Without turning this into a political discussion— I want to add that this business of asking why, and coming up short, is for me an interesting blind spot for humans who are at least paying lip service to the value of rationality. Many of us (how many? My guess is most or even virtually all of us) struggle to “make sense” of irrational behavior, whether it’s “evil,” or just anti-science, anti-expertise, etc. I think we would all do a better job of understanding each other if we could learn that the “meaning” of behavior or thinking isn’t always found in rational logic or critical thinking. I’m not even convinced rational thinking is the norm. And we all seem to think that WE are the rational ones, the reasonable ones, the ones who have critical thinking skills.
I’ve had conversations with people who said they don’t understand how anyone could vote for (name withheld), and I explained what I thought were the reasons, and in one case the guy I was explaining it to was a therapist. I found myself thinking, man, you’re TRAINED in this subject.
I think his need to have me walk him through it suggests that even a qualified man of science (and a lovely guy, this friend of mine) expects rational behavior and is confused when he doesn’t find it. Maybe it’s related to our need to find patterns that explain things; when we can’t find the pattern, we’re thrown off.
But if there’s going to be understanding, we need to stop being confused when behavior isn’t rational.
Thanks, Karl! You make some really interesting points here. I fear I have not finished thinking them through. Certainly you’re right that human behaviour is generally a long way from Vulcan-style rationality. We are really much better adapted for survival than reason, so I suppose that’s only to be expected, but as you say I guess we do tend to maintain the illusion than we ourselves are rational creatures, it’s just everyone else who is nuts. That’s probably helpful for survival too in some way.
When it comes to understanding voting behaviour, I have the sense that what we mean when we ask ‘why’ may be different from what we mean when we ask ’why’ someone committed an extreme act like grave-robbery. I’m not sure - as I say, I haven’t fully thought this through yet - but there may be some value us distinguishing reasons from causes. When it comes to voting, we ask from the former; when it comes to robbing graves, we ask for the latter. Exactly why that should be, I am still puzzling out.
You are doubtless absolutely right about our trying to seek out patterns. Patterns are really important for survival in a hostile environment such as the one we evolved to deal with - edible fungi are usually found near that kind of tree; enemies often lurk behind those rocks over there. We are perhaps less civilised than we tend to think.
Hey, I feel good if you’re not completely dismissing my theories! I like your distinction about reasons vs. causes being a significant difference between the voting trend and serial killer situations. That could be right, and I look forward to hearing what you come up with after you think about it some more.
My guess is that causes are always part of it, whether it’s grave robbing or voting for a person whose policies or utterances may be seen as cruel, vindictive, etc. My impression from my non-scientific research is that people studying these phenomena see them flowing from psychology that flows from root causes, and that generalization covers the study of serial killers as well as the study of conspiracy belief and tribalism. But the non-scientific person is inclined to interpret “bad behavior” as flowing from “evil,” or an innate propensity for immoral thinking and action.
And I’m positing that while a serial killer being interviewed may not offer any reasons for their behavior, the voter typically does— and this makes the two situations different, but maybe not wholly different. Because people on right and left will both claim that they arrived at a conclusion through analysis and sifting of facts, but they believe the other side only operates from emotion and ignorance. Thus, the reasons a person gives for their voting habits are often (likely?) not the real causes.
All of that is just a wordier way to say that we demonize other people, and tar them with the badge of otherness, and tribalism/polarization at its most extreme leads to people judging voters in a similar way to the way we judge psychopathic killers. It’s not exactly the same, but there’s a similar habit of judging our political enemies to be less moral and less human. And I think that in my country we are doing this in a way that has gone pretty far from where it was when I was young.
As a man of science, you would be wise to assume that much of my data is anecdotal, even though I have read and followed people who study these things in a scientific way. But— I offer a few examples.
When Rush Limbaugh died, I posted on Facebook that I didn’t like Limbaugh, and felt that he had made the world worse, and so forth, but dancing on his grave, as many were doing, was degrading and unhealthy regardless of Limbaugh’s acts. And someone commented that he hoped Limbaugh died slowly with as much pain as possible. Another time, I waded into a Facebook thread where people were calling for public torture of a Republican whose name now escapes me, and the poster was talking about how the politician ought to have people scraping his testicles with a cheese grater.
All of this reminded me of the clips I saw on TV as a kid where people carried signs outside the prison where Ted Bundy was to be executed, reading “Fry, Ted, Fry,” and similar slogans.
