Wrong

Wrong
How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for
Misinformation

Dannagal Goldthwaite Young

Johns Hopkins University Press

BALTIMORE
© 2023 Dannagal Goldthwaite Young
All rights reserved. Published 2023
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
987654321

Johns Hopkins University Press

2715 North Charles Street
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Young, Dannagal G., author.

Title: Wrong : how media, politics, and identity drive our appetite for misinformation / Dannagal
Goldthwaite Young.
Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and
index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023003636 | ISBN 9781421447759 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781421447766 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Group identity—United States. | Belonging (Social psychology)—United States. |
Truthfulness and falsehood. | Error.
Classification: LCC HM753 .Y67 2023 | DDC 305—dc23/eng/20230203
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023003636

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 Contents

Prologue

PART I. The People

Chapter 1. People Like Us Believe These Things
Chapter 2. How Do We Know What We Know?
Chapter 3. How Did We Get So Far Apart?
Chapter 4. What Does My Team Think?
Chapter 5. What Guides My Team, Intuition or Evidence?

PART II. The Process

Chapter 6. Exemplify Us: Identity Reinforcement through Political News
Chapter 7. Separate Us: Identity Distillation through Partisan Media
Chapter 8. Curate Us: Identity Distillation through Social Media
Chapter 9. Disrupt Us: Solutions to Identity-Driven Wrongness

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Wrong
 Prologue

IN MAY 2020, two months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I wrote a personal
essay that was published on Vox. The piece, titled “I Was a Conspiracy Theorist,
Too,” details how I had fallen down a rabbit hole of conspiratorial thinking when
my late husband, Mike, was hospitalized with a brain tumor in 2006.* In it, I
describe how the confusion and fear I felt from Mike’s diagnosis left me
grappling for comprehension and control. I simply could not fathom how our
baby boy and I could live without him.
Over the course of seven months in 2005 and 2006, Mike had 13 brain
surgeries and lost his vision, his short-term memory, and control over his bodily
functions. That time has become one of the defining periods of my life. It has
also become an interpretive frame through which I think about human behavior.
As a social scientist, I think about human behavior a lot.
Although I fell into a thousand pieces from the moment of Mike’s diagnosis,
Mike did not. He reminded me regularly that “events of life don’t define us. It’s
how we respond to those events that defines us.” While I demanded an off-ramp
to return to our old life, Mike took each day as it came. I often reference Mike
Young’s uniquely high tolerance for ambiguity. As an artist and improviser, he
used the concept of “yes, and” to inform his approach to the events of his life.
He accepted the offer (event), built on it, and found a way to move the “scene”
forward. In the early days of his diagnosis, his high tolerance for ambiguity was
especially valuable. It allowed him to be at least somewhat at peace in the
moment and open to the fact that we wouldn’t (couldn’t) know his fate until we
encountered it.
Meanwhile, I was spending my days spinning out every scenario, and all of
them were horrifying. The lack of control and constant uncertainty were too
much to bear. I wanted a direction to move in, and I had none.
His first surgery, in November 2005, offered me some sense of control. The
tumor was the enemy, and Mike’s doctors were taking it out. But within weeks it
grew back. This meant another holding pattern and more surgeries before we
could begin radiation treatment. I was directionless once again. After several
weeks adrift and out of control, I discovered the comfort of anger and assigning
blame. I began to consider who or what might have caused the tumor in the first
place. Perhaps it was something at his office? A local industry site? (The answer
was likely a genetic abnormality.) Then I started to question why the tumor grew
back. Was it suboptimal care? Something the doctors did wrong? (The answer is
that that’s just what craniopharyngiomas do.) I spent hours online, looking at
websites that offered alternative explanations for the origins of brain tumors. I
searched publicly available environmental documents to learn the locations of
local Superfund sites. I looked for patterns: Did our neighbors suffer similar or
related illnesses? What about his coworkers?
I did my own “research,” all with the goal of finding someone to blame. It
gave me a renewed sense of energy and optimism. Instead of being adrift and out
of control, I had agency and direction. Fueled by anger at forces working against
me, I became unyielding and defiant. This anger gave me energy and direction,
but as the weeks passed, I began to feel a mismatch between my increasingly
paranoid online searches and Mike’s spirit of openness and acceptance. He
would have hated my going down these rabbit holes. “For what? How is that
going to help?” he would have said.
I say “would have said” because by the time I had become “conspiracy
curious,” Mike was not able to engage in these conversations with me. But
because I was his best friend and partner for six years, Mike’s identity—who he
was and how he approached life—very much informed my own. We also had a
circle of friends—artists, musicians, academics, and comics—people whose days
were spent exploring, playing, and creating. For our friends, Mike’s illness was
not about identifying who to be angry with or how to get revenge. It was about
spending time with their friend Mike—being playful with him, loving him, and
keeping him comfortable.
Being a part of that community, tapping into their social norms of practicing
gratitude, openness, and playfulness, helped to stop my dysfunctional spiral.
Mike offered the perfect prototype to model how to play that role. Even when he
didn’t know where he was or what day it was or even that he was sick, he
pleasantly greeted friends and loved ones as they came in the door. He joked
with us and laughed as we laughed. He bobbed his head to the music playing on
the stereo and remarked at how delicious the food was. All Mike had was the
present moment, and for him that was enough.
Witnessing the spirit and approach of Mike and our community of friends, I
began to see anger and conspiracy theories as a violation of our group norms.
And as fast as I had fallen down the rabbit hole, I pulled myself out of it. I
stopped thinking about where the tumor came from or who was to blame.
Instead, to satisfy my need for comprehension, I began thinking about what I
might be learning through the process of Mike’s illness. The experience was
teaching me about qualities I never knew I had: patience, unconditional love, and
a willingness to put someone else’s needs before my own. To satisfy my need
for control, my friends and I organized a calendar where people could sign up
for meal shifts at the hospital so that I could be home with the baby for dinner.
People signed up to visit in the evening to read books to Mike, and I took
comfort in knowing that he was rarely alone. And to satisfy my need for
community, I embraced the gratitude, openness, and playfulness of our friends
and loved ones and allowed them to guide me. At night, I would fall asleep
picturing Mike, me, and our baby boy being carried by a sea of our friends and
family.

In the spring of 2020, as the world wrestled with the uncertainty, chaos, and
isolation of COVID-19, I witnessed in friends and loved ones the very same
inclinations that I had succumbed to in 2006. My social media feed became
home to conspiracy theories and false narratives, with people sharing their
doubts about the origins of the coronavirus, the severity of COVID, and the
efficacy of face masks. In early May 2020, several friends shared a
misinformation-filled documentary that falsely claims that the director of the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was
concealing information about COVID. The film presented conspiracy theories,
including the claim that wearing face masks “activates” COVID and makes
people sick, and that vaccines have killed millions of people. Importantly, the
friends and acquaintances who were sharing these posts were not unintelligent
people. They were not foolish people. These were people feeling confused and
scared, looking for comprehension and control. And they were sharing these
false narratives with members of their community to say “Hey, have you seen
this? Do we believe this? Is this possible?,” as if to say, “How do people like us
process something as confusing and difficult as this?”
Recognizing the parallels between my psychological needs during the chaos
of Mike’s illness and the psychological needs of many loved ones during
COVID, I decided to share my story and discuss it in terms of the psychology of
misinformation. My thought was that through vulnerability and humility, I might
be able to encourage people to reconsider their decision to embrace COVID-
related conspiracy theories—or, perhaps, help people understand why their loved
ones were entertaining these ideas. Understanding the underlying mechanisms of
these inclinations, I believed, might help people connect in ways that facilitated
trust and discussion. So I wrote the online piece “I Was a Conspiracy Theorist,
Too.” The emails I received in response to my published essay told me that I was
right. I heard from folks who developed empathy for their conspiracy-curious
loved ones. I heard from people who suddenly recognized their own impulse to
believe COVID misinformation because it had helped them feel less frightened.
It may seem odd that a social scientist is willing to share such a personal
story, especially one that reveals that I embraced conspiracy theory beliefs. As a
scholar, I’m supposed to be rational. I’m supposed to make observations based
on data and logic. Educated people do not entertain unfounded claims, right?
Wrong. We all have inclinations from time to time to believe information that is
untrue. Not always for long. Not in all domains. Not always in ways that have
harmful effects on us or others. But we are all motivated to comprehend our
world, feel in control, and be part of a community. Sometimes these motivations
lead us to believe things that are demonstrably false.
This book is an exploration of how the ways that we satisfy those needs—our
need for comprehension, control, and community—are shaped by our social
identities: how we think of ourselves in relation to others, and how we believe
members of our group think and act. Just as I looked to Mike and our close
friends to inform my approach to the chaos and trauma of his illness, so do we
all look to our social groups to help guide us. One of the defining questions of
human behavior is, How do people like me deal with situations like this? Which
means that our conceptualization of “people like me” becomes very important.
The conundrum here (and why this gets complicated) is that “people like me”
does not comprise just my best friends or family. “People like me” is a social
construction that is intentionally—and incidentally—shaped by synergistic
forces related to politics, journalism, media technologies, and media economics.
And what about our understanding of how these socially constructed groups
think and act? This, too, is shaped both intentionally and incidentally by those
same political, cultural, and media-related forces.
The goal of this book is to help us think broadly about the interdependence of
these complex features of our political, media, and social worlds. Sometimes the
social identities we consult to understand how “people like me deal with
situations like this” encourage us to seek out, embrace, and even share
information that is demonstrably false. Our social identities are both constructed
by and anticipated by political and media entities. If we can find ways to disrupt
these dynamics, we might reduce our own attraction to—even demand for—
misinformation.
 Outline of the Book
This book chronicles how belief in misinformation doesn’t start with false
content or specific conspiracy theories themselves. Humans are not clean slates.
We already hold values, theories, and beliefs that help us comprehend the world,
have control over it, and form a sense of community—all tied to our team.
Humans are also agentic: we are goal directed as we observe the world. We
engage with information. We seek out information. We use information. We
even create information. And when we do, we do so to comprehend, to control,
and to find and create community—in service of our team. This means that when
our team identity is salient in our minds, it guides this entire process, from the
values we hold to the observations we make.
In the US context, social identities tied to our politics are notably salient and
thus especially powerful. Many Americans’ political identities don’t necessarily
capture a specific slate of policy positions as much as they capture an entire way
of life. Republicans and Democrats have become increasingly distinct from one
another in their members’ racial, ethnic, geographic, and cultural characteristics.1
This is especially true on the political right, where Republican Party
identification has come to overlap with more homogeneous primal identity
categories including race (white), religion (Christian), geography (rural), and
culture (traditional and conservative). The sorting of these distinct American
political identities along primal sociodemographic and cultural lines means that
our “political mega-identities” become an efficient sense-making shortcut in
American politics and American culture.2 And the fact that this social sorting has
led to a more racially, religiously, culturally, and geographically homogeneous
Republican party means that the consequences of social sorting are asymmetrical
—more pronounced on America’s political right than on the left.3
These political mega-identities shape how we comprehend the world, what
we want to control, and how we enact our need for community. Meanwhile,
powerful entities have realized the influence of American political mega-
identities and use them to their advantage every day. Political elites tap into and
reinforce them to mobilize voters. Mainstream news outlets emphasize culture
war issues and frame stories in terms of the Right versus the Left, reinforcing
our membership in our political team. Partisan media tap into and reinforce our
political mega-identities to attract audiences. And social media platforms reward
content that taps into and reinforces these identities because it engages users,
elicits user data, and activates consumers. This results in what I call the identity
distillation apparatus, consisting of political elites, news organizations, partisan
media, and social media—all of which tap into and offer up content that
reinforces our political mega-identities. As our distilled political mega-identities
come to dominate how we think and what we see, identity-reinforcing
information that is empirically inaccurate can satisfy our needs for
comprehension, control, and community quite well.
Rather than focusing on misinformation (the supply of inaccurate
information), I concentrate instead on “wrongness,” or, the quality on the part of
individuals to be in error, to believe things that are inaccurate. This book is thus
divided into two sections. The first half (chapters 1–5) explores the social
psychology and political roots of American wrongness. The second half
(chapters 6–9) tackles the mediatization of wrongness. We first explore how we
make sense of the world and the roles that false beliefs can play for us in service
of our needs for comprehension, control, and community (chapter 2). Next, we
move to the American political context to explore political polarization and
research from political science showing how the two major parties have become
“socially sorted,” resulting in a wide partisan gap in racial, religious, and cultural
identities and a Republican Party that is made up of people who are more
sociodemographically the same (chapter 3). We’ll then unpack how social
identity shapes our perceptions of the world and tie this back to the social sorting
of America’s political parties (chapter 4).4 I will then draw on my own research
as I illustrate how the two parties have become epistemically sorted; that is, even
the very way we come to know what we know is tied to our political identities,
with the gut-guided “intuitionists” and the evidence-based “rationalists” on
opposite sides of a wide gulf (chapter 5).5
The second half of the book considers how the interactions between political
elites, journalists, partisan media, and social media platforms tap into and
reinforce our political mega-identities. Chapter 6 explores how news economics
and journalistic norms reinforce political mega-identities and reward dramatic
displays of “identity ownership” by lawmakers.6 Chapter 7 investigates partisan
media and how outlets like Fox News seek to engage viewers efficiently and
emotionally through the activation of identity threat. Chapter 8 considers how
social media outlets incentivize content to get us to do things on their platforms
to help advertisers target us and sell to us. The content best suited to get us to do
things online is content that is emotionally evocative. Such content often taps
into our salient political mega-identities. While these mediated political spaces
are giving us what they think we want, they are also actively constructing and
distilling who we think we are. Finally, in chapter 9, I detail some of the ways
we might work toward dismantling the machinery of wrongness.
 While the book discourages us from thinking simplistically about the direct
effects of misinformation on individuals, it does offer a mechanism through
which our political and media environments encourage and reward the
“performance of politics and identity” in ways that perpetuate this harmful
cycle.7 This process of identity distillation (yes, an analogy drawing from
whiskey production) is cyclical, as media and political forces draw on, and then
contribute to, those constructed social identities. And since our political and
media institutions themselves anticipate and respond to the political, social, and
cultural climate, America’s distilled political identities become embedded in the
communication, content, and rhetoric of American political media.
So, while others tackle the supply side of misinformation, let us travel
upstream on the demand side, to identify factors that encourage people to be
attracted to misinformation, to demand misinformation. People are always going
to be wrong. But we don’t need to reinforce identity-driven social categories
through our media economics or incentivize wrongness through political and
media institutions. And at the individual level, we don’t need to privilege
confidence over humility or prioritize fabricated group memberships over
authentic connections. Finally, part of the disruption of wrongness can come
from simply embracing the possibility that we might not be right.
Maybe this book will help us figure out how.
Of course, I could be wrong.

* Young, D. G. (2020, May 15). I was a conspiracy theorist, too. Vox, https://www.vox.com/first-
person/2020/5/15/21258855/coronavirus-covid-19-conspiracy-theories-cancer.
 Part I
The People
 Chapter 1

People Like Us Believe These Things

ON THE EVENING OF JANUARY 6, 2021, relaxing at her Washington, DC,
hotel in the aftermath of the insurrection at the US Capitol building, rioter Jenny
Cudd from Midland, Texas, recorded a video reflecting on her feelings about the
day: “Fuck yes, I am proud of my actions. I fucking charged the Capitol today
with patriots today. Hell yes, I am proud of my actions.”1
Jenny Cudd was one of thousands of supporters of President Donald J. Trump
who traveled to Washington, DC, on January 6 to protest the certification of a
presidential election they wrongly believed had been stolen from Trump. They
listened as President Trump reinforced the “Big Lie,” asserting that their
“election victory [was] stolen by emboldened radical left Democrats.”2 The
group of rioters then marched down Pennsylvania Avenue and confronted police
officers at the Capitol building, pushed through police barriers, broke windows,
and beat police officers with hockey sticks and American flags. After gaining
access to the building, they wandered the halls chanting “Execute the traitors”
and “Hang Mike Pence.” They were intent on disrupting the routine
congressional electoral vote certification and stopping Joseph R. Biden from
becoming the next president. The insurrectionists’ actions that day resulted in
several deaths, including those of officer Brian Sicknick and rioter Ashli Babbitt,
all because these thousands of people believed in an identity-reinforcing fiction.
The fiction of the “Big Lie” did what all identity-based fictions do: it allowed the
rioters to comprehend the incomprehensible (how their team could have lost the
election), control the uncontrollable (offering a path forward where their team
ends up in the White House), and have a sense of community (connection and
belonging to a social group of individuals like them). These mechanisms all
centered on the rioters’ sense of who they were and what team they were a part
of.
The January insurrection played out against the backdrop of another
misinformation-fueled tragedy: the COVID-19 pandemic. Like the insurrection,
the pandemic illustrated the lethal consequences of inaccurate beliefs, but on a
far grander scale. With over a million Americans dead in a little more than two
years, the virus’s impact was overwhelming. So, too, was the political divide in
Americans’ beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors related to the deadly virus.
Scholars define misinformation as information that is inconsistent with “clear
evidence and expert opinion,”3 or information that contradicts “expert consensus
contemporaneous with the time period [under] study.”4 Based on these
definitions, in the early days of the pandemic in the United States, President
Trump was a purveyor of COVID-related misinformation. While scientists
emphasized the high mortality rate from COVID and how little they knew about
prevention, treatment, or the origins of the virus, President Trump compared it to
the common flu, and touted unfounded remedies, even suggesting that doctors
look into the injection of disinfectants as a possible way to clean the body of the
virus.5 As early as April 2020, a partisan divide in Americans’ beliefs about
COVID had emerged. Belief in COVID-related misinformation (regarding its
severity and its origins) was higher among Republicans than Democrats.6
Researchers found that the more people believed COVID-related
misinformation, the less likely they were to wear masks or practice social
distancing.7 That summer, data pointed to a partisan gap in Americans’ beliefs
about the efficacy of masks, with Republicans less likely to see masks as an
effective way to slow the spread of COVID.8 Republicans were also less likely
than Democrats to engage in preventive behaviors like masking, social
distancing, and limiting travel. A YouGov poll from October 2020 indicated that
Biden supporters were twice as likely as Trump supporters to wear a mask
outside of their home.9
At the beginning of the pandemic, the United States saw Democratic-leaning
locations, which tended to be cities high in population density and mobility,
bearing the brunt of the virus’s negative impact.10 But by the fall of 2020, when
medical experts recommended masks and social distancing to slow the spread of
the virus, the partisan divide in COVID’s impact had reversed. By then, death
rates in Republican-leaning counties were significantly higher than in
Democratic ones. As COVID cases surged in November 2020, the hot spots with
the highest COVID numbers were overwhelmingly counties that voted for
Donald Trump.11
As vaccines rolled out across the country in the spring and summer of 2021,
counties where Trump won during the 2020 election lagged in vaccine uptake
compared with those counties where Biden had won. Throughout 2021, this gap
in COVID deaths grew wider. The emergence of highly contagious COVID
variants like Delta put the efficacy of COVID vaccines to the test. The good
news was that the vaccines were exceptionally effective at preventing serious
illness and death from the virus. The bad news was that Republicans were
disproportionately more likely to remain unvaccinated. In the fall of 2021, about
10 months after the rollout of the vaccine, the Kaiser Family Foundation
reported that of the quarter of Americans who remained unvaccinated, only 10
percent identified as Democrats.12
Over the course of the pandemic, we heard countless stories of people who
believed things about COVID, masks, and vaccines that were inconsistent with
evidence and expert consensus. These include the 56-year-old truck driver from
Missouri who told the Guardian, “It’s a hoax. There’s no pandemic. As Trump
said, how many millions die of flu?” and the West Palm Beach, Florida, woman
who testified at her local commissioners meeting that it was not COVID-19 but
rather masks that gave people COVID.13 We saw footage of anti-mask rallies
where participants argued everything from masks not adequately protecting
people from the virus to COVID being a hoax.14 And we heard vaccine-related
conspiracy theories, such as Bill Gates using the vaccine to track people with
microchips and the vaccines causing people to become magnetic.15 Even a year
and a half into the pandemic, belief in misinformation about COVID was
shockingly high, with over a third of Americans reporting the belief that the US
government was exaggerating the number of COVID deaths.16
Meanwhile, long after the 2020 presidential election, a surprisingly large
number of Americans continued to believe the Big Lie. A year into President
Biden’s first term in office, about one-third of Americans reported the belief that
Biden was not the legitimate winner of the 2020 election. Among Republican
respondents, two-thirds reported the belief that Biden’s win was illegitimate.17
When we talk about the people who believe misinformation about COVID
and the people who believe misinformation about the 2020 election, in many
cases we are talking about the same people. Many of these misinformation
beliefs hang together, even those that would seem to have little to do with each
other—for example, vaccines containing microchips and dead people voting in
Pennsylvania. Consider the “health conference” held in Nashville, Tennessee, in
2021, which was billed as a truth-seeking social event where people would
“discuss the truth about cancer, vaccines, and many other aspects of natural
health.”18 Although described as a health conference, the gathering served as a
place where conspiracy theorists and the “conspiracy curious” could come
together to discuss everything from cancer to COVID to the 2020 election. And
while the slate of speakers for the event included natural health advocates, it also
included longtime Trump associate Roger Stone and Trump’s son Eric. As
misinformation psychologist Lisa Fazio observed, it seemed that conference
attendees were forming a “community of belief”—that is, people who think
“people like us believe these things.”19

The 3 Cs: Comprehension, Control, and Community

The overlap between belief in misinformation about COVID and belief in
misinformation about the 2020 election highlights the social nature of human
knowledge. We do not come to knowledge of the world randomly or objectively.
The things we “know” are not just “accurate neutral facts” that we arbitrarily
acquire from logic and analysis, on the one hand, or observations of the world,
on the other. Rather, the things we “know” are the result of a complex
interaction between our values, needs, and beliefs and our observations of the
world, which operate together in service of our social identity—our sense of
what team we identify with. These social identities inform what we value and
believe (inside our minds) and what we see (our observations of the world) by
shaping our needs for comprehension, control, and community (the three Cs).
Human beings are motivated to understand their world (comprehension), have
agency (control), and be socially connected with a sense of belonging
(community). What shape these motivations take depends on what shape they
take for members of our team.
While the specific form that these three Cs take varies from person to person,
among members of a shared social category we will tend to find shared
understanding, shared mechanisms of control, and shared social norms. This is
because members of the same team come up with the same answers to questions
like, How do people like me comprehend things like this? or How do people like
me control things like this? or How do people like me have community in times
like this? The result is members of a shared social identity sharing an
understanding of the world, even if it might be wrong.

From Misinformation Supply to Misinformation

Demand?
In 2021, data scientist Jevin West and biologist Carl Bergstrom warned that
“misinformation has reached crisis proportions. It poses a risk to international
peace, interferes with democratic decision making, endangers the well-being of
the planet, and threatens public health.”20 Scholars around the globe have been
working to address the misinformation problem. They’re testing the
effectiveness of content moderation (flagging or removing misinformation from
social media platforms) and designing online interventions to slow users down
and have them think twice before believing or sharing questionable content.
These scholars are also identifying promising fact-checking and belief-correcting
techniques, and they are mapping the ecology of the misinformation
environment—identifying networks of people, organizations, and social media
accounts that spread misinformation.21 All of these measures are necessary to
reduce the spread of misinformation, especially given the complexity of the
digital media landscape. But focusing only, or even primarily, on the side of
misinformation supply is not going to solve the problem of identity-driven
wrongness.
I would like this book to help turn the misinformation problem upside down,
to offer what communication scholar Zeynep Tufekci describes as “study[ing]
the people end of [misinformation],”22 or what I call the “demand” side of
wrongness. In the US today, the all-encompassing nature of political identity
overwhelms our desire to be empirically accurate in our understanding of the
world. Instead of being motivated by accuracy, we are motivated by identity-
based needs for comprehension, control, and community. I propose that we
understand wrongness as a complex set of dynamics fueled by a political and
media environment that draws on and actively constructs our social identities,
thus leaving us with more culturally resonant and distilled political identities
every single day.
Being wrong is about who we think we are, who we want to be, and who we
want to be like. It’s about how people like us comprehend the world, seek to
control it, and find community within it. Remember how Jenny Cudd reported
being proud of storming the Capitol? How she talked about her actions that day?
She said she “fucking charged the Capitol with patriots.”23 Seeing the election as
stolen allowed her to comprehend how her team could have lost. Believing that
Vice President Pence could simply overturn the election results and declare
President Trump the winner offered her and her team a sense of control. And as
prominent in her mind as the false allegations of voter fraud was how she
thought of herself as a part of a community of patriots.
This is the essence of identity-driven wrongness.
 Chapter 2

How Do We Know What We Know?

IMAGINE YOU VISIT A GROCERY STORE on a sunny spring day, and
there, in the produce section, you see a flowering houseplant with beautiful
yellow blooms. On a whim, you put the plant into your cart and bring it home
along with your groceries. When you get home, where do you put that plant?
You probably put it in the window, or some location that receives nice sunlight.
But why do you do that? You do it because you know the plant needs sunlight to
thrive.
But, how do you know that?
Perhaps you’ve had other plants that thrived in the sunlight. Or perhaps you
inadvertently killed a plant by keeping it too far from a window. But what if you
had never owned a houseplant before? Would you still know that you need to put
the plant in the window? Probably. You likely know that all plants need sunlight
to survive. You learned about photosynthesis in school, and you recall that plants
undergo a chemical process in which they use sunlight to help convert water and
carbon dioxide into food. Or maybe you simply recall that all plants need
sunlight to survive. Thus, if all plants need sunlight to survive, and what you
have purchased at the grocery store is indeed a plant—and not an animal (let’s
hope)—then you can deduce that this little houseplant needs sunlight and should
be placed in the window.
This example illustrates two very different ways of knowing. One way draws
on our observations of the outside world; the other way is based on the theories
already in our minds. For the first way, you recalled your observations of how
plants responded in the past and then generalized from those observations to
conclude that plants need sunlight. In the philosophy of science, we call this
induction. Your observations and lived experience suggested a pattern to you,
and you used that pattern to come to a general proposition: plants need sunlight.
The other process of knowing is deduction. With deduction, we start with a
broad theory—like photosynthesis—and then logically deduce a specific claim
from that theory. Photosynthesis is what keeps plants alive. Photosynthesis
requires sunlight. Therefore, plants need sunlight. This thing I bought at the store
is a plant. Hence, it needs sunlight.
These issues are at the heart of what is called epistemology, the centuries-old
pursuit of the question, How do we know the things we know? For empiricists,
who prioritize observation and experience (induction) over logic and reason
(deduction), understanding human perception is paramount. If we are going to
base our knowledge on what we observe in our world, we need to be able to trust
our observations. But we know our senses can lead us astray, such as when we
see an animal out of the corner of our eye only to realize it’s just a leaf blowing
in the wind or hear someone call our name and say “Hi!” to a stranger who
clearly wasn’t talking to us. The trouble is, if we believe that observations of the
world are the pathway to objective knowledge and we acknowledge that our
senses are fallible, then we need some standards to hold ourselves accountable
whenever we’re drawing conclusions from our observations of the world.
For a while, philosophers relied on a concept known as verification; that is,
can you confirm a claim with observations of the world? Can you verify that
plants need sunlight? If I put my houseplant in the window and it thrives, and
then I move it to a dark corner and it gets pale and stops flowering, this would be
verification of my claim that this houseplant needs sunlight. But what if I want
to conclude that all living houseplants need exposure to sunlight? Is this
accurate? What about indoor lights for plants (known as grow lights) that mimic
sunlight indoors? The existence of grow lights means that plants do not need
exposure to the sun to survive. Generalizing from our observations of the world
can lead us to incorrect conclusions. The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher
David Hume called this the problem of induction. We can’t possibly know that
what we’re observing here and now will be true in other contexts. We cannot
know if it is going to happen again tomorrow or the next day or somewhere else.
This is the problem of induction.
But if we do not allow ourselves to generalize from our observations of the
world around us, what can we even say? I suppose I could conclude that when
this plant is in this window on this day it seems green and healthy.
Congratulations. I have developed a useless theory.
If we can’t generalize to a broader theory after verifying a claim through
observations, then how will we ever decide whether a broader theory is true?
According to scientific philosopher Karl Popper, we don’t. He turns the whole
question upside down and suggests that instead of trying to prove whether
something is true, we should do our best to see if it’s not wrong. This is the
concept of falsification.1
Maybe I buy 100 of those houseplants. I randomly place half of the
houseplants in various windows around the house and place the other half in
various darker spots in my house, away from the window. I give all 100 plants
the same amount of water. After a few weeks, if the plants in the dark look about
as healthy as the plants in the windows, I reject my theory about plants needing
light. If the plants in the dark died and the ones in the windows are thriving,
then, following Popper, I can say that we have observed evidence consistent with
the theory that plants need sunlight, but I cannot say that the theory has been
proved. The falsifiability principle says we never remove ourselves from doubt.
This is one of the many reasons the life of a scientist is frustrating: we are never
totally right; we are just varying levels of “not wrong.”

Seeing What We Want to See

Now imagine that on the same day you bought that plant, your friend Judy also
bought a plant. Judy also has the idea to place the plant on a sunny windowsill in
her home. Judy has witnessed that when she has placed plants on the
windowsills next to her cats’ favorite spots, the plants have thrived. But Judy
doesn’t know about photosynthesis or the relationship between sunshine and
plant health. Instead, Judy has observed that when she has placed plants next to
her beloved cats, the plants stayed green and healthy. Judy has induced that the
cats’ breath produces a special cat-specific substance that is key to the health of
her plants. Her empirical observations have verified to her that this is true.
You urge Judy to run an experiment in the hopes it will expose her false
perception that her cats are improving the health of her plants. Judy conducts the
same experiment that you did, placing 50 plants on the windowsill and 50 in the
dark. After a few weeks, the plants on the windowsills are thriving and the ones
in the dark are dead. She concludes that the cats’ breath is the key to the health
of her plants. Judy’s cats spend most of their time sleeping in sunny spots near
the windows, and so the plants that have been placed in the sunshine also happen
to be next to her cats. To Judy, the causal factor that is helping the plants survive
is not the sun but the cats.
Obviously, Judy’s experiment has a fatal flaw. She introduced what we call a
confounding variable by tying the presence of a cat to the sunshine. But that fatal
flaw, and Judy’s conclusion from this experiment, brings me to one of my
favorite concepts from the philosophy of science: observations are theory laden.
Can we ever objectively “see” the world absent our interpretation of it?
Philosophers like Norwood Russell Hanson argue that all observations are theory
laden.2 There are no objective perceptions of the world absent our interpretations
of them. There is no “sensing” something separate from “interpreting what we
sense.” Judy observes the cats helping her plants. She knows the cats are helping
her plants. She sees it with her own eyes. It is the essence of her observation.
If observations are theory laden, shaped by our own theories and ideas about
the world, then our observations are unlikely to get us to the objective truth. The
tests we run, the measures we use, the questions we ask—Hanson argues that
these are all designed with theoretical assumptions behind them. Our underlying
values and beliefs about the world are inseparable from the things we “see.” So,
Judy “saw” that her cats’ breath helped her plants grow.
Take also the example from the early twentieth century, in which social
scientists in the United States and Britain were influenced by the study of
eugenics. Eugenics sought to “improve” the human species through selective
reproduction.3 Among British and US social scientists, eugenics provided a
useful biological defense for racist and anti-Semitic ideologies, including
Naziism. Eugenics researchers pointed to “empirical evidence” in support of the
racial superiority of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. They pointed to the fact that
immigrants and ethnic minority populations displayed characteristics that were
deemed less desirable than those displayed by whites: higher rates of poverty,
lower education, and higher rates of imprisonment. Eugenics researchers also
cited the results of intelligence tests, which purportedly showed lower rates of
intelligence among ethnic and racial minority populations.
What the eugenics researchers had not done, however, is consider the social,
cultural, economic, and political context that contributed to the observed
differences in socioeconomic status by race. They also failed to see that their
measures of “intelligence” captured a kind of knowledge that was closely tied to
socioeconomic status—for example, questions asked respondents the color of an
emerald or in which city a particular brand of car was made.4
What eugenics researchers saw as clear empirical evidence of biological, or
even genetic, differences between the races, contemporary social scientists see as
artifacts of social, cultural, and political context. Whereas the eugenics
researchers of the 1920s were operating from the assumption of white racial
superiority, most social scientists in the 2020s operate from the assumption of
systemic racial inequities—in schooling, professional opportunities, and
treatment within the criminal justice system—that contribute to poverty rates,
imprisonment, and test performance. This is what we mean when we say that all
observations are theory laden. The same data sets viewed by these two different
groups of researchers hold two opposing sets of meaning. The former views the
observations as evidence that whites are inherently superior to racial and ethnic
minorities. The latter views the observations as evidence that racial and ethnic
minorities have been systematically disadvantaged by political, economic, and
cultural institutions.
The psychological phenomenon responsible for the “theory-ladenness of our
observations” is the concept of confirmation bias, the human tendency to pay
more attention to information that confirms our preexisting theories and beliefs.5
Not only do we pay more attention to information that agrees with us, but we
also look for it. We also interpret the world around us in a manner consistent
with those beliefs and resulting expectations. As psychologist Raymond
Nickerson writes, “If one were to attempt to identify a single problematic aspect
of human reasoning that deserves attention above all others, the confirmation
bias would have to be among the candidates for consideration.”6 The related
concept of motivated reasoning captures the notion that our cognitive processes
are rarely carried out objectively with the goal of learning what is empirically
true. Rather, we have skin in the game; we are motivated to land on a particular
answer, often the one that favors us in some way.7
Popper’s principle of falsifiability is intended in part to help us push back
against the theory ladenness of observations, against confirmation bias.
Scientists design tests to try to prove a claim wrong. After they gather data and
analyze patterns, they find that their hypothesis is either confirmed in the data or
not. If it is confirmed, they don’t say their theory is right. They simply say it’s
not wrong … yet. Over time they revise and expand the theory and derive a new
testable hypothesis, and the process goes on and on. This is the day-in and day-
out of scientific inquiry: coming to an understanding of the world through a
never-ending process of elimination.
While this might make sense for scientists, for the rest of us this practice
would be ridiculous. For nonscientists, as soon as we realize that we bought a
live plant, we also realize that it obviously needs sun. And with that, we’re done.
Our process of knowing ends here. We derived a claim based on prior
knowledge, and we “know” it’s true.
 Human Meaning-Making. Our observations are theory laden.

