psychology of our current social divide and how understanding it can help reduce the conflicts it causes

There has been much written about the impact of polarization on elections, political parties, and policy outcomes. But Keith Payne’s goal is more personal: to focus on what our divisions mean for us as individuals, as families, and as communities. This book is about how ordinary people think about politics, why talking about it is so hard, and how we can begin to mend the personal bonds that are fraying for so many of us.

Drawing upon his own research and his experience growing up in a working class, conservative Christian family in small town Kentucky, Payne argues that there is a near-universal human tendency to believe that people who are different from us are irrational or foolish. The fundamental source of our division is our need to flexibly rationalize ideas in order to see ourselves as good people. 

Understanding the psychology behind our political divide provides clues about how we can reduce the damage it is causing. It won’t allow us to undo our polarization overnight, but it can give us the tools to stop going around in circles in frustrating arguments. It can help us make better choices about how we engage in political debates, how policy makers and social media companies deal with misinformation, and how we deal with each other on social media. It can help us separate, if we choose to, our political principles from our personal relationships so that we can nurture both.

Échantillon de lecture
A lot of writing has analyzed what polarization means for electoral horse races. Because the country is evenly divided, news stories and essays tend to focus on events and ideas that might tip a close election. That means they focus on factors like inflation, gas prices, how well the economy is doing, candidate messaging, and how much candidates have spent on political advertising. The intense news coverage creates the false impression that those are factors that drive politics for most people. In reality, those factors might only shift ten or twenty thousand votes. They are important for election outcomes, but in a country that is divided nearly fifty‑fifty, every tiny factor that influences 1 or 2 percent of the votes matters for election outcomes. Elections are obviously important, but the factors that swing close elections are not the factors that explain why the vast majority of people vote the way they do or believe the things they believe. This book is about why we are evenly divided in the first place, and that has little to do with how the economy is doing or political ads.

Plenty of essays and books have delved into the differences between progressivism and liberalism. Or neoconservatism and traditional conservatism. Or why traditional conservatism is really classical liberalism. All of the isms turn political and social life into a complex web of ideologies that might be important for academics and journalists but don’t mean much for the average person. Abstract ideas like socialism, racism, or fascism have become a primary way scholars go about understanding politics, and I think that’s a shame. The problem is that isms take interesting things that human beings do and turn them into abstractions with fuzzy boundaries. Then, when we want to talk about people doing interesting things, we have to argue that this particular thing is an instance of the general abstraction. Is this policy a case of socialism? Is that decision an instance of racism?

Throughout the book, I try to avoid using abstract isms. My goal is more personal. I want to focus on what our divisions mean for us as individuals, as families, and as communities. Whenever I encounter an ism, I want to take it apart and ask what people are actually doing, why they do it, and what it means to them. This book is not about politicians or political strategists or party organizations. It is about ordinary people making sense of their world in the best way they know how.

Sometimes it is shocking how differently people make sense of the same world. It has become more and more apparent for many of us in recent years that other people we thought we knew don’t just disagree with us; they see the world in a deeply different way than we do. The question is: Why? In this book I try to answer that question by understanding how people think about politics, the deeper meanings and identities behind our political worldviews,and why talking about it is so hard.

Most psychological accounts of the differences between liberals and conservatives focus on personality traits. They produce explanations in the form of “Liberals are like this, but conservatives are like that.” One popular theory argues that liberals, but not conservatives, are high on a personality trait called openness to experience.People who are open to experience like to try new and different things. They like to travel, to eat strange new foods from cultures around the world, and to listen to kinds of music they’ve never heard before. They like to do all the things that people low in openness to experience call weird. People who are low on the trait have more conventional tastes. They like traditional food, art, and entertainment. They like to do things they consider normal. It is easy to see how being open to experience fits our stereotyped mental images of cosmopolitan, epicurean liberals, while being less open fits our images of buttoned‑up conservatives. According to this theory, the liberal mind is a playful mind, and the conservative mind is a cautious m…