Why you don’t understand Donald Trump

Early in the evening, the giant overhead screens showed CNN “calling” east coast states like Maryland and Connecticut. As Wolf Blitzer turned each state blue on the colour-coded map, the crowd cheered and clinked glasses. I could hear in their voices that it meant more than other elections, especially for the women in blue. Finally, it was their turn!

As hours passed, though, the festive mood began to lose some of its fizz. Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina were called red. The celebratory buzz was replaced by increasingly nervous chatter. No one was talking about a Clinton landslide any more. Some people took phone calls and others fiddled with their devices in search of reassuring news. My own phone buzzed with texts from friends:

Should I be worried? Is it going to be ok? WTF?

The room grew quieter still as more states on the election map turned red, including Pennsylvania, which had polled blue. What the hell was going on? As paths to victory narrowed, the gathered Democrats reassured each other by tallying up the electoral votes of the remaining states expected to be blue. 

There was an ominous delay in the news about Wisconsin and Michigan. Some people looked at their phones and began quietly sobbing. Others swore aloud in anger. Septuagenarians in front of me shook arthritic fists. I looked up at the giant screen to see a smugly smiling photograph of “President-elect Donald J. Trump.”

It was like a bad dream. I felt blindsided: I had been sure Clinton would win. Everyone I knew had thought so too. I couldn’t help but suspect some kind of foul play, even though I had no evidence for any. I felt a visceral anger rising in me and thought it better to leave. I worked my way out through the crowd, everyone staring at screens, dazed and distraught. I walked for many blocks, unable to find a cab.

Finally, I hopped into the back of an Uber Pool. The other rider, a thirty-something woman, waved hello with a relaxed smile, the first I’d seen in hours.

“Coming from the event?” she said.
“At the Javits Center?” I asked.
“No, the Midtown Hilton . . .”
The pieces fell abruptly into place. She was one of them – a Trump supporter!
After several minutes of awkward silence, curiosity overcame me. “Were the folks at your event surprised at the outcome?” I asked.
“Not a bit,” she answered. “He’s been surging in the Midwest, and no one likes her!” She then reeled off some factoids about Trump’s campaign momentum, none of which I’d heard before.
I hadn’t expected to meet a Trump supporter that night. But even less had I expected to meet one so utterly unsurprised. All the evidence I had seen pointed to a Clinton landslide. But this apparently evidence-based Republican had been equally sure that her candidate would prevail. We shared a ride but didn’t share the same reality.

How, I wondered, could this parallel reality possibly exist – and how come it still exists? And if half of the country lives in that reality, how could I have been so utterly unaware of its existence?

The rift between the “realities” of left and right has continued to grow in the US and across the west – and, along with it, mutual mistrust. Red and blue voters don’t socialise with each other any more, even on dating sites. And, of course, the rift is as pronounced inside the Capitol as it is outside. As congresspeople of the two parties have come to inhabit increasingly separate realities, they’ve lost the ability to “reach across the aisle” to pass legislation. 

An account for all of this is “tribalism”, sometimes “toxic tribalism”, and political journalists have tried to spell out what it means. The author Thomas Friedman mused that the US had caught a “virus of tribalism” from our Middle East adventuring, a mentality of seeing political opponents as mortal enemies rather than fellow citizens, implying that elections not won must be denied. 

The commentator Andrew Sullivan described the reawakening of a long-buried urge for blind allegiance and primal hate for outsiders, somehow stirred by this historical moment. Alex Altman of Time attributed the change to an inimicable “tribal warrior” who entered our presidential politics and forced others to respond in kind. The pundits differ about the inciting cause, but these accounts all describe toxic tribalism as the unlocking of a primal fear and loathing, a genie escaped from the bottle that we can’t put back again.

This trope of toxic tribalism makes for colourful journalism but not necessarily for accurate understanding or practical solutions. It is true that our species evolved psychological systems that distinguish “us” from “them”, and the resulting cognitive biases and motivational drives guide our behaviour in politics and many other realms of life. But those tribal instincts do not include blind hate for outsiders. Evolution focused its group-related motives on “us”, the in-groups that kept our forebears alive day-to-day, not “them”, the out-groups that our forebears encountered only occasionally. 