Because, in daily life, our goal in observing the world is not to get closer to
truth.
What is our goal, then?
Is our goal to understand what’s happening around us? Or maybe not to
actually understand it but to “feel” like we understand it? (comprehension
motivations).
Maybe our goal is to feel like we have control over things that seem chaotic
or random (control motivations). Maybe our goal is to feel loved, respected, or
connected to others as we make sense of the world around us (community
motivations). Importantly, all of these goals (comprehension, control, and
community) are rational. They are all directly related to survival and to our
psychological and sociological well-being. But these goals also lead us to
conclude things or be attracted to things that are not true.

Lies We Tell Ourselves

I have been, and continue to be, wrong about a great many things.
For years living in Philadelphia, I was convinced that there were two different
mail systems: one (still operative) that used the big blue boxes bolted down on
street corners, and a second, older mail system (now defunct) that used big green
mailboxes, also bolted to street corners. I observed that the green mailboxes had
no slot for depositing a letter, and I decided that the slots had been welded shut.
This observation, combined with my prior knowledge and beliefs about the
government being slow to act, led me to conclude that the government had
simply failed to remove the old mail system after introducing the newer, blue
mailbox system.

Mailboxes and Relay Boxes (a.k.a. Danna’s old Pony Express mailboxes)
Photo by Elliott R. Plack, Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=113397578.

When my husband and our friends learned of my belief, they were beyond
amused. They explained that the green boxes were called relay boxes—storage
boxes where postal workers could leave large bags of mail that they would then
deliver throughout the neighborhood. The relay boxes relieved the mail carriers
of having to carry tons of mail around the city all day. My husband started
calling the relay boxes “Danna’s old Pony Express mailboxes.” And I’ll be
honest: to this day, when I see the green relay storage boxes, I have a fleeting
moment of “Wow, I can’t believe they still haven’t removed those old boxes.”
Also in the early 2000s, our dear friends started to have families. Within a
year, we knew five couples who had given birth to baby boys. At that point, I
deduced that since the distribution of sex is about 50/50 in the population, if my
husband and I got pregnant, we had to have a baby girl because our friends had
“taken up all the boy slots.” So, when we learned we were having a baby in 2004
and the ultrasound revealed a baby boy, I thought there was a good chance the
doctor had read it wrong. Lo and behold, in December 2004 we had a healthy
baby boy.
In high school, my friends and I loved going to the boys’ basketball games on
Friday nights. When the referee called a foul against our team, and a player from
the other team approached the foul line to take a shot, all the fans from my
school would boo and holler to try to distract the player. One night my friend
randomly—and loudly—yelled the word “raisins.” The opposing team’s player
missed the basket. He tried another shot, she yelled “raisins” again, and he
missed again. Soon we were all yelling “raisins” and the other team kept missing
the foul shots. We observed, with our own eyes, that yelling “raisins” caused
them to miss. For the entire season, my friends and I yelled “raisins” when the
other team was at the foul line. It filled us with glee, and even if the player made
the shot, we were convinced we were successfully sabotaging the opposing
team.
We—all of us—are wrong about lots of things. And although my
misperceptions about mailboxes, the sex of my baby, and the magic powers of
the word “raisins” might seem arbitrary, they’re not. They are all motivated by
my psychological needs and desires. I wanted to comprehend why these big
green mailboxes had no mail slots, so my brain came up with an answer for me. I
wanted to feel like I had some control over my pregnancy by knowing the sex of
the baby before the doctors were able to tell me, so my brain came up with an
answer for me. I wanted to feel like I was part of a community with my high
school friends and classmates, united in opposition to our out-group (the rival
team), so my brain (and my friends) came up with an answer for me.
Observations are theory laden—and my observations of the world, and the
theories that informed them, served my own needs and desires for
comprehension, control, and community.8
Comprehension motives (also called epistemic motives) capture our desire to
feel as though the world makes sense to us. These motivations encourage us to
identify cause and effect relationships and to see patterns in events, even when
those relationships and patterns aren’t there.9 This tendency is functional and
adaptive. It helps us live more efficiently and helps us survive. An inability to
recognize cause and effect relationships would be an absolute hindrance to our
survival. Imagine if we could not predict that touching fire would cause us to get
burned or that animals baring their teeth are likely poised to attack. The human
species might be extinct in just a few generations. But while these tendencies are
adaptive, they can also lead us to identify causal relationships where they don’t
exist. This is because these motivations are more about feeling as though we
comprehend things than they are about actually being accurate in what we
comprehend. It is enough for us to feel like we “get it,” without having to verify
that our understanding is correct. So when I concocted the story that the green
mailboxes didn’t have slots because they were from an outdated postal system,
that answer—even though it was wrong—was good enough for me.
While we are motivated to feel like we comprehend the world, we are also
motivated to feel like we have control over our worlds. Control motives (also
called existential motives) concern our desire to feel as though we are safe or in
control—again, not necessarily to be safe or have control. After my friends had
all given birth to baby boys, my belief that they had used up all the boy slots
offered me a sense of control over something that was clearly out of my hands.
That feeling of control was good enough for me.
Finally, we have a desire for community. By sharing beliefs with members of
our social group, we feel closer to them and feel like we are being good
members of our group. Once my friends and I were yelling “raisins” to sabotage
the other basketball team, why would I ever have challenged that misperception?
It felt good to share that with my friends. Socially motivated misperceptions like
this typically operate in service of both in-group bonding and intergroup conflict,
like believing that yelling “raisins” would sabotage our rival team. Did it
actually sabotage our rival team? No. But it felt like it did, and that was good
enough for me.

The three Cs
COMPREHENSION CONTROL COMMUNITY
We want to make sense of our We want to have some control over our We want to be a part of a social
world. world. group.

Notice that these examples are not about my belief in false information that
has been shared with me. My false beliefs about mailboxes, babies, and
basketball foul shots were not the result of “misinformation”—that is, false
information shared by people unaware that the information is false. Nor were
they the result of “disinformation”—that is, false information shared
intentionally and strategically by people trying to deceive.10 Instead, the
examples I just offered are falsehoods that I have told myself—to help me make
sense, feel in control, and feel a part of my group.
While I will spend significant time in later chapters exploring belief in mis-
and disinformation that is shared with us, it’s important to recognize just how
much of our “wrongness” can come from us. In fact, even when we believe
misinformation that has been shared with us, or disinformation designed to
deceive us, the resulting misperceptions—our beliefs in the things that aren’t
true—largely stem from us. In later chapters we will learn how our needs for
comprehension, control, and community are informed by our social identity. We
will also learn how our identity-based needs are often deliberately cultivated and
exploited by political and media elites. But by starting out with a consideration
of how much of the misinformation problem stems from us, we might later
recognize that we have the agency to disrupt these dynamics.

Comprehension
Our motivation to feel like we understand the world around us drives us to
quickly and efficiently draw conclusions based on the information available to
us. Misperceptions that come from these epistemic or sense-making motivations
are closely tied to how carefully we are thinking. My conclusion about the green
mailboxes was just a shortcut that my brain created to account for the lack of a
slot on the mailboxes. It wasn’t the result of research or investigation. These
kinds of errors in understanding come from our tendency to make judgments
quickly and efficiently, using as little mental energy as possible. This makes
sense. Thinking long and hard about everything in our world would leave us
unable to function. We would be stymied—and therefore vulnerable to threats.
Now, in the context of my hasty conclusion about the weird green mailboxes, if I
had stood at the street corner for a while, examining the mailbox, and asked
some passersby what it was, I probably wouldn’t have experienced any severe
threats. I would have been late to wherever I was going, and I likely would have
annoyed people who found me strange. But otherwise, thinking long and hard
about why this mailbox looked the way it did wouldn’t have affected much.
But now imagine it was thousands of years ago, and instead of mailing a
letter, I was out picking berries. And instead of a mailbox that didn’t look like
any mailbox I had ever seen before, it was a weird-looking large cat that didn’t
look like any cat I had ever seen before. As I stand there, examining the animal,
I look for a passerby to whom I might inquire, “Excuse me, dear sir. Do you
happen to know what this large cat is? I have examined his sharp teeth and fur
standing on end and he appears to be poised for attack. But before I do anything
rash, I want to be sure I have properly identified him.”
Speed and efficiency are essential to survival in the wild, but they also
increase our likelihood of being wrong.11 Importantly, not all human beings are
equally likely to prioritize speed and efficiency when making decisions. Some
people take their time and think long and hard before forming a judgment or
decision. This is true for people with high levels of a psychological trait called
“need for cognition,” a trait that captures how much people enjoy—or get
satisfaction from—thinking hard and solving problems.12 People who are high in
“need for cognition” are more likely to evaluate and reevaluate information
before updating their beliefs, and so are less susceptible to mis- and
disinformation.13 Another trait associated with careful thinking is cognitive
reflection.14 But before I say too much about cognitive reflection, humor me for
a moment. Consider how you might answer the following questions from Shane
Frederick’s Cognitive Reflection Test:15

• A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost? _____ cents
• If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take
100 machines to make 100 widgets? _____ minutes
• In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size.
If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it
take for the patch to cover half of the lake? _____ days

This three-question test measures whether an individual will arrive at an

intuitive, but inaccurate, conclusion or whether they will engage in the kind of
thoughtful reflection required to come to a cognitively taxing, but correct,
response. If you’re answering quickly and efficiently, chances are you’ll answer
(1) 10 cents, (2) 100 minutes, and (3) 24 days.
And you would be wrong.
But if you engage in careful analytical reasoning, you might get to the correct
answers: (1) 5 cents, (2) 5 minutes, and (3) 47 days. Or, if you’re like me and
you’re impatient and prone to efficiency over reflection, you can be fully aware
that your intuitive response is incorrect, try to come to a less intuitive correct
response, think for 15 minutes, and still answer all three items incorrectly. This
is probably bad. Researchers have found that people who score lower in
cognitive reflection are more likely to believe false information shared online.16
They also tend to follow sources on social media that are less reputable than the
sources that people with higher scores follow.17
In general, studies point to meaningful variation in the way that people
interact with and understand their worlds. While all of us are somewhat
motivated by efficiency and use cognitive shortcuts (called heuristics) for
guidance, some rely on heuristics more than others. Individuals who have a high
level of the trait “need for closure,” for example, tend to prioritize efficiency
over accuracy, especially under conditions of urgency.18 These individuals are
uncomfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity and prefer to have answers sooner
rather than later. People who are high in need for closure and low in need for
cognition tend to use their emotions to guide their beliefs and behaviors—for
example, angry: attack, happy: relax, fearful: run, aroused: approach. While
those who need closure tend to form judgments more efficiently, this approach is
also more likely to result in errors in judgment and recall.19

Control
When I was a high school freshman, I concocted all kinds of falsehoods to make
me feel like I had agency. I believed that brushing my hair would make it grow
faster and that I could tan more quickly by lying on top of my picnic table (rather
than on the ground) because I’d be closer to the sun (it was the early 1990s;
tanning was still a thing). As a teen consumed with self-image, who felt little of
her life was in her control, I felt a sense of agency from these ego-driven lies.
Needing a sense of control is central to many of the lies we tell ourselves.
While we may outgrow the distinct challenges of adolescence, the salience of
other things, such as our own mortality, can take their place. In 1973, cultural
anthropologist Ernest Becker proposed a sweeping account of contemporary
society, based on the idea that just about everything we do here—from
commerce to war to art to religion—is designed to manage our fears of, and lack
of control over, our own death.20 His book The Denial of Death inspired social
scientists to develop terror management theory (TMT).21 TMT posits that
humans are uniquely capable of thinking abstractly about the inevitability of
their own death. But, to avoid perseverating on our own death and ruminating
ourselves into oblivion, TMT suggests that we engage in various protective
strategies, including maintaining a cultural worldview, developing self-esteem
and theories of immortality (like religion), and investing in close attachments
with loved ones.22 But, as scientists Ajit Varki and Danny Brower argue, some of
the strategies we use to avoid thoughts of death involve self-deception: “It is
important to note that denial of mortality is part of a much broader concept about
our human ability to deny many other aspects of reality, especially when such
realities are not to our liking. … We go further in our denial of reality, holding
completely false beliefs about many things even in the face of the cold, hard
facts.”23
Rituals and superstitions, for example, may help us feel like we can prevent
bad things from happening, including death.24 Underestimating our likelihood of
contracting a contagious disease makes us feel safe and in control.25 These
beliefs do not make us safer. They do not increase our agency. But they do
increase our perceptions of safety and agency.
For example, religion is a faith-based belief system that is unable to be
empirically verified or falsified.26 Regardless of its ultimate truth value, it is a
framework that humans use to manage their terror about death, largely through
the proposition of a powerful deity who influences events on earth, and some
form of life after death. Research has shown that religion manages our fear of
death quite well. Religiosity mitigates the negative effects of mortality salience
(death thoughts) on well-being, especially when the religious beliefs are firmly
held.27
In rare but extreme cases, individuals’ need for control over an uncontrollable
world may contribute to false beliefs that cause them to engage in pathological
behaviors. In the case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, for example, people are
made so anxious by their lack of control, they may believe that the performance
of certain ritualistic behaviors will help them impose order on their worlds.28 In
other words, their misperception is that by performing the ritual (counting,
washing hands, etc.), bad things will not happen. These invasive—and false—
beliefs can be debilitating, as the behaviors fail to alleviate the fears and
anxieties.
It turns out that people often believe things that aren’t true because those
falsehoods can provide them a kind of hope that reality doesn’t. As my friend
and colleague Dr. Brian Southwell explains about belief in medical
misinformation, “Sometimes misinformation offers hope in the face of a
devastating disease or dire condition and that’s why it gains traction among
people.”29 It turns out, people really need hope.

Community
Community, the social dimension of wrongness, is a central tenet of this book.
Falsehoods can bring us closer to the people we want to feel closer to (our in-
group) while distancing us from people we want to feel farther from (our out-
group). We might come to hold false beliefs because we believe that “people like
me believe this,” and so the false beliefs make us feel close to our group, or
because we want to actively engage in social interactions that stem from a given
belief—as when people talk to members of their in-group about how they all
believe the earth is flat.
Depending on the nature of the falsehood, the content of that false belief
might help me and my group feel good about ourselves while justifying our
sense of moral superiority toward members of the out-group. This explains the
existence of false beliefs held to justify and maintain divisions in social status,
wealth, and power that might be disproportionately distributed across different
social groups. The false belief that different races or ethnicities are inherently
intellectually inferior, for example, is something that people use to justify
harmful racial and social hierarchies (remember eugenics?).30 The psychological
and social appeal of racially motivated falsehoods accounts in part for the
prevalence and influence of mis- and disinformation that reinforces racial
hierarchies and racial conflict.31
Such socially motivated falsehoods can also justify feelings of disgust and
dehumanization toward out-groups—like the 16 percent of Americans polled in
2021 who agreed that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the US
are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global
child sex-trafficking operation.”32 If you believe that powerful people are doing
criminal, horrible things, then being disgusted by them, seeing them as less than
human, and even engaging in violence to stop them might be seen as justified
moral responses.

Conspiracy Theories: A Special Kind of Fiction

That last example—believing that the government, media, and financial worlds
in the United States are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles
who run a global child sex-trafficking operation—is one of a host of beliefs tied
to the conspiracy theory known as QAnon. And while actual conspiracies do
exist, as they did during the Watergate cover-up or when researchers failed to
provide lifesaving care to Black study participants in the Tuskegee syphilis study
in the 1950s, conspiracy theories are allegations of conspiracy that remain
unsubstantiated. They “attempt to explain the ultimate causes of significant
social and political events and circumstances with claims of secret plots by two
or more powerful actors.”33 They also assume that powerful people operating in
the shadows are bad actors deliberately keeping the public in the dark.34
In the QAnon conspiracy theory, Q is an anonymous internet poster who is
said to have inside knowledge of criminal activity among powerful liberal
leaders—Democrats and media celebrities—involving crimes against children. Q
would post premonitions and allegations cloaked in mystery and coded
language. Over time, Q’s following grew. The QAnon conspiracy theory soon
evolved into a “big tent conspiracy theory” that included references to countless
elites, various historical figures, and world events.35 According to some QAnon
supporters, Donald Trump’s presidency was orchestrated by military leaders to
help expose child sexual abuse among Democratic elites and to break up their
criminal conspiracy ring. Some QAnon supporters also believed that, after his
electoral loss in 2020, President Trump would appear in Dallas, Texas, in
November 2021, where he would be reinstated as president and would announce
the late John F. Kennedy Jr. as his vice president.36
The “Big Lie” was built on conspiracy theories and was embraced by many
groups, far beyond just QAnon supporters. The rally in front of the White House
that preceded the storming of the Capitol building was called “Stop the Steal”—
an expression that had circulated on right-wing social media for months before
the election.37 The phrase “Stop the Steal” is efficient shorthand for the
conspiracy theory that argued Democrats had illegitimately stolen the election
from President Trump. In the weeks just after the election, a Reuters poll found
that 68 percent of Republicans (versus 16 percent of Democrats) reported the
belief that the election was rigged—specifically that state vote counters had
unfairly handed the election to Biden.38 Meanwhile, 77 percent of Trump voters,
versus 26 percent of Biden voters, reported that voting in the United States was
prone to fraud.39
This last study, conducted by social psychologists Gordon Pennycook and
David Rand in the week immediately following the 2020 election, also examined
what events or evidence might alter Trump voters’ beliefs about the election
outcome. What would change their minds? If Trump conceded, would they
change their minds? If Trump lost all his legal challenges, would they change
their minds? One would imagine that just one of these would convince
Republicans that President Biden had been legitimately elected and that the
election was free and fair. But Pennycook and Rand found that 40 percent of
Trump voters reported that neither Trump’s concession nor his loss of every
legal challenge would convince them that he really did lose the election. As
depressing as this finding is, the reality was even worse. By December 2021,
long after Trump had conceded the election to President Biden, long after Trump
had lost all his legal challenges in courts across the country, a whopping 71
percent of Republicans still reported the belief that Biden’s win was
illegitimate.40 And this belief persisted despite the fact that the reasons they had
previously cited for disbelieving Biden’s victory (false claims about votes from
dead people, votes from noncitizens, and fraudulent ballots) had all been
debunked and thrown out of courts across the country. For many Republicans,
the Big Lie had generated what scholar Emily Thorson calls a “belief echo.”
Their broader attitudes toward Trump and the legitimacy of the election results
persisted even after the specific false claims had been discredited with
evidence.41
Using the language of epistemology, what 71 percent of Republicans were
engaging in was nonfalsifiable reasoning. They were not updating their
perception of truth in the face of new evidence. Instead, they doubted the
credibility of the institutions providing that evidence, allowing them to ignore it
altogether.42 The nonfalsifiability of the Big Lie is what makes it so powerful. No
matter what evidence one might bring to bear on the lie, in the minds of the
believers, there is always a reason to throw that evidence out. By refusing to
trust the institutions and people charged with safeguarding election outcomes
(courts and local election officials), by questioning the motives of journalists
covering the election, they can dismiss contradictory evidence as “fake news.”
Conspiracy theories are unable to be falsified by design. Their inability to be
“disproved” is what makes them especially sticky. Legal scholars Adrian
Vermeule and Cass Sunstein describe conspiracy theories as “self-sealing,”
which makes them “particularly immune to challenge.”43 Put simply, any
evidence you might introduce to disprove the theory is reframed by the
conspiracy theorist as more evidence of the depth and genius of the conspiracy
plot.
When confronted with disconfirming evidence, the conspiracy theorist can
simply say, “See? They’re all in on it.”
Like the Big Lie about the 2020 election, much of the misinformation related
to COVID-19 was also rooted in conspiracy-theory narratives, typically
involving beliefs about political figures or other elites operating in the shadows
to make money, acquire power, and undermine the will of, or cause harm to, the
public. In 2020, this included the following beliefs: the pharmaceutical industry
created COVID to make more money, the US government exaggerated the risk
of COVID to hurt President Trump, and the government covered up the fact that
wearing face masks actually makes you sicker.44 As the vaccines were rolled out
in 2021, new COVID conspiracy theories emerged. These theories focused on
unsubstantiated risks of the vaccine, including the proposition that the vaccine
would implant a microchip inside your body so Bill Gates could track you
through his surveillance system.45 Other vaccine conspiracy theories peddled
false information about the harms posed by the vaccine and claims of a
deliberate cover-up of information about those harms by scientists and the
government. Among these false claims were vaccinated people “shedding the
virus” to others, as well as the vaccine causing infertility, causing many deaths,
or making people magnetic.46

Conspiracy Theories: All Three Cs

While the most well-known conspiracy theories are those spread by citizens or
political leaders, the internal logic of conspiracy theories is so attractive that we
may even come up with conspiracy theories on our own. A few days after Russia
attacked Ukraine in 2022 and the United States placed sanctions on Russia in
retaliation, I was watching the news on television when suddenly our power
went out. Having just learned about the economic sanctions that the United
States had placed on Russia and that Russia might retaliate with a cyberattack, I
confidently said, “It’s probably a Russian cyberattack.” Within a few minutes,
though, the lights came back on, power was restored, and we learned that it was
just a temporary short circuit limited to our block. Not the Russians. Soon
thereafter, I got a call from my 82-year-old mother complaining that her email
wasn’t working and that it was “probably the Russians.” The conspiracy theorist
doesn’t fall far from the tree, it seems.
Conspiratorial thinking is attractive because it satisfies all three needs and
urges that typically drive our sense-making—the trifecta of meaning-making:
comprehension, control, and community.

Comprehension through Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy theories allow us to “connect the dots” and feel like we comprehend
things that are otherwise inexplicable. Conspiracy theories are thus more likely
to be held by people who are prone to “pattern-seeking,”47 including people high
in “need for closure,” who dislike ambiguity and prefer predictability and clear,
fixed answers.48 Human beings are also generally biased in favor of “agency
detection,” meaning we generally see events as the outcomes of someone’s or
something’s actions, rather than as random chaos.49 As social scientists Jan-
Willem Van Prooijen and Karen Douglas explain, “People tend to perceive
events as caused by intentional agents.”50 However, whereas some people are
higher in need for closure than others, some people are higher in agency
detection than others. I, admittedly, am high in agency detection.
I also ascribe intentionality to individuals, animals, and objects. Work by
Karen Douglas has shown that anthropomorphism—the tendency to attribute
human characteristics to anything other than a human being—is a form of
agency detection that is positively associated with conspiracy theory beliefs.51
My natural state is to anthropomorphize all things: plants, trees, flowers, and
even cutlery. I once wrote a college French essay about how, when looking at a
table setting, it is evident that the fork is the husband, the spoon is the wife, and
the knife is the aggressive male lover who has separated the fork and the spoon
with a plate. It seems my psychological traits accurately predict that I am the
person who would explain a brief neighborhood power outage with a story of a
secret Russian plot.

Control through Conspiracy Theories

“Connecting the dots” and concocting human-centered stories to account for
chaotic events might also—at least temporarily—serve our need for control.
Control motives help explain why we find greater belief in conspiracy theories
among people who feel powerless.52 Even when a person’s sense of control has
been manipulated, as in a study by experimental researchers, this can affect
conspiracy theory belief.53 In a reassuring set of findings from Jan-Willem van
Prooijen and Michele Acker, just getting respondents to recall a situation in
which “something happened, and they were in complete control of the situation”
was enough to reduce their conspiracy theory beliefs.54
Part of the control function offered by conspiracy theories may stem from
their ability to generate a feeling of anger.55 Anger is a mobilizing emotion that
we tend to experience when we perceive a threat and have some sense of
certainty about the nature of the threat and what to do about it.56 Unlike fear,
which we experience in the face of threat combined with uncertainty (and which
may leave us feeling pessimistic), anger provides agency and optimism.57 By
giving us a target to which we can direct our anger—the bad people operating in
the shadows—conspiracy theories can make us feel hopeful and provide a
logical course of action: get the bad guys.58
Among groups who feel that they are lower status or somehow losing,
conspiracy theories can allow them to save face by blaming their losing status on
an orchestrated plot against them.59 This explains why people who vote for the
losing political candidate are more likely to believe conspiracy theories related
to an election,60 like Jenny Cudd from Midland, Texas, who stormed the Capitol.
This also accounts for the appeal of the racist right-wing conspiracy theory
known as replacement theory, which argues that liberals and elites are
deliberately encouraging immigration from nonwhite, non-Christian countries to
“replace” whites and Christians and dilute their political and cultural power.61
Following the mass shooting in a Black neighborhood grocery store in Buffalo,
New York, by a white supremacist who embraced “great replacement theory,”
the New York Times’s Nick Confessore explained, “Like all conspiracy theories,
the ‘great replacement’ provides, for some people, a comforting and also
angering explanation for changes that they see around them.”62
The desire for control and safety also explains why conspiracy theories arise
in response to horrifying, unthinkable events, like the attacks on September 11,
2001, or the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Large
mass casualty events—terrorist attacks, mass shootings, and natural disasters—
make us feel afraid, uncertain, and insecure. We have trouble processing their
horror. We want to assume they didn’t really happen. And if we are willing to
admit to ourselves that the events did occur, we are governed by the adage
“Major events have major causes.”63 In the face of events like these, sweeping
conspiracy theories seem more plausible than the notion that just one or two
people (or nature) could cause such vast devastation. Narratives that offer
alternative explanations for these terrifying moments, especially narratives that
propose the events were either preventable or staged, promise to make us feel
safer. To the listeners of InfoWars propagandist Alex Jones, this was part of the
appeal of his Sandy Hook conspiracy theories. For years after the horrific event,
Jones alleged that the shooting never really happened and that the victims’
families were “crisis actors” hired to perform the role of grieving family
members.64 For people unable or unwilling to face the prospect of twenty
kindergartners being massacred in their classroom, Jones’s fiction provided an
escape hatch.
It is clear from the literature on conspiracy theory beliefs that fear, threat, and
uncertainty are associated with a higher likelihood of conspiratorial thinking. As
van Prooijen writes, “Feelings of uncertainty and fear … cause an activation—
and frequently, an overactivation—of the human tendencies to perceive patterns
and detect agency.”65 Faced with uncertainty and threat, we crave
comprehension and control even more than usual. And when these urges are on
overdrive, they encourage us to grab on to whatever story fits the bill.
The uncertainty and sense of threat in the early days of the coronavirus
pandemic provided the perfect storm for conspiracy theory beliefs to thrive.66
Two conspiracy theories suggested we didn’t need to worry so much about the
virus: the belief that the coronavirus was fake and that the medical community
was exaggerating COVID death rates. Some COVID beliefs also suggested
simple solutions. If people believed that 5G cell phone towers were somehow
amplifying or spreading COVID, which some people did, then the solution was
simple: burn down the cell phone towers. Which some people did.67
Given that social isolation has been found to be associated with various
superstitions and conspiracy beliefs,68 it seems the isolating experience of
quarantines and lockdowns may have contributed to COVID conspiracy theory
beliefs as well, either through a lack of interpersonal interaction or through
increased time spent online, where coronavirus misinformation thrived.69

Community through Conspiracy Theories

While conspiracy theories may offer us a promise of comprehension and control,
they serve our need for community as well. Remember how proud the
insurrectionist Jenny Cudd was because she had “fucking charged the Capitol
with patriots”? The human desire to connect with members of a group and
monitor intergroup hostilities is central to the function of conspiracy theories.
Van Prooijen explains that conspiracy theory beliefs involve the perception that
“hostile coalitions” are working against the interest of other groups.70 Conspiracy
theories increase in-group cohesion while emphasizing the threat posed by an
out-group (bad actors operating in the shadows). Conspiracy theories also
efficiently reinforce social identity and mobilize the in-group toward action.
According to Van Prooijen, “Conspiracy theories have a clear social dimension.
A conspiracy by definition is a hostile outgroup, and most conspiracy theories
specify how the suspected conspiracy harms or deceives a larger collective of
people.”71
In a fascinating evolutionary psychological account of the social functions of
misinformation and conspiracy theories, political scientist Michael Bang
Petersen proposes that false beliefs among the public—especially those
associated with elite-spread disinformation—are more about taking action than
they are about “believing things.”72 He suggests that fringe beliefs held within
the group help solve what he calls “the coordination problem,” the difficult task
of coordinating the behaviors of large numbers of individuals all at once. It’s not
that people have been manipulated into suddenly believing something that is
false, but that the belief (which tends to complement existing intergroup conflict)
signals group membership and mobilizes group action. Writes Petersen, “The
psychology of coordination helps explain why people happily believe
preposterous things without a need to resort to notions of manipulation. From a
coordination perspective, the primary function of fringe beliefs is thus not
epistemic but social: They serve as a signal to others about your allegiances.”73
Viewed this way, false conspiratorial beliefs like “the election was rigged” or
“Bill Gates is implanting a microchip through the vaccine” are about what team
you’re on, who you’re opposed to, and what you’re going to do about it (e.g.,
storm the Capitol and not get vaccinated). Conspiracy theories are quite good at
“solving the coordination problem.” Political scientist Yongkwang Kim found
that not only were individuals who believed in conspiracy theories the same
people with high rates of participation in the 2012 election (including attending
rallies, wearing campaign buttons, or signing petitions), but after experimental
participants saw election-related conspiracy theories, they became more likely to
participate, even more than people exposed to similar but nonconspiratorial
election information.74

A Matter of Trust
The social roots of conspiracy theory beliefs also help explain the close
relationship between conspiracy theory beliefs and trust. Conspiracy theory
beliefs are higher among both those who do not trust other people75 and those
who don’t trust institutions like government and media.76 Given that most
conspiracy theories are about deception by elites working within our existing
institutions, the latter of these associations is quite intuitive. If you believe that
people working in government, media, science, or medicine are in it for
themselves or power hungry, it’s not a huge leap to believe they are coordinating
in secret to harm the public and help themselves. In the very early days of the
COVID pandemic, psychologist Daniel Freeman and his colleagues studied
COVID-19 conspiracy theory beliefs among citizens in the UK. They found that
these beliefs were most prevalent among people with low levels of trust in
government, military, doctors, scientists, the World Health Organization, and
even the United Nations.77
 As described by media scholar Ethan Zuckerman, a lack of institutional trust
fosters “the loss of a single collective reality.”78 Without trust in the institutions
and experts charged with creating and disseminating information, members of
the public will look elsewhere to fill in the gaps of their understanding—perhaps
to friends, social media, or partisan political leaders. Given that over the last half
century America has experienced a vast erosion of trust in government,79
media,80 and education, it follows that information from these institutions is
increasingly likely to be met by a skeptical public, leaving us more susceptible to
mis- and disinformation.
The role of trust in shaping our belief in false information highlights how
much of our understanding of the world is derived from knowledge
communicated to us by experts and official sources. Most of us do not have
access to specialized knowledge in all things. Our direct observations of the
world certainly don’t get us there. We rely on experts and institutions to provide
it for us. In A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault
on Democracy, political science professors Russell Muirhead and Nancy
Rosenblum put it plainly: “Much of what we know, or think we know, we take
on trust.”81 We are not the ones conducting scientific experiments on the safety
of the COVID vaccines or counting mail-in ballots on election day. We know
COVID vaccines are safe and the 2020 election was conducted properly because
we trust what members of our key institutions say on these matters. And if we
don’t trust what these key institutions say, we may well come to believe that
microchips are being implanted through vaccines or that bad people rigged the
election—or both.

