This is a follow-up post to my original article on why liberals and conservatives can't understand each other on the Syrian refugee issue. If you haven't read it, you can check it out here. Most of that article drew on the work of Jonathan Haidt, a positive psychologist who focuses on the psychology of morality. I heard about him through this compelling interview on the public radio program "On Being."
Here are some more notes I gleaned from Haidt’s talk:
Neither side has all the pieces to the puzzle. When one side or the other becomes too homogenous, we start to see problems.
It’s harder for liberals to understand conservatives than for conservatives to understand liberals. It’s cliché but true – the media and academic worlds tend to be more liberal. Thus conservative people grow up being exposed to liberal frames all the time. Many liberal people never encounter conservative ideas unless they intentionally pick up a book on the subject. Sure, liberals hear Fox News and Donald Trump, but these caricatures don’t really offer a substantial take on legitimate conservative ideas.
From a political perspective, the happiest people tend to be the people on the extremes. This is where each group’s “moral matrix” is most homogenous, so they don’t have to deal with opposing views as much. It’s much more stressful to be somewhere in the middle and constantly have to duke it out. That’s unfortunately why people on the extremes are the most vocal and present in the political arena – the rest of us get so exhausted from dealing with this stuff all the time that we give up. Hence the huge problems with voter turnout.
Religion people – yes, even Muslims, folks – tend to be better citizens, especially when there is “competition.” For example, in an urban setting where you have a church, a synagogue, and a mosque, they are usually all really nice to each other. Religious people tend to be better citizens and give more time and money to charity. When there isn’t competition – say in Saudi Arabia or a rural area in the Deep South – religions tend to be too homogenous and foster all the bad things we think of when it comes to religious fundamentalism.
Because of the idea of the moral matrix and our inability to see beyond it, the messenger is more important than the message vehicle when communicating with the other side. In other words, liberals will tend to spend too much time obsessing over the wording of their message to conservatives instead of thinking of who should deliver the message. The concept of “unexpected validators” is really important – pick someone to deliver the message whom the other side respects. I remember “Republicans for Obama” being an important group in the 2008 election, for example. Or sometimes you see Colin Powell – a former member of the Bush Administration – picked to deliver a statement in line with liberal values. Another strategy for delivering the message is to share food with members of the other side. It sounds silly, but eating together is anthropologically a really powerful way to break through barriers.
To break through barriers, it’s often better not to come together for the sole purpose of “discussion,” but rather to work together on superordinate goals. If they’re just getting together to discuss, it will be three hours of proving each other’s moral matrix. But when conservatives and liberals work side by side on a project bigger than themselves, it can lead to breakthroughs. This reminds me of my friend Carl Wilkens’s emphasis on stories and service as means to building community. Stories feed service, service feeds stories.
Another way to break through to the other side is to emphasize virtues instead of stances on issues. It’s more productive to talk about hospitality, honor, and characteristics people value rather than abstract political stances. Avoid at all costs an atmosphere in which the two sides are “combatants.”
Other ways of breaking through barriers and changing one’s worldview include foreign travel, films, and literature. Unfortunately, liberal people (who tend to be more open anyway) are usually more open to these new experiences than conservative people.
Conservatives are psychologically pre-disposed to being more groupish, whereas liberals are pre-disposed to being more universal. The right has all this “psychological equipment” to be more tribal and avoid inter-group mixing – hence the emphasis on purity as a conservative value.
Liberals tend to be better at delivering justice (fairness) within the group, whereas conservatives tend to be better at keeping the group together.