Humans evolved instincts to unify, help, and preserve their groups that involve different kinds of shared knowledge. Although these instincts can indirectly contribute to conflicts with other groups, solidarity within the group does not directly entail hostility toward other groups. Conflicts can escalate to hostility, but assuming that they start from hostility is inaccurate and unhelpful.

If we were wired to obsess about outsiders and reflexively hate them, we would never have come so far as a species. However, each tribal instinct can spin out of control under certain conditions due to chain reactions and feedback loops. The peer-instinct can metastasize into delusional groupthink. The hero-instinct can become clannish favouritism that undermines broader justice. Traditionalism can turn into attacks on another tribe’s institutions and legitimacy.

In the case of the troubles afflicting the US two-party system, it’s not hard to spot a central role of what’s known as “peer-instinct conformity”. Most partisans take in a steady stream of similar opinions all day long – from their neighbours, news shows, and online networks. More than ever before, they have opportunities to express partisan views and gain validation and admiration for doing so. This cycle of conformist learning and conformist expression has produced ideologically inbred communities. When all of the other villagers attest to the beauty of the emperor’s new clothes, it’s hard not to see them.

In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, sociologist Robert Putnam reported the waning of community associations: Americans bowled more than ever but didn’t bowl in leagues anymore. For better or worse (but mostly for better), fewer Americans lived in ethnically homogeneous neighbourhoods. Instead, people of the same partisan feather increasingly “flocked together”: Democrats relocated to coastal cities and college towns, while Republicans gravitated to the heartland and the countryside. 

Political party membership increasingly overlapped with other divides such as old/young, white/non-white, and straight/queer. As the like-minded groups of past generations waned, party leanings became increasingly visible and filled the vacuum.

The polarisation of the media, along with the amplifying effect of social media, has led to divergent views of reality. Opposing political factions always disagreed in subjective evaluations (Is the president doing a good job?) but increasingly they began to disagree about objective facts (Is the president a Muslim?). By the 2016 election, the two camps held different factual beliefs about global warming, fracking, Clinton’s emails, Trump’s ties to Russia, and many other matters. 

Because we are not conscious of reaching conclusions through peer-instinct conformist learning, we (naively) regard our beliefs about these matters as direct reflections of reality. The combination of partisan falsehoods and our “naive realism” gives rise to flawed predictions. Both Republicans and Democrats predict that Independents share their take on any given issue (How could they not see it in this “reality-based” way?). Hence both sides expect to win in a close election. They may make campaign errors as a result. The losing side feels genuinely surprised at the returns on election night.

We also form warped perceptions of the opposing party. Because we are unaware that our own beliefs are politically filtered, the other side’s beliefs appear highly distorted; “they” must be blinded by ideology or self-interest. Republicans believe that 38% of Democrats are gay, lesbian, or bisexual, when it’s actually 6%. Democrats believe that 44% of Republicans earn over $250,000 per year, when in fact it’s 2%. Republicans estimate that 50% of Democrats endorse the statement “Most police are bad people”; it’s really only 15%. Democrats estimate that only half of Republicans accept that “racism is still a problem in America”; in reality, 79% do.

This is “epistemic tribalism”. Through runaway peer-instinct processing, tribal conformity increasingly comes before truth. As a result, people find the opposite party baffling, impossible to communicate or cooperate with, and hence sometimes infuriating, frightening, or disgusting. Previous generations held strong stereotypes and animosities across the lines of religion or ethnicity, but nowadays, surveys show that political party is the divide where social prejudice is strongest. 

When I look back on 2016, part of me finds it a little depressing that, even as a psychologist studying cultural biases, I was so susceptible to epistemic tribalism. I eagerly assimilated the blue tribe verities of my surrounding communities. I was overconfident, felt blindsided, and reacted with distrust. I’m glad, in any case, that the chance event of a shared ride home started a process of talking to the other side more. 

We should mind our tribal language when trying to persuade the other side. Stanford’s Matthew Feinberg and Robb Willer found that political advocates tend to use their own party’s habitual rhetoric. But when trying to persuade the other political tribe, it works better to employ their tribal lexicon, for example, instead of environmentalists invoking social justice, they could invoke the “sanctity of the earth” to persuade conservatives.

Increasingly, environmentalists have used clerics and faith-based language to lobby conservative-leaning politicians. The right tribal signs can be critical in making a plan palatable: Republicans reject a “carbon tax” but accept a “carbon offset”.

After concerns about the role of the media in the 2016 election, many technologists devised tools to allay media bias. FlipFeed, for instance, is a plug-in that sends you a Twitter (now X) feed from the political camp opposite to your own. In 2017, Duke’s Chris Bail tested the underlying concept by paying partisan Twitter users to follow a bot that retweeted twenty-four messages a day for a month from the other side’s opinion leaders: Republicans were piped posts from sources like Barack Obama, while Democrats received updates from the likes of Donald Trump. Before and after surveys about political issues revealed an effect opposite than intended: Republicans grew significantly more conservative and Democrats became slightly more liberal.

This backfire effect reflects the fact that people have defences against signals that strike them as suspicious, such as out-group sources imposed upon them to correct them. After Obama publicised his long-form birth certificate in 2011, the share of Republicans who believed he was foreign-born increased rather than decreased. 

Social psychologists have long observed that partisans dismiss evidence that weighs against their side’s cherished beliefs but embrace the same kinds of evidence when it weighs in favour. Dan Kahan of Yale Law School finds that this selective scrutiny occurs most for those with high education levels. People use their education to defend themselves against evidence from outsiders that challenges their beliefs.

But partisans can listen to people from the other side, so long as they come across as people, rather than as from the other side. University of Pennsylvania sociologist Damon Centola asked red and blue partisans to play a climate forecasting game: they predicted a climate-relevant metric before and after sharing views with a bipartisan group. Participants saw a NASA chart of Arctic ice thickness over recent decades with a downsloping, but zigzagging, line; they were asked to extrapolate from this to predict the thickness during 2025. Consistent with partisan peer codes, Democrats tended to guess a big drop while Republicans forecasted little change. 

After communicating with a politically diverse group of peers (without knowing these peers’ party affiliations), participants made second-round estimates. For the most part, these updated estimates were more accurate. Meanwhile, in a different condition that highlighted the peers’ Democratic or Republican affiliations, the second-round forecasts didn’t become more accurate. The lesson is that when political affiliations are highly salient, people’s defences spring up to block their learning from the other side.

People are also receptive to signals from their own party. Psychologist Geoffrey Cohen presented Yale undergraduates with a fake newspaper article about a congressional vote on a welfare plan and asked them whether they personally favoured the plan. 

In different versions of the article, the policy was either generous or stringent in its provisions to the needy. Information about the voting was another factor that varied in the experiment: either Republicans predominantly supported the plan or Democrats predominantly supported it. 

Strikingly, students’ evaluations of the plan were affected by the party information more than by the policy information. When informed that most of the congresspeople from their party voted for the plan, they evaluated it positively, regardless of whether the welfare benefits were generous or stringent. When asked the basis for their evaluation, they denied that the prevalence signal affected them; instead, they rationalised why the policy details – a generous (or stringent) policy – fit their “philosophy of government”. We are not usually aware of how tribal signals affect us, and we are very good at inventing post hoc explanations for our behaviour.

When the pundits proposed that partisan conflicts arise from a toxic tribalism of primal hostility, they were close but not on target. The conflict involves tribal psychology and there are hostilities, to be sure. But hostility is not where the problem starts, and thinking so yields no useful solutions. By recognising the “us” instinct at the heart of the problem and the effect of peer-instinct conformity, we can understand how it escalated in the past decade and we can identify interventions related to peer-instinct triggers and signals. 

There are no instant solutions, but politicians and citizen groups employing these tactics have been making progress. For the sake of US and global politics, especially as Trump starts his second term, we must hope they continue – and that they succeed.

An edited extract from “Tribal”, by Michael Morris, published by Swift Press