American Political Asymmetry

As troubling as the erosion of institutional trust among the public is the
asymmetry in institutional trust between America’s two major political parties.
Republicans report having significantly less trust in science, higher education,
media, and the federal government than Democrats do.82 And along with lower
levels of trust, some researchers have found greater belief in conspiracy theories
and misinformation on America’s political right.83 In cross-cultural studies of the
relationship between political ideology and conspiracy theory beliefs across the
globe, researchers have found that conspiracy theory beliefs are more prevalent
among political extremists on both the political left and the political right.84
Given that our needs for comprehension, control, and community (needs that
contribute to conspiracy theory beliefs) also likely contribute to the strength of
people’s political beliefs, the notion that political extremists on both sides of the
political spectrum would be more likely to believe conspiracy theories makes
sense on its face. However, while cross-cultural studies suggest that conspiracy
theory beliefs are the domain of the Far Right and the Far Left, the American
context may tell a different story.85
Some research suggests that, compared with liberals, American conservatives
are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories and score higher in their general
tendency to engage in conspiratorial thinking.86 While American liberals are
more likely to believe conspiracy theories related to Republican presidents
Trump and Bush,87 American conservatives are more likely to hold empirically
false beliefs on everything from President Obama’s birthplace88 to the origins of
COVID and climate change.89 Conservatives are also more likely to share false
information online than are liberals.90 Communication scholars R. Kelly Garrett
and Robert Bond found that American conservatives are less adept at
“discriminating between political truths and falsehoods,” largely because a
greater proportion of the false claims circulating in the information environment
benefited conservatives.91 Garrett and Bond found that “socially engaging
truthful claims tended to favor the left, while engaging falsehoods
disproportionately favored the right.” In other words, there was an ideological
asymmetry in the supply of misinformation, with more false claims favorable to
the Right than to the Left circulating online. And because humans are generally
not very good at identifying false information that is biased in our favor, this
asymmetry in misinformation supply contributed to an asymmetry in
misinformation beliefs.
In various studies of Russian disinformation efforts in the 2016 election,
scholars found evidence of an ideological asymmetry in the supply of
disinformation as well, with the majority of Russian-led efforts to undermine
American democracy targeted toward conservatives.92 As Deen Freelon and his
team concluded, “The rightward skew of the ideological asymmetry is consistent
with the inference that the [Russian propaganda agency] IRA considers the
American right wing to be especially vulnerable to disinformation attacks.”93
Although it is certainly not a foregone conclusion that belief in conspiracy
theories and misinformation are necessarily the domain of conservatism, there
may be something going on in the United States that is making it so.94 To
explore potential asymmetries in American “wrongness,” we must first
understand America’s unique and evolving political context. In the next two
chapters, we will explore how America’s two political parties became
ideologically polarized and sociodemographically distinct, especially on the
political right. We will then explore how partisan identity shapes our needs for
comprehension, control, and community, thus affecting what we “know” and
what we “see.”
 Chapter 3

How Did We Get So Far Apart?

IF I TOLD YOU there was a man named John and asked you whether he was a
Republican or a Democrat, you’d likely say “How would I know?” But if you
learned that John is a 40-year-old African American male with a college degree
and lives in a medium-size city, you might start to make some guesses about his
political party. And if I told you I know a man named Frank who is white, lives
in rural Texas, and is an evangelical Christian, you’d probably make some
guesses about his political party as well. Chances are you’d say John is a
Democrat and Frank is a Republican.
Is this stereotyping? Yes it is. Is it possible our assumptions about John’s and
Frank’s political parties are completely wrong? Absolutely. It’s unlikely, but it is
possible these extrapolations would be incorrect. To return to the language of
how we know what we know, you probably reached these conclusions using the
process of deduction. You guessed that John is a Democrat because you have a
sense that people who live in medium to large cities and who are African
American are more likely to be Democrats. And you probably guessed that
Frank is a Republican because you are aware that people who live in rural Texas
and who are evangelical Christians are more likely to be Republicans. Based on
the empirical reality across today’s America, your two conclusions are more
likely to be true than not true. According to work by political scientists, these
probabilities—that John is a Democrat and Frank is a Republican—are more
likely now than at any point in the past 70 years.1
Political scientist Lilliana Mason and others have chronicled how, starting in
the latter half of the twentieth century, the two major political parties in the
United States have become more different from each other in terms of
sociodemographic characteristics, like race, religion, and even culture.2 The
Republican Party became more conservative, white, rural, and Christian while
the Democratic Party became more liberal, secular and agnostic, and racially
diverse. The people within the parties did not change in their gender, race,
religiosity, or political ideology. But over time people within these different
sociodemographic categories became more likely to identify with one party over
the other.3
This “social sorting” of political parties is bad for democracy.4 From the
increasing animus that everyday partisans hold against members of the other
party, to encouraging party leaders to refuse compromise of any kind, to the
many downstream consequences we will explore in the pages that follow, having
two political parties that are distinct along dimensions of race, religion,
geography, and culture is a bad thing.5 But while political scientists today are
concerned that American political parties are too distinct, back in 1950 political
scientists were concerned that the two political parties were not distinct enough.
Political scientists at that time urged that the American political party system be
revamped to increase opposition between the parties and increase party loyalty.
Their report, Towards a More Responsible Two-Party System, emphasized the
importance of contrasting party platforms and distinct issue positions informed
by two opposing ideological orientations.6
Remember, it was 1950. The United States was busy celebrating its victory of
democracy over fascism, enjoying the fruits of its economic boom, and making
lots of babies. Compared with today, it was a moment of relatively high trust in
government, high trust in journalism, and broad economic growth. The two
political parties in the United States were not ideologically distinct at that time,
meaning there was a lot of overlap of liberal and conservative issue positions
between the two parties. The parties were most accurately described as “two
loose associations of state and local organizations, with very little national
machinery and very little national cohesion.”7 Political scientists suggested that
without ideological anchors (liberal and conservative) to signal meaningful
policy differences to voters, the two parties were doing voters a disservice. As a
proposed solution, they urged the parties to realign along the lines of ideology.
Importantly, though, that lack of clear ideological distinction in the mid-
1900s stemmed from a strategic compromise on the part of the Democratic
Party, in which it would embrace the racist policies of the Jim Crow South for
purposes of legislative victories. It wasn’t until millions of Black southerners
migrated north and west in the early 1900s that northern Democrats began
prioritizing civil rights, and thus the great “racial partisan realignment” began.8
This new emphasis on civil rights among northern Democrats in the mid-
1900s triggered a backlash among southern conservatives, on which the
Republican Party soon capitalized. The 1964 campaign of staunch conservative
Barry Goldwater is an early example of such efforts. Goldwater ran an explicitly
ideologically conservative campaign: strong national defense, anti-Communist,
small government, and anti-tax. He opposed civil rights legislation on the
grounds that it violated states’ rights, a position that invigorated a white
supremacist push from local party leaders in the southern states.9 And although
Goldwater suffered a massive defeat in the 1964 general election, his campaign
had done something profound. By placing conservatism front and center—tying
party to conservatism, and conservatism to race (states’ rights = conservative
values = white values)—he helped usher in (or perhaps just sped up) the shift
toward “a responsible two-party system” that political scientists had advocated
14 years before.
Goldwater’s loss left a sting, and the Republican Party didn’t immediately
adopt his ideologically conservative covenant. He was defeated on election day,
after all. But by the mid-1970s, Republican Party leaders realized the electoral
benefits of culturally conservative issue positions, and through the 1980s and
’90s, the two parties began drifting further apart on policy platforms, a drift that
was more pronounced among Republican legislators than Democratic ones.10 As
summarized by Pew Research Center’s Drew DeSilver. “What’s happened? In
large part, the disappearance of moderate-to-liberal Republicans (mainly in the
Northeast) and conservative Democrats (primarily in the South). Since the
1970s, the congressional parties have sorted themselves both ideologically and
geographically.”11
And while political change usually takes a while, it can sometimes happen
quickly, as it did in 1994, the year of the Republican revolution. Following
Democrat Bill Clinton’s presidential victory in 1992, House Speaker Newt
Gingrich crafted the Contract with America—a 200-page document outlining
ideologically rooted issue positions that would serve as the cornerstone for the
Republican Party. Gingrich called for smaller government, balanced budgets, tax
cuts, term limits, and reforms to various social programs from social security to
welfare. Three hundred and sixty-seven Republican candidates for the House of
Representatives publicly signed the contract and placed its conservative policy
positions at the forefront of their campaigns for the 1994 midterm elections. At a
public signing on September 27, 1994, the Republican candidates stood on the
steps of the US Capitol building and swore an oath: “If we break this contract,
throw us out.”12 The Republican victories over the Democrats in November 1994
were staggering. The Republicans gained 54 seats in the House and 9 seats in the
Senate, thus regaining majority control of both houses of Congress. They had
also shown that nationalizing congressional races by focusing on federal (rather
than local) policy could be a winning strategy. And so, America bid adieu to the
loosely affiliated, nonideological, local political coalitions that made up the
parties of the past. Party leaders became slightly more ideological in the votes
they cast through the 1970s and 80s, with Republicans supporting conservative
policies and opposing liberal ones and Democrats supporting more liberal
policies and opposing conservative ones. Importantly, until 1994, there was still
an overlap in congressional votes. After Contract with America, that kind of
cross-party cooperation became increasingly rare.13

Political Polarization and Partisan Animus

Several overlapping concepts are at play here and need to be cleared up before
we go much further. The first is the concept of political polarization or
ideological polarization, referring to the shift in the two major political parties
toward more ideologically extreme issue positions. These include both “elite
polarization” (ideological polarization in the votes cast by elected lawmakers)
and “mass polarization” (ideological polarization in the issue positions of regular
people in the electorate). Elite polarization means that Democratic lawmakers
support liberal policies and legislation (expanded social programs, tax increases,
regulation on industry) and Republican lawmakers support more conservative
policies and legislation (smaller government, lower taxes, fewer regulations on
industry). It also means that lawmakers rarely, if ever, cross party lines to
support legislation from the other party. These votes are informed not only by
lawmakers’ beliefs on the issues but also by the political calculus they are
making: “Is it worth it for me to vote against my party?” “Will I suffer in the
next election if I vote against my party?” And here, on elite polarization, we
have seen striking shifts over the past 50 years.14 Fewer lawmakers are working
with the opposing party on legislation or breaking ranks to support legislation
proposed by a member of the other party. This means less legislation gets
passed, as well as significant legislative delays—all affectionately known as
gridlock.15
Mass polarization is when regular Democrats and Republicans—your
neighbors and family members—move further apart on which policies they
support. While evidence of elite polarization among lawmakers is clear,
evidence of mass polarization (in the form of people’s positions on public
policy) has proved more elusive.16 As lawmakers became more ideologically
distinct and extreme, most Americans continued to support policies that were a
mix of liberal and conservative.17 Over the past several decades, however, ticket-
splitting—voting for members of both the Democratic Party and the Republican
Party—has just about disappeared.18 Today most voters are straight-ticket voters,
either all red or all blue.
And yet, lots of Americans with mixed policy positions (a little bit liberal and
a little bit conservative) certainly exist. Work by Matthew Levendusky and Neil
Malhotra shows that Americans tend to overestimate the extent of ideological
polarization among the public, especially when judging the policy positions of
the “other side.”19 They suggest that this “false polarization” might result from
party stereotypes that come through media or from our propensity to
overestimate differences between us and our “out-group.”
Perhaps more concerning than mass ideological polarization has been a
phenomenon political scientists call affective polarization.20 Here, “affect”
(synonymous with “emotions” or “feelings”) captures the notion that we feel
negatively about the other party and the people who identify with it. Both
Republicans and Democrats rate the other party and its members more
unfavorably than at any time in the past 40 years.21 In 2019, Pew reported that 75
percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans described the other side as
“closed minded.” And about half of Republicans and Democrats would describe
the other side as “immoral.”22 A 2014 study by Pew found that a quarter of
consistent liberals and about a third of consistent conservatives reported being
unhappy at the thought of an immediate family member marrying someone from
another political party.23 Using property deed records combined with data from
voter rolls, a team of scholars studied the behaviors of homeowners when
members of the other party move close by. The results show that people are
more likely to sell their homes when members of the other party move in—
especially when those party members are strong partisans and when they move
especially close by (like immediately next door).24 Some research even points to
Americans feeling a sense of physical disgust just from looking at a picture of
someone described as having voted for the opposing political party.25
While the ideological polarization among lawmakers in Washington might be
partially responsible for Americans’ high levels of affective polarization,26
political science research points to a host of other factors.27 Shanto Iyengar and
his colleagues highlight the role played by the social sorting of the parties
described earlier, a process that fuels the construction of in-groups and out-
groups.28 They also explain how our “high choice media environment”—where
people can choose media programming that confirms their worldview—
reinforces party identification and deepens the political divide, and how negative
political campaigns exacerbate interparty contempt. Finally, they propose that
Americans increasingly dislike members of the other party because we have
become less likely to interact (both on- and offline) with friends, neighbors, and
coworkers who are politically different from us. This increasing isolation of
Americans from folks with contrasting political preferences widens the gulf
between the Left and the Right.29
Yet at the same time, political scientists are warning of a devastating spiral
that may be triggered by the overestimation and mischaracterization of political
polarization.30 On average, voters—regular Democrats and Republicans—
perceive that members of the other party are far more extreme in their ideology
than they really are. Americans also assume that members of the other party are
far more politically engaged than they really are. This is a bad combination. The
more I think members of the other party are ideologically extreme and politically
engaged, the less I like them. However, when my misperceptions are corrected
to reflect the ideology and engagement of “average” out-party members (rather
than hyperpartisans on the margins), my dislike of the other party drops. This
means that the way we talk about political polarization, and our decisions about
what kinds of partisans we (scholars, journalists, and citizens) center in our
discussions, affects how regular party members feel about the other side.
When partisans dislike members of the other party, they are less likely to
support democratic norms and principles that might disadvantage their own
party. For example, Americans who most strongly dislike the out-party are also
the most supportive of restrictions to the other side’s speech and voting rights.
These same people are also the most open to the idea of weakening the system of
checks and balances among the branches of government and concentrating
executive power if it serves their own side.31 But, just getting Americans to like
members of the other party might not be enough to increase our desire to protect
democratic processes. Studies show that getting partisans to like each other
doesn’t necessarily translate into increased protection of democratic norms. It
does result in some interpersonal outcomes, like an increased willingness to
engage with members of the other party and less aversion to the idea of being
friends with members of the other party. But it does not lead to core democracy-
protective attitudes. In experimental research, even those whose affinity toward
the other party had been increased through an experimental manipulation were
just as likely as the control group to oppose the right of the out-group to
peacefully protest, oppose investigations into corruption in their own party, and
be amenable to their own party’s overturning an election in their favor.32 As
much as we might hate to embrace these norms when they are “bad” for our side,
they are essential to democratic health. So, if increasing bipartisan affinities isn’t
enough to strengthen Americans’ support for democratic institutions and
practices, where does this leave us?
Well, what if it’s not just about liking people from the other party but about
identifying with them and sharing things in common with them? Because, on
that front, America is in a bad spot too. In addition to finding negative attitudes
toward members of the other party, the Pew Research Center has also
documented countless social and cultural differences between the parties.
Almost half the liberals in Pew’s 2014 study reported that if they could live
anywhere, they would choose to live in a city, and only 4 percent of
conservatives said the same. Instead, just about half of conservatives would
choose a rural area, compared with only 11 percent of liberals. These distinctions
go on and on, including conservatives wanting to live in communities with
people who share their religious affiliation, and liberals wanting racially and
ethnically diverse neighborhoods—where they are close to cultural hubs like
museums and theaters.33 In 2020, Pew published an article with the headline
“Voters Say Those on the Other Side ‘Don’t Get’ Them.” The article described
how only 2 percent of Biden and Trump supporters said that supporters of the
other candidate “understood them very well.”34

Race and Populism

While affective polarization is harmful to democracy, what’s worse is political
sectarianism—in which people perceive their political party to be morally good
and opposing parties to be morally bad. In the US context, such moral
identification with our political parties has been driven by the social sorting
described earlier, especially by the sorting of racial and religious groups into
separate political parties.35 In his book Why We’re Polarized, journalist Ezra
Klein highlights the crucial role of race in America’s political divide.36 From the
party realignment over civil rights in the 1960s, to the “racialization” of
conservative politics as a backlash against Obama, to Trump’s successful
exploitation of the perceived “demographic threat” among the conservative base,
Klein ties America’s political divide directly to the country’s ongoing journey
with race. And there is ample evidence that Klein is correct.
Take, for example, Americans’ beliefs about whether it is more difficult to be
Black than white in the United States. In 2020, the Pew Research Center found
that 95 percent of Biden supporters agreed with this statement, compared with
half of Trump supporters.37 The same trend is found when voters are asked
whether white people have societal advantages that Black people don’t have.
And although Americans’ attitudes toward immigrants have improved overall,
the Pew data still point to a giant partisan gap, with 84 percent of Biden
supporters in 2020 agreeing that “newcomers strengthen American society,”
compared with a third of Trump supporters.
Which brings us to the unique case (or maybe not) of President Trump.
Countless political scientists have worked to trace the origins of support for
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016. Using surveys and
longitudinal studies to measure people’s attitudes at various points in time and
analyzing how those beliefs relate to vote choice, these researchers found that
support for Trump was largely driven by racial resentment. In their data-driven
account of the 2016 election, Identity Crisis, political scientists John Sides,
Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck conclude that “attitudes concerning race,
ethnicity, and religion were more strongly related to how Americans voted in
2016 than in recent elections.”38 They also show that the centrality of racial and
ethnic identity and attitudes in the election outcome was not a direct result of
demographic changes in the United States or even a result of hugely shifting
attitudes on race. Instead, it was about the words and behaviors of the candidates
themselves in choosing to highlight certain issues (related to race and ethnicity)
over other issues (anything else). By putting race and ethnicity front and center,
Trump succeeded in unearthing starkly contrasting racial views among
America’s cultural conservatives and cultural liberals.
With his “America First” and “Make America Great Again” slogans,
President Trump ran a nationalist, culturally conservative campaign, one focused
on tightening border security, reducing immigration, and pushing back against
“political correctness.”39 Even in his declaration of his bid for the presidency in
June 2015, the former real estate mogul and reality television star stated that the
Mexicans immigrating to the United States were drug dealers and rapists (with
the caveat that “some, [he] assumed, were good people”).40 Back in 2011, after
appearing at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump began making
appearances on cable news programs, where he publicly challenged the
authenticity of Democratic president Barack Obama’s birth certificate and
demanded that Obama prove his US citizenship—a thinly veiled (if that) racial
attack.41 “Birtherism” as it was called, was also tied up with false rumors
suggesting that President Obama was a Muslim and was born in Kenya.42 Even
back in 2011, people who believed in Birtherism were more likely to see Trump
as a “potentially good or great president” than to see Mitt Romney, the actual
GOP nominee at the time, as such.43
Trump is emblematic of a populist politician. Populism, as described by
expert Cas Mudde, is a “thin ideology” that is “malleable.”44 It’s less about
policy positions and more about a generic opposition between the “pure people”
and the “corrupt elite.”45 Populist leaders construct an idea of the “real people,”
typically a mythologized subpopulation of “common people,” whose pure heart
ought to (according to populist rhetoric) dictate the direction of the country. In
lieu of policy, it is the identity-centered rhetoric of populism, with its adulation
of “the people,” their homogeneity, and their moral distance from the “corrupt
elites,” that is its defining characteristic.46 Populism flatters people by
contrasting the morality of these competing social categories. Populism is
accessible and attractive because of its emotional, common-sense appeals. It
mobilizes people by appealing to their sense of resentment and
disenfranchisement, using the construction of out-group threats to do so.47
In their book Cultural Backlash, democracy experts Pippa Norris and Ronald
Inglehart explore the global rise in support for populist authoritarian leaders like
Donald Trump.48 They test various competing explanations for the rise of
populist authoritarian leaders, including the often-suggested “economic anxiety
hypothesis” (which states that populist leaders are elected when people are
concerned about the state of the economy).49 Norris and Inglehart land not on
economic anxiety but instead on cultural backlash as the reason for populist
authoritarians’ success. That is, changing racial and cultural aspects of
postmodern society have provoked uncertainty and fear in those who feel that
traditional values are being eroded. This has prompted a backlash steeped in
resentment and a desire to reclaim a “traditional” way of life, especially among
older, white, male, less educated, lower-skilled citizens (the “pure people”),
whose perceived displacement “generates resentment, anger, and a sense of
loss.”50
Support for Trump in the United States followed this very pattern. Trump
facilitated this support through rhetoric that “peddle[d] a mélange of xenophobic
fear tactics (against Mexicans and Muslims), deep-seated misogyny, paranoid
conspiracy theories about his rivals, and isolationist ‘America First’ policies
abroad.”51 And through these appeals to xenophobia and racism, Trump offered
up himself as a solution to their resentment, fear, and anger. It was no accident
that support for Trump in 2016 was highest among those who indicated that
immigration was the number-one problem facing the country.52
These findings are consistent with work by Lilliana Mason, Julie Wronski,
and John Kane exploring the predictors of support for Trump in 2016. Using
data gathered over time, they trace the social and political attitudes most
predictive of later support for President Trump. Again, the answer is racial and
cultural animus. Animus toward African Americans, Hispanics, gays and
lesbians, and Muslims measured in 2011 was a strong, significant predictor of
people’s favorability toward President Trump in 2016 and even 2018. The
authors write that “Trump support is uniquely predicted by animosity toward
marginalized groups in the United States” and warn that, “given Trump’s
success, future candidates may attempt to create a winning coalition based on
activating group-based animosities through the explicit use of anti-out-group
rhetoric.”53 And here we are.

Culture Wars and Christianity

While race is certainly at the center of the American partisan political chasm,
that divide is accompanied by divides on human rights issues related to gender,
LGBTQ rights, and abortion. The Pew Research Center identified a growing
partisan divide on gender attitudes between 2016 and 2020. In 2016, almost
three-quarters of Hillary Clinton supporters and only one-third of Trump
supporters agreed that, when it comes to getting ahead, women face significantly
more obstacles than men do. By 2020, this gap had grown even larger between
supporters of Biden and those of Trump. Similar gaps are found between
Democrats and Republicans on whether the country has “not gone far enough”
or has “gone too far” on giving women the same rights as men.54
The American public’s view of same-sex marriage has grown increasingly
favorable over the past two decades, with a 30-point increase from 2004 to 2019
in the percentage of Americans favoring same-sex couples being legally allowed
to wed (from 31 to 61 percent). However, this trend looks quite different when
we break it down by party, where 75 percent of Democrats and less than half of
Republicans currently support gay marriage.55 Turning to transgender rights, in
2022 Pew reported a similar partisan divide with over half of Republicans saying
that “greater social acceptance of people who are transgender is generally very
or somewhat bad for society,” compared with 13 percent of Democrats.56 And on
abortion, in 2022 Gallup reported 57 percent of Democrats supporting legal
abortions under any circumstances, compared with only 10 percent of
Republicans.57
When it comes to the increasing partisan divide on these “culture war” issues
(related to gender, sexuality, and abortion), scholars point to the central role of
religion. Using 20 years of data from the American National Election Studies,
political scientist Geoffrey Layman documented the changing religious makeup
of the parties from 1972 to 1992, a shift that resulted in a Republican Party
dominated by active, vocal evangelical Protestants, and a Democratic Party
dominated by active, vocal secular liberals.58 Layman proposed that this divide
was triggered by strategic actions of Republican Party leaders who appealed to
traditional, culturally conservative value systems, thereby “creating” new
Republicans out of already morally conservative evangelicals. Indeed, among
Republicans, his work shows a steep rise in self-reported church attendance and
in the number of people who reported getting “a great deal of guidance” from
their faith over that 20-year period—most notably among first-time Republican
voters. Central to Layman’s argument about the implications of this religious
shift for the so-called culture wars, his work documents a growing gap between
Democrats’ and Republicans’ views on abortion, women’s rights, and gay rights
over that same 20-year period, especially on the issue of abortion.
The fact that these patterns have unfolded as the parties have sorted along
religious and racial lines—with Republicans becoming more homogeneously
white and Christian, and Democrats becoming more racially and ethnically
diverse, secular, and agnostic—is unlikely a coincidence. The historian Randall
Balmer documents how evangelical leaders capitalized on the issue of race in
their early mobilization efforts in the 1960s.59 Balmer points to white Christian
resentment over the 1970 governmental order to revoke the tax-exempt status of
private, racially segregated Christian schools. Conservative Christian activists
like Paul Weyrich leveraged the school issue to mobilize the cultural Right. He
also cofounded the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation and coined
the term “moral majority” to refer to these new, politically awakened, Christian
conservative voters. In other words, racial resentment has long been tied to the
mobilization of the Christian coalition.60

Divides in Trust, Education, and Geography

As we witness the sociodemographic sorting of the parties along the lines of race
and religion, we are witnessing a growing partisan gap in trust, with Republicans
less likely than Democrats to trust media, higher education, or science.
According to Gallup, in 2022, 70 percent of Democrats reported having a great
deal or a fair amount of trust in the media, compared with only 14 percent of
Republicans.61 In 2019, when asked if they believed colleges and universities
had a positive effect on the way things are going in the country, two-thirds of
Democrats said yes, compared with one-third of Republicans.62 And data from
the 2021 General Social Survey suggest a larger gap in trust in science than any
time in the survey’s 50-year history, with 64 percent of Democrats reporting a
great deal of faith in the scientific community, compared with only 34 percent of
Republicans.63
While some are concerned about the partisan divide in trust, others are
worried about the accompanying—and growing—partisan education gap, where
the Democratic Party is overwhelmingly the party of the college educated.64 In
2016, Pew found that among those with a college degree, one-quarter reported
consistently liberal political values, compared with only 5 percent of those with
a high school degree or less.65 Data from 2017 show a sharp contrast, especially
among Americans with postgraduate experience, with 41 percent reporting a
Democratic Party affiliation, and only 19 percent reporting a Republican one.66
The rural-urban political divide is yet another vivid manifestation of social
sorting. As described in Bill Bishop’s book The Big Sort, the separation of
Americans into urban and rural communities overlaps with all kinds of
individual characteristics, from educational attainment to religion, hobbies to
cuisine, diversity to, of course, politics. As the New York Times’s Emily Badger
writes, “Today the urban party is also the party of gay marriage and gun control.
The more rural party is also the party of stricter immigration and abortion
restrictions.” Badger highlights the dangers of one category of membership
serving as a proxy for another: “We keep adding more reasons to double down
on geography as our central fault line, and to view our policy disagreements as
conflicts between fundamentally different ways of living.”67
When you start digging into these dynamics, you quickly find that there is a
synergy between them. Take, for example, work by Jay Hmielowski and his
colleagues exploring over time trends in media trust among urban- and rural-
dwelling Americans. Using over 40 years of data from the General Social
Survey, Hmielowski and his coauthors find decreases in media trust across the
population, but more among conservatives than among liberals. They also find a
greater drop in media trust among Americans living in rural areas compared with
those in urban ones. The most interesting finding is that these characteristics—
political ideology and geography—interact, such that the steepest drops in media
trust were found among conservatives living in rural areas.68 In other words, the
steepest drops in trust were found among Republicans whose sociodemographic
categorizations were well aligned.
 Polarized or Lopsided?
While it’s tempting to view these dynamics as happening on both sides, it’s
apparent to political scientists that these phenomena are not symmetrical.
Democrats and Republicans do not mirror each other’s attitudes, knowledge,
behaviors, and politics. We are not two parties drifting at the same pace in
opposite directions. Rather, these trends are more pronounced in the Republican
Party than in the Democratic Party. As political scientists William Galston and
Thomas Mann wrote in 2010, “These developments have not produced two
mirror-image political parties. We have, instead, asymmetrical polarization.”69
In their book Asymmetric Politics, Matt Grossman and David Hopkins
propose that this asymmetry results from differences in the central function of
each of the parties.70 While the Republican Party prioritizes conservatism and
“ideological purity,” the Democratic Party is a party of coalitions—groups of
voters who want “concrete government action.”71 This gap in what the parties are
for then informs what they do. The consequence is a Republican Party
increasingly committed to ideological purity in their votes in a way that the
Democratic Party is not. This is demonstrated by the increasingly conservative
votes of Republican legislators over the past 40 years, a trend that has not been
matched by a comparable liberal shift in Democratic congressional votes.72 As
political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein put it, “Let’s just say it:
The Republicans are the problem.”73 According to Mann and Ornstein, “The
GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically
extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of
facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political
opposition.”74
On the one hand, this asymmetry is the result of the behavior of Republican
lawmakers and party leaders, not only through their embrace of ideological
purity but also through their failure to constrain the more fringe elements of their
party. In 2010, for example, the conservative Tea Party wing of the GOP scored
electoral victories and helped the party reclaim control of the House of
Representatives. Their dedication to “ideological purity” meant little to no
willingness to compromise; this value system not only made it difficult to pass
legislation but even led to a 16-day government shutdown in 2013. This impasse
created substantial headaches for Republican Party leaders, especially for House
Speaker John Boehner, who opted to resign his position in 2015 rather than deal
with the intransigence of his own party members. It was also vividly illustrated
by the failure of the Republican Party leaders to sideline the candidacy of
authoritarian populist candidate Donald Trump. The latter of these failures is
what political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt refer to as “the great
Republican abdication”—resignation of democratic responsibility; in other
words, party members shirked their responsibility to gatekeep party leadership
and keep out a populist autocrat.75
On the other hand, though, this asymmetry is also an artifact of the social
sorting discussed throughout this chapter. The sorting process itself has been
asymmetric, with the Republican Party becoming more homogeneously white
and evangelical Christian, and the Democratic Party becoming more racially
diverse, secular, and religiously unaffiliated.76 Even the geographic sorting is
asymmetrical, with almost half of Republicans living in rural areas but only a
third of Democrats living in urban areas.77 As described by Ezra Klein, “Sorting
has made the Democrats into a coalition of difference and driven Republicans
further into sameness.”78
As bad as it seems for a political party to fit a distinct and homogeneous
racial, religious, geographic, and cultural profile, in terms of social psychology,
it’s even worse. When we perceive ourselves as members of a readily
identifiable team operating in opposition to another team, fundamental aspects of
human psychology are activated. In the next chapter, we will explore how
aligned sociodemographic and cultural categories increase the efficiency of the
construction of “otherness” based on synergistic primal categorizations. These
aligned social identity categories also affect how we arrive at truth. When it
comes to how we comprehend the world, seek to control it, and connect to our
communities, the power and influence of these aligned and salient social identity
categories are paramount.
 Chapter 4

What Does My Team Think?

WHILE WE MAY TECHNICALLY be the same people today that we were
yesterday, the way we think of ourselves changes from day to day—or even from
minute to minute. Sometimes I think of myself as extroverted and idealistic;
other times I think of myself as a professor or as a native of New Hampshire.
Sometimes I think of myself as a University of Delaware Blue Hen (since I’m on
faculty there) or as a University of New Hampshire Wildcat (where I completed
my undergraduate degree). These are all aspects of my identity, or what it means
to be who I am.
When we think about who we are, we might think about the ways in which
we’re distinct from other individuals. This is where we might use words like
“confident,” “optimistic,” or “thoughtful.” Thinking of ourselves in terms of
qualities, traits, and beliefs helps establish our mental schemas—cognitive
representations—of self that feature our “most centrally-defining attributes.”1
But we also think of ourselves as members of social groups. When I think about
how I identify with college faculty or with people from New Hampshire, I am
tapping into a social identity rather than a personal identity.2

One of These Things Is Not Like the Other

When Polish social psychologist Henri Tajfel developed the concept of social
identity in the late 1960s, it was a result of his quest to understand the roots of
intergroup prejudice, or, what causes one group of people to look down on
another group of people. Tajfel was a Polish Jew whose entire family was
murdered by the Nazis while he was held as a prisoner of war by the Germans
during World War II. This trauma led to a passion for understanding group
dynamics and the causes of intergroup prejudice. His research in these areas was
also influenced by the work of psychologist Gordon Allport, who in the 1950s
considered discrimination and prejudice not just as social phenomena related to
power and status but as by-products of human cognition. As we seek to
understand and make sense of our world, we find ways to simplify what we
observe.
One such method of simplification is through categories that we create to
separate different kinds of things, such as objects, ideas, and even people. In his
book The Nature of Prejudice, Allport argues that “the human mind must think
with the aid of categories. … Once formed, categories are the basis for normal
prejudgment. We cannot possibly avoid this process. Orderly living depends
upon it.”3 Remember the old Sesame Street song “One of These Things Is Not
Like the Other”? On our television screens we would see, for example, an apple,
an ice cream cone, a hamburger, and a mitten. The child viewing the show
would need to recognize that three of those are food items and one is a piece of
clothing. And since you can’t eat a mitten, the mitten “doesn’t belong.” Henri
Tajfel built on Allport’s premise that humans simplify their worlds through
processes of categorization. He began to consider how putting things into
categories erases differences where they do exist and creates differences where
they don’t.
For example, imagine you have a list of distinct things, like porcupines, lake
trout, blue jays, daffodils, hydrangeas, and roses. Wouldn’t it be easier to just
have an animal category and a flower category? This would certainly simplify
this list and make it easier to remember. It’s efficient. But notice that by
grouping together porcupines, lake trout, and blue jays, we ignore very real
differences between these distinct animals—like the fact that some swim, some
fly, and some attack with quills. Meanwhile, putting daffodils, hydrangeas, and
roses in a separate category from the animals erases qualities that they might
have in common. For instance, both blue jays and hydrangeas can be the color
blue. And a porcupine’s quills and a rose’s thorns can both prick your skin and
make you bleed. This is what the process of categorization does. As Tajfel
writes, categories “transmute fuzzy differences into clear ones” and “create new
differences where none existed.”4
Categorizing people does the same thing: it erases some differences while
exaggerating others. As social psychologist Nils Karl Reimer and his colleagues
explain, “Self-categorization is the cognitive grouping of oneself and other
members of a category as similar (‘us’), in contrast to the members of another
category (‘them’).”5 This process of self-categorization thus involves social
comparisons, comparisons between ourselves and members of our own social
groups (intragroup comparisons), and comparisons between ourselves and
people from other groups (intergroup comparisons). When we engage in these
social comparisons and categorizations, we have two goals: first, we want to
reduce our uncertainty; and second, we want to feel good about ourselves.6
Because we are motivated to protect our self-concept, we tend to perceive “us”
as more desirable than “them.” We are also motivated to be more like those who
share our in-group, and so we downplay the differences that might exist between
us.
If you’ve ever been a fan at a sporting event, you’ve probably felt this happen
in real time. You see fans of your team (your in-group) in the parking lot or in
line entering the stadium, and you feel a connection to them. You feel like you
share something, and so you are “like” them. You’re not thinking about how you
have vastly different occupations, life experiences, or politics. You’re thinking
about how you are all clad in your team colors and are united in your scorn for
the other team—and the other team’s fans.
To protect our self-concept, we also tend to exaggerate the differences we
perceive between us and members of our out-groups, sometimes even
manufacturing differences to justify our cognitive separation from them. As you
see fans of the opposing team entering the stadium, you might tell yourself how
they are different from you, maybe even morally inferior. In our rational minds,
we may know that—outside of geography—most football fans are comparable.
(I would argue that fans of various NFL teams are probably similar—unless
you’re talking about fans of the Philadelphia Eagles, who infamously threw
snowballs at Santa Claus in 1968.) And yet, simply by being fans of different
teams, we perceive our fellow fans as “like us” and fans of the opposing team as
“different from us.” We also see our fellow fans as “better,” and fans of the
opposing team as “worse.”

