Why is Everyone So Polarized?

Have you noticed how divided people are on so many current issues? It's gotten so bad that parents say they would be upset if a son or daughter were to marry someone from a different political party.

Dozens of recent books have explored likely causes of these divisions. They rightly cite factors like opinions expressed on social media, biased search algorithms, and heated political rhetoric. Some people see themselves as bombarded by extreme opinions, but that might not be the only cause. What if people create their own polarization through how they think?  

A Little Thought Can Be as Dangerous as a Little Knowledge

Psychologists have known about the polarizing power of thought since the 1970s. Abraham Tesser and his colleagues told college students about fictitious strangers who had either likable or unlikable personality traits. Then they asked some students to sit quietly and merely think for a few minutes about the strangers. The students did not list their thoughts, but after thinking for a few minutes, they liked the strangers more if the original traits were positive and less if the original traits were negative. Like lone wolf attackers who sit in a basement thinking themselves into a lethal frenzy, their own internal thought processes polarized their opinions.

 What were Tesser's students thinking about that led them to adopt more polarized opinions? They might have been thinking about additional, unmentioned personality traits the strangers were likely to have. Told the strangers were finicky, for instance, the students might have inferred they were also rude and selfish. But did the students need to be told about any personality traits to think that way? Could that type of thinking have come from knowing only something the strangers did?   

Personality Traits Are in the Eye of the Beholder

People readily infer personality traits just from knowing a stranger's actions. If all you know is that a stranger praised Vladimir Putin, for instance, you might assume the speaker has several undesirable personality traits. Our research was motivated by a belief that when asked to think about it, people would attribute very desirable personality traits to people who agreed with them on a controversial issue and attribute very undesirable personality traits to those who disagreed with them. More importantly, we thought that doing so would make them trust people on their own side more and trust people on the other side less than if they had not thought about each side's personality traits.

That's what we found, for people of all ages and education levels. They attributed extremely virtuous traits to folks on their side of two issues—abortion and kneeling during the national anthem—and attributed extremely nasty traits to folks on the other side. After thinking these thoughts, regardless of which side they were on, our respondents were even more willing to socialize with, do business with, and have their children taught by people on their own than the other side. Not only that but simply attributing traits to strangers on both sides of an issue made opinions more extreme on the issue itself. "Good people must be right and bad people must be wrong."    

Healing the Divide

We hope our research motivates people to pay more attention to how their own thoughts can lead them to have more polarized opinions. Edward Jones and his colleagues, who first showed in the 1960s that people readily infer personality traits from actions, tried every which way to stop them from doing so, without much success. We suspect the best antidote for self-polarization might lie in making people aware of the dangers inherent in moving from knowing another person's stance to biased trait attributions and then to more strongly held opinions on controversial issues. Polarization isn't only the fault of the media, but is also something that results from our own tendency to draw unwarranted inferences about other people's personality traits.

For Further Reading

Decker, K. A., & Lord, C. G. (2023). Self-Polarization: Lionizing those who agree and demonizing those who disagree. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 45(5), 125-137. https://doi.org/10.1080/01973533.2023.2234534

Iyengar, S., Lelkes, Y., Levendusky, M., Malhotra, N., & Westwood, S. J. (2019). The origins and consequences of affective polarization in the United States. Annual Review of Political Science, 22(1), 129–146. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-051117-073034

Pew Research Center. (2021). Beyond red vs. blue: The political Typology. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology-2/

Kaleigh A. Decker completed her PhD at Texas Christian University in 2022 and is now a Market Research Strategist. Her dissertation examined psychological mechanisms by which extrapolating from known to unknown "facts" can polarize attitudes.

Charles G. Lord is a social psychologist who studies how people's thought processes can lead them astray.  He has been a professor at Texas Christian University since 1987.