2 weeks Ago
Would you consider someone an enemy because she’s an introvert and you’re an extrovert, or vice versa? Because he’s a pessimist and you're an optimist? Of course not. Those are hardwired psychological traits. We can train ourselves to be more outgoing or more introspective, more positive or more realistic, but these innate tendencies are just that: innate — neither good nor bad except in the extreme.
Not something we celebrate or demonize. What if our politics flow from similar psychological traits? Scoppe What if the hardwired psychological traits that drive our political preferences are — like being an introvert or an extrovert — neither good nor bad? Could we maybe be more willing to tolerate people whose politics are different from our own? I recently happened upon a fascinating theory that I think can help us understand each other as we live through an extremely divisive election and what I expect will be an even more divisive aftermath, regardless of who wins the White House or any other office. And frankly, our ability to live together is a lot more important than any of that.
The theory involves tolerance for ambiguity. Scoppe: You could be surprised on Election Day, but not by either of these possibilities As University of Delaware political communications professor Dannagal Goldthwaite Young explained on the podcast Hidden Brain : “People who have a high tolerance for ambiguity tend to be really comfortable with situations that are uncertain and unpredictable. They're really OK with change.
They don't need a lot of routine in their world. ..
. And people who are high in need for closure are quite the opposite. They really prefer routine and order and structure and predictability in their lives, in their interactions, and in their sort of physical environments.
” Those who prefer ambiguity tend to see how both sides could be right in a conflict, they enjoy thinking for the sake of thinking — and they tend to be liberals. Those who need closure tend to make important decisions quickly and confidently, they are highly attuned to threats in the environment — and they tend to be conservatives. Scoppe: Candidates still need to criticize their opponents, just cool the overheated rhetoric I know, I know: Liberals are thinking, "Well, yes, of course; we’re the smart ones.
" And conservatives are thinking, "This is just another elitist vision of division, one that denigrates conservatives as seeing the world in black and white and elevates liberals as more enlightened." I would agree with the conservative critique except for this: The researcher is of the closure class, someone with an “extreme distaste for uncertainty.” She talks about how good it felt to be sucked down conspiracy rabbit holes looking for reasons her husband developed a brain tumor.
She talks about her dislike of abstract art, which she describes as a classic test for ambiguity tolerance. Central to her fellow anti-ambiguitests, Dr. Young says, is a predisposition for looking for threats.
Scoppe: After an awful race that isn't over yet, what happens next is up to each of us “For people who are high-threat monitors, they are all about survival in the face of threat, and it's on their mind all the time,” she says. “What serves these people best is making decisions quickly and efficiently based on heuristics, emotions, intuition and shortcuts. That is what causes them to have this lower need for cognition.
It's not that they can't, it's that it doesn't make sense for them. ..
. They're not going to be very high in tolerance for ambiguity because that exposes them to threat.” These are the people you want around when you’re walking through a jungle and there’s a tiger hiding in the bushes.
Rather than “thinking about the systemic reasons the tiger might want to eat you,” podcast host Shankar Vedantam said, you want “decisive action” from “the person walking in the forest and hearing a twig crack behind them.” Editorial: Here's who The Post and Courier is endorsing for 2024 election In a world full of people working around the clock to manipulate us , there's a significant downside to this type: It makes us more susceptible to manipulation. As Dr.
Young explains from personal experience down the rabbit hole: “Conspiracy theory beliefs are really rooted in a very simple causal mechanism. They say that whatever the crisis is, or the horrible event is, it's not some complex systemic thing. It is something that has been caused by powerful people operating in the shadows to benefit themselves and harm others.
And it provides a really quick closure to what could be a complex problem.” Of course in a world full of people working around the clock to manipulate us, there are other ways to manipulate the love-to-think crowd; intellectual exclusivity seems to be a pretty big attractant. Despite the downsides, though, both psychological traits are extremely valuable.
And if you don't take anything else away from this column, please take away that. Scoppe: An all-purpose solution for road rage, politics and life's other challenges “A society that only has people who are tolerant of ambiguity and high in need for cognition, well, it might be a society that has art and music and innovation, but it might also be a society that could be attacked and taken over very quickly,” Dr. Young said.
“A society that only has high need for closure and low need for cognition — that is a society that might be super safe, super high in law and order, but might not have the kind of innovations and exploration, art and culture that would make quality of life really rich. So thinking about these two things as the yin and the yang of society, rather than things that need to be demonized ..
., I think, is necessary.” As Mr.
Vedantam put it, “we find ourselves constantly at odds with other people and bewildered by their choices” because we don’t see how something as basic as tolerance for uncertainty shapes their — and our own — thoughts. “We don't say, OK, she has a higher need for cognition, and therefore wants to understand the context that leads to crime; we say she must be a snowflake,” he said. “We don't say he has a more acute sense of threat and wants to keep our community safe; we say he's a gun-toting extremist.
” The framework is imperfect. But looking at each other through this lens can provide a starting place for beginning to close the deepening rift within our families, our churches, our friend circles, our workplaces, our society — if we’ll just let it. Click here for more opinion content from The Post and Courier.
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