Why Groups? Why Not Individuals?

Although we may consider ourselves as individuals distinct from other
individuals, we think, feel, and act—by definition—in a social context. As social
psychologists John Turner and Penelope Oakes write, “Individuals are society
and society is the natural form of being of human individuals.”7 Sociologists
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann make a similarly emphatic case for the
social essence of man, writing, “As soon as one observes phenomena that are
specifically human, one enters the realm of the social. Man’s specific humanity
and his society are inextricably intertwined.”8 This is a provocative proposition
as it suggests that our thoughts, feelings, and actions, as well as aspects of self
that we think of as highly autonomous, are socially informed. But, as
psychologists Jay Van Bavel and Dominic Packer state plainly, “The fact is that
individual aspects of identity are hard to separate from social aspects of
identity.”9
From an evolutionary standpoint, the explanatory mechanism to account for
“human as social animal” is simple. We survive better together than we do
alone. According to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, “Once human groups
had some minimal ability to band together and compete with other groups, then
group-level selection came into play and the most groupish groups had an
advantage over groups of selfish individualists.”10 If you’ve ever watched the
television show Survivor, where one of the episodes features a contestant who
has to spend a night away from their tribe alone on Exile Island, this probably
doesn’t come as a shock. Unable to capitalize on the skills of others in their
group—like the guy who can make fire, the girl who is great at catching fish, or
the dude who can get a papaya from a tree—the person alone on Exile Island
must do it all by themselves, often with limited success. It frequently results in
no fire, no fish, no papaya, and lots of tears.
Those of our ancestors who were fortunate enough to be members of
“groupish” groups had a greater chance of surviving and contributing to the gene
pool than did the individualists. Fast-forward to millions of years later and here
we are: We like being in groups. We like our group and want to be accepted by
our group. We want to be good members of our group. As a result of these
primal forces, social identity has an efficient and powerful influence on our
attitudes and behaviors. Without much reflection or critical thought, our
individual beliefs, feelings, and actions are shaped by the beliefs, feelings, and
actions of our group. Even in the United States, where research suggests
European Americans in particular score high on “individualism” and low on
“collectivism,”11 our group norms and social dynamics are integral to our
attitudes and behaviors. In fact, in a piece aptly titled “We’re All Individuals,”
social psychologist Jolanda Jetten and her colleagues illustrate that the very
concept of “American individualism” is itself a group norm.12 That’s right—we
think of ourselves as “individualistic” because everyone else does too. Oh, the
irony.
This brief account explains why we want to be good members of our in-
group, but it doesn’t necessarily explain why we might come to dislike our out-
group. Here Tajfel emphasizes the importance of societal context, real-world
factors relating to the distribution of power and wealth—scarce resources for
which various groups compete. When scarce resources are unequally distributed
across social groups, we find “pervasive ethnocentrism and out-group
antagonism between the over- and underprivileged groups.”13 Societies with
histories of racially determined social strata provide vivid examples of such
intergroup conflict. Social identity theory also points to “social competition” as a
source of intergroup conflict—that is, conflict over reputation, status, and social
self-esteem.14 Here, the conflict is not about an unequal distribution of wealth,
per se, but about an unequal distribution of power.15 And of course, when both
resources and power are unequally distributed and also correlate with readily
available cues like race or ethnicity, the potential for social conflict is huge.
Because these intergroup conflicts center on power and social status, they
tend to play out as battles over social change, where groups are looking to either
“create social change or preserve the status quo.”16 In fact, our social identity is
so closely tied to our motivation to push for—or resist—social change that social
psychologist John Jost drew on social identity theory in his development of
system justification theory,17 a theory to account for things like, Why do people
who would benefit from government assistance programs oppose them? Or why
do people whose health is negatively affected by nearby industrial pollutants
oppose environmental regulations that would reduce industrial harm? Jost’s
work explains why so many people are driven to protect the existing social order
and power hierarchies, even if the existing system may harm them personally.
As it turns out, much of our inclination to keep things the same—to favor
tradition over change—is borne of our psychological needs related to our social
identity.

Are Social Identities Changeable?

Our primal human need to be a part of a group is so strong that even random
group constructions can trigger feelings of favoritism toward in-group members.
In the 1960s, Henri Tajfel tested whether randomly constructed groups could
trigger the same in-group favoritism that we witness when groups occur
organically—through shared interests, values, or activities. In a series of
experiments, he examined what happens when people are randomly assigned to
groups and how that affects their behavior toward people described as part of
their team compared with those described as part of a different team. The results
consistently revealed that participants favored in-group members over out-group
members, even though those groups were arbitrary and brand new. As Tajfel
concludes, “Perhaps the most important principle of the subjective social order
we construct for ourselves is the classification of groups as ‘we’ and ‘they’ as
ingroups and outgroups.”18
The fact that social identities can be artificially constructed through
experiments shows that they are affected by context. What group we identify
with changes based on what is happening around us, what we’re thinking about
—or, in the language of cognitive psychology, what is cognitively accessible or
salient. If I am at the stadium watching the Philadelphia Eagles play, I am
thinking of myself as a fan of the Eagles. My Eagles fan identity is accessible
and salient. The same is true when we find our category in the minority—for
example, where you look around and find that you are the mitten in a room of
food items. Being in one social category when most people around you are in a
different one likely makes you feel distinct, and this increases the salience of that
social identity in your mind. If you have ever been an Eagles Fan in a sea of
Patriots fans, you might be familiar with this kind of identity salience. The same
is true if you are the only man in a room full of women, or vice versa.
But social identity is also informed by how well we feel we “fit” in our
category. I may be a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles, but I don’t really think of
myself as an Eagles fan, because I don’t do the things Eagles fans do. I don’t
attend the games. I don’t wear the gear. I’ve never thrown snowballs at Santa. I
don’t even watch all the games on TV. “Categorical fit” also concerns whether I
see myself as more like my in-group members than my out-group members. If I
went to a football game and the opposing team’s fans sitting next to me were
grading college midterm exams in the parking lot, it would make my Eagles fan
identity less salient because I’d see similarities between myself and the opposing
team’s fans.19 Those same two criteria—accessibility and fit—inform how we
categorize others too. We place other people in social categories based on what
is on our minds and on how well we think they “fit” into that category.20
While context shapes what social identities are salient in our minds, some
social categorizations—ones we use all the time—become “chronically
accessible” to us. These are social categories that we use regularly, for ourselves
and others, and so having them readily available makes decision-making more
efficient. For example, gender and race, social categories that may be
accompanied by identifiable visual characteristics, tend to be chronically
accessible in our minds. Not only do we use these categories frequently, but
others also may use these categories for us, hence reminding us of where they
see us fitting.
 As one of our social identities becomes more prominent—owing to
accessibility or fit—our other identities will tend to be less accessible to us in
that moment. For example, when I am at home in New Jersey, I don’t think too
much about my identity as “someone from New Jersey.” But in the summer,
when I spend time in my home state of New Hampshire, and our car is one of the
few cars with New Jersey license plates, my New Jersey identity becomes very
accessible to me. Family members joke about the way we pronounce words like
“water” (wooder) or “crayon” (crown). In New Hampshire, I remind my kids
that we need to use our “New Hampshire” voices at the beach, because “New
Jersey” voices are too loud and will be considered impolite.
Even though my New Jersey identity is made salient by being in New
Hampshire, I find that I don’t want to be in the out-group when I’m up there. I
want to be in the in-group with the people we interact with at the beach and in
the grocery store. So, I try to tap into my New Hampshire identity. Having
grown up there, I know that people from Massachusetts—or, heaven forbid,
south of there—are considered “flatlandahs” (flatlanders), and with that comes
judgment (playful, of course, but judgment all the same). Flatlandahs have soft
hands. They don’t know how to work the land. They are spoiled, drive too fast,
and are rude and always in a rush. If they are from Massachusetts, we
affectionately refer to them as “Massholes.”
So, when I’m in New Hampshire, I try to perform my New Hampshire
identity, explaining that “I grew up heah” and that my parents “still live heah.” I
throw in specific references to businesses that used to exist in the community
back in the ’80s, like “Frosty’s Ice Cream Corn-ah … Remembah that?” And
when I see license plates from Massachusetts—or even from New Jersey—I feel
myself internally scoff at these “outsidahs.”
I find it interesting that the “flatlandah” resentment is also related to Tajfel’s
proposition that intergroup conflicts stem from the unequal distribution of wealth
and social status. People who vacation in rural areas have enough money and
leisure time to do so. They may have free time and disposable income that local
residents may not have—or at least be perceived as such. This is the same sort of
social conflict we find between “townies” and tourists in beach towns or
between “townies” and college students in university towns. Unequal
distribution of power, resources, and status causes intergroup conflict.
Once we identify with a social group and begin to see our in-group as good
and our out-groups as bad, we’re motivated to think, feel, and act how “people
like me” think, feel, and act. But when we look to our in-group to inform our
thoughts and actions, we’re not trying to figure out what is normal group
behavior. Rather, we’re looking for the best examples of our group—the shining
star that represents what our group’s all about. This shining star is called a group
prototype. It’s a stereotyped, idealized group member. This group member may
or may not actually exist. Social psychologist Michael Hogg and his colleagues
explain that these “prototypes” are “fuzzy sets” of descriptions, “often in the
form of representations of exemplary members (actual group members who
embody the group) … or ideal types (a relatively nebulous abstraction of group
features).”21 These prototypes are the poster children for our social categories—
mythical versions of ideal group members who look, think, feel, and act the way
that we feel is most desirable for our group.
For example, my prototype of a Philadelphia Eagles fan is a middle-aged
male, decked out in face paint, draped head to toe in Eagles gear, attending every
game, tailgating in the parking lot, yelling passionately at the refs, or even
throwing snowballs at Santa Claus. Never mind that the average Eagles fan may
just try to catch most of the games on TV and is disappointed when they lose.
My mental image of an Eagles fan isn’t a person who tries to catch some of the
game on Sunday. It’s a dude in face paint swearing at Santa Claus.

What Do People Like Me Think, Feel, and Do?

We not only learn the appropriate attitudes and behaviors of our group from
these group prototypes, but we begin to incorporate and embody them as well.22
As I mentioned, I identify as a native of New Hampshire. More precisely, I
identify as someone from a rural New Hampshire community, where my family
still lives. It is a beautifully pristine lake and mountain region that is largely
untouched by developers. I also consider myself to be someone who cares about
the environment. We own a hybrid car, recycle, and use reusable grocery bags. I
would consider both of these identities—New Hampshirite and environmentalist
—to be among my social identities.
In New Hampshire, several renewable energy companies have constructed
large wind farms along the surrounding mountaintops near my family’s home.
These farms are home to dozens of wind turbines that use the power of the wind
to generate electricity that is exported south. These wind farms have changed the
appearance of the landscape. Many local folks from the area don’t like the
windmills. Some find them to be unsightly or invasive. Others feel that they
might hurt the local economy if tourists decide to stop visiting because they find
the windmills too industrial-looking. Along the backroads, residents have put up
signs making it known that they oppose the wind turbines. One particularly
popular sign features a picture of a windmill with the colorful pun: “I am NOT a
FAN.”
So where do I stand on the wind turbine issue?
It depends on which of my social identities is salient—which hat I’m wearing.
A good environmentalist supports policies that reduce our reliance on fossil
fuels. Wind energy is clean energy. So, when I wear my environmentalist hat, I
celebrate the windmills. But, when I put on my rural New Hampshirite hat, I am
not a fan. I feel like they ruin the view, make the hillside look like an industrial
park, and rob the landscape of its natural beauty. What’s wild is how easily I can
tap into either one of these identities. When I’m chatting with locals, people I’ve
known since I was a kid, I see those turbines as the product of outsiders, as
invasive and unsightly. But once at a distance, chatting with my environmentally
minded friends, I see those same windmills as a symbol of progress. I feel
critical of the “not in my back yard” attitude and judge wind-turbine opponents
as short-sighted, even small-minded.
And here is the most disconcerting part: the wind turbines even look different
to me when I tap into the two different identities. Depending on what team I feel
like I’m on that day, either they look monstrous and industrial, or they look like
clean air and progress. It all varies based on which identity is most salient in my
mind. And because I’m not a full-time resident of New Hampshire, the
competition between these two social identities causes my ambivalence on the
issue.
Can priming one social identity over another change not only how we think,
feel, and act but even what we see? Work from social psychology says yes.
Take, for example, studies described by Jay Van Bavel and Dominic Packer in
their book, The Power of Us.23 The authors recount a study led by their colleague
Leor Hackel exploring how activating a social identity affects how people rate
the deliciousness of various foods.24 After researchers primed participants’
southern identity (by having them write about things southerners typically do),
the participants rated foods they considered to be southern (like collard greens
and grits) tastier than did those participants who did not participate in the writing
assignment. In other words, priming their southern identity changed how they
anticipated southern foods would taste. The same effect was found among
Canadians in their ratings of Canadian maple syrup. When their Canadian
identity was made salient, Canadian maple syrup tasted better to them. So yes, it
is very possible that how my brain perceived those wind turbines—as friend or
foe—varied according to who I felt I was: a proud New Hampshirite or a
progressive flatlandah.
Van Bavel and Packer describe these processes in terms of attention.25 They
explain that our social identities change what we pay attention to, thereby
altering which information is processed in our minds. This changes what we
think about, thus changing what we “see”—and “taste,” apparently. Van Bavel
and Packer equate social identities to a pair of glasses that shape our view of the
world by winnowing down the information that we let in: “Identity helps you
grapple with the vast amount of information continually bombarding your
senses. It tells you what is important, where to look, when to listen, and perhaps
even what to taste.”26 Voilà. Here we are back at chapter 2, where we learned
that observations are theory laden. Or perhaps I should say: observations are
identity laden.
Recall that we make sense of the world through the use of observations and
the theories, knowledge, and beliefs we already have in our minds. That is, what
we know and believe is shaped by what we see; and conversely, what we see is
shaped by what we know and believe. Social identities shape both of these.
Social identities shape our theories, values, and beliefs. We tend to value and
believe what we feel that good members of our team value and believe. Social
identities also influence what we see—like seeing the wind turbines as monsters
when I think of myself as a New Hampshire local.
But our social identities are also informed by our observations of and
interactions with in- and out-group members, like when my conversations with
New Hampshire locals teach me that the group norm in my hometown is to view
wind turbines as negative. Our social identities also shape how we engage with
in- and out-group members in the first place—and how we view them, their
values, and beliefs. These interactions and observations influence our own
theories, values, and beliefs as well. All these processes result in our salient
social identities influencing how we comprehend the world, how we seek to
control it, and how we think about and connect with our communities (see table
above).

Social identities and the three Cs

SOCIAL-IDENTITY-BASED SOCIAL-IDENTITY-BASED SOCIAL-IDENTITY-BASED
COMPREHENSION CONTROL COMMUNITY
Making sense of the world in Controlling the world in ways that Connecting with and being a good
keeping with our team are good for our team member of our team
 “It’s a Good Fit”: American Politics and Aligned
Social Categories
If social identities are powerful enough to affect what I believe and even what I
see, then understanding what makes a given social identity salient will help me
understand the origins of my knowledge and beliefs. Recall that the more I think
about my group membership, the more accessible that social identity will be in
my mind. And the closer I feel I am to my group prototype, the better the fit with
that social identity. When I’m in New Hampshire, wearing my New Hampshire
flannel, breaking out my NH accent, and referencing landmarks from days gone
by, I am activating my NH social identity and making it accessible in my mind.
But I am also illustrating how well I fit. By wearing the clothes, using the accent,
and sharing relevant cultural history, I’m approaching my sense of the group
prototype. Then, once my identity is both accessible and a good fit, that identity
is salient. And once salient, it shapes my perceptions and judgment formation.
Translation: I start to see cars from Massachusetts as interlopers and wind
turbines as eyesores.
In the US political context, the concepts of accessibility and fit are working to
tear us apart. Recall that because of social sorting, America’s political parties
serve as efficient proxies for racial, religious, geographic, and cultural
categorizations. One’s political party in the United States has come to serve as a
mega-identity that envelops all these sociodemographic and cultural
categorizations. In fact, Lily Mason’s work shows that as these identities are
aligned, partisans identify more with these related groups.27 The fit of America’s
parties extends not only to cultural differences in how Democrats and
Republicans tend to spend their free time and raise their children but even to
their aesthetic preferences—for art, music, and entertainment.28 These
differences allow our group prototypes (star examples of our team and our
opposing team) to be observed and reinforced in the world around us all the
time.
Republicans in particular have exceptionally good fit. Working-class
conservative white evangelicals who live in rural places fit very well into the
Republican category; they embody the group prototype. But liberal Americans
from ethnically diverse urban or suburban neighborhoods who might question
the existence of God fit fairly well into the Democratic category, where they are
approaching a group prototype—albeit a more ambiguous one than we find on
the political right. Thus, the social sorting of the parties, and the fit of party
members, is asymmetrical (see figures below and on facing page).

Social Sorting. As our social identities become aligned with one another, our political party identity
efficiently captures our racial, religious, geographic, and cultural identities as well.

Asymmetrical Social Sorting in the United States

It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: there is nothing inherently
bad about occupying “aligned” sociodemographic and cultural categories.
Simply being conservative, white, Christian, and rural-dwelling doesn’t make
someone a bad person, nor does being liberal, from a racial or ethnic minority
group, secular, and city-dwelling. However, having aligned categories makes our
corresponding political identities salient by giving us good fit. Good fit means
we are more likely to think of ourselves in terms of our partisan identities. And
thinking of ourselves in this way means our attitudes and behaviors can be
readily “guided” by prominent group prototypes (like politicians or media elites)
and constantly reinforced (or strengthened) through our political and media
environments. Ezra Klein summarizes it this way: “Since these mega-identities
stretch across so many aspects of our society, they are constantly being
activated, and that means they are constantly being reinforced.”29

Expressive Approaches to Partisanship

The identity-based approach to political partisanship—also referred to as an
expressive approach—considers political party to be a stable characteristic and
thus largely unaffected by policy considerations or ideology.30 Instead of being
about the issues, expressive approaches to partisanship suggest that my party
identification is about my identification with my team. In Partisan Hearts and
Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters, political scientist
Donald Green and his coauthors compare political identity with religion—where
the team identity comes first and related beliefs and feelings about other
religions come later.31 For example, you’re born into a Catholic family, so you
don’t believe in abortion or sex before marriage, and you feel an opposition to
Protestants. This picture of partisanship operates in stark contrast to more
“rational” or “instrumental” models that see party identification as the thoughtful
result of policy preferences, which would change as my policy positions
change.32 I find the parallels between party and religion quite helpful, but maybe
that’s just because I have a whole lot of loved ones who identify as Catholic and
yet are pro-choice and open to premarital sex. Their religious social identity
stays the same, regardless of their specific beliefs.
For decades, political scientists have traced the ideological sorting of
America’s political parties, in which the Republican Party has become more
conservative and the Democratic Party more liberal.33 It was then that experts
began to consider that these increasingly overlapping aspects of partisan and
ideological identities might facilitate a more “expressive” (less policy-based)
approach to party identification.34 Researchers found that political participation
was driven more by strength of partisan identity and less by concerns about
political policies. Instead of just measuring party identification on a scale from
“strong Democrat” to “strong Republican,” scholars began examining the
“identity” part of party identification. Through questions like, “When talking
about [Republicans/Democrats/Independents] how much do you use ‘we’ instead
of ‘they’?” they learned that strong party identification was associated with
heightened emotional responses to party-based threats and reassurances.35 All of
these findings were consistent with partisanship functioning more as a social
identity and less as an outcome of rational policy deliberations.
As our various identity categories become more associated with our political
parties, and as our categorical fit improves, the salience of our political party
mega-identity grows too. In fact, political scientists Lily Mason and Julie
Wronski found that Democrats and Republicans with highly aligned racial,
religious, and political categories—and thus highly salient partisan identities—
report feeling closer to members of their party than those whose categories are
less aligned.36 If I am an agnostic Democrat from a diverse Boston
neighborhood, I will feel closer to the Democratic Party than if I am a
churchgoing Democrat from rural Iowa, regardless of my opinions about
government policy. And party members whose identities aligned were also more
likely to identify as strong Democrats and strong Republicans compared with
other party members.37 So the agnostic Democrat who lives in the diverse Hyde
Park neighborhood of Boston will tend to feel more strongly like a Democrat
than the churchgoing one in rural Elk Horn, Iowa. All this makes sense when
you consider how these political cleavages facilitate group prototypes. As our
categories align, we get closer and closer to our sense of what an idealized group
member looks and acts like.
Does thinking of ourselves in terms of our political party or identifying
strongly with our party matter? Well, if tapping into one’s southern identity
makes southern food taste better, and if connecting with my rural New
Hampshire identity transforms environmentally friendly windmills into
industrial eyesores, then yes. Thinking of ourselves in terms of our political
party matters. It matters for a host of reasons I’ll summarize here, but let’s start
with this one: partisan identity salience matters because observations are theory
—and identity—laden. Salient partisan identities shape what we see.
Take, for example, the much-studied phenomenon of partisans changing their
evaluation of America’s economic performance on the basis of which party
holds the presidency. When asked how well they feel the economy is doing
before and after important elections, partisans will change their economic
evaluations seemingly overnight to reflect whether their party is in control.
When my party is in control, I think the economy is strong. When the other party
is in control, I think it’s in the toilet.38 These partisan effects on perception
extend to how partisans experience news events and media content as well.
Partisans selectively perceive their party’s candidate to have performed better in
presidential debates.39 They are more likely to perceive news show hosts who
critically cover their political side as being unfairly “biased” against them, and
they are less likely to see actual bias in opinion programming that supports their
political side.40
Not only does political identity influence what we see and how we see it, but
it also influences what we feel.41 When a salient social identity is threatened, we
experience heightened anger.42 In the context of political identity, then, having
aligned social, political, and cultural identities facilitates deep emotional and
ego-driven responses in the realm of politics. Partisans with aligned identity
categories experience more anger at the opposing party’s candidate and greater
pride in their own party’s candidate.43 They are made angrier and more
enthusiastic by exposure to emotionally charged political content and tend to
participate more in politics.44 While category-aligned people are more likely to
hold slightly more extreme issue positions than those with less aligned social and
political categories, the real difference between aligned and nonaligned groups is
in the emotional and social aspects of their polarization: their anger, their
political participation, and their perception of the other side.45
Crucially, these hyperemotional responses to partisan identities contribute to
the dehumanization of the other side.46 Political psychologist Erin Cassese finds
that the more partisans identify with their party, the lower they place members of
the other political party on the Ascent of Man visual scale—the graphic that
shows various stages in the evolution of humans, from apes to Neanderthals to
Homo sapiens. In other words, the more people identify with their own party, the
more they rate the other side as less evolved, and hence less human.47

Partisan Identity Salience Shapes Belief in

Misinformation
Not only does partisan identity salience affect what we see and feel, but it also
shapes what we know—or at least what we think we know. In my work with my
colleagues at the University of Delaware, we studied how partisan identity
salience relates to belief in misinformation about COVID-19 and the 2020
election. Recall that in late 2020, President Trump both downplayed the severity
of COVID-19 and falsely alleged that the 2020 election had been rigged and was
riddled with fraud. Thus, it would have been consistent with the Trump-guided
Republican Party prototype for Republicans high in partisan identity salience to
hold beliefs consistent with these propositions.
Because our research team was studying health-related attitudes and beliefs
among at-risk groups, our data are split into two samples: ages 18–49 and ages
50 and older, surveyed in November–December 2020. First, we identified
Democrats and Republicans as low, medium, or high in partisan identity salience
on the basis of their agreement with the following statements: “My identity as a
(Democrat/Republican) is important to me” and “Being a
(Democrat/Republican) is a big part of who I am.” These two items were
averaged and used to separate respondents into low, medium, and high partisan
identity salience.48
We then looked at the percentages of Democrats and Republicans who
somewhat to strongly agreed with three pieces of COVID misinformation as a
function of their levels of partisan identity salience. Those three pieces of
misinformation were (a) “The coronavirus is a hoax,” (b) “The coronavirus
vaccine will be used to implant people with microchips,” and (c) “The flu is
more lethal than coronavirus.”
Our results tell a simple story. Among Republicans, the more central that
partisanship was to their identity, the more likely they were to report believing
that COVID was a hoax, microchips would be implanted through the vaccines,
and the flu was more lethal than COVID. Note, however, that belief in
misinformation about COVID was lower in the older sample than in the younger
one. This should give us some peace of mind, as it shows how the population
most at risk from the harmful effects of COVID (older individuals) was less
likely to believe false information about COVID than were younger folks. When
I look at these graphs, my concern is about what happens to perceptions of
reality on issues that are distant from us (which COVID may have seemed for
younger people). The extent of misperceptions reported among Republicans ages
18–49 who said their political party was a big part of how they think of
themselves is staggering, with about half of the 18- to 49-year-old Republicans
high in partisan identity salience reporting that COVID was “a hoax.”
We conducted a similar analysis of misperceptions related to the 2020
election in the weeks immediately following the presidential election.49 Here we
looked at the percentage of respondents with varying levels of partisan identity
salience who somewhat to strongly agreed with the following: (a) “The fact that
Trump lost means that the election was rigged,” (b) “There was widespread
voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential election,” and (c) “We can never be sure that
Biden’s win was legitimate.” The story is similar. Across both age groups,
Republicans who reported that their political party affiliation was a central part
of their identity were the most likely to report believing party-serving
misinformation. Among Democrats, election misinformation beliefs were higher
among the younger population than among the older one.
Democrats and Republicans Who Report Believing COVID Misinformation by Their Partisan Identity
Salience Democrats and Republicans Who Report Believing COVID Misinformation by Their Partisan
Identity Salience
 These findings are consistent with the results of a CNN poll conducted almost
10 months after the 2020 election that found that 59 percent of self-identified
Republicans reported that “believing that Donald Trump won the 2020 election”
was “very” or “somewhat important” to what being a Republican meant to them.
Belief in the Big Lie had become a central part of their partisan identity.50

Partisan Identity Salience Shapes Our Actions

As our partisan identities shape what we see and how we feel, they also shape
what we do. Political scientist Marc Hetherington traced increases in Americans’
political participation from 1996 to 2004.51 Following 30 years of decreased
voter turnout, in 1996 American voter turnout began to rise, a trend that
Hetherington connects to the increased political polarization among elites
starting at that time. (Remember the 1994 Republican revolution and Republican
candidates taking the oath to uphold the Contract with America on the steps of
the Capitol building?) His analyses show that it was then that Americans became
more interested in elections and started to care a whole lot more about who won.
They became more likely to express their political opinions through bumper
stickers, buttons, campaign donations, and efforts to influence the votes of
others. While some of these increases in voter turnout appeared to be the
outcomes of more active outreach efforts on the part of campaigns, partisan
identity researchers point to intensifying political group identities and resulting
partisan emotions as the pivotal factors driving Americans’ increased political
action.
In a study of 30 years of survey data from the American National Election
Survey, political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Masha Krupenkin tracked
changes in partisans’ evaluations of—and emotional responses to—the opposing
party and how these trends contributed to increases in political participation.52
Not only did they find increasingly negative evaluations of the opposing party,
but starting in the mid-1990s (again, the year 1994 seems important here) the
relationships between out-group evaluations and emotions increased. Meaning,
now more than ever, the more you dislike the opposing party’s candidate, the
more you also dislike members of the other party, evaluate the other party’s
candidate more negatively on key traits, and report more negative emotions in
response to the other party. All this negativity focused on the out-group is
increasingly being experienced as part of one big cohesive partisan package.53
And all these negative evaluations are increasingly associated with political
participation. To me, the most alarming finding is that prior to 1994, voting and
political participation were driven by Americans’ positive feelings toward their
own party more than they were by negative feelings toward the other party. But
today, we participate more because we hate the other side. So, in 1984, someone
might wear a button and put up a yard sign because she loves Ronald Reagan.
Today, she attends a rally and donates money because she hates Joe Biden.
Democrats and Republicans Who Report Believing Election Misinformation by Their Partisan Identity
Salience Democrats and Republicans Who Report Believing Election Misinformation by Their Partisan
Identity Salience
 The Problems for Democracy
To be clear, the concern here is not that Americans are participating too much in
politics but rather that the forces driving that participation are corrosive and
dangerous. Political communication scholars Nathan Kalmoe and Lily Mason
explore the distinction between benign partisanship anchored in party pride (e.g.,
wearing a button because you love Reagan) and malign partisanship tethered to
out-group animus (e.g., attending a rally because you hate Biden).54 Their
analyses suggest that as party identity gets stronger and more salient, partisans
are more likely to endorse a kind of partisanship that is open to aggressive
attacks—or even violence—against the other side. Considering that we look to
the “best” members of our social categories for a sense of how to think and act,
this is bad news. Today when we look to those who identify most strongly with
our party, we find partisans who are more likely to hate the other side,
participate in politics driven by hate, see the other side as less than human,
morally disengage from them, and be open to the idea of threats and violence in
service of our opposition to them. Note that this is not what we see when we
look at the “average” party member (who is less affectively polarized, less
participatory, and less morally disengaged), but rather what we see when we
look at prominent partisan prototypes.
There are so many reasons why these dynamics are bad for democratic health
that it’s hard to know where to begin. I find it helpful to think more broadly
about the criteria necessary for democracies to thrive and how each of the
developments discussed here complicates those criteria. Steven Levitsky and
Daniel Ziblatt, authors of How Democracies Die, explain that a key criterion for
democratic health is support for democratic norms among political elites—that
is, the unwritten rules that allow for democracy to function. Chief among them,
they argue, are “mutual toleration” and “forbearance.” Mutual toleration is
described as “the idea that as long as our rivals play by constitutional rules, we
accept that they have an equal right to exist, compete for power, and govern.”55
Forbearance is the democratic proposition that “politicians should exercise
restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives.”56 When members of the
two opposing political parties have deep animus for one another or begin to see
the other side as a threat to their way of life or as less than human, the prospect
of mutual toleration becomes grim. Such hostilities discourage legislators (and
regular citizens) from recognizing the other side’s views as remotely acceptable
—or even legitimate. These conditions easily morph into an “ends justify the
means” mentality in which people fighting for their side feel justified in using
any means necessary to stop the other side, hence violating the norm of
“forbearance.”
So, what do Levitsky and Ziblatt see as the chief contributors to the erosion of
these two democratic norms? Like many political scientists studying the state of
American democracy, the authors point to the social sorting of the parties as a
central factor: “The social, ethnic, and cultural bases of partisanship have also
changed dramatically, giving rise to parties that represent not just different
policy approaches, but different communities, cultures, and values.”57 As a
possible solution, they suggest a “reshuffling” of the parties to undo the racial
and religious alignment that has occurred over the past 50 years.
The authors also warn of the ability of populist leaders to take advantage of
these fertile conditions for democratic erosion, stating simply, “When populists
win elections, they often assault democratic institutions.” Recall that populist
leaders like Donald Trump are antiestablishment figures who promise to rid
politics of “corrupt elites” (e.g., “Drain the swamp”) through identity-based
appeals to the good, pure, moral people.58 Polarization and social sorting
increase the effectiveness of such “us/them” appeals. And in places where the
population has become ideologically polarized and parties have become sorted
along the lines of race and religion, populist authoritarians have thrived.59
In the next chapter we will unpack another by-product of social sorting: the
epistemic sorting of America’s political parties. As the two parties have sorted in
terms of race, religion, and culture, they seem to have also sorted in the very
ways that they come to understand their worlds. And because of the nature of the
sorting process—especially the sorting of evangelical Christians into the
Republican Party—the asymmetrical way Americans make sense of their worlds
may be contributing to asymmetrical wrongness, potentially contributing to a
greater belief in misinformation and conspiracy theories on the right than on the
left.
 Chapter 5

What Guides My Team, Intuition or

Evidence?
IN AUGUST 2021, scrolling my Twitter feed, I came across a tweet from
Nathan Vickers, a reporter at KCTV5 in Kansas. He was covering the Johnson
County Board of Commissioners meeting where community members were
speaking out about face mask mandates and COVID-19 vaccines. Vickers
highlighted one mother’s public comment: “I have a bachelor’s degree in logic, a
master’s in motherhood, and I’m board certified in American freedom.”1 I
messaged Vickers to confirm that this statement was real, and he kindly
forwarded the link to the Johnson County Facebook page so that I could hear the
resident for myself: “Bachelor’s degree in logic, a master’s in motherhood, and
board certified in being a freedom loving American.” A few words off from the
original quote, but, yes, it was real.
Recall that we understand our world through two pathways: the theories,
values, and beliefs we hold in our minds, and our observations of the world.
These two paths are intertwined, as our theories and beliefs are updated by our
observations, while our observations of the world are both theory laden and
identity laden. The willingness to allow observations and evidence—even
disconfirming observations and evidence—to inform our theories, values, and
beliefs is central to the pursuit of empirical truth: truth as it exists not in our
minds but in the world. Relying only on the theories, values, and belief we
already hold in our minds will inevitably lead us to reinforce what we already
believe to be true, even if it’s not. Without the incentive to integrate
disconfirming observations and challenge our preexisting theories, it’s difficult
to imagine how we would ever get closer to empirical truth.
Countless psychological theorists have recognized that humans form
judgments in wildly different ways under different conditions. We have the
capacity to make decisions quickly, based on gut instinct and emotional
responses; and we also have the capacity to make decisions more slowly, based
on reflection and thoughtful integration of new information with existing
knowledge and beliefs. As described by the late Seymour Epstein, these are “two
kinds of processing [that] are not opposite equivalents but represent two kinds of
information processing that are independent.”2 In other words, it’s not an either-
or situation. Most of us are regularly using both. The research and theorizing on
these two systems are vast.3 Perhaps best known is Nobel Prize winner Daniel
Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow. In it, Kahneman characterizes two
systems of thought: System 1 is the more efficient system that uses emotions and
instinct to form judgments quickly, and System 2 is the more thoughtful system
that takes time to reflect and even challenge the judgments derived through
System 1.
While all of us rely on both systems to survive, some tend to rely on one more
than the other. Individuals who place faith in their own intuition and emotions
tend to feel as though their automatic responses to the world—informed by their
preexisting theories, values, and beliefs—are sound, even though they may
sometimes be wrong.4 Individuals who prefer to deliberate and evaluate evidence
may take longer to arrive at their beliefs about the world.5 They will tend to
engage in more cognitive reflection as they consider how their observations of
the world ought to update their theories, values, and beliefs.
Political psychologists Kevin Arceneaux and Ryan J. Vander Wielen use
individual psychological traits to identify the kinds of people who will tend to
use one system over the other. They propose that people who are less inclined to
enjoy thinking and problem solving (people who score lower in the trait “need
for cognition” [NFC]) and people who enjoy and prefer to experience intense
emotions (people who score higher in “need for affect” [NFA]) are more likely
to engage with the world through intuition and emotions (System 1), while those
high in need for cognition and low in need for affect are more likely to engage in
deliberate thoughtful reflection (System 2). Their research shows that those more
prone to thoughtful reflection (high in NFC and low in NFA) are more likely to
“tame their intuition,” adjusting their immediate reflexive responses through a
more thoughtful process. Meanwhile, those prone to emotional responses (low in
NFC and high in NFA) are more likely to go with their gut—and are also more
likely to be wrong.6
We can also think about these different decision-making systems in terms of
“epistemic motivations” related to our “beliefs about the nature of knowledge
and how one comes to know.”7 On the one hand is how much an individual
trusts intuition and emotion as a pathway to truth, and on the other is how
important it is that one’s beliefs match and are updated by empirical evidence
and data. For obvious reasons, epistemic beliefs have become a centerpiece of
the study of misinformation and conspiracy theory beliefs. People who are
guided by intuition over evidence are more likely to believe misinformation.
And people who value evidence and data as a pathway to judgment formation
are less likely to believe misinformation.
Political communication scholars R. Kelly Garrett and Brian Weeks
examined how these different ways of knowing are correlated with beliefs in
conspiracy theories. They assessed “faith in intuition for facts” by asking
respondents how much they “trust their gut to tell them what’s true and what’s
not,” “trust their initial feelings about the facts,” and “can usually feel when a
claim is true or false even if they can’t explain how they know.” They then
measured “need for evidence” by asking respondents if they agreed with
statements like “Evidence is more important than whether something feels true,”
“A hunch needs to be confirmed with data,” and “I trust the facts, not my
instincts, to tell me what is true.”8 Their findings show that valuing intuition is
associated with greater belief in conspiracy theories, while “needing evidence” is
associated with less belief in conspiracy theories. Because intuition is about
coming to conclusions efficiently and “feeling” what’s true, this way of knowing
emphasizes what we already value and believe over observations or evidence to
the contrary. Individuals who place their faith in intuition are more likely to
observe or “see” the world in keeping with their preexisting theories and social
identities—and so sometimes those observations are wrong.

Actively Open-Minded Thinking, Intuition, and

Religion
In contrast to intuition or gut-guided thinking is “actively open-minded thinking”
(AOT), which reflects the extent to which we allow new information, settings,
and stimuli to influence our knowledge and beliefs.9 When we measure AOT, we
ask people how much they agree with statements like “A person should always
consider new possibilities” and “People should always take into consideration
evidence that goes against their beliefs.” It also includes the reversed-coded
items “It is important to persevere in your beliefs even when evidence is brought
to bear against them” and “One should disregard evidence that conflicts with
your established beliefs.” Professor Gordon Pennycook and his colleagues have
conducted extensive research of how these individual “thinking styles” affect
one’s susceptibility to false information.10 While they have used many different
measures to assess how individuals come to truth (including Frederick’s dreaded
Cognitive Reflection Test involving lily pads and the cost of baseball bats,
covered in chapter 211), Pennycook has focused extensively on AOT. His studies
consistently show that when people place value on the role of evidence as a
means of updating their beliefs, they are less likely to believe misinformation
and conspiracy theories.12
In an interview with Pennycook and his frequent collaborator David Rand, I
asked about these psychological measures, and their thoughts about the
importance of actively open-minded thinking in particular. Pennycook explained
AOT this way:

[AOT] is not about how much you care about the truth, because everyone cares about the truth. …
To exist in the world, you have to rely on things being true. What the AOT is about is the way that
you approach evidence and problems, whether you’re questioning yourself. Do you care enough?
… Are you obsessed with knowing what is actually true? How much are you motivated to put that
first rather than how you’re feeling about something?13

Pennycook’s research points to relationships between AOT and countless

psychological, political, and informational constructs. People who score higher
on AOT score higher on acceptance of science and tend to be more politically
liberal, while those who score lower on AOT are more likely to embrace
traditional moral values and religious fundamentalism.14
In our discussion of AOT, Rand highlighted an important distinction between
people who come to truth based on faith and those who prefer evidence:

Yes, people want to know the truth. But at the same time, work that you [Pennycook] and I have
both done suggests that there also is—with religion as the dominant example—big variation in the
extent to which people are happy to take things on faith, rather than wanting evidence. These are
separate dimensions, right? Like how much I need evidence to believe a thing versus “Am I down
to believe it on faith?”15

One cannot study the psychology of misinformation without being overwhelmed

by the amount of empirical evidence regarding the relationships between
religiosity, cognitive style, and belief in misinformation. As Michael Bronstein
and his colleagues (including Pennycook) conclude, “Delusion-prone and
dogmatic individuals, as well as religious fundamentalists, are more likely than
others to believe fake news, and that this may be in part because they exhibit
reduced analytic and actively open-minded thinking.”16 Notice that this lack of
open-minded thinking does not mean that fundamentalists are pigheaded or
prejudiced, but rather that they simply prioritize faith in what they already
believe over any evidence to the contrary.
When I first encountered research on the social sorting of the political parties
in the United States, I was struck by the potential dangers inherent in racially
and religiously sorted political parties simply because of their capacity to fuel
the identity-based divides we’ve discussed so far. These dynamics are
dangerous, and democracy experts warn that these aligned political mega-
identities are contributing to political sectarianism, which threatens democratic
health.17 But through the social-identity-driven dynamics of wrongness, social
sorting may have another insidious downstream effect: the epistemic sorting of
the parties. Because of the ideological, religious, and cultural sorting of our
parties, partisanship also signals a divide between different ways of
comprehending the world.
For reasons related to biology, physiology, and genetics, individuals have
interpersonal threat-monitoring systems on varying levels of alert.18 These
systems then shape our psychological needs that contribute both to our social
and cultural attitudes and beliefs and to our preferred ways of engaging with the
world.19 This process creates asymmetries in the needs and urges that shape how
liberals and conservatives think and behave, in terms of both existential needs
related to threat management and epistemic needs related to how they come to
know the things they know.20
Social and cultural conservatives are more likely to be monitoring for
interpersonal and physical threat. As a result, they are more likely than liberals
to be motivated by efficiency and to form judgments based on emotions and
intuition.21 In contrast, those who are less concerned about physical threats feel
less pressure to make decisions quickly; instead, they have the luxury of being
comfortable with uncertainty, ambiguity, and unpredictability. Liberals thus
have a higher tolerance for ambiguity and engage in more cognitive reflection
when faced with new information. These same underlying predispositions likely
contribute to more socially liberal attitudes, especially on issues relating to race,
sexuality, and crime.22
This association—between ways of coming to truth, on the one hand, and
political ideology, on the other—might help account for some of the political
asymmetry researchers find in belief in and spread of misinformation and
conspiracy theories.23 In the US context, for example, we know that Republicans
were more likely than Democrats to believe COVID misinformation and
conspiracy theories and more likely to share false information about COVID
online.24 Studies of rumor-sharing online show a sizable asymmetry in the
sharing of false information (this time related to the 2013 Boston Marathon
bombings and the 2020 death of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein in prison), with
conservatives far more likely to share rumors than liberals.25
But not all studies show that belief in misinformation and conspiracy theories
is higher among conservatives than among liberals. In a massive cross-national
study of conspiracy theory beliefs, a team of researchers found that the
association of conservatism with conspiracy theory beliefs depended on context,
like which political side was favored by the conspiracy theory and which
political and cultural elites were sharing it.26
Additionally, the relationship between conservatism and conspiracy theory
beliefs depends largely on what kind of political conservatism we’re talking
about. These relationships between psychological traits, on the one hand, and
political ideology, on the other, don’t really show up in the context of fiscal
conservatism (our positions on taxes, regulation, and welfare). Instead, they are
most pronounced in the context of social and cultural ideology—that is, issues
related to gender, sexuality, race, and crime.27 This same ideological dimension
is central to the sorting of America’s political parties discussed in chapter 3.28
This is the divide that captures everything from debates over critical race theory
to transgender rights, LGBTQ rights, abortion, immigration reform, and policing
issues. With conservative beliefs on these social and cultural issues, come more
efficient, emotion-based, and intuitive forms of information processing. And
with liberal views on these issues come a higher tolerance for ambiguous
situations and experiences, a higher need for cognition, and more careful
information processing. No, these relationships are not necessarily true for every
individual conservative or every individual liberal, but on average, these
associations between thinking styles and social/cultural political ideology do
exist.
There’s an additional angle to this “epistemic sorting” story that I find
compelling as well. Recall that as the Republican Party deliberately began
courting the vote of white evangelical Christians, the party grew more
conservative in its views on everything from abortion to women’s rights to
LGBTQ issues.29 As the number of evangelical Protestants in the Republican
Party grew throughout the 1980s and ’90s, the frequency of church attendance
and the importance of religious faith in the lives of Republican Party members
steadily increased. And with that shift toward Evangelicalism in the Republican
Party came a shift in how Republicans—and Republican Party leadership—came
to value different ways of coming to “truth.”
In their book Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our
Politics, political scientists J. Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood argue that the most
significant consequence of this religious shift in American partisanship is how it
changed the ways in which the two major parties come to know the things they
know.30 As the Republican Party became the home to evangelical and
fundamentalist Christians, it also became home to a way of understanding the
world rooted in faith and intuition—as opposed to empirical evidence and data.
Explain the authors, “Conservatives are far more likely than liberals to be
Intuitionists. Partly this is because so many of them are conservative Christians.
And it is precisely the conflation of ideology, intuition, and religion that is
causing much of the confusion about the role of ideology in US politics.”31
While Oliver and Wood acknowledge that we all use intuition to navigate the
world to some extent, people vary in how they prioritize intuition and emotions
over evidence and data. Intuitionists display what the authors refer to as
“magical thinking,” a way of interpreting the world that is designed not to bring
them closer to truth but to “validate their feelings and placate their anxieties.”
Using a fascinating series of items, the authors measure people’s preferences for
situations that involve symbolic harm (those that can’t harm you but that feel
harmful) over situations that involve real harm (such as physical harm)—for
example, a preference for the symbolic harm of “stabbing a photograph of one’s
family six times” over the real harm of “sticking one’s hands in a bowl of
cockroaches,” or for “yelling ‘I hope I die tomorrow’ six times out loud” over
“riding in a speeding car without a seat belt.” The authors then integrate these
responses with people’s scores on “apprehension” and “pessimism” scales to
create a full “magical thinking” measure. Their results show that the “magical
thinkers”—those who are more afraid of symbolic harm than situations that pose
real harm—are more religious and attend church more frequently. They are also
more likely to believe in angels, ghosts, and the paranormal and are more likely
to believe that “everything happens for a reason.” These highly religious
intuitionists are also more likely to believe conspiracy theories. As Oliver and
Wood write, “The most important thing that conspiracy theories share with
religion is that they both attempt to order an ambiguous reality.”32
The work of sociologist and media scholar Francesca Tripodi illustrates that
some of the relationship between conservative Christianity and pathways to truth
is reflected in the evangelical practice of individualized scriptural inference. She
describes how evangelical Christianity encourages “close readings undertaken to
find truth in the words of sacred documents like the Bible or the Constitution.”33
Rather than relying on higher-status religious leaders to serve as arbiters of truth,
evangelical Christianity empowers members of the congregation to find their
own meaning in sacred texts. Although “encouraging conservative voters to do
their own research is not necessarily nefarious,” argues Tripodi, “it is a key
component of conservative propaganda.”34 “Doing our own research” inevitably
emphasizes what we already believe (and what people like us believe) as we
make sense of the world, leaving us with observations that are highly theory
laden and highly identity laden.

Do Ways of Coming to Truth Come First?

Most of these political psychological models assume that people hold underlying
propensities (originating from their threat-monitoring systems) related to ways
of knowing—favoring System 1 (intuition and emotions) or System 2 (reflection
and evidence)—and that it is the influence of these traits on interpersonal threat-
related beliefs as well as the sorting of different kinds of people into the different
parties that has exacerbated these political divides. But there is another
possibility that I find provocative and compelling—one that has the causal arrow
moving in the opposite direction.
What if psychological traits related to epistemology are not fixed but
malleable? What if our need for cognition, need for affect, tolerance for
ambiguity, value placed in intuition, and value placed in evidence are contingent
on what is happening around us—on what is made salient? What if the very way
we comprehend the world is informed by “how people on my team understand
things like this”?
In survey research conducted in 2008, Chris Federico and Pierce Ekstrom
found evidence consistent with this. They explored how the link between certain
psychological traits and political issue positions varied with the partisan identity
salience of the individual.35 They found that the link between people’s issue
positions and their need for cognitive closure (a trait that captures a discomfort
with ambiguity and a need for clear, final answers) was higher among those
whose partisan identity was more salient. While need for cognitive closure was
higher among issue-based conservatives than among liberals (consistent with
prior work), the need for cognitive closure was especially high among issue-
based conservatives who reported that “political attitudes are an important part
of my self-image.” And among issue-based liberals who reported high partisan
identity salience, need for cognitive closure was especially low. If your partisan
identity is important to you, your epistemic traits will look a lot like those shared
by members of your team. Admittedly, these are correlational data that do not
show that identity salience causes these associations to get stronger. It is still
possible that people who hold those traits are just higher in political identity
salience.
Fortunately, political psychologists Bert N. Bakker, Yphtach Lelkes, and
Ariel Malka were on the case with experiments and panel studies that allowed
them to examine changes in psychological traits over time.36 In studies
conducted in the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States, they found that
the personality traits most characteristic of an epistemically “closed” personality
(high in need for cognitive closure and authoritarianism) did predict more right-
wing issue positions at later points in time. But they also found evidence that
people’s politics affected how they later comprehended the world, with
conservative issue positions at one point in time associated with more “closed”
personality traits later on. Notably, given the religious sorting of the parties
described above, this was most pronounced in the US sample in the context of
attitudes toward abortion and LGBTQ issues. Here, conservative attitudes at
Time 1 predicted authoritarian personality traits at Times 2 and 3. These results
support a model in which people have a partisan identity that then increases their
likelihood of reporting personality traits that are in line with those of their
political team.
The researchers then conducted an experiment in which they hypothesized
that just getting people to think about themselves politically would cause them to
report psychological traits that are most valued by their political team. In other
words, how people think of themselves as part of their political team would
affect how they comprehended the world around them. The researchers told a
random half of the participants that the survey was about politics and asked them
political questions, including what they disliked about the opposing party. The
other random half was told the survey was about the internet. For the people who
were made to think about their political identity (i.e., who were asked political
questions), when they later responded to questions about personality traits, they
looked “psychologically” more like their “partisan team” than did respondents
who were told the survey was about the internet.
In the language of social identity theory, a couple of different things might be
happening here. On the one hand, maybe priming partisan identity caused people
to want to “perform” as good members of their partisan teams—and answering
questions about personality traits gave them that opportunity. But it might also
be that highlighting partisan identity motivated people to embody the traits that
made them feel like a part of their team. Bakker, Lelkes, and Malka conclude
their study by outlining the democratically problematic consequences of both:
“From a normative standpoint, this adds a concerning wrinkle to the standard
story on political polarization. Specifically, political polarization may be
exacerbated by people on different sides of the ideological spectrum adopting—
or perceiving themselves as possessing—different personality traits. Rather than
merely reflecting non-political psychological differences, opposite political
loyalties might motivate people to enhance such differences.”37

The Epistemology of Populism

Not every study shows a link between American partisanship and ways of
comprehending the world. Kevin Arceneaux and Ryan J. vander Wielen
explored whether a preference for intuition over evidence was associated with
American partisanship in 2015 and found no differences by party.38 Note,
however, that their study was conducted just months before Donald Trump
announced his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, in which he
referred to people emigrating from Mexico as “bringing drugs … bringing crime
… and [being] rapists.” If, as the findings of Bakker, Lelkes, and Malka suggest,
political context causes partisans to increasingly embody (or at least report
embodying) the epistemic traits of their team, then maybe the lack of findings in
2015 makes sense. It is certainly possible that years of political identity
reinforcement under a Trump presidency might make these correlations stronger.
In research that Erin Maloney, Amy Bleakley, Jessica B. Langbaum, and I
conducted immediately after the 2020 presidential election, we explored how the
ways that people report comprehending the world—through feelings and
intuition or through evidence and data—are associated with political preferences
and with belief in misinformation.39 The study, published in the Journal of
Social and Political Psychology, was conducted in the context of the larger
COVID-related project discussed in the last chapter. Because that work required
two separate samples—one for Americans ages 18–49 and one for Americans
ages 50 and over—these data are presented within each of those age groups. The
national survey we conducted in November–December 2020 asked participants
how much value they placed in intuition and emotions as pathways to truth, and
how much they valued evidence and data.40 We found that those who reported
“trusting their gut to tell them what’s true and what’s not” and “trusting their
initial feelings about the facts” were more favorable toward President Trump.
Meanwhile, those respondents who reported trusting “facts, not their instincts,”
and who agreed that “evidence is more important than whether something feels
true” were less favorable toward Trump and more likely to be liberal and
Democratic.41 Trump support was a stronger correlate of “ways of coming to
truth” than was party or ideology.
To illustrate these relationships here, I’ve categorized participants as low or
high in valuing intuition and emotion and low or high in valuing evidence and
data (split at the means). These two categorical variables were then crossed to
identify individuals with a combination of high intuition and low evidence
(“intuition-based thinkers”) and a combination of low intuition and high
evidence (“evidence-based thinkers”). The figure on page 117 illustrates the
average favorability toward President Trump within each of these two groups,
broken down by party affiliation. Among Republicans, Independents, and
Democrats alike, intuition-based thinkers rated Trump more favorably than did
their evidence-based thinking counterparts, across both age groups.
 Trump Favorability by Party and Type of Thinking

Next, we wanted to understand how these patterns were associated with belief
in misinformation about COVID and the 2020 election. We found that belief in
both sets of misinformation was higher among Republicans, conservatives, and
Trump supporters. But most importantly, like our colleagues R. Kelly Garrett
and Brian Weeks, we found that belief in misinformation was highest among
those who valued intuition and emotions and rejected evidence and data. The
figure on page 119 shows the number of pieces of COVID misinformation that
individuals somewhat to strongly agreed with out of three statements, including:
“The coronavirus is a hoax,” “The coronavirus vaccine will be used to implant
people with microchips,” and “The flu is more lethal than coronavirus.” It also
shows how many pieces of election misinformation that individuals somewhat to
strongly agreed with. These three statements were as follows: “The fact that
Trump lost means that the election was rigged,” “There was widespread voter
fraud in the 2020 Presidential election,” and “We can never be sure that Biden’s
win was legitimate.” As illustrated in the figures, more value placed in intuition
and emotions was associated with higher rates of misperceptions of both COVID
and the election, in both age groups. This relationship was most pronounced
among Republicans, such that the highest rates of misperceptions were found
among those Republicans who reported placing high value in intuition and
emotion. Importantly, these relationships were still significant even when we
held constant various sociodemographic characteristics.42 As J. Eric Oliver and
Thomas Wood write, “Intuitionism not only amplifies America’s ideological
divisions, it exerts its own power on public opinion.”43
You may notice that several of the misinformation beliefs explored in our
study were rooted in a classic conspiracy theory narrative. Statements like “The
coronavirus is a hoax,” “The coronavirus vaccine will be used to implant people
with microchips,” and “The fact that Trump lost means that the election was
rigged” are all tales of bad, powerful people operating in the shadows to harm
the public and hide the truth. Conspiracy theories such as these are a staple of
populist political rhetoric and populist beliefs.44 They were also a part of
President Trump’s political biography as he leveraged speculation about
President Obama’s birthplace to garner political and media attention back in
2011. Oliver and Wood explain that “conspiracy theories are so common in
populist movements that many scholars view these as one of the primary forms
of populist discourse, how ordinary people understand power structures.”45 In
their research, they also find that “magical thinkers” (their intuitionists) score
higher on political and cultural populism.
Misperceptions by Party and Level of Intuition-Based Thinking Misperceptions by Party and Level of
Intuition-Based Thinking
 Intuitionism and the rejection of evidence and expertise are especially
compatible with conservative populism. As discussed in chapter 3, populism is
an ideology that is thin on substance or policy positions. Instead, it is the rhetoric
of populism, with its adulation of “the pure people” and their moral distance
from the “corrupt elites,” that defines it.46 In solidarity with the crowd, populists
appeal to “common sense” and gut instinct.47 They reject experts and
intellectualism, instead prioritizing group affiliation and symbolism. As
rhetorician Jennifer Mercieca writes, President Trump is a “rhetorical genius”
when it comes to populist appeals.48 His engagement with the world—and his
communication style—is guided by instinct and intuition. In 2018, he told the
Washington Post, “My gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain
can ever tell me.”49 That same year, Trump’s adviser, Peter Navarro, discussed
his role as Trump rolled out new tariffs on steel and aluminum imports: “This is
the president’s vision,” Navarro said. “My function, really, as an economist is to
try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his
intuition is always right in these matters.”50 Phil Bump of the Washington Post
highlighted how this intuition-driven approach makes it challenging to get to
truth and to engage in democratic governance: “If there are no agreed upon facts,
all that’s left is opinion. But even when there are facts that could inform
decision-making, willfully ignoring them in favor of trusting the president’s gut
makes changing Trump’s view nearly impossible. How do you reason with
someone’s instincts?”51

Don’t Be Fooled
Prioritizing intuition and emotions while rejecting evidence and data can
increase our susceptibility to misinformation and conspiracy theories.52 This
combination is also associated with more polarized views on political issues and
more animosity toward members of the opposing political party.53 Given these
trends, it’s tempting to want to conclude that intuition-based thinking is always
bad, that evidence-based thought is always good, and that we should, as
Arceneaux and vander Wielen write, “tame our intuition.” But while emotional,
intuitive approaches to understanding the world can lead us to inaccurate
conclusions, they are not inherently bad. Psychologists Jonathan Evans and
Keith Stanovich explain that the notion that “intuitive, heuristic processes are
responsible for all bad thinking and that reflective, analytic processes necessarily
lead to ‘correct’ responses” is the most “persistent fallacy” in thinking about
how people come to understand their worlds.54 Psychologist Seymour Epstein
acknowledged that careful, reflective thinking is cognitively taxing and a huge
pain (my words) as well as “a very inefficient system for responding to everyday
events.”55 This is especially true given that intuition and emotions seem to work
pretty well most of the time. Psychologist Martie Haselton’s concept of adaptive
rationality emphasizes just this: that humans have adapted to make rational
decisions from “irrational” (read: intuitive and emotion-based) processes. We
instinctively know that a big animal baring its teeth is something to avoid, and
that when crowds of people are moving rapidly in one direction, we probably
should go with them. These shortcuts guide us in the direction of solid decisions
most of the time.56

Epistemology, Identity, and Humility

While “dual systems” approaches to the study of human cognition have been
popular for decades, the reality of what is going on in the brain is likely far more
complex.57 According to newer dynamic models of cognition, all of us use a
combination of intuition and emotions, on the one hand, and evidence and
reason, on the other, to various degrees in different contexts.58 All told, it seems
that characterizing intuitive emotional approaches as separate from or worse than
evidence-based or rational approaches is an oversimplification. Worse, to do so
might exacerbate the social and political divisions we’ve discussed thus far.
If partisan identity can trigger people’s conscious embrace of—or
performance of—distinct epistemic traits, perhaps politicizing ways of coming to
truth is a bad idea.59 Explicitly linking reason and evidence-based approaches to
liberal politics could very well encourage a deliberate rejection of seemingly
evidence-based approaches (like science, for example) among those on the
political right. It could also, hypothetically, lead to a citizen at a town hall
meeting opposing science-based public health measures on the grounds that she
has “a bachelor’s degree in logic, a master’s in motherhood, and is board
certified in being a freedom loving American.”
While Jonathan Evans and Keith Stanovich challenge the notion that
evidence-based approaches are normatively good and intuitive approaches are
normatively bad, they acknowledge that the more efficient, heuristic approaches
can be strategically manipulated to cause harmful, dysfunctional outcomes.60
When the cues we receive from our information environment are authentic (like
an actual tiger baring its teeth), our heuristic responses (scared = run!) will
generally lead to functional outcomes. They refer to this as a “benign”
information environment, where the cues are authentic and so the responses are
generally appropriate. But sometimes we find ourselves in an environment in
which cues are manipulated and used strategically to exploit our efficient
heuristic processes. They refer to this as a “hostile” information environment.
And in a hostile information environment, our heuristic responses may lead us
astray.
Given the role of political identity salience in activating accompanying
epistemic traits, conservative populists can make strategic use of partisan
identity to activate intuition and emotions to efficiently spread self-serving
disinformation and conspiracy theories among their supporters.61 If “people like
me” think through intuition and emotion, then I will tend to prioritize my
preexisting values and beliefs over disconfirming observations and evidence. But
if “people like me” think through evidence and data, I will prioritize new
observations and evidence over my preexisting beliefs. In other words, the
direction and strength of the arrows linking theories, values, and beliefs with
observations will depend on the ways of coming to truth that I feel are valued by
my team.
And yet, unless you are personally conducting controlled trials on the efficacy
of vaccines or conducting audits of election outcomes, the observations you’re
making are not direct observations of data and evidence but rather observations
of what credible sources and experts say they have observed. So, really, these
“evidence-based thinkers” are not being directly guided by evidence but rather
are guided by their trust in experts who are being guided by evidence. This
would imply that trusting sources who are guided by evidence and data might be
less of a cognitive process related to the evaluation of evidence and more of an
identity-driven shortcut related to trust.62 “People like me trust scientists.” This is
a heuristic cue. It is a form of System 1 processing—an efficient decision-
making process just like the one that social conservatives use.
In fact, identifying as the kind of person who relies on evidence and data may
become part of one’s social identity on the political left, regardless of how
liberals really form judgments. I think about this whenever I see those signs
posted in people’s front yards that say, “In our home, we believe that Black
Lives Matter, love is love, and … science is real.” Science is real. If I put this in
my yard, would it serve as a description of how I arrive at truth? Through
evidence, data, verification, falsification, and not removing myself from doubt?
Or would it signal what team I’m on?
This question was especially salient in the later months of the COVID
pandemic as the scientific findings and recommendations regarding the efficacy
of face masks evolved. During the initial deadly COVID wave in the spring of
2020, face masks were shown to be a highly effective way of preventing the
spread of the virus. In April 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention released new guidelines recommending the use of a cloth face
covering to help stop the spread of COVID, especially since new research
indicated transmission was possible even from asymptomatic carriers and that a
face covering significantly limited the amount of virus that people could expel
into the air.63
But wearing face masks became politicized. Politicians and media
personalities on the political right framed face mask mandates as a threat to
individual liberty.64 Research I conducted with my colleagues at the University
of Delaware in the fall of 2020 showed that Trump supporters who were
especially psychologically reactant (who reported experiencing high levels of
anger when their freedom of choice was restricted) were among the least likely
to engage in masking behaviors outside the home.65 For those on the political
left, engaging in masking behaviors starting in the spring of 2020 was an
evidence-based behavior guided by trusted experts.66 But over time, the mask
became embedded with elements of a liberal social identity. Masking became a
symbol of protecting people in your community and reflected a sense of
collective responsibility. It was also more likely among liberals who were
conflict averse—meaning they likely believed in the efficacy of masks but also
didn’t want to get in arguments with people for not wearing one.67
As the months went by, we learned more about COVID’s transmissibility
outdoors and the role of masks in slowing its spread. Evidence indicated that
outdoor transmission was highly unlikely, especially if people were more than
three feet apart.68 In an article in The Atlantic titled “The Liberals Who Can’t
Quit Lockdown,” Emma Green explores the challenge for some on the left as
COVID restrictions loosened in the spring of 2021: “For this subset, diligence
against COVID-19 remains an expression of political identity—even when that
means overestimating the disease’s risks or setting limits far more strict than
what public-health guidelines permit. … For many progressives, extreme
vigilance was in part about opposing Donald Trump.”69
As someone who lives in a predominantly liberal community and whose
friends and family are mostly liberal, I admit I felt a social pressure to continue
masking outdoors long after restrictions were lifted, as a way of signaling my
good standing as a part of my team. I found myself being skeptical of
information that suggested masks were unnecessary when outside. What may
have started out as an “evidence-based behavior” had become a part of my social
identity, and once it did it was very hard to go back, despite the changing
evidence. My community saw masks to be a sign of goodwill, and we put faith
in them as a way of controlling the spread of a deadly virus. For my team,
“belief in science” meant “belief in the efficacy of masks,” and I found it
difficult to stop wearing them while I was walking the dog or at an outdoor
barbecue. It had become hard for me to allow challenging or disconfirming
evidence to update my beliefs about masks. The irony here, of course, is that the
spirit of scientific inquiry requires that we seek out disconfirming evidence and
that we update our theories, knowledge, and beliefs in light of it. But for me,
what had started out as a science-based practice had—at least in some contexts
—become an identity-based performance.

