In Why We're Polarized, after a discussion of how Republicans who had championed the individual mandate turned against it when it was proposed by a Democrat, Ezra Klein quotes Jonathan Haidt on the role that individual reasoning plays in political disagreements:
... Haidt told me, "once group loyalties are engaged, you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Thinking is mostly just rationalization, mostly just a search for supporting evidence." Psychologists have a term for this: "motivated reasoning."
Three paragraphs later, Klein writes:
I first wrote about motivated reasoning and Obamacare’s individual mandate in 2012. In response to that piece, the psychologist Paul Bloom wrote an article in the Atlantic that didn’t quarrel with anything in my argument but included this gotcha: “notice that Klein doesn’t reach for a social-psychology journal when articulating why he and his Democratic allies are so confident that Obamacare is constitutional.”
Bloom’s right, of course. But the implications are more radical than he seemed prepared to admit. The question isn’t whether I fall victim to motivated reasoning, too, or whether I’m less psychically guarded when faced with information that accords with my values and worldview. Of course I am. The question is what it means that all of us are doing this, to greater or lesser degrees, all the time.
Wait. A gotcha of Klein's description of Republicans' 180-degree reversal on the individual mandate? That's intriguing. In "The War on Reason" (the article Klein cites), Bloom writes:
We’re at our worst when it comes to politics. This helps explain why recent attacks on rationality have captured the imagination of the scientific community and the public at large. Politics forces us to confront those who disagree with us, and we’re not naturally inclined to see those on the other side of an issue as rational beings. Why, for instance, do so many Republicans think Obama’s health-care plan violates the Constitution? Writing in The New Yorker in June 2012, Ezra Klein used the research of Haidt and others to argue that Republicans despise the plan on political, not rational, grounds. Initially, he notes, they objected to what the Democrats had to offer out of a kind of tribal sense of loyalty. Only once they had established that position did they turn to reason to try to justify their views.
But notice that Klein doesn’t reach for a social-psychology journal when articulating why he and his Democratic allies are so confident that Obamacare is constitutional. He’s not inclined to understand his own perspective as the product of reflexive loyalty to the ideology of his own group. This lack of interest in the source of one’s views is typical. Because most academics are politically left of center, they generally use their theories of irrationality to explain the beliefs of the politically right of center. They like to explore how psychological biases shape the decisions people make to support Republicans, reject affirmative-action policies, and disapprove of homosexuality. But they don’t spend much time investigating how such biases might shape their own decisions to support Democrats, endorse affirmative action, and approve of gay marriage.
But Bloom doesn't place much weight on this rhetorical gotcha, because in the next two sentences he writes: "None of this is to say that Klein is mistaken. Irrational processes do exist, and they can ground political and moral decisions; sometimes the right explanation is groupthink or cognitive dissonance or prejudice."
Bloom contends in the Atlantic article that in spite of irrational cul-de-sacs in individual reasoning, humans are generally rational, while conceding that in thinking about political issues we are especially vulnerable to irrationality:
[I]f you want to see people at their worst, press them on the details of those complex political issues that correspond to political identity and that cleave the country almost perfectly in half. But if this sort of irrational dogmatism reflected how our minds generally work, we wouldn’t even make it out of bed each morning. Such scattered and selected instances of irrationality shouldn’t cloud our view of the rational foundations of our everyday life. That would be like saying the most interesting thing about medicine isn’t the discovery of antibiotics and anesthesia, or the construction of large-scale programs for the distribution of health care, but the fact that people sometimes forget to take their pills.
He elaborates on this view in a follow up piece ("The Irrational Idea That Humans Are Mostly Irrational"), while emphasizing that in everyday life, generally speaking, people act rationally:
If you want to see people at their stupidest, check out national politics, which is replete with us-vs.-them dynamics and virtue signaling, and where the cost of having silly views is harmless. Unless I’m a member of a tiny, powerful community, my beliefs about climate change or the arms deal with Iran will have no effect on the world, and so it’s not surprising that people don't work so hard to get those sorts of facts right.
It’s revelatory, then, that we do much better when the stakes are high, where being rational really matters. If I have the wrong theory of how to make scrambled eggs, they will come out too dry; if I have the wrong everyday morality, I will hurt those I love. So if you’re curious about people’s capacity for reasoning, don’t look at cases where being correct doesn’t matter and where it’s all about affiliation. Rather, look at how people cope in everyday life.
(In September 2016 it may have been easier, than it is today, to assess our political divisions as of little consequence, where "the cost of having silly views is harmless." Or perhaps Bloom is less concerned with democratic backsliding than I am. Let's set that aside.) It turns out, based on both Atlantic articles, that Bloom's gotcha is less significant than we might have suspected. In fact, Bloom doesn't actually disagree with Klein at all. Essentially, he believes with Klein that tribal politics makes us irrational.
Reaching across the divide
So, should small-d (and big-D) democrats simply throw up our hands and forget about engaging our political opponents because they are too irrational, too committed to tribal loyalty, to listen to reason? Not at all, though our first priority should be to defeat authoritarian leaders at the polls and to oppose authoritarian policies at every level of government. To succeed, we must appeal to folks not locked-in to the MAGA Republican Party and do whatever we can to turn out as many votes as possible to preserve our democratic institutions, especially free and fair elections.
But another priority should be to reach across the tribal divide and persuade (some fraction of) Americans on the red team (perhaps at the margins) that democracy is worth preserving -- for them, as well as for us. It would be wise to keep tribal allegiances and motivated reasoning in mind when constructing political strategies. But I suggest that in the give and take of politics, we focus primarily on clarifying our views about our country, our challenges, the high stakes, and our differences with our political opponents, while making rational arguments to support our points of view. We need, as much as possible, to engage our political opponents, not simply write them off.
And we need to dig deeper. Team Red has a host of grievances, some of which are legitimate concerns that deserve to be addressed and might be remedied at least in part by reasonable public policies. We desperately need to be talking about that.