I'm certainly not dismissing any theories! The whole matter of voting behaviour and tribalism, in particular is a really interesting one, and especially relevant in today's fractured world. Like a lot of people, I can't quite understand how we got here. Is Karl Rove to blame, with his notorious strategy for winning 51% of the vote? Surely other people were involved and perhaps social media too.
Whatever caused it, tribalism and 'othering' has never been so acute as it seems to be now. We seem to have forgotten the basic idea that we can have civil disagreements without believing our opponents to be actually evil. Indeed, that was a big part of the whole Enlightenment project, which also seems to be going, tragically, by the wayside.
Social Psychology tells us that the moment we split people into groups (especially visible groups, especially when there are limited resources to be won) ethnocenticism raises its ugly head. I use a cliche there because 'ugly' is a word I wanted to get to: we tend to think of the members of the outgroup as inferior in every way, and that includes their aesthetics. People on my side of the fence are good and angelic even down to their faces; people on the other side look and act like demons. As the social world becomes more and more split, I see no solution to this.
I quite agree that the way some politically-extreme voters conceive of those on the other side is not very much different from how law-abiding citizens tend to see serial killers. I don't know whether you saw a post on Substack just yesterday (I forget who posted it, of course) about what certain people would like to do to Rush Limbaugh. It wasn't much less sickening than what some serial killers have done to their victims. Also, it's routine for some people to refer to their political opponents as 'not human'. That's what soldiers are taught in a war: your opponent is 'not human', you are not killing a *person*, you are eliminating a dangerous pest...
If it helps, it's not just your country, Karl. This is happening all around Europe, too. Sometimes I am tempted to go buy a cabin in the woods and go sit it all out...
Yes, while I suspect that the American version of all this is unusual, I do hear rumblings that ethnocentrism and anti-immigrant feeling are fueling polarization around the world. It’s dispiriting. I think it’s very much possible to have serious opinions about immigration policy without degrading yourself, but polarization is accompanied by an increasingly comfort level with reducing this complex topic to a cartoonlike fascism-adjacent view. And liberals don’t help by pretending that ALL objections to the liberal side are racist.
Excellent!
Without turning this into a political discussion— I want to add that this business of asking why, and coming up short, is for me an interesting blind spot for humans who are at least paying lip service to the value of rationality. Many of us (how many? My guess is most or even virtually all of us) struggle to “make sense” of irrational behavior, whether it’s “evil,” or just anti-science, anti-expertise, etc. I think we would all do a better job of understanding each other if we could learn that the “meaning” of behavior or thinking isn’t always found in rational logic or critical thinking. I’m not even convinced rational thinking is the norm. And we all seem to think that WE are the rational ones, the reasonable ones, the ones who have critical thinking skills.
I’ve had conversations with people who said they don’t understand how anyone could vote for (name withheld), and I explained what I thought were the reasons, and in one case the guy I was explaining it to was a therapist. I found myself thinking, man, you’re TRAINED in this subject.
I think his need to have me walk him through it suggests that even a qualified man of science (and a lovely guy, this friend of mine) expects rational behavior and is confused when he doesn’t find it. Maybe it’s related to our need to find patterns that explain things; when we can’t find the pattern, we’re thrown off.
But if there’s going to be understanding, we need to stop being confused when behavior isn’t rational.
Thanks, Karl! You make some really interesting points here. I fear I have not finished thinking them through. Certainly you’re right that human behaviour is generally a long way from Vulcan-style rationality. We are really much better adapted for survival than reason, so I suppose that’s only to be expected, but as you say I guess we do tend to maintain the illusion than we ourselves are rational creatures, it’s just everyone else who is nuts. That’s probably helpful for survival too in some way.
When it comes to understanding voting behaviour, I have the sense that what we mean when we ask ‘why’ may be different from what we mean when we ask ’why’ someone committed an extreme act like grave-robbery. I’m not sure - as I say, I haven’t fully thought this through yet - but there may be some value us distinguishing reasons from causes. When it comes to voting, we ask from the former; when it comes to robbing graves, we ask for the latter. Exactly why that should be, I am still puzzling out.
You are doubtless absolutely right about our trying to seek out patterns. Patterns are really important for survival in a hostile environment such as the one we evolved to deal with - edible fungi are usually found near that kind of tree; enemies often lurk behind those rocks over there. We are perhaps less civilised than we tend to think.