The Power of Admitting We Might Be Wrong

At the heart of the epistemology of wrongness is an unwillingness to allow new
information to update our beliefs. But is there anything that can increase our
willingness to engage with and be moved by new information and evidence?
One of my favorite concepts in this area is that of intellectual humility (IH). IH
is an individual-level characteristic that captures how much we “recognize that a
particular personal belief may be fallible, accompanied by an appropriate
attentiveness to limitations in the evidentiary basis of that belief and to one’s
own limitations in obtaining and evaluating relevant information.”70 IH is about
how much we embrace—and adjust to—the fact that we might be wrong.
Psychology professor Mark Leary developed the following six items to capture
IH: (1) “I question my own opinions, positions, and viewpoints because they
could be wrong”; (2) “I reconsider my opinions when presented with new
evidence”; (3) “I recognize the value in opinions that are different from my
own”; (4) “I accept that my beliefs and attitudes may be wrong”; (5) “In the face
of conflicting evidence, I am open to changing my opinions”; and (6) “I like
finding out new information that differs from what I already think is true.”71
Like the AOT scale, IH captures how much people value the role of new
information and evidence in updating their existing beliefs,72 but while the AOT
scale frames these as prescriptive principles that people ought to live by, IH
frames these as descriptive aspects of the self. So rather than AOT’s “People
should do and think these things,” IH captures how much “I do and think these
things.”
Notice that IH does not make a firm distinction between ways of knowing,
either through intuition or through evidence. Rather, it captures how much
people recognize that their beliefs may be inaccurate—regardless of how those
beliefs were arrived at—and how much they are open to challenging and
updating their views. One of the many benefits of IH is a reduction in
susceptibility to misinformation. People who score higher on IH are more likely
to scrutinize health information and less likely to belief misinformation about
COVID-19.73 They hold fewer antivaccination attitudes, have higher intentions
of receiving the COVID vaccine,74 and are less prone to believe in conspiracy
theories more broadly.75 Psychologist Adam Grant writes, “Arrogance leaves us
blind to our weaknesses. Humility is a reflective lens: it helps us see them
clearly. Confident humility is a corrective lens: it enables us to overcome those
weaknesses.”76 It seems that being open to the possibility that we could be wrong
might very well increase our chances of being right.
 Part II: The Process
The first half of this book has unpacked how human beings are wrong about lots
of things all the time. Our innate needs to understand our worlds
(comprehension), to have agency in our lives (control), and to form a sense of
belonging (community) shape what we see and the conclusions we draw. We’ve
seen how social identity is a powerful force that influences what the three Cs end
up looking like. And we’ve seen how, in today’s America, lots of us—even
those of us who don’t think of ourselves as especially political—have “good
partisan prototype fit.” Because of overlapping sociodemographic, political, and
cultural identity categories, tapping into and activating our political mega-
identities can be done all kinds of ways—through politics, yes, but also through
references to religion, race, ethnicity, culture, lifestyle, and even ways of coming
to truth, all of which tend to cluster us under a blue tent or a red tent. We have
explored how this process of social sorting has harmful implications for
democracy and even how it shapes how we make sense of our worlds.
What we have yet to discuss is how these same dynamics are a goldmine for
anyone looking to engage and rile up lots of people all at once. The second half
of this book thus dissects the process through which our mediated political world
enhances American wrongness. Political elites, news organizations, partisan
media, and social media platforms make use of our political mega-identities to
mobilize supporters, attract audiences, and engage users. And every time they
do, those identities become a more potent, purer version of what they were
before. They become distilled, like an expensive whiskey. And as they do, they
increase our capacity for wrongness.
So, let’s head to part 2: the story of political identity distillation through our
mediated political world, how it fuels a cycle of asymmetrical American
wrongness, and what can be done to disrupt it.
 Part II
The Process
 Chapter 6

Exemplify Us
Identity Reinforcement through Political News

THE MARCH 2022 SUPREME COURT nomination hearing for Judge

Ketanji Brown Jackson marked the nomination of the first Black woman to serve
on the country’s highest court. A graduate of Harvard Law, Judge Jackson came
to the nomination as a “conventional and mainstream” highly credentialed
judge,1 with a measured judicial philosophy that seemed—on its face—unlikely
to ruffle the feathers of Republican lawmakers. Given that Supreme Court
nominees have historically been confirmed with “a substantial majority of votes
for confirmation,”2 one might expect the hearings for Judge Jackson to be rather
perfunctory and uncontroversial. But while confirmation hearings had
historically occurred with overwhelming bipartisan support (except in rare
instances like President Reagan’s nomination of Justice Robert Bork or President
H. W. Bush’s nomination of Clarence Thomas), over the past two decades, these
proceedings have been increasingly tinged with partisan conflict. In 2016,
President Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland was stalled by
Republican senators, who refused to hold a hearing or a vote on Garland’s
nomination. Soon thereafter, President Trump’s nominees, Justices Neil Gorsuch
and Brett Kavanaugh, were confirmed with just a minimum number of
Democratic votes—and Justice Amy Coney Barrett with no Democratic votes at
all.
As the nomination hearings for Justice Jackson unfolded, it was evident that
she, too, would be subject to the kind of browbeating that had come to define
contemporary Supreme Court nomination hearings.3 Republican senator Josh
Hawley of Missouri challenged the judge’s sentencing record on cases of child
sex abuse materials, suggesting that she had been too soft on child pornography
criminals, and voicing his fears of his own children being exploited. Republican
senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina questioned the judge’s defense of
detainees held as enemy combatants in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the 9/11
attacks. Frustrated by the committee chair’s defense of Judge Jackson, Senator
Graham raised his voice, expressing anger at the idea of these prisoners’ early
release. “As long as they’re dangerous, I hope they all die in jail if they’re going
to go back and kill Americans,” he said, before turning off his microphone and
storming out of the hearing.4
Republican senator Ted Cruz of Texas questioned the judge on the meaning
of critical race theory, a frequent topic of conversation among conservative
media hosts like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. An academic theory
introduced by Harvard legal scholars in the 1970s, critical race theory (CRT)
explores how institutions and systems perpetuate racial inequality. And while
CRT is not technically taught in elementary or secondary schools, in 2020 and
2021, conservative critics began describing antiracist and social justice curricula
in public schools as “CRT.”5
Senator Cruz’s CRT-related questioning included the dramatic use of props,
like an antiracist children’s book from the library of the private school where
Judge Jackson served on the board. Gesturing to oversized illustrations from the
book propped up on an easel behind him, the senator asked Judge Jackson, “Do
you agree with this book that is being taught to kids that babies are racist?” The
senator then used his time to read various passages from several of the school’s
books, including the provocative quote, “Can we send white people back to
Europe?”6
In reference to Senator Cruz’s aggressive questioning of Judge Jackson,
Michael Barbaro, host of the New York Times’s Daily podcast, asked Supreme
Court correspondent Adam Liptak, “What exactly is Cruz up to here?” Liptak
suggested that the Republican senators were engaged in a strategic performance,
that they “need[ed] a reason to vote against the first Black woman to serve on
the Supreme Court,” and that these questions were an “effort to find something
that will sell to at least [their] constituents that she likes terrorists, that she’s soft
on people involved in child sexual abuse, that she endorses racist baby books in
private schools. Whatever force these critiques have, their real purpose seems to
be to provide a rationale for a vote against Judge Jackson.”7
Connecting these dots would allow Republican lawmakers to convince more
moderate conservatives that their rationale for opposing the nomination was
sound, while also tapping into wedge issues that would mobilize their
conservative base. In the ideologically polarized and socially sorted reality of
contemporary elections, the latter of these is especially important. Every public-
facing moment is an opportunity to avoid “getting primaried”—that is, losing
their party’s nomination to a more ideologically extreme challenger. And the
threat of “getting primaried” is real. Between 2010 and 2014, one-third of
Republican senators seeking reelection found their vote totals under 60 percent
owing to challenges from the Right, and three of them lost their seats.8 The threat
posed by conservative Tea Party Republicans to establishment members of the
GOP during that time transformed the party. This ideological shift was fueled by
a well-oiled machine of conservative interest groups—organizations such as the
Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, and Heritage Action stepped in to financially
support and promote ideologically conservative candidates, including Senator
Ted Cruz and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.9 In that sense, the behavior of
elites in Congress—including their performances during Judge Jackson’s
nomination hearings—is a defensive strategy.

Partisan Prototype Performances

For a racially, religiously, geographically, and culturally homogeneous
Republican Party, avoiding “getting primaried” is about successfully performing
the role of a prototypical party member. Remember the prototypical Philadelphia
Eagles fan adorned with face paint and throwing snowballs at Santa? Not the
average member of the party but the best member of the party. The behavior of
Republican senators during the hearings illustrates their performance of “identity
ownership,” a term coined by political communication scholars Daniel Kreiss,
Regina Lawrence, and Shannon McGregor. The performance of identity
ownership involves political elites’ strategic “attempts to create the perception
and remind voters that they, and their parties, best represent particular social
groups.”10 For decades, political scientists studied the related concept of issue
ownership to describe how each political party was considered especially
capable of addressing certain issues. As a result, party leaders would work to
center elections on the issues their party “owned.”11 It is only appropriate that in
a socially sorted and identity-driven political context, politicians are working
less to own policies or issues and more to own their side’s political mega-
identities, proving they are “appropriate, credible ‘prototypes’ of particular
groups—and manifesting a good ‘fit’ with a group’s characteristics, values, and
norms.”12
For Republican senators in 2022, aggressively questioning Judge Jackson on
the teaching of CRT in schools or on child pornography sentencings was an
effort to do just this: prove to voters that they are a strong fit with the Republican
Party’s values and norms centering on race, religion, crime, and the vulnerability
of (white) children. Notice that all these values and norms are group based,
emphasizing values of one social category in opposition to other categories,
including white versus nonwhite, evangelical versus secular, and less educated
versus college educated.
Notice also that strategic use of identity-centered approaches does not require
that lawmakers share (either deliberately or inadvertently) false information. Yet,
through their performance of identity ownership, they set the wheels in motion
to facilitate identity-based misperceptions on the part of their supporters.
Political leaders “connect the dots” across social and cultural issues, creating
associations and developing schemas from which partisans can draw conclusions
(maybe true ones, maybe false ones). Following Judge Jackson’s nomination
hearings, experts warned that although the questions did not technically contain
false information, the framing of Senator Hawley’s questions tapped into a long-
standing web of right-wing conspiracy theories alleging that Democratic elites
have some involvement in child trafficking or pedophilia.13 The QAnon
conspiracy theories in particular—which have spread around the world since
2016—are based on false claims about a network of satanic child sexual
predators operating in the highest ranks of government and media. Just through
mere power of association, Hawley’s questions could tap into the same mental
schema, thus enabling the reinforcement of cognitive connections between the
judge and these insidious conspiracy theories.
Hawley’s questioning might have facilitated connections with the known
QAnon catchphrase “Save the children” frame as well—one that connects
conservative opposition to both the mandatory use of face masks and the
teaching of CRT in schools. As the Washington Post’s Phil Bump writes, “It’s
not necessarily that Hawley is specifically trying to appeal to QAnon supporters.
… But QAnon’s focus and Hawley’s politics share a common point of origin:
elevating and amplifying the fears of parents. And in both cases, that
amplification overlaps with hyper partisan attacks on the political left.”14 In this
way, both Hawley’s questions about child-pornography sentencing decisions and
Senator Cruz’s questions about the contents of antiracist children’s books likely
reinforced the same mental schema and, in so doing, placed it at the center of
what it means to be a prototypical Republican.

A Symbiotic Relationship
But is that it? Were these senators just performing their identity ownership to the
most extreme partisan voters, in the hopes they don’t lose their seats in the
primaries? Probably, yes. But remember that our understanding of politics is
mediated. We’re not in the room at the hearing. We rely on mediated
constructions of events to have a sense of what happened—or as Walter
Lippmann wrote in 1922, “The only feeling that anyone can have about an event
he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of the event.”
In other words, what we respond to are not actual events we have witnessed
directly, but to “pictures in our heads” of those events.15 So, yes, these displays
of identity are about shaping the pictures in voters’ heads, but lawmakers know
that these pictures get there by way of media, and they know that the press
cannot resist dramatic, aggressive performances of partisan identity. Senators’
dramatic identity-based performances serve two goals simultaneously: they
prove their culture war credentials to their base, and they appeal to journalistic
routines (habits of reporters and news producers) that earn them press coverage.
Even Democratic Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin, when asked about his
“very testy exchange” with Senator Lindsey Graham, replied with a laugh,
“Lindsey knows how to get on CNN.”16
This exploitability of the mainstream press, like politicians engaging in
dramatic displays of identity ownership knowing they’ll be rewarded with media
attention, is attributable to long-standing journalistic routines—habits of the
press that inform how they select, produce, and frame news stories. Political
communication scholar W. Lance Bennett describes the outcomes of these press
routines as “content biases” in the news.17 For example, news media tend to
focus on drama over harmony, individual personalities over institutions and
systems, and fragmented events over abstract policies and concepts.18 These
biases are generally done in anticipation of what it is that media organizations
think that we, the audience, want. We want drama. We want people. We want
stories. Or so media executives tell themselves. The negative effects of these
press biases are wide ranging, from fueling political cynicism to encouraging
audiences to blame individuals for their roles in their own misfortunes instead of
considering system-level solutions.19
These content biases in favor of conflict, personality, and isolated events are
so well established and predictable that political actors and interest groups have
used them to their own advantage for decades, making “getting spun the norm
rather than the exception.”20 Historically, these dynamics have been captured by
the phrase “the professionalization of politics,”21 which includes how political
handlers stage photo-ops to associate persuasive visuals with policy rollouts. Or
how communication teams produce “pseudo-events” to create good “optics” to
garner media attention.22 Professional communications teams work to create
experiences, events, scandals, and moments to be captured and distributed by
media organizations. These dynamics are also captured by the concept of the
“mediatization of politics,” wherein the behaviors of both media producers and
political leaders are governed more by the logics of media than by the logics of
politics.23
The predictability of the press’s content biases is why the press and
politicians are in a long-term “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”
relationship. Politicians need the press to help create “pictures in voters’ heads,”
and the press needs politicians to give it the raw ingredients for the political
spectacle of the day.24 And because they need each other, each of these entities
feeds into and rewards the needs and biases of the other. As our political context
has (d)evolved through polarization and sorting, the nature of the mediatization
of politics has (d)evolved, too.25
The professionalization of America’s political campaigns throughout the
1980s and ’90s was a strategic response to advances in the production standards
of television news. As political news became highly produced and edited,
politicians found fewer of their own words being included in the news, and more
editorializing from reporters against a backdrop of aesthetically pleasing
visuals.26 Michael Deaver, President Reagan’s media adviser, who orchestrated
countless positive press cycles for the president, explained that he and his team
understood that the business of television news in the 1980s was not journalism
but entertainment. Embracing the needs of the press meant producing good
“wallpaper” (pretty pictures) to accompany their stories, like arranging for
President Reagan to be filmed riding a horse, eating jellybeans, or drinking beer
with working-class voters in Boston—the latter occurring on the same day he cut
the corporate income tax rate.27
But recall that in 1986, the United States was not ideologically polarized at
the level of elites or the public. Legislation was frequently passed with bipartisan
support. Affective polarization was significantly lower than what we find among
partisans today.28 The parties were less separated along the lines of race, religion,
and culture than they are today. They were not as socially sorted—both the
Democratic and the Republican Parties included mixes of racial, religious,
geographic, and educational categories. And although trust in government
wasn’t as high as it had been back in the 1960s, in 1986 trust was hovering
around 40 percent—a stark difference from the mere 20 percent of Americans
currently reporting they can trust the government to do what is right most of the
time.29 For politicians like Reagan, creating “pictures in voters’ minds” against
this backdrop—of relative elite bipartisanship, moderately ideological voters,
amicable relations between regular Democrats and Republicans, and some trust
in government—meant curating positive pictures of strength (Reagan riding a
horse), grandfatherly kindness (Reagan eating jellybeans at work), and
approachability (Reagan drinking with the guys). Such moments appealed to the
press’s bias in favor of personalized, fragmented news while appealing to the
political spirit of the moment.
But for politicians to make it into the news today—in an era of elite
polarization, sorted and ideological voters, popular disdain for members of the
other party, and woefully low trust in government—they must appeal to a
different iteration of these same biases. In today’s context, personalization is
firmly conflict centered, as illustrated by the popularity of negative emotional
displays and up-close camera angles in political programming.30 In-your-face
programming, in which partisan actors yell at, insult, and interrupt each other, is
good for the audience metrics of media and bad for the citizen metrics of
democracy. These uncivil exchanges increase viewer attention and arousal—two
positive metrics that please media producers and advertisers while increasing
viewers’ hostility toward the opposing side and making them evaluate the other
side’s arguments more negatively.31
For Senators Cruz and Graham, tapping into today’s press biases to maximize
coverage while also creating positive pictures in the minds of today’s sorted,
polarized, untrusting Republican voters means emotionally, aggressively
challenging the opposition while proving their prototypical group fit. Intense
emotional displays about child pornography, terrorists, and racist baby books
appeal to the press’s bias in favor of personalized, fragmented, and dramatized
news while also allowing these elected officials to prove that they “own” their
party’s identity. Bennett was right when he said that “members of Congress have
learned how to play the media game.”32
In the days after the nomination hearings, I watched as the outrage cycle
came full circle. In my Twitter feed, I saw a post from Senator Graham saying,
“The Game Has Changed” along with a one-minute video arguing that
Democrats had been ruthless and relentless in their questioning of Trump’s
Supreme Court nominees but had given a free pass to “activist” Judge Jackson.
The video ended with the proud proclamation: “Senator Graham Voted Against
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for the U.S. Supreme Court,” with a call to donate
to his reelection campaign (see below).
The emotional intensity of the current polarized and social-identity-laden
political world means that political conflict and aggressive exchanges about
divisive social and cultural issues will be most likely to make the news. They
appeal to media’s biases in favor of conflict, personalities, and fragmented
events. And they help lawmakers perform the partisan prototype, all while
emotionally engaging their most attentive partisans. Put simply: if you berate a
Supreme Court nominee about pedophiles, racist baby books, and terrorists, that
clip will probably end up on television. You’ll probably go viral on social media
too. Perhaps that is precisely what Senator Cruz was contemplating in the photo
that Los Angeles Times photographer Kent Nishimura snapped of the senator
appearing to search for his own name on Twitter on the afternoon of the hearings
(see above).

Senator Lindsey Graham Online Ad from April 2022

 Ted Cruz Appears to Search for His Own Name on Twitter during the Judge Jackson Hearings on March
23, 2022.
Photo by Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Conflict Frames and the Primacy of Social Identity

At the center of today’s symbiotic relationship between politicians and the press
is a press routine that is so common in political news that it’s difficult to imagine
political coverage without it: conflict framing. In conflict framing, news stories
are told in terms of competing factions, either groups or individuals, and it is
especially prevalent in news coverage of politics. Because of its inherent appeal
to the press biases of personalization, drama, and fragmentation, and because
conflict frames allow journalists to maintain an “objective” stance in their
treatment of a topic while framing Democrats and Republicans in a war against
one another, the conflict frame dominates political news.33 In the context of
campaign coverage, conflict framing often focuses on elements of the “horse
race,” such as who is ahead and who is behind, and on strategies used by the
various sides that are pitted against each other in a “battle” for victory.34 There is
an economic basis behind the press’ fascination with election strategy and the
horse race, though. First, elections are indeed contests that do involve campaign
strategy. To pretend otherwise would be disingenuous. And second, audiences—
especially politically engaged audiences—seek out election stories focused on
the horserace and campaign strategy.35 So, these stories are lucrative. The
trouble, I submit, is not the mere existence of such stories, but rather, a press that
only reports on politics through the lens of partisan conflict to the exclusion of
substantive reporting on issues, policy, and democratic processes.
In their 1996 book Spiral of Cynicism, Joseph Cappella and Kathleen Hall
Jamieson demonstrate how exposure to these kinds of conflict narratives caused
people to become more cynical about politics. While cynicism is bad for
democratic health, today, as affective polarization and social sorting have come
to dominate America’s political landscape, it seems the implications of conflict
frames might be even more dire. In today’s environment, in addition to fostering
cynicism about politics, political conflict frames in the news contribute to our
political mega-identities and to hostility toward the other side. In a set of
experiments, political psychologists Jiyoung Han and Christopher Federico
examined the effects of exposure to two different conflict frames: news stories
framed in terms of conflict between genders, and news stories framed in terms of
conflict between the political parties. Their goal was to understand not just the
effects of these frames on polarization but the specific psychological mechanism
through which these effects occurred.36
Respondents read an article about Facebook’s and Apple’s new policies to
cover female employees’ costs for freezing their eggs. But respondents read the
piece framed in one of two ways: either in terms of partisan conflict, with the
headline “Egg-Freezing Rekindles Partisan Debates on Workplace Inequality,”
or in terms of gender conflict, with the headline “Egg-Freezing Rekindles
Debates on Gender Inequality in the Workplace.” Results showed that exposure
to both the political conflict frame and the gender conflict frame increased
participants’ “self-stereotyping.” After reading the article, participants’ attitudes
toward the egg-freezing issue matched their perception of their in-group’s view
on that issue (based on either gender or party depending on their experimental
condition). It was this process that best accounted for their polarized attitudes on
the topic. In other words, participants who read the political conflict frame were
more likely to anchor their attitude toward egg-freezing policies to what they
thought was the attitude of their party. And those in the gender conflict frame
condition were more likely to anchor their attitude to what they thought was the
attitude of their gender. This is how the attitudes of the different groups
(Democrats versus Republicans and men versus women) moved even further
apart on the egg-freezing issue.
In short, partisan conflict frames activate our partisan identities. We read a
story where our team is in a fight with another team, and we immediately
respond as a member of our team. Whether that team is defined in terms of
gender or political party, once activated, we respond as a good team member
would respond. This means that the very way that news stories are most
frequently told and the way that political events and issues are most frequently
presented (as partisan conflicts) are constantly driving us apart: activating our
partisan identities and influencing us to match our attitudes to those of our party.
The phenomenon of the “partisan pundit” is another useful television
(especially cable) news routine that embraces the conflict frame while offering
emotionally evocative performances of partisan identity. Pundits are talking
heads who appear on the news not to “report” news but to talk about the news.37
Cable news programs frequently assemble panels of pundits (for example,
journalists, experts, and partisan commentators) who argue about the topic, tie
that topic to broad themes in the culture war, and typically do so with the “in
your face” interpersonal conflict style that increases viewer engagement while
also increasing viewers’ hostility toward the other side.38 Among CNN’s past
pundit panel topics are questions of whether President Trump is a racist,39 the
role of racism in immigration policy,40 and the security of American elections.41
In fact, put this book down for just a second and google “ ‘panel erupts’ and
‘CNN.’ ” It appears that “erupting panels” has been an entire subgenre at the
cable network, especially in 2017 and 2018. Among the results are “Panel erupts
over conversation of race,” “Panel erupts over death threats to press,” and “Panel
erupts over Ivanka Trump rabbi meeting.”
Through interruption and insult, huffs, puffs, and eye rolls, the conflict
inherent in partisan pundit panels can activate and reinforce viewers’ partisan
identities yet again.42 And while viewers’ partisan identities become more salient
and refined in ways that will inevitably shape how they view the world, these
panels also provide partisan operatives the opportunity to directly misinform
audiences. At the nonpartisan fact-checking organization Politifact, researchers
fact-check statements made by pundits and on-air guests at the major cable
networks. A 2015 report showed that of the pundit claims they checked, almost
60 percent on Fox News were rated as mostly false or false. This was true of 44
percent of pundit claims at MSNBC and 20 percent of pundit claims on CNN.43
Recall the concept of intellectual humility from the last chapter? Intellectual
humility is the extent to which people are open to the possibility that they might
be wrong. Well, partisan pundit panels are characterized by performances of
intellectual arrogance or “I am not listening because I just want to show I’m
right.” Intellectual arrogance plays well on television, whereas intellectual
humility does not. In fact, we rarely see intellectual humility modeled in our
mediated political world. When we do, it’s from the occasional appearance of
scientists—people trained to never prove things or remove themselves from
doubt. They don’t speak in absolutes or forevers. They speak with caveats and
conditions and often answer with “Time will tell” and “For now this seems to be
the case.” But in our mediated information-scape, their humility makes them
come across as unsure, ambivalent, weak, or waffling.44 As the late Neil Postman
wrote in 1985, “When a television show is in process, it is very nearly
impermissible to say, ‘Let me think about that’ or ‘I don’t know.”45

Hostile Identity Performance Is Rewarded by the

Press: A Case Study
To better understand how aggressive performances of identity ownership are
rewarded with press coverage, I examined media coverage of Senators Cruz and
Graham during the week of the nomination hearings. To perform a comparison, I
needed to explore media coverage of a senator who had also used the hearings to
do more talking than listening but whose comments were less in keeping with
the conflict-centered content biases of the press. Reader, I offer you New Jersey
Democratic senator Cory Booker.
During the nomination hearings for Judge Jackson, Senator Booker used his
time to praise the judge and tell her how much her nomination meant to him. He
emphatically told her that he would not let anyone in the Senate “steal his joy.”
His voice trembled as he said, “I want to tell you when I look at you, this is why
I get emotional. … You’re so much more than your race and gender. You’re a
Christian, you’re a mom. You’re an intellect, you love books, but for me, I’m
sorry, it’s hard for me to look at you and not see my mom, not see my cousins.”46
While Booker’s performance was emotional and tapped into aspects of identity,
it was not aggressive or oppositional. There was no fight to show. Would the
New Jersey senator receive the same news coverage extended to Senators Cruz
or Graham?
Using the Lexis-Nexis news database, I searched various news outlets for
stories mentioning the Supreme Court as well as each of the three senators’
names during the week of the hearings.47 The results are consistent with a
national press obsessed with conflict driven by partisan identity. When
examining the proportion of “Supreme Court” news stories from each outlet that
mentioned each senator’s name, Senator Booker received far less media
coverage for his joyful, tearful “pep talk” than did Senators Cruz or Graham for
their aggressive culture war questioning (see figure below).

Media Mentions of Cruz, Graham, and Booker. Aggressive performances of identity ownership and identity
threat are rewarded with press coverage.

On the broadcast news networks, all three senators were mentioned in about
half of the Supreme Court stories. But on cable news, Senators Cruz and Graham
enjoyed more than twice the coverage of Senator Booker: Senator Graham was
mentioned in over half of the Supreme Court stories on the conservative Fox
News and 68 percent of the stories on the more liberal MSNBC, and Senator
Cruz was mentioned in 44 percent and 62 percent, respectively, of the Supreme
Court stories. In the New York Times and the Associated Press (AP), the overall
proportion of Supreme Court coverage mentioning each of the senators was
lower than on television or cable, but Senator Cruz still benefited from over
three times the coverage of Senator Booker, with mentions in just under a
quarter of their stories. Also note that liberal-leaning MSNBC amplified Cruz’s
and Graham’s identity performances as well. As explained by Jeff Berry and
Sarah Sobieraj in their book The Outrage Industry, partisan programs like those
on MSNBC and Fox News are chiefly in the business of producing “outrage
programming” that focuses on the identification of partisan threats.48 Partisan
opinion shows cover stories and issues that they believe will outrage their
partisan audiences. If you’re a producer at liberal-leaning MSNBC looking to
steep your audience in outrage, covering the identity performances of
conservative senators Cruz and Graham at Judge Jackson’s nomination hearings
is as good a plan as any. The logic of media has become the logic of politics. In
this polarized and socially sorted political context, the press’s biases in favor of
conflict and personalities reward negative emotional outbursts and the
weaponization of political mega-identities with press coverage.

Following the New Rules of the Game

Although both Democrats and Republicans have become more ideologically and
socially sorted, as illustrated in chapter 3, these trends have been significantly
more pronounced on the right than on the left.49 With a commitment to
ideological purity over the building of coalitions, Republican lawmakers are
under much pressure to perform their identity as devout ideological
conservatives. In doing so, they reconstruct the role of a Republican lawmaker.
Take author J. D. Vance. A Kentucky native, Vance came to fame after the 2016
publication of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. The book tells the story of his poor,
white, working-class upbringing in America’s Rust Belt in the 1980s and reveals
how, despite his traumatic family history of abuse and alcoholism, he was able
to achieve the new American Dream through his hard work.50 Following the
publication of his book, Vance was a media darling. The press, eager to
understand how they had so underestimated the popularity of culturally
conservative Donald Trump, turned to Vance—and midwestern diner patrons51
—to understand the inner machinations of the white working-class voter. Vance
was a relatable source for members of America’s legacy press. He attended Ohio
State and Yale Law School and, in 2016, declared himself a proud “never
Trumper,” even calling then candidate Trump “reprehensible.” In one of his
since-deleted tweets from a month before Trump’s presidential victory, Vance
wrote, “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc.
Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.”52
But Vance soon developed political aspirations and announced his candidacy
for a coveted US Senate seat in Ohio in July 2021. After this announcement, his
public commentary completely changed. By that summer, he had deleted his
anti-Trump tweets and was appearing on Fox News to disavow his prior
criticisms of the conservative populist president.53 This disavowal was rewarded
with financial support and endorsements from conservative billionaire Peter
Thiel, conservative Republican senator Josh Hawley, and controversial right-
wing congresswoman from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene.54
In an asymmetrically polarized and socially sorted political world, there may
not be a place for a moderate, anti-Trump, Ivy League–educated Republican
candidate J. D. Vance. But there may be a place for a culturally conservative
populist pro-Trump J. D. Vance—one who signals his commitment to
Republican values by supporting the idea of cutting funding for universities that
teach critical race theory, and who says things like “The professors are the
enemy”55 and “The childless left [has no] physical commitment to the future of
this country.”56
After the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, those few Republicans
who dared criticize the party’s embrace of the Far Right (or vote with
Democrats) were insulted or rebuked by other party members. Republican Party
rising star (and daughter of the former vice president) Liz Cheney of Wyoming
was removed as Republican conference chair after voting to impeach President
Trump and criticizing his role in the events of January 6. Utah senator and 2012
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was the only senator to vote to
impeach his own party’s president in Trump’s first impeachment trial and did so
a second time after the attack on the Capitol. Romney also voted in favor of
Judge Jackson’s appointment to the Supreme Court. After Far Right members of
Congress Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar appeared at a pro-Putin rally
and addressed white nationalists, Senator Romney remarked on their appearance
with a quote from the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: “Morons. I’ve
got morons on my team.” He described as “almost-treasonous” the Far Right
members of his party speaking out in support of the Russian president during
Russia’s horrific assault on Ukraine. He also acknowledged the mediated
political incentives driving these Far Right identity performances, saying, “Of
course they do it because they think it’s shock value and it’s going to get them
more eyeballs and maybe get a little more money for them or their network. It’s
disgusting.”57
While traditional conservative Republicans like Cheney and Romney tried to
push back against the fringe elements of their party, the mediated political logics
continued to incentivize and reward extremist displays of Republican identity.
Following Senator Romney’s vote in favor of Justice Jackson’s appointment to
the court, Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that Romney and the two other
Republicans who voted yea were “pro-pedophile,” a reference to the questioning
by Senators Hawley and Cruz regarding sentencing for child pornography
charges, and a barely veiled (but convenient) reference to the QAnon conspiracy
theory centering on false claims of satanic pedophilia rituals by political elites.
Greene’s “pro-pedophile” tweet was covered by all the major news sources,
including CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, and the New Yorker. The
aggressive performance of the Republican mega-identity got the last word.

Who Gets Covered?

In the 1990s, W. Lance Bennett, the scholar who gave us the concept of content
biases, became interested in (and concerned by) what appeared to be invisible
constraints placed on the range of perspectives that journalists included in
mainstream national news coverage. Bennett coined the term “indexing” to refer
to the press practice of “indexing” acceptable points of view (perspectives that
would be included in news coverage) to the range of positions expressed by
congressional lawmakers.58 The result was the compression of representations of
public opinion “to fit into the range of debate between decisive institutional
power blocs.”59 To the extent that voices of the public fit within that range of
elite opinions, those viewpoints might be included in the news. But voices of the
public that were further left or right of the “institutional power blocs”—defined
by the positions expressed by congresspeople—would be excluded from news
coverage or framed as deviant or dangerous. But today, as the ideological
extremity of members of Congress increases, and as elites make explicit appeals
to their parties’ sorted and polarized social identities, the range of policy
positions promoted by lawmakers is expanding. So, how does that affect the
range of opinions that is deemed acceptable enough to be treated as “legitimate”
by the press?
Well, it turns out that the ideological extremity of lawmakers is rewarded
with press attention. Political scientists Mike Wagner and Mike Gruszczynski
examined the amount of press coverage received by members of Congress
serving between 1992 and 2013 to assess how lawmakers’ ideological extremity
(based on the ideological leaning of their floor votes) related to the amount of
press coverage they received.60 The strongest predictor of the amount of press
coverage given to any individual member of Congress—especially coverage of
members of the House of Representatives—was their ideological extremity.
Ideologically extreme members of the House received three times the amount of
newspaper coverage that more centrist lawmakers received, and twice the
amount of broadcast television news coverage. Wagner and Gruszczynski
conclude that “in an era of increased partisan polarization at the elite level,
extreme politicians are good fits for modern journalistic norms of judging
newsworthiness.”61 When broken down by party affiliation, their results show
that “ideologically extreme Republicans tended to net more news coverage than
ideologically extreme Democrats.”62 This difference was so stark that when
looking only at Democratic lawmakers, there was almost no correlation between
ideological extremity and press coverage. But among Republicans, political
extremism yielded a sharp increase in press coverage. Once again, these
mediated political incentives are profoundly asymmetrical. They are lopsided.
From a journalistic standpoint, the problem is that the professional norm of
objectivity discourages journalists from taking a side in the reporting of political
and social issues and events. The practice of press objectivity naturally
encourages reporters’ reliance on official sources and the indexing of political
perspectives according to the institutional power blocs within houses of
Congress. If members of one party have embraced positions and rhetoric that
flirt with white nationalism, promote falsehoods about the legitimacy of the
presidential election outcome, and otherwise challenge democratic norms and
institutions, then embracing objectivity would mean leaving those claims
unchallenged to avoid allegations of press bias.
In his 2014 Atlantic article headlined “Yes, Polarization Is Asymmetric—and
Conservatives Are Worse,” journalism scholar Norm Ornstein of the American
Enterprise Institute warns of the dangers of false equivalence, also known as
“bothsidesism”: “Saying both sides are equally responsible, insisting on
equivalence as the mantra of mainstream journalism, leaves the average voter at
sea, unable to identify and vote against those perpetrating the problem.”63
Ornstein was writing two years before the election of Donald Trump and six
years before the challenges Trump would pose to America’s democratic
institutions through false claims of voter fraud and election insecurity. So, when
faced with the January 6 insurrection, what was a journalist to do? In this
context, bothsidesism ran the risk of placing lies on equal footing with the truth.
In the weeks following the 2020 election, journalism scholar Jay Rosen
identified a new, insidious version of journalistic bothsidesism that became
commonplace in national news: “dueling realities stories.” These were stories
that covered Democrats and Republicans operating with two understandings of
reality but that failed to acknowledge that one of these realities—one of these
sets of “facts”—was false. One was empirically inaccurate, contradicted by
evidence and expert consensus. This is how bothsidesism in the press fuels
asymmetric wrongness.
 Rewarding the Performance of Populism
With a nearly nonexistent public media infrastructure in the United States, we
rely on a media system that is concerned first and foremost not with the public
good but with maximizing profits and minimizing production costs.64 Such a
system will reward charismatic authoritarian populists over what rhetorician
Jennifer Mercieca calls “normie” democratic politicians: those who embrace the
norms of democratic discourse and respect the legitimacy of democratic
institutions. The content biases of personalization, dramatization, and
fragmentation all stem from a deregulated media industry that is incentivized to
generate profit through sensationalized, audience-centered, cost-effective
production routines. The focus on individuals over issues, conflict over
harmony, and isolated events over static systems is a way to maximize eyeballs
while decreasing production costs. Populist leaders, with their emotional,
common-sense appeals and their charismatic criticisms of abstract institutions,
are a great fit for contemporary media norms.65 Populism expert Cas Mudde
emphasized these dynamics when he wrote about the audience-oriented
pressures that encourage media producers to “focus on more extreme and
scandalous aspects of politics.” He concludes that “all this provides a ‘perfect
stage’ for populist figures who find ‘not just a receptive audience, but also a
highly receptive medium.’ ”66
Candidate and then president Donald Trump was unpredictable, prone to
improvisation and insult, and played into the audience’s cynicism and distrust of
government and media. Trump understood that in an era of ratings-chasing
journalism, even antagonistic relationships between politicians and the press are
symbiotic. Candidate bashes press, press covers those insults with outrage and
incredulity. Repeat. Journalism scholars Matt Carlson, Sue Robinson, and Seth
Lewis propose that Trump used news media’s audience-driven content biases to
get airtime, thereby increasing the viability of his candidacy while also
transforming journalism in the process:

Trump took advantage of journalistic conventions to increase his presence in the news; He used
press bashing as a type of political performance commensurate with his populist rhetoric; He
demonstrated the expansiveness of the contemporary media culture through his use of social media,
political rallies, and right wing media to reach the public; He boldly invented or misrepresented
facts in ways that strained reporting norms; And, in doing all of this, he challenged the institutional
character of journalism.67

Political communication professor Dave Karpf put it simply: “Trump was

demonstrably good television and reliable click bait.”68 Karpf points to the
commentary of CBS chairman Les Moonves, who stated that Trump’s candidacy
“may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”69
In the wake of Trump’s presidency, we have seen more Republican elected
officials playing by Trump’s rules—both in their rhetorical style and in their
attacks on governmental institutions and the press. We saw Florida Republican
governor Ron DeSantis criticizing medical experts and the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, issuing an executive order prohibiting schools from
requiring face masks during COVID-19 and tweeting, “If the corporate press
nationally isn’t attacking me, then I’m probably not doing my job.”70 We saw
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene blaming mainstream media for her
attraction to conspiracy theories like QAnon and then declaring that COVID was
not real and vaccines did not work—all while receiving press coverage that
continued to raise her profile and amplify her claims.71 As Jay Rosen put it, “It is
very obvious … that being ‘hated by the media,’ as she would put it, is the basis
to Greene’s appeal. Therefore, critical coverage is not actually accomplishing
what we think of it as doing: accountability. It’s actually building her résumé.”72
These populist political figures capitalize on the routines of journalism to
build their reputations while eroding faith in the journalistic institutions
themselves. Both DeSantis and Greene have been rewarded for their aggressive
attacks on the press with, you guessed it, more press. In fact, Governor DeSantis
had become such a sought-after Fox News guest that, following the 2020
election, he was invited to appear on Fox News just about every day during a
three-month period.73

Nationalization of Wrong
As I write about Governor Ron DeSantis and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor
Greene, I find it fascinating that these names—of the governor of Florida and a
member of the House of Representatives from Georgia’s Fourteenth
Congressional District—have become household names. In a normal political
moment, the average American would not, and need not, know these names. And
yet, regardless of whether you live in Tallahassee, Columbus, Denver, or Boston,
you have likely heard of both Ron DeSantis and Marjorie Taylor Greene. This is
because in addition to being mega-identity-centered, American politics are
highly nationalized. Americans’ political attention and interest tend to be driven
by considerations of the national political scene over and above those of local or
state politics. On the one hand, this includes the fact that voters are increasingly
likely to vote for the same party for state and local elections as they do for the
presidency.74 On the other hand, as political scientist Daniel Hopkins explains,
nationalization also includes “when voters are engaged with and knowledgeable
about national politics to the exclusion of state or local politics.”75
Nationalization is about what aspects of American political life citizens attend
to, think about, and allow to shape their partisan identities. Put simply: big-
ticket, national culture war issues take prominence over local- and state-level
issues.
In accounts of why Americans pay more attention to national politics than
they do to state and local politics, scholars point to the same phenomena that
have been the focus of the book so far: the ideological polarization of the two
parties, affective polarization among the public, geographic and social sorting,
and the primacy of partisan identity as a cue guiding citizens’ vote choice.76
Together, these factors create a political climate in which public officials
running for local- and state-level offices see a strategic advantage to playing
politics “nationally.” Because, as Hopkins writes, “national politics is rife with
people and issues that are evocative to voters.”77 Instead of campaigning down in
the weeds of state and local issues, candidates can perform their identity as a
party prototype on the national stage.
For political media producers with hours of airtime to fill, millions of eyeballs
to attract, and millions of dollars to save, nationalization is a lucrative cost-
cutting mechanism. Rather than reporting on complicated policy proposals that
may have different implications across different communities, nationalized
politics rewards the coverage of high-profile culture war issues that can be
covered from 30,000 feet. Through “erupting” partisan pundit panels and
conflict-framed stories of Right versus Left, televised political news can talk
about national culture war topics without having to invest much in local or
investigative reporting.
On the audience side, the growth in media choice through cable and internet
allows politically interested citizens to immerse themselves in America’s
national political scene (by watching CNN, MSNBC, and FOX) while the
politically disinterested tune out from political information altogether.78 Because
there is so much emotionally evocative, conflict-ridden national political news to
take in, politically passionate Americans tend to engage with their state and local
news less and less.79 And since national politics tends to be more partisan than
local politics, as we turn our attention away from the local and toward the
national, we activate our partisan identities even more.80 It is this interplay
between the economics of news and the salience of political identities that
explains Americans’ “declining engagement with state and local politics.”81

Local Goes National

But what about local news? Can’t Americans disrupt their political mega-
identities by anchoring themselves in their actual communities and by paying
attention to local and state politics through local news? Yes! Not only are the
audiences for local journalism in decline, but since 2004, the industry itself has
been demolished. Today, financial organizations like hedge funds, private equity
firms, and investment groups—organizations with little interest in journalism or
the public good—have discovered the value of buying up local newspapers,
gutting them, and in many instances, eliminating them altogether.82 At the
University of North Carolina’s Hussman School, researchers have found that
once these financial organizations acquire a local paper, their standard operating
procedure is “aggressive cost-cutting, the adoption of advertiser-friendly
policies, the sale or shuttering of under-performing newspapers, and financial
restructuring, including bankruptcy.”83 As of 2018, thousands of American
counties were served by only one local newspaper, and 200 counties had no local
newspaper at all. During the coronavirus pandemic, this trend worsened, with
over 100 local newsrooms closing in 2020 and 2021.84 For Americans across the
country, the choice isn’t whether to consume local news or national news, but to
consume national news or no news at all.
While the death of local news means local officials can get away with more
shenanigans without the watchful eye of journalists, it also contributes to
Americans’ disdain for the opposing political party. Political communication
scholars Joshua Darr, Matthew Hitt, and Johanna Dunaway have explored how
consumption of national news “in the absence of a local newspaper” exacerbates
political polarization.85 In counties where local newspapers had closed, citizens
were significantly less likely to engage in split-ticket voting (voting for
candidates for multiple parties) than citizens in counties with local newspapers.
Darr, Hitt, and Dunaway argue that the death of local newspapers causes a shift
in citizens’ attention to national politics, which is inherently more polarized than
state and local politics, and is focused on the most contentious and most uncivil
behaviors of political elites. According to The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey, as local
newspapers disappear, “all news becomes national news”: “Instead of reading
about local policy decisions, people read about the blacklisting of Dr. Seuss
books. Instead of learning about their own local candidates, they consume angry
takes about Marjorie Taylor Greene.”86 Godfrey highlights the crucial
substantive content of local newspaper stories as “the connective tissue of a
community; they introduce people to their neighbors, and they encourage readers
to listen to and empathize with one another. … As local news crumbles, so does
our tether to one another.”87
After the publication of Darr, Hitt, and Dunaway’s 2018 study, the executive
editor of the Desert Sun, the daily paper of Palm Springs, California, had an
idea. Editor Julie Makinen decided to try to reduce her community’s political
polarization by “refocusing the paper’s opinion page on local authors and issues”
and avoiding commentary or cartoons related to national politics.88 This provided
researchers with an amazing opportunity to run an experiment in real time that
would examine how citizens’ political attitudes and beliefs changed in
communities with and without a local paper that focused on local issues. Results
showed that following the shift to local news, readers of the local paper in Palm
Springs (where Makinen had localized her newspaper) experienced less social
and political polarization compared with the control community in nearby
Ventura (whose local paper’s opinion page continued to include national
issues).89
While these findings are heartening, there is still intense pressure on local
news outlets to cover the conflict-ridden mega-identity-focused national political
spectacle.90 Indeed, as local newspapers have shuttered, local television news
programming and online local news sites that emphasize national politics have
flourished.91 As of October 2022, conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group owned
approximately 200 local television stations across the United States, reaching
about 40 percent of US households.92 As Sinclair acquired these local TV
networks, the company infused local news content with conservative-leaning
frames and topics while also moving away from the local and toward more
national political stories.93 When local stations are acquired by Sinclair, not only
does news content become more ideologically conservative, but the amount of
national political news increases substantially and the amount of local news
drops.94
What about online local news, you ask? Unfortunately, despite the potential
for the internet to expand local news through websites and blogs, by 2011, media
scholar Matthew Hindman had found “almost no evidence” that such digital
local news expansion had come to pass.95 Jump forward in time another decade,
and the online local news situation had become even worse. Instead of local
news sites simply not existing at all, thousands of fraudulent and partisan
sources had popped up masquerading as local sites.96 Journalism scholars and
practitioners have come to refer to these sources as “pink slime,” in reference to
the low-grade beef discards that are used to make fast-food burgers.97 Chief
among the pink slime sites was Journatic, a centralized “journalism” company
founded by former journalist and conservative entrepreneur Brian Timpone in
2006. Timpone hired writers and researchers, many based in the Philippines, to
write “local stories” using the tools of the internet. Stories were then sold to
local papers around the country.98
The Journatic business model—a centralized company hiring workers from
afar to create cheap content for local news—proved both profitable and
exploitable. By 2021, its exploitability was exemplified by Metric Media, a
network of media companies that boasted over 1,000 “local”—yet ideologically
conservative—news websites across the country. While Journatic had created
generic news stories for local papers looking to save money on staffing, Metric
Media offered cheap local news with a conservative frame. Research by the Tow
Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University revealed that Metric
Media’s partisan content was funded by conservative organizations connected to
the Tea Party movement.99 And one of the key people at the helm of Metric
Media? The same guy who started Journatic in 2006: Brian Timpone.
In recent years, liberal pink slime sites have emerged as well, but in far fewer
numbers than the conservative pink slime infrastructure. In 2019, progressive
Super PAC Priorities USA had invested in four “local news” sites to mimic the
Timpone model on the left but at a smaller scale: publish liberal-leaning stories
on local news sites in swing states to defeat President Trump in the 2020
election.100 The progressive organizers admitted this plan was made possible
through the death of local newspapers—especially in such states as Michigan,
Pennsylvania, Florida, and Wisconsin, where many local newspapers had been
dissolved.101
Fortunately, most people are not immediately receptive to information from
unknown sources, which is a good thing.102 But, given exposure to information
from unknown—even deceptive—sites, readers’ attitudes and beliefs do change
in the direction of the perspective advanced in those stories.103 Researchers warn
that low trust in traditional media might work together with social media
recommendations to increase people’s willingness to read information from less
credible sites like pink slime sites. Given the extensive work by psychologist
Lisa Fazio and her team demonstrating that repeat exposure to false information
increases beliefs in false claims regardless of perceptions of source credibility,
none of these findings is particularly reassuring.104
 While not all pink slime stories contain explicitly false information, they tie
local stories to national partisan identity in ways that may increase
misperceptions through the lens of political identity. An analysis by progressive
journalist Judd Legum showed that the conservative “local news” sites funded
by Brian Timpone were instrumental in tying the 2020 Virginia governor’s race
to the divisive issue of “teaching critical race theory in schools.”105 (See next
page.) Through its 28 “separate” “local” “news” sites across the state and
hundreds around the country, Timpone’s network published “tens of thousands
of stories about Critical Race Theory,” many of which falsely suggested that
CRT was being taught in Virginia public schools. Immediately following
Republican Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial win, one of his chief fund-raising
operatives, Gerrit Lansing, posted a celebratory tweet with a link to a story from
Timpone-owned West Nova News. The headline read, “Loudoun County Public
Schools Spent $422K on Controversial Critical Race Theory Curriculum in Past
Two Years.” Above it, Lansing wrote, “The story that started it all.”106
At the time of the writing of this book, a visit to the West Nova News website
under a section labeled “Loudoun County Public Schools” brings up the
headlines in the following list. Please note, this is not a selection of headlines.
These were the top six stories on the site on April 7, 2022:

• “ ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ remains on Loudoun County schools’

curriculum”
• “LCPS’ equity team draws mixed reaction, school spokesman says district
values ‘all the input we receive’ ”
• “Loudoun County schools signs new contract with social justice
consultants”
• “PACT founder calls conciliation terms between Loudoun County schools,
local NAACP ‘reprehensible’ ”
• “Loudoun County school official: Measures ‘should reduce suspension
rates,’ ‘ultimately close disparities’ ”
• “Loudoun resident: School plan the wrong approach on racial issues”
 Examples of Metric Media’s Automated “News” Sites for Different Towns. These Metric Media sites for
towns across Virginia generate “local” news that all looks the same, and all sites feature thematically
similar content that resonates with national culture war issues.
Judd Legum, Popular Information, November 8, 2021.

The nationalization of political parties, activist groups, and candidates makes

it more likely that national political battles—like those regarding racial policy
and the teaching of race-related aspects of American history—will play out at
the local level. In Laboratories against Democracy, political scientist Jacob
Grumbach highlights the dangers of nationalization in the US political context:
democratic backsliding at the state level, especially in states with Republican-
controlled legislatures. He concludes that “the Republican Party has eroded
democracy in states under its control,” largely through the actions of nationally
coordinated Republican groups, including a coalition between “the very wealthy
on the one hand, and those motivated by white identity politics and cultural
resentment on the other.”107 Crucially, these coordinated efforts to nationalize
local and state politics do so by activating our political mega-identities through
references to culture war issues.
So, what about those six West Nova News headlines I found on April 7—all
on the topic of CRT and diversity in public schools? Those stories invite white
conservative Republican audiences to activate their aligned white conservative
Republican identities in their engagement with their local communities. And as
these “local” news stories prime those identities and identify threats, they also
connect local stories directly to the national political scene, where Republican
leaders like Ted Cruz make CRT a centerpiece. Since these “local” news sites
are funded through investments by national conservative advocacy groups and
super PACs (e.g., DonorsTrust and Liberty Principles), it is efficient to connect
local stories to national themes like “white identity politics and cultural
resentment.” So, while Senator Cruz signals partisan prototypicality with his
questions during Supreme Court nomination hearings, these deceptive news sites
bring the issue home. For residents of Loudoun County reading these stories, this
is now about our community—our children in our schools. Importantly, even if
these nationally focused, partisan pink slime stories do not contain explicitly
inaccurate information, the political-identity-driven narratives masquerading as
“news” reinforce the conditions under which a “misinformation society”
thrives.108

The Perfect Progressive Partisan Prototype

Because the dynamics explored throughout this book are identity driven, and
given that the Republican Party has experienced more racial, religious,
geographic, and cultural homogenization than the Democratic Party, it follows
that identity-related consequences are likely asymmetrical. However, the
nationalization of politics has not been limited to exemplars from the Republican
Party. Liberal partisan prototypes have emerged from within the Democratic
Party in recent years to receive significant attention on the national stage. Most
iconic, perhaps, were the female members of Congress elected in 2018, referred
to by commentators on both the left and the right as “the Squad.” All under the
age of 50 at the time of their election, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“AOC”) of
New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and
Rashida Tlaib of Michigan boasted ideological liberalism on both fiscal and
social issues. And while ideologically conservative Republican national stars
like Missouri senator Josh Hawley and Texas senator Ted Cruz are devout
Christians, the Squad’s Congresswomen Omar and Tlaib are two of only four
Muslims to have ever served in the US House of Representatives.
The Squad is distinct not just for its youth, gender, and religious affiliations
but also for its racial and ethnic diversity—situating these four congresswomen
at the center of the national political spectacle’s identity-driven narratives.
Representative Omar is Somali American, Representative Tlaib’s parents
emigrated from Palestine, Representative Pressley is African American, and
AOC’s parents are Puerto Rican. The distinctiveness of the four female
representatives wasn’t lost on them, either. In fact, they coined the term “the
Squad” at a 2019 photoshoot.109
Just weeks after the four freshman lawmakers were sworn in, President
Trump placed them firmly in the camp of the racial, ethnic, and political out-
group, tweeting “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and
crime infested places from which they came.”110 The progressive social and
fiscal positions of these congresswomen made it easy for reporters to feature
them in conflict-framed stories purporting to be issue centered but that facilitated
personalized, identity-centered stories. The conservative New York Post ran a
story with the headline “AOC, Far-Left Pols Urge Biden to Bypass Congress on
Energy, Immigration and More.”111 In that piece, the reporter Mark Moore linked
Representative Ocasio-Cortez to the other members of the Squad, describing
their positions on immigration and crime as “radical,” and implicitly signaling
the issue of race to readers: “Progressive House Democrats like Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the ‘Squad’ are urging President Biden to
sidestep Congress and use the power of his pen to authorize dozens of radical
policies on issues like immigration, criminal justice, climate change and student
loan debt.”
Representative Ocasio-Cortez, in particular, has become a favorite target of
conservative politicians and commentators. Media Matters for America, a liberal
media watchdog, found that over the course of 42 days in 2019, the conservative
cable networks Fox and Fox Business mentioned the freshman congresswoman
3,181 times.112 Scholars have theorized that Ocasio-Cortez embodies the spirit of
intersectionalism—occupying minority categories across gender, age, class, and
ethnicity. Writes Eleanora Esposito,

Ocasio-Cortez never made a mystery of the fact that she was born to a Puerto Rican family in the
Bronx and took jobs as a bartender and waitress to help her family fight foreclosure of their home.
All these inseparable aspects of her lived-experience and identity contribute to her depiction as an
outsider in the largely white, male, upper-middle class game of politics, and provide multiple cues
for aggression and delegitimization.113

When we combine AOC’s overlapping social and cultural identities with her
progressive ideology and the reality of political mega-identities, we have a
recipe for a perfect progressive partisan prototype on the national stage—one
that can be used to mobilize and inspire in-group members (liberal Democrats)
or to anger and threaten out-group members (conservative Republicans). This is
exactly what local and state political campaigns did in 2020. AOC was
mentioned in ads for both Democratic and Republican candidates to mobilize
voters—through excitement in the former, and through anger in the latter.
Warning Republican voters about AOC was especially popular among more
conservative candidates in more conservative districts.114 Consider the campaign
ads of Georgia’s far right candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene that warned, “AOC
wants to plunge us into Communism,”115 and Colorado’s far right candidate
Lauren Boebert, who stated, “I am ready to be the one that steps up for
conservative values and takes on AOC.”116 In one of her final campaign ads
against incumbent Republican representative Scott Tipton, Boebert juxtaposed
the congressman with pictures of the Squad (see opposite).117
 Campaign Ad for Lauren Boebert, Republican Candidate for Congress in Colorado’s Third District.
Boebert’s ad against incumbent Republican congressman Scott Tipton in 2020 uses members of the Squad
to trigger identity threat.

Both Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert went on to win their
elections and were sworn in as freshman members of the US House of
Representatives in January 2021. In a socially sorted, polarized political context,
in which the Republican Party is racially and culturally homogeneous and the
Democratic Party is racially and culturally diverse, identity-based campaigns
conducted by Republicans in opposition to the perfect progressive partisan
prototype apparently work quite well.
In Why We’re Polarized, Ezra Klein argues that “to appeal to a more
polarized public, political institutions and political actors behave in more
polarized ways. As political institutions and actors become more polarized, they
further polarize the public. This sets off a feedback cycle.”118 One central piece
of the story of how and why so many of us are so “wrong” stems from these
transformations of our democratic and media institutions and the consequences
of their perpetual reinforcement of political identity. The logic of media has
dominated our political institutions for decades. But today’s political leaders are
incentivized to play into press biases while also performing the kind of partisan
prototypicality that is rewarded by a polarized and sorted American public. In
the words of Senator Lindsey Graham, this is one of the ways that political elites
can attempt to “stay relevant.”119
 Chapter 7

Separate Us
Identity Distillation through Partisan Media

FOR 24 YEARS I’VE STUDIED how media exposure influences individuals’

attitudes, knowledge, and behaviors. After almost a quarter century of running
experiments and conducting surveys, I’ve concluded that early media scholars
like Paul Lazarsfeld and Joseph Klapper were right: mass media are better at
reinforcing existing attitudes than they are at changing them. However, unlike
those scholars, I don’t see reinforcement as an indication that media’s effects on
people are “limited.” On the contrary, I see reinforcement as the most significant
influence of all, especially right now.
Recall that we believe things that satisfy our needs for comprehension,
control, and community. Also recall that how those needs become articulated
(what we use to satisfy those needs) depends on the identity-driven theories,
beliefs, and values that we start with. If I primarily value freedom and individual
liberties, for example, then my need to feel in control and like I am part of a
community will be satisfied by vastly different attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors
than if I primarily value equality and diversity. And since the specific
manifestation of those needs depends on values rooted in my social identity, they
also depend on what social identity is most salient to me at that moment. Thus,
exposure to media content that reinforces what I value, what I believe, and what
team I’m on can be hugely influential—even if it isn’t changing my mind.
In the 1970s, media scholar Todd Gitlin proposed that media’s capacity to
reinforce our existing beliefs is consequential in itself. We know through
decades of social science research that reinforcing an existing attitude increases
its influence on subsequent behavior.1 If you remind me how much I love
chocolate ice cream, I’m going to eat more chocolate ice cream. But, Gitlin went
further, suggesting that reinforcement of existing attitudes “can be understood as
the crucial solidifying of attitude into ideology,” a “relatively enduring …
configuration which determines how people may perceive and respond to new
situations.”2 Not only will activating and reinforcing my attitude toward
chocolate ice cream increase my likelihood of eating it, but chronic
reinforcement over time might create a broader cognitive framework that will
guide how I engage with chocolate-ice-cream-adjacent stimuli—you know,
things like chocolate cake or cookies or perhaps even Fudgsicles.3

Reinforcement in a Low-Choice Media Environment

When Gitlin was writing in the 1970s (and when Lazarsfeld and Klapper were
writing in the decades before that), mass media—broadcast television and radio
and physical newspapers—were highly centralized with few options. There were
three major broadcast networks in the United States. No cable television. No
internet. And little specialization—that is, very few niche outlets designed
specifically for different types of people.
Magazines were an exception—a rare medium with titles geared toward
distinct audiences with specific interests. Through the success of early “ladies”
magazines in the nineteenth century, magazine publishers knew the viability of
specialization as a business model. So, when television exploded in popularity in
the late 1940s and national advertisers abandoned the pages of general-interest
magazines like the Saturday Evening Post for television, the magazine industry
pivoted. It saved itself by creating titles for smaller, unique audiences, featuring
content that made an attractive home where smaller specialized products and
services could be efficiently advertised. Titles such as Seventeen, Jet, Good
Housekeeping, Yachting, and Gourmet Magazine successfully catered to specific
kinds of readers and featured specific kinds of ads that could, in the words of
communication professor Theodore Peterson in 1956, “capitalize on the tastes
and interests of a large share of [their] audience. Indeed, those tastes and
interests helped to establish a magazine’s raison d’être.”4
Why this detour into the history of Ladies Home Journal, you ask? This
pivoting of the magazine industry in the 1950s is analogous to what the
television industry did in the 1980s after the emergence of cable and, later, the
internet. This is the story of media fragmentation. And the story of media
fragmentation is the biography of the contemporary media environment. With
the introduction of cable and the internet, the number of outlets increased. As the
number of outlets increased, the economic model that previously sustained the
media industry fell apart. As outlets proliferated, the number of people watching
any one thing shrank. Suddenly, the industry that had been built on the sale of
advertiser access to giant diverse mass audiences (e.g., audiences of ABC, CBS,
and NBC in the 1960s) had to pivot. The solution was the deliberate creation of
content that would separate distinct kinds of audiences—or more accurately,
distinct kinds of consumers. Television executives used sociodemographic,
psychological, and personality data, as well as information about viewers’
hobbies, interests, and purchases, to create outlets and programming to appeal to
different types of people. In Breaking Up America, Joseph Turow describes how
media executives in this new, fragmented environment appealed to advertisers
by touting the “efficient separation” of their distinct audiences with whom they
had developed “special relationships” through their specialized content.5 It is in
this environment that we find the birth of MSNBC in 1996, in the very same
month that Comedy Central introduced its news satire show The Daily Show,
both just three months before the birth of their eventual foil, Fox News Channel.
Back in the 1940s–1970s, it was understandable that American media
scholars would downplay the consequences of “reinforcement” as a media
effect. With only a handful of networks, media producers sought to appeal to as
wide a swath of the American public as possible, typically by offering viewers
what NBC vice president Paul Klein called “least objectionable programming.”6
It was in this climate that media sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton
suggested that the potential for American mass media to be used as conduits for
propaganda was limited. Since it was in the interest of private corporate owners
of American media to maintain the status quo, and since business was about
giving people what they already wanted, Lazarsfeld and Merton argued that
media would “operate toward the maintenance of the going social and cultural
structure rather than toward its change.”7
But this was also a time of relatively high trust in media and in government,
with little elite polarization. Before the partisan racial realignment in the 1960s
and ’70s, the two political parties were not particularly distinct ideologically,
racially, or religiously. In this political context, “giving Americans what they
wanted” through a handful of top-down media sources meant providing them a
lot of homogeneous, status-quo-affirming (read: unobjectionable) programming.
It made sense for media effects researchers at that time to say, “Don’t worry,
folks. Media only reinforce people’s preexisting beliefs.”
By the 1970s (even in the still-low-choice media environment), media
scholars began theorizing about the ways media reinforcement might be of
consequence. “Uses and gratifications” research explored how people used
media content rather than what media content did to people. This approach
suggested that people used media to serve specific needs and fulfill desires,
whether to monitor what was happening in the world, to feel social connection,
to escape from everyday life, or to reaffirm one’s own values,8 all of which were
motivated by a goal of reinforcing interests, beliefs, and identity.
In the late 1970s, George Gerbner and his colleagues at the University of
Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School developed a provocative and sweeping
theoretical framework to describe the cumulative effects of media reinforcement.
They suggested that television had become America’s cultural storyteller and
was shaping our collective perception of reality—how we perceived the real
world. Through the introduction of cultivation theory, these scholars proposed
that television content was largely homogeneous, with meta-narratives like
interpersonal violence and traditional gender roles dominating programming
across network and across timeslots. Their survey research confirmed that
people who consumed heavy amounts of television were more likely to view the
world in keeping with these dominant themes in TV content; viewers with heavy
TV exposure overestimated their likelihood of being the victim of a crime and
were more likely to hold gender stereotypical views than those with less TV
exposure.9
The cultivation researchers also found that people from different
sociodemographic categories, whose real, lived experiences were quite different,
looked more alike in their perceptions of reality when their television viewing
was especially heavy. In the absence of television viewing, people of different
races and income groups reported varied levels of fear of crime. As one might
expect, those from demographic categories most likely to experience crime in
real life (racial minorities and those from lower-income categories) were far
more likely to report that fear of crime was a “very serious personal problem.”
But at high levels of television exposure, these differences eroded, especially
among high-income and white respondents, who reported significantly higher
levels of fear of crime, consistent with the prevalence of violence on television.
The authors described this as a “mainstreaming effect” of media exposure,
writing, “The ‘mainstream’ can be thought of as a relative commonality of
outlooks that television tends to cultivate. By ‘mainstreaming’ we mean the
sharing of that commonality among heavy viewers in those demographic groups
whose light users hold divergent views.”10

Reinforcement in a High-Choice Media Environment:

 A Different Beast
As cable fragmented the television landscape in the 1980s and 1990s, cultivation
research moved in a new direction. With more thematically diverse viewing
options, it became harder to argue that all media content had the same effect on
heavy television viewers.11 Instead, researchers began thinking about how
exposure to specific media genres or programs was shaping viewers’ perceptions
of reality. This approach centered on how mediated depictions of the world (of
events, relationships, and power dynamics) shaped the cognitive representations
(mental models) viewers came to hold in their minds.12 Watching shows that
depicted traditional romantic relationships, for example, informed our brain’s
schematic representations of what “romantic relationships look like.”13 We
would then draw on those “mental models” to make sense of the real world.14 In
other words, exposure to specific media content served as an “observation of the
world” that we then used to inform our knowledge, theories, and beliefs about
what reality was like.
On average, media provide just some of the many observations that we use to
understand our worlds. This helps explain why the strongest media “effects”
tend to emerge in the context of issues and topics with which we have the least
real-world experience.15 Researchers have found that the effects of watching
stereotypical depictions of minority groups on television are strongest among
those with little interaction with members of those groups in real life.16
Similarly, the effects of media exposure on perceptions of police are greatest for
those with the fewest real-world interactions with police.17 If media provide
some fraction of the observations that we use to inform our understanding of the
world, then media’s influence will be strongest in the context of phenomena we
have the least opportunity to directly “observe” on our own.
Putting this all together, from the 1960s to the 1980s, centralized low-choice
media technologies were operating against the backdrop of low elite
polarization, high(ish) trust in institutions, and sociodemographically mixed (not
very sorted) political parties. In their quest to offend as few people as possible,
media producers created broadly appealing, status-quo-affirming television
content that was associated with viewers looking more and more similar in their
worldviews the more they watched.
But what happens in a decentralized, high-choice, fragmented media
environment in which media producers deliberately create content to separate—
and create relationships with—different kinds of people? And what happens
when this strategic audience segmentation occurs in a climate of increasing
political polarization, institutional distrust, and the social sorting of the political
parties? Well, the fact that MSNBC, Fox News Channel, and the political news
satire program The Daily Show were all launched in 1996 is no accident. Recall
that the 1994 Republican revolution marked a seismic shift in American politics.
It coincided with a sharp increase in ideological polarization of elites, increased
affective polarization among the public, and the increased social sorting of the
two parties. All these trends were making American media consumers harder to
please, especially in terms of their perception of bias in political programming. It
was in the 1980s that scholars identified a “hostile media effect,” a perceptual
error in which partisan viewers perceive objective political programming to be
biased against their side.18
As cable outlets proliferated, one of the domains that media producers could
use to efficiently separate and develop special relationships with distinct
audiences was politics. And it worked. Research by Kevin Coe and his
colleagues conducted in 2004–2005 found liberals were more likely than
conservatives to watch the liberal satire show The Daily Show, and conservatives
were more likely than liberals to watch the conservative Fox News Channel.
Partisans perceived less bias in programming that agreed with their politics: Fox
was perceived as less biased among conservatives than among liberals, and The
Daily Show was perceived as less biased among liberals than conservatives.
Like-minded partisan content was also perceived as more interesting and
informative.19
This fragmentation of the media landscape not only allowed politically
interested partisans to seek out content they found interesting and informative
but also allowed a whole lot of people to tune out from politics altogether.
Political scientist Markus Prior has demonstrated that the fracturing of our media
landscape through cable and internet allowed politically disinterested Americans
to avoid consuming any political news.20 Instead, these less interested folks fled
explicitly political content for entertainment and sports, leaving “news” and
“public affairs” to the most partisan among us.
As these politically interested partisans engaged in selective exposure—
tuning into the content consistent with their worldview—that worldview was
thus reinforced.21 But unlike media reinforcement in the 1970s and ’80s, where
broadly appealing “least objectionable programming” reinforced the things
Americans had in common, “reinforcement” in today’s fragmented media
landscape reinforces the things that divide us. In a quest to satisfy a politically
divided, untrusting population, producers are producing one side’s “most
objectionable programming” as an efficient way to appeal to the other side.
 For years, political communication researchers worried that because
audiences could opt out of media programming that disagreed with their political
views, we would all end up in echo chambers, avoiding anything that disagreed
with us and moving further in the direction of our preexisting views. It turns out
that most people don’t do this. Even though we tend to seek out information that
agrees with our politics,22 most of us consume at least some political media
content that contradicts our views.23 Unfortunately, the problem isn’t what “most
people do.” The problem is what the highly engaged, highly interested, strong
partisans do.24 Scholars have found that it is here—among the most politically
interested and engaged partisans—where people enter a partisan echo chamber,
watching and reading media that support their beliefs and avoiding content they
disagree with.25 And unfortunately, it’s among these engaged partisans where
we’re likely to find the kind of heightened emotional responses—especially
anger—that contribute to even more like-minded exposure later on.26
Does it matter that politically interested partisans avoid media that disagree
with them? The problem is what “attitude reinforcement” looks like among
people who already hold strong attitudes. Political scientist Matthew
Levendusky has studied what happens to individuals’ political attitudes and
beliefs after watching partisan cable media (like Fox and MSNBC). His book
How Partisan Media Polarize America makes a compelling case that politically
biased media lead us to privilege what we already believe over what is
empirically true.27 Levendusky explains how exposure to attitude-reinforcing
content makes us think of ourselves more in terms of our political “team,”
worsening these (non)sense-making tendencies: “Priming this sort of salient
identity increases viewers’ directional goals—it heightens their desire to reach a
conclusion in line with their partisanship, thereby strengthening their biases
toward attitudinally congenial information.”28 These effects are greatest (read:
worst) at the margins, where highly engaged partisans experience identity-
reinforcing effects that move them further in the direction they were already
heading. Among those who are highly attentive to politics, being able to select
like-minded news media is associated with greater partisan-ideological
alignment, such that highly politically engaged Democrats are more liberal as
their media options increase, and highly engaged Republicans are more
conservative.29 Levendusky writes, “These programs contribute to polarization
not by shifting the center of the ideological distribution, but rather by
lengthening the tails (i.e., moving the polarized even further away from the
center).”30
 Reinforcing Political Identity and Identity Threats
Since political mega-identities have come to capture ideological, racial,
religious, and cultural identities, tapping into cultural politics has proved to be an
especially effective (highly profitable) mechanism to separate different kinds of
audiences and different kinds of consumers. And because of the growing
alignment of various dimensions of identity, political identity signals not just
what belief systems we hold but how we engage with the world, what kind of
lifestyle we have, and even what aesthetics media producers should use to make
that content as appealing as possible.31
By studying viewers and tracking their movement across various platforms,
media executives use partisan social identities to guide what they cover and how
they cover it. Advances in data analytics allow them to capture patterns in
viewer engagement in real time—both with the programming itself and on social
media.32 Media scholar Dave Karpf proposes that this focus on analytics is what
allowed populist candidate Donald Trump to become a media juggernaut. Karpf
writes, “The increasing reliance on newsroom analytics created a positive
feedback loop, in which journalists and their editors became so attuned to
Trump’s clickworthy campaign that they continually devoted outsized attention
to his candidacy, which in turn sustained and supported his polling numbers,
which thus gave news media even more reason to provide overwhelming
coverage of his campaign.”33
In an investigative report detailing the operations and success of conservative
outrage program Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News Channel, the New York
Times’s Nick Confessore described how media analytics pushed Carlson’s
programming further into the realm of culturally conservative identity politics.34
As one Fox employee told Confessore, audience analytics motivated Fox
executives to call for more of “the grievance, the stuff that would get people
boiled up. … ‘They’re coming for you, the Blacks are coming for you, the
Mexicans are coming for you.’ ‘They’re all obsessed with the minute-by-
minutes,’ said a former Fox employee. ‘Every second that goes on that network
now gets scrutinized.’ ”
All told, the consequences of media reinforcement depend on how much
media producers know about us in the first place. Data analytics make the study
of audiences possible at a granular level, integrating individual
sociodemographic and consumer behaviors with our real-time engagement with
television and social media content. But—and this is essential—these methods
do not result in the production of media content that reflects and reinforces who
we are. Rather, they result in the production of media content that reinforces the
most emotionally engaged, attentive versions of ourselves, since that is what is
most financially viable for the media industry. If there is anything that ignites the
attention and emotional response of viewers—especially threat-monitoring
culturally conservative viewers—it’s threats to their team. Viewed this way,
Carlson’s meta-narrative of “they’re coming for you” was a safe bet in terms of
viewer engagement, retention, and profitability.
The notion that reinforcement itself is a powerful media effect is at the heart
of media scholar Mike Slater’s Reinforcing Spirals Model.35 Rather than a
simplistic account of media’s direct influence, the model acknowledges that
people are goal directed in their use of media. Our social identities shape how
we interpret messages while also guiding our selection of media in the first
place. We anticipate what messages and programs will complement our social
identities, then we seek them out. It’s the “people like me watch shows like this”
calculus. As we view this content through our social identity lens, our identities
are further reinforced. The next time we seek out media content, the identity that
guides us in that selection has become even more crystallized and salient than
before—hence Slater’s description of the process as an ongoing “spiral.” Over
time, as we consume more media to support our group identity, the process
repeats itself and we become more entrenched in our role as a member of our
team.
Slater’s model also highlights the role of “identity threat” in these dynamics,
where threats to our social identities increase our likelihood of seeking out
identity-reaffirming media content. If I encounter media content that makes me
feel like someone is coming for my team, I’m going to want to seek out content
that makes me feel good about my team and keeps tabs on rival teams. Slater
explains that a sense of identity threat can happen “during political campaigns or
… when rival ideologies are becoming salient, or at times of economic or social
strain,” at which point, “selective use of attitude- and identity-consistent content
should increase.”36 Identity threat is increased when people encounter opposing
views that challenge fundamental beliefs or values associated with their social
group. In fact, after strong partisans experience a threat to their partisan
identities through interactions with people of competing political views, they
seek out more like-minded political content.37 Under conditions of identity
threat, they turn to their team’s partisan programming to reinforce their role as a
member of their team. Identity threat can also be increased when public debate is
“framed as a threat to core values and beliefs.”38 In American politics today,
elites strategically tie public policy debate to the values and beliefs that are at the
heart of political mega-identities. On the right, those values are freedom,
tradition, and the protection of innocent children. On the left, they are equality,
diversity, and caring for the less fortunate.39 Even at the local level, where
community debates are being nationalized, we see policy discussions framed in
these very terms, like those conservative “local news stories” that tied school
curriculum discussions to critical race theory.
Since threats to our identity increase our desire for identity-reaffirming media
exposure, partisan media producers have perfected a genre predicated on identity
threat. In chapter 6, I showed how both Fox and MSNBC made extensive use of
Senator Cruz’s and Senator Graham’s outbursts during Judge Jackson’s
nomination hearings (MSNBC even more so than Fox). By highlighting out-
group protypes, MSNBC emotionally engages its audience while reinforcing the
concept of identity threat from the right.
Meanwhile, conservative outrage hosts directly threaten a white conservative
social identity with content that says “they’re coming for you.” A 2021 analysis
by political scientists Jeff Berry, James Glaser, and Debbie Schildkraut shows
that Fox viewers are 94 percent white and just 1 percent Black, compared with
MSNBC’s audience, who are 67 percent white, 24 percent Black, and 9 percent
other.40 In a country that is 76 percent white, these numbers matter.41 They also
help us understand why in just five months, from February to June 2021, the
term “critical race theory” was mentioned 1,860 times on Fox News shows.42
Political communication scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson explains Fox’s
obsession with the alleged teaching of critical race theory in schools in terms of
the threat-monitoring propensity among Fox’s conservative viewers: “If you are
on high alert to threats to your identity, then if it’s happening in any place, it’s
worrisome to you.”43 In the end, these content choices are about reinforcement:
reinforcing the fears, outrage, and identities of their threat-monitoring viewers.
And as Jamieson says, “It works. It holds audiences. The goal is sustaining
viewership.”

Asymmetrical Identity Distillation

The anticipation of political mega-identities by political elites, media producers,
and social media algorithms encourages the creation and spread of identity
threats and thus identity-reinforcing content. This content provides observations
that we then use to make sense of the world; and since it was created to tap into
our partisan identity, it reinforces it every time we watch.
 When master distillers make whiskey, they first mix grains like corn and
wheat, boil the mixture, and then add alcohol to begin a process of fermentation.
The resulting “wash” is then put through a process of distillation—it is brought
to a boil to evaporate the alcohol. The evaporated alcohol is captured,
condensed, and turned into a raw form of whiskey. But good whiskey puts that
already-distilled liquid through the distillation process again, removing even
more impurities through evaporation and collecting the alcohol product. Double-
and triple-distilled whiskey gets purer and purer, increasing the proof every time.
This process is akin to what our political media ecosystem does to our social
identities—refining and purifying our idea of who we are and how people like us
think, feel, and act, then drawing on those purified identities to repeat the
process again and again.
While both liberals and conservatives have their identities distilled through
partisan-reinforcing media content,44 the nature of the conservative media
ecosystem and the alignment of Republican sociodemographic and cultural
categories streamline these dynamics.45 Meanwhile, the psychological profile of
social conservatives, capitalizing on heuristics like emotions and intuition,
increases the potential for conservative media to reinforce beliefs and distill
mega-identities on the right.46 In a study of how the Reinforcing Spirals Model
operates differently for conservatives and liberals, Jay Hmielowski and his team
found that “reinforcing effects were more likely to occur for conservative media
outlets compared to liberal media outlets.”47 The extent to which underlying
beliefs predicted subsequent media behaviors—tuning into like-minded content
—was greater for conservatives than for liberals. Not only are conservatives
more likely to seek out like-minded content when their political identity is made
salient; they are also more responsive to the statements of political elites than
liberals are.48 So once again, the process is lopsided, creating an identity
distillation apparatus that is more efficient on the right than on the left.
From a media programming standpoint, one of the problems is that as
political mega-identities become distilled and salient, these audience members
become increasingly hard to please.49 According to the literature on the hostile
media effect, as partisans become more entrenched in their identity, they come to
see anything other than like-minded media content as increasingly hostile to
their side.50 The machinery of partisan outrage constantly reminds viewers that
their team—and their entire way of life—is under threat. As highly interested
and engaged partisans consume like-minded content, their views become more
extreme.51 Over time, strong partisan viewers’ needs for comprehension, control,
and community will come to take a very narrow and extreme identity-centered
form. They will increasingly perceive objective counter-attitudinal content as
hostile to their side and will perceive it as especially hostile if it comes from a
source that is supposed to be “on their side.”52 When someone who is on my
team threatens my team’s core values and beliefs, they are threatening my sense
of self.

“Fox Knew”
A vivid illustration of how this process plays out in the conservative media
ecosystem can be found in the days after the 2020 presidential election. It took
four days for news organizations to officially declare Joe Biden the winner of the
2020 election. But, on Election Day itself, ahead of other news organizations, the
Fox News decision desk called the state of Arizona for Joe Biden. Four days
later, on November 7, Fox News’s Bret Baier announced, “The Fox News
decision desk can now project that former vice president Joe Biden will win PA
and Nevada putting him over the 270 electoral votes he needs to become the
46th president of the United States.” Cohost Martha MacCallum then stated that
President Trump “would be denied a second term” and urged viewers to “keep in
mind the Trump campaign is in the midst of waging legal challenges in several
states, but the path is clear for the new President Elect.”53
For Fox viewers and Trump loyalists who had spent the better part of a year
hearing tales of likely voter fraud from Fox opinion show hosts and from Trump
himself, Fox’s early call on Arizona and its announcement of Biden’s electoral
victory constituted the ultimate identity threat.54 As Fox News’s Chris Stirewalt
put it on National Public Radio, “Part of the problem, of course, was that there
were opinion hosts on Fox who, for months and months and months, had been
repeating the baseless claim that Trump was going to win the election for sure or
that we were going to do it again or don’t listen to the polls.”55
Ratings data confirm that in the weeks after Fox News made the call in favor
of Biden, fringe conservative media outlets, like Newsmax TV, benefited. The
Trump-loyal, Big Lie–embracing Newsmax TV channel enjoyed an increase in
viewership to the tune of 500 percent.56 As CNN’s Brian Stelter writes, Trump’s
electoral loss “changed the cable TV calculus. Viewers who were frustrated
when Fox admitted the truth of Trump’s loss sought other options. Trump
encouraged them to try Newsmax.”57 And so they did—so much so that on
December 7, 2020, Newsmax surpassed Fox’s ratings during a primetime slot
among the key 25- to 54-year-old demographic. In interviews with former Fox
viewers who had left the network to watch Newsmax after the election debacle,
Washington Post reporter Jeremy Barr heard tales of grief.58 Some reported
feeling like moving on from Fox was akin to “losing a friend” or a “part of the
family.” Yet others felt satisfied by the “appreciation” they felt from Newsmax,
as though Fox had been taking them for granted.
In early 2021, contending with the competition posed by more conservative
media outlets, Fox News faced the incompatible challenges of offering attractive
conservative opinion programming while also supporting a news operation that
was charged with reporting the truth. The Fox outrage opinion hosts offered
identity-rooted content to satisfy viewers’ needs for comprehension (Biden did
not really win), control (Trump is the rightful winner), and community (We are
in this together, and the Democrats, RINOs [Republicans in name only], and
mainstream media are against us). Meanwhile, the Fox News desk was still
trying to report on what was empirically, observably, true. But as weeks went
by, Fox News’s editorial direction leaned in favor of the identity-driven outrage
programming and away from empirical truth. Or, as the New York Times’s
Michael Grynbaum put it, Fox’s content moved “Trumpward.”59
This Trumpward shift at Fox included media hosts modeling a way of
knowing rooted in intuition and gut instinct over evidence. Tucker Carlson, for
example, amplified a discredited conspiracy theory about giant suitcases of
fraudulent ballots, saying, “We’re going to show you a video you may have
already seen today. It seems real. It’s pretty unbelievable,” followed up by “We
spent all day trying to find out exactly the context here. … We know that fraud
took place. We know ballots just kind of showed up in various places.”60 Fox
News personalities Sean Hannity and Brit Hume also floated false claims that
“leftists” and “bad actors” including “Antifa” were probably responsible for the
violence at the Capitol on January 6, which they were not.61 Their coverage thus
became guided by what reinforced their shared political mega-identity—by what
“felt right”—rather than what was empirically true.
For some at the network, the Trumpward shift in programming went too far,
especially after the insurrection at the US Capitol.62 In December 2021, longtime
Fox News anchor Chris Wallace announced his departure from the network as he
headed to rival CNN. After 18 years at Fox, Wallace lamented the recent shift in
the truth value of Fox programming, stating, “I’m fine with opinion:
conservative opinion, liberal opinion … But when people start to question the
truth—Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection?—I found that
unsustainable.”63 Wallace’s comments highlight what happens when political
programming chases ratings by moving away from evidence and truth, in the
direction of identity-based content. When identity dominates, truth no longer
matters.
Several lawsuits filed against conservative outlets and personalities following
the 2020 election highlight the epistemic divide discussed in chapter 5, between
truth arrived at through intuition and emotion, on the one hand, and truth arrived
at through evidence and data, on the other. In the context of law, truth is based
on considerations like how evidence is used, what evidence is admissible in
court, and what is meant by a “preponderance of evidence.”64 Note that it is not
about intuition, hunches, or what we (or our viewers) “want to believe to be
true.” So, when facing legal challenges, conservative sources that reinforce
identity threats by knowingly spreading false claims rooted in intuition or
hearsay face an uphill battle.
After the election, Trump surrogates appeared on conservative media
networks and repeatedly peddled conspiracy theories about voting technologies
rigging the election in favor of Joe Biden.65 Fox hosts like Tucker Carlson and
Sean Hannity platformed election deniers and amplified these false claims on
their shows. In response, election technology companies Smartmatic and
Dominion Voting Systems filed billion-dollar defamation lawsuits against
conservative media personalities and outlets. Smartmatic alleged that
conservative outlets OAN, Newsmax, Fox News, and Fox Business Network
“knowingly and intentionally disseminated a continuous stream of falsehoods
that harmed Smartmatic and negatively impacted the company’s business.”66
In a separate $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit, Dominion Voting Systems sued
Sidney Powell, an attorney who propagated vote-rigging conspiracy theories on
Fox and elsewhere. In her defense in that case, Powell proposed that “no
reasonable person would conclude that the statements [she had made about
Dominion] were truly statements of fact.”67 Recall political scientist Michael
Bang Petersen’s proposition that elite-spread disinformation is more about
mobilizing than informing.68 Perhaps he was onto something.
In 2021, Fox News was hit with a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit by
Dominion alleging that while the network was providing a platform to Powell
and other election misinformation peddlers (including Trump’s personal attorney
Rudy Giuliani), decision makers at Fox knew the claims were false. Dominion’s
lawsuit sought to show that Fox executives displayed actual malice by
knowingly and willfully airing false claims of voter fraud and rigged voting
machines.69 Depositions and private communications between Fox News hosts
and producers revealed that many Fox personalities viewed the claims by
Powell, Giuliani, and others to be absurd, but they aired them anyway. Carlson
texted a producer that “Sidney Powell is lying.” Laura Ingraham described
Powell in a text as “… a bit nuts.” And in a deposition, Sean Hannity stated,
“That whole narrative that Sidney was pushing. I did not believe that for a
second.”70 As Dominion states in their January 2023 brief, “Fox knew. From the
top down, Fox knew the Dominion stuff was total B.S.”71
The documents made available through the Dominion lawsuit illustrate the
very phenomena I described earlier: identity distillation, the hostile media effect,
and a partisan audience steeped in identity-threatening content. Following Fox’s
call of Arizona for Biden, Tucker Carlson texted a producer, “We’re playing
with fire, for real … an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.”72
After the election, Fox higher-ups and show hosts met to assess the damage from
their Arizona call (which was accurate) and their election call (also accurate).
Chief executive Susanne Scott stated that if they had not made the call for
Arizona, “our ratings would have been bigger.”73 Scott maligned Bill Sammon,
the head of Fox’s Decision Desk, saying that he should have been more
concerned with protecting “the [Fox] brand.”74 Meanwhile, news anchors like
Martha McCallum explained that “in a Trump environment,” making election
calls based off the vote count alone might be inadequate. The New York Times’
Peter Baker explains that both McCallum and news host Bret Baier suggested
“that viewer reaction should be considered” when making election calls.
To protect ratings and market standing after the election, Fox gave viewers
what they wanted rather than what was true. As producer Abby Grossberg texted
host Maria Bartiromo, “To be honest, our audience doesn’t want to hear about a
peaceful transition.” Bartiromo responded, “Yes. Agree.”75 Fox gave audiences a
way to understand how Trump could have lost—through vote rigging and
cheating by Democrats (thus fulfilling viewers’ need for comprehension). Fox
showed viewers what entities to hold accountable, including local election
officials, Democratic lawmakers, mainstream media, Smartmatic, and Dominion
(thus fulfilling their need for control). And Fox provided a friendly environment
where this narrative was communicated across programs by their favorite hosts
(thus fulfilling their need for community). I should note that in April 2023, Fox
settled the lawsuit with Dominion for $787.5 million. The litigation leading up to
this landmark settlement and information revealed in discovery spurred several
events at Fox News, including a lawsuit filed by producer Abby Goldberg
against Tucker Carlson for creating a hostile work environment, and perhaps
most stunningly, Fox’s abrupt “parting of ways” with Tucker Carlson on April
24, 2023.
Given the feedback loop that drives the identity-distillation apparatus, Fox
News’ response to the Dominion allegations was especially revelatory. In a
counterclaim filed against the voting software company, Fox lawyers wrote,
“Dominion brought this lawsuit to punish [Fox] for reporting on one of the
biggest stories of the day—allegations by the sitting president of the United
States and his surrogates that the 2020 election was affected by fraud. … The
very fact of those allegations was newsworthy.”76 In other words, the false
claims about the election were news because newsworthy people were making
them.77 But this ignores the fact that newsworthy people were incentivized to
make these claims because months of identity-threatening content guaranteed
that these claims would be effective. It was a lucrative—and insidious—
symbiotic relationship. In The Propagandist’s Playbook, sociologist Francesca
Tripodi highlights the symbiosis between conservative lawmakers and the right-
wing media ecosystem. She explains how conservative propaganda machinery
reinforces the white conservative Christian cultural identity along with the
existential threats against it (from the Left, minorities, immigrants, and media).
Conservative media hosts repeat a chronic refrain that the mainstream media
cannot be trusted, which “deepens [conservatives’] resolve to seek out so-called
alternative facts, and ‘do their own research’ ”78 This research, spurred by
identity threat, is conducted not with a goal of getting closer to truth but with a
goal of satisfying their needs for comprehension, control, and community in
keeping with their conservative mega-identity. And in the context of the 2020
election, this pattern reinforced the Big Lie.
As is true of most of the underlying dynamics explored throughout this book,
these processes also operate on the left, but not as effectively. The apparatus is
not as well oiled, and the liberal identity categories are not aligned to run
efficiently, but it does run. Consider, for example, how MSNBC opinion show
host Rachel Maddow covered the Steele Dossier, an unverified file of documents
by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele alleged to contain
evidence of Trump colluding with Russia, and salacious details of sex acts
performed with sex workers in Moscow. But an FBI investigation raised
“significant questions about the reliability of the Steele reporting,” including
questions about who funded the work and what other ties Steele might have
had.79 While Maddow conceded that the dossier was unverified and that the
claims of Trump colluding with Russia were not corroborated, on her show the
dossier remained at the center of speculation for weeks.80 On March 8, 2017, she
said, “But even if [the claim of Trump/Russia collusion] is as yet in itself
uncorroborated and undocumented. … All the supporting details are checking
out, even the really outrageous ones. A lot of them are starting to bear out under
scrutiny. It seems like a new one each passing day.”81 This looks a whole lot like
reporting on what seems to be true based on salient partisan identity threat,
rather than reporting on what is true based on evidence.
Writing about how partisan cable news distills the political identities of our
most interested and engaged partisans is admittedly depressing. And because
these highly engaged partisans are also highly influential, the effects on their
beliefs tend to affect the people around them through interpersonal
conversation.82 Your uncle Jim watches Fox News and is increasingly convinced
of the dangers of demographic “replacement.” He tells his friends and family
about these theories, and they start to share his concerns. This two-step flow
effect, where media influence the beliefs of the highly attentive, who then shape
the beliefs of the people they talk to, means that the impact of partisan media on
the public is more widespread than it might appear based on audience size
alone.83
The influence of partisan cable television—especially conservative media—
on the distillation of identity and belief in misinformation was especially
palpable during the COVID-19 pandemic. Misinformation about mask wearing
was more prevalent on Fox News than on any other mainstream, print, or cable
news outlet.84 Viewers of Fox News were more likely to believe misinformation
and conspiracy theories about COVID than viewers of broadcast media.85 People
prone to conspiratorial thinking were more likely to seek out conservative media
sources (read: Fox News) in the first place, then grew to hold even greater
misperceptions about COVID over time.86 Conservative media users were not
only more likely to believe COVID misinformation and conspiracy theories but
also more likely to believe that “public health experts over-estimated the severity
of the pandemic.”87 Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, viewers of Fox News were
among the least compliant with social distancing orders,88 held significantly
more negative attitudes toward the COVID vaccine,89 and were significantly less
likely to receive the COVID vaccine.90
In my conversation with misinformation experts David Rand and Gordon
Pennycook91 I asked them, “In your ideal world, if the vectors of influence could
operate at any level with infinite funds, where would you stage an intervention
[to reduce belief in misinformation]?” Pennycook responded without hesitation:
“I would delete Fox News.” Rand agreed, “I would say de-platforming bad
elites.” Pennycook continued: “The [United] States has an insane media
ecosystem. It is not the same in other countries. Even Canada. We don’t have
Fox News. … That is the issue.”
These are two scholars who study the psychological and sociological factors
that contribute to misinformation beliefs. They explore how interventions staged
on social media slow the spread of misinformation and which kinds of people
are more likely to believe misinformation. And when asked what lever they
would pull to stop the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories, they
would delete Fox News and deplatform bad elites. Given the primacy of “free
speech” doctrine in the United States and our history of a hands-off libertarian
approach to media policy, such a lever doesn’t exist. But it is essential to
acknowledge that experts recognize that the synergy between America’s
demographically sorted political landscape and the identity-threat-propelled
engine of conservative media has created something uniquely bad for democratic
—and physical—health in the United States.
Until you look at the profile of the American news audience in comparison
with other nations, you might think this is just the way it is everywhere. But it’s
not. The United States is unique in the magnitude of its news audiences’
ideological polarization—especially, you guessed it, on the right. For years,
scholars at the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford have studied the
profile and behaviors of news audiences around the globe.92 Their work shows
that even though liberals and conservatives in many countries are gravitating to
distinct ideological news sources, the US situation is striking. In most other
countries, the largest audiences (indicated by the size of the circles in the figure
opposite) are ideologically moderate, leaning slightly left. There are partisan
audiences that lean left and right, like the UK’s Guardian (left) and the Daily
Mail (right), but these audiences are smaller in size than more mainstream news
audiences. In the United States, politically middle-of-the-road audiences are
small. Instead, we see sizable liberal audiences gravitating toward the New York
Times and CNN. And on the right, we find one hugely popular media source
being consumed by an audience that is distinctly far right: Fox News. Unlike
right-wing news audiences in most other countries, the right-wing audience of
Fox is sizable, attracting as many, if not more, audience members as any other
major news outlet explored (see figure).
The size of the conservative news audience in the United States makes sense
given what we know about conservatives’ trust in mainstream news sources. A
2020 Pew report found that of 30 news sources that Americans were asked
about, conservatives distrusted 20 of them. Less than a third of Republicans
reported trusting CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time
Magazine, or any of the major television network news organizations. But 65
percent of those same Republicans reported trusting Fox News.93
Polarization of News Audiences in Different Countries. America’s news audiences are more ideologically
polarized than those in many other democratic countries.
From: Newman, N., Fletcher, R., Robinson, C. T., Eddy, K., & Nielsen, R. K. (2022). Reuters Institute
Digital News Report 2022. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2022.

In a high-choice media environment in which republicanism signals not just

ideological conservatism but also whiteness, Evangelicalism, rural geography,
and cultural values, centering editorial decisions on a Republican mega-identity
is good business. And it works best when it reinforces most: focusing on the
fundamental values and beliefs shared by those overlapping categories and
reinforcing the audience’s perception that their identity is under threat. While
reinforcement in the mid-twentieth century was a homogenizing influence that
muted differences between different kinds of Americans, reinforcement today is
a mechanism for sectarianism and, in some instances, extremism. Rather than
coming to a shared understanding of the world through increased media
exposure, we come away from partisan media with perceptions of reality that (1)
interpret events in a way that fits with the ideological and cultural values of our
team (comprehension), (2) empower us to think and act in service of our partisan
identity (control), and (3) reinforce our connection to our team (community). In
the next chapter we turn our attention to digital technologies’ contribution to
American “wrongness,” where many of these same concepts are at play: media
fragmentation, partisan identity threats, data analytics, and the power of media
reinforcement. But the nature and economics of our largest social media
platforms—decentralized, interactive, networked, user driven—compound these
dynamics, distilling partisan identity and driving wrongness even more.
 Chapter 8

Curate Us
Identity Distillation through Social Media

IN AN ATLANTIC ARTICLE FROM APRIL 2022 titled “Why the Past 10

Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” social psychologist
Jonathan Haidt suggests the answer is simple: it is the fault of social media.1
Haidt argues that the rise of social media is largely responsible for America’s
devolving sense of community, our cultural fragmentation, our eroding trust in
institutions and each other, our balkanization along political lines, the spread of
misinformation and conspiracy theories, and the rising mental health challenges
experienced among our young people.
And although Haidt concedes that Americans were divided before the
introduction of social media, he suggests the ascendance of social media was the
equivalent of the biblical tale of the fall of the Tower of Babel: social media
made us unable to communicate with each other and unable to have a shared
reality necessary to work together to solve societal problems. He attributes the
destructive power of social media to what he refers to as metaphorical “dart
guns” (tweets and Facebook posts) that “give more power to trolls and
provocateurs while silencing good citizens” and “give more power and voice to
the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate
majority.”
On these last two specific points, I believe Haidt is correct. Social media
empower the margins and are especially good at encouraging the polarization of
extremes, as we will see. But what Haidt downplays are the synergistic
influences—political, journalistic, economic, and cultural forces—that are
driving identity-based sectarianism. These forces are capitalizing on social
media machinery just as social media are capitalizing on them. After its
publication, Haidt’s Atlantic article caused a kerfuffle in scholarly circles and
(somewhat ironically) on social media, where scholars took issue with the
breadth of the brush that Haidt used to paint his bleak picture. My critique is
somewhat different. I am less concerned that Haidt may have overstated the
harm posed by social media, and more concerned about the powerful people,
entities, and influences that Haidt let off the hook—namely, those covered in the
previous chapters.
Let’s face it: social media are wildly different from earlier media
technologies. They are decentralized, networked, and interactive in ways that
can both benefit and devastate democratic health and the “reality-based
community” at large. They are well suited to persuasion and mobilization, which
means they are also well suited to propaganda and exploitation. But whether
social media facilitate one set of consequences over another depends largely on
the actions of political elites, journalists, partisan media, and the actions of users
—us.
Like television and news media content, social media newsfeeds and
timelines provide some of the “observations of the world” that inform our
understanding of what is true. But these observations—especially on large
platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter—have been curated in
anticipation of our most passionate emotional responses. And these emotional
responses are most efficiently activated by identity threat. Social identity has
become the backbone of social media logic—media logic being the processes
that shape not only how media organizations and platforms function but also the
kinds of content that we receive (and create) through them.2 The observations of
the world that we receive through our newsfeeds are shaped by who we’re
connected to and by algorithms that prioritize what we have emotionally
responded to in the past (through likes, reactions, or shares) and what other
people “like us” have liked or responded to in the past. I say “like us” because
these determinations are made by linking us to others with shared
sociodemographics, interests, and network characteristics. They might not
actually be like us at all. So, these three things—who we are connected to, how
we respond to emotional content on the platform, and what most people “like us”
watch, like, and share—are all influenced by how we categorize ourselves (that
is, what team we’re on). This is why I say social identity is the backbone of
social media logic. And in the United States right now, political mega-identities
are the most all-encompassing, efficient, and threat-inducing social identities of
all.
The Internet: Doing Exactly What It Was Designed to
Do
When I teach my students about the potential influence of digital technologies
and social media, I first remind them of the features, capacities, and limitations
of analog mass media—the media I grew up with in the early 1980s: printed
newspapers, broadcast television, and radio. Most of my undergraduates do not
remember life without internet access in the home. Their media experience has
always been a digital one, a networked one, an interactive one. So before
discussing the unique features of digital technologies, I first explain how
traditional mass media before the 1990s were a one-to-many proposition. One
powerful message producer (publisher or network owner) would disseminate a
message to a giant diverse audience of many people largely disconnected from
one another and with little ability to talk back directly to message producers. It
was the one-way, top-down nature of mass media that caused media sociologists
such concern about the potential for powerful media effects on audiences dating
back to the 1930s and ’40s.
To understand how social media platforms work, it helps to remember that
the internet was designed in part to solve the problem of the inherent
vulnerability of a centralized information infrastructure. When the Soviet Union
placed nuclear-capable missiles on the coast of Cuba within range of the United
States in 1962, it revealed core vulnerabilities in the US military’s information
systems. Their systems were hierarchical and centralized. Command centers
were home to data and strategy, on which military officials relied. If one
information hub were destroyed, or if the physical information infrastructure
were damaged, the military’s capacity to respond would be compromised.3 The
1969 creation of the first decentralized information network was the US
government’s solution to the vulnerability of information centralization.
Through the technology of “packet switching,” information could be sent
through an interconnected system, made redundant across the network, and
decoded at various destinations.4 In other words, people could receive the same
information anywhere on the network, even if one of the hubs were destroyed.
No one person or entity controlled the network.
In traditional top-down analog mass media systems, media organizations
controlled what messages entered the flow of information. