Keith Payne is a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an international leader in the psychology of inequality and discrimination. His research has been featured in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and on NPR. He has written for Scientific American and Psychology Today.
What’s the big idea?
Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you they are a good, reasonable person. No matter what side of the political fence a person pledges allegiance to, beliefs tend to be fickle and based more upon life circumstances and group association than any particular evidence or passion for an issue. There is mostly a gray area in the ideological stand-off that pretends to be starkly black and white.
Below, Keith shares five key insights from his new book, Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide. Listen to the audio version—read by Keith himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Most people don’t have a political ideology.
People may call themselves liberal or conservative, but most people struggle to define what that means. Scholars define an ideology as a coherent, interconnected set of beliefs, but when they look at how people respond to surveys, their answers are all over the place. For example, someone who takes a conservative position on taxes might take a liberal position on government spending. On issue after issue, there’s not much correlation between opinions on logically related topics.
And people are incredibly inconsistent over time. They flip-flop on issues from one survey to the next. Political scientists suggest that only about 15 percent of Americans have a coherent ideology. They are usually journalists, academics, and news junkies. The other 85 percent might feel passionate about politics, but their passion is not about issues or policies but social group identities.
2. Everyone believes they are good and reasonable.
People interpret every piece of information in ways that preserve the conviction that they are good, reasonable people belonging to groups of good, reasonable people. If you present partisans with evidence that what they believe is wrong or bad, they have dozens of ways to avoid changing their minds. They can decide that the source of the information is unreliable or biased. They can decide you are untrustworthy or that you’ve been brainwashed. They can move the goalposts, change the subject, engage in whataboutism, and so on. It’s frustrating when other people do that, but it’s hard to see that we all do it ourselves. The psychological bottom line is that I’m a good, reasonable person and my groups are, too. Everything else has to add up to that.
3. Political allegiances are mostly a matter of chance events.
We feel that we have reasoned our way to our views, but the reasoning we find convincing is almost entirely predictable, based on factors in place before birth. Philosophers call it moral luck. Jack Yufe and his identical twin brother Oskar were separated at birth in 1933. Jack was raised in a Jewish American family. Oskar was raised in a Christian family in Germany as the Nazis came to power, and joined the Hitler youth. Predictably, they adopted the values of the groups they were assigned to. Many years later, they found each other and worked on reuniting, but they could never fully overcome the vast differences in how they saw the world.
“The time, place, and racial groups we are born to set us on different paths, and we must make sense of the world from where we stand.”
In the U.S. today, we can accurately predict which political party people identify with based on a few facts regarding their birth. About 90 percent of Black Americans support Democrats. Around 60 percent of White Americans support Republicans, and that percentage is much higher if they were born in a county that was economically dependent on slavery in 1860.
Also, we can predict which counties depended on slavery by looking at which parts of the southern U.S. were covered by a prehistoric ocean in the Cretaceous period, leaving chalky soil that made fertile ground for cotton. Like a great line of dominoes set in motion millions of years ago, the time, place, and racial groups we are born to set us on different paths, and we must make sense of the world from where we stand.
4. We don’t vote because of what we believe; we believe because of how we vote.
Many people believe that we are experiencing a misinformation crisis—a new post-truth world. Misinformation and conspiracy theories are rampant, but people have always believed weird stuff. When researchers looked at survey responses going back to the 1970s, they found that the proportion of the population that believes in conspiracy theories has remained roughly constant since then. In 1981, 48 percent of Americans believed the assassination of Robert Kennedy was a conspiracy rather than the act of a lone gunman. In 2021, 43 percent believed that. In 2021, half of Americans believed that humans had contacted aliens, but the government was covering it up—almost the same proportion as in 1996. In the 1980s, popular conspiracy theories involved the Reagan administration. In the 1990s, there were popular conspiracy theories about OJ Simpson. Those have fallen out of fashion, replaced by QAnon and false stories about immigrants eating pets. Tomorrow, it will be something different.
“People endorse whatever stories justify their vote.”
There is a simple recipe for making people believe strange stories: Take the political group you want to vilify (Democrats, Republicans, or whatever) and say that they are in league with powerful forces (banks, pharmaceutical companies, etc.) to nefariously help themselves and harm the weak and vulnerable. When researchers made up new conspiracies using that recipe, large proportions of Americans believed them so long as the villains were in the other party. We worry that if people are fooled by conspiracy theories, then they will vote for the wrong candidate. But that worry has it backwards. People endorse whatever stories justify their vote.
5. Everyone is winging it.
When we argue over politics, we focus on issues or recent outrages—but those are the smoke, not the fire. We would sound silly if we said, truthfully, “I believe my party is right and your party is wrong because I want to be a good member of the racial and social groups that I feel closest to.” So, we embrace one side and reject the other, always justifying our positions based on some piece of evidence that is not the true cause of our allegiance. We wield justifications as needed to defend that we are good, reasonable people. We’re all just making it up as we go along.
If you want to get past the endless circles of unproductive debate, the next time you are tempted into a political argument, ask yourself: Why do I believe what I believe, and why does my opponent believe what they believe? Don’t answer with facts and evidence. Answer how their position reassures them that they are a good, reasonable member of their groups and how yours does the same for you. You won’t start agreeing with one another, but you might come to see yourselves as two people trying their best to make sense of a messy, complicated world.
To listen to the audio version read by author Keith Payne, download the Next Big Idea App today:
