Politics and hatred

 With my social scientist hat on, I study group identity – how people behave differently to ingroups and outgroups. My experimental subjects are mostly students. If one divides them by sex or ethnicity, they are quite unlikely to be mean to the other group. This is not so surprising: most young people strongly believe that sexism and racism are wrong. But, dividing them by politics works much better. Leftwingers are happy to discriminate against rightwingers, and (maybe?) vice versa. (I, Denise Laroze and Arndt Leininger have some work using this approach: here is a presentation.)

This is not just true in the lab. Someone once refused to shake my hand because I was a Conservative. Today twitter is ablaze – when is twitter not ablaze? – with photos of the anti-Tory protest in London.

My impression is that political hatred tends to be stronger from the Left to the Right than the other way round. Perhaps this is because many on the Left are idealists with a strong concern for social justice and compassion. To be against those things, surely you must be evil!

But of course across history there have been many Right wingers who evince hatred for their opponents. Political scientists talk about "politicide": destroying a political movement by mass murder. After Suharto gained power in Indonesia, up to a million people were murdered for being Communists.

Thinking about politics through the lens of group identity can be analytically helpful. Why do people vote when notoriously, a single vote will not change the result? Well, people don't go to football matches because they have calculated that the sound of their cheering will cause their team to win, but because they enjoy supporting their team. Maybe voting is like that.

It would also be a good idea if politically active people were more self-aware about this "group identity" aspect of their beliefs. Be passionately committed to your political ideals – God knows, we do not need more apathy. But understand that this engagement works partly on a primitive, non-cognitive level of your brain. If we all knew this, democratic politics might be a bit less rancorous.

Meanwhile, when a left wing person tells me I am evil, I have an easy response: "I don't think you're evil!

"I just think you're stupid." :-D