Hey, I feel good if you’re not completely dismissing my theories! I like your distinction about reasons vs. causes being a significant difference between the voting trend and serial killer situations. That could be right, and I look forward to hearing what you come up with after you think about it some more.
My guess is that causes are always part of it, whether it’s grave robbing or voting for a person whose policies or utterances may be seen as cruel, vindictive, etc. My impression from my non-scientific research is that people studying these phenomena see them flowing from psychology that flows from root causes, and that generalization covers the study of serial killers as well as the study of conspiracy belief and tribalism. But the non-scientific person is inclined to interpret “bad behavior” as flowing from “evil,” or an innate propensity for immoral thinking and action.
And I’m positing that while a serial killer being interviewed may not offer any reasons for their behavior, the voter typically does— and this makes the two situations different, but maybe not wholly different. Because people on right and left will both claim that they arrived at a conclusion through analysis and sifting of facts, but they believe the other side only operates from emotion and ignorance. Thus, the reasons a person gives for their voting habits are often (likely?) not the real causes.
All of that is just a wordier way to say that we demonize other people, and tar them with the badge of otherness, and tribalism/polarization at its most extreme leads to people judging voters in a similar way to the way we judge psychopathic killers. It’s not exactly the same, but there’s a similar habit of judging our political enemies to be less moral and less human. And I think that in my country we are doing this in a way that has gone pretty far from where it was when I was young.
As a man of science, you would be wise to assume that much of my data is anecdotal, even though I have read and followed people who study these things in a scientific way. But— I offer a few examples.
When Rush Limbaugh died, I posted on Facebook that I didn’t like Limbaugh, and felt that he had made the world worse, and so forth, but dancing on his grave, as many were doing, was degrading and unhealthy regardless of Limbaugh’s acts. And someone commented that he hoped Limbaugh died slowly with as much pain as possible. Another time, I waded into a Facebook thread where people were calling for public torture of a Republican whose name now escapes me, and the poster was talking about how the politician ought to have people scraping his testicles with a cheese grater.
All of this reminded me of the clips I saw on TV as a kid where people carried signs outside the prison where Ted Bundy was to be executed, reading “Fry, Ted, Fry,” and similar slogans.
I'm certainly not dismissing any theories! The whole matter of voting behaviour and tribalism, in particular is a really interesting one, and especially relevant in today's fractured world. Like a lot of people, I can't quite understand how we got here. Is Karl Rove to blame, with his notorious strategy for winning 51% of the vote? Surely other people were involved and perhaps social media too.
Whatever caused it, tribalism and 'othering' has never been so acute as it seems to be now. We seem to have forgotten the basic idea that we can have civil disagreements without believing our opponents to be actually evil. Indeed, that was a big part of the whole Enlightenment project, which also seems to be going, tragically, by the wayside.
Social Psychology tells us that the moment we split people into groups (especially visible groups, especially when there are limited resources to be won) ethnocenticism raises its ugly head. I use a cliche there because 'ugly' is a word I wanted to get to: we tend to think of the members of the outgroup as inferior in every way, and that includes their aesthetics. People on my side of the fence are good and angelic even down to their faces; people on the other side look and act like demons. As the social world becomes more and more split, I see no solution to this.
I quite agree that the way some politically-extreme voters conceive of those on the other side is not very much different from how law-abiding citizens tend to see serial killers. I don't know whether you saw a post on Substack just yesterday (I forget who posted it, of course) about what certain people would like to do to Rush Limbaugh. It wasn't much less sickening than what some serial killers have done to their victims. Also, it's routine for some people to refer to their political opponents as 'not human'. That's what soldiers are taught in a war: your opponent is 'not human', you are not killing a *person*, you are eliminating a dangerous pest...
If it helps, it's not just your country, Karl. This is happening all around Europe, too. Sometimes I am tempted to go buy a cabin in the woods and go sit it all out...
Yes, while I suspect that the American version of all this is unusual, I do hear rumblings that ethnocentrism and anti-immigrant feeling are fueling polarization around the world. It’s dispiriting. I think it’s very much possible to have serious opinions about immigration policy without degrading yourself, but polarization is accompanied by an increasingly comfort level with reducing this complex topic to a cartoonlike fascism-adjacent view. And liberals don’t help by pretending that ALL objections to the liberal side are racist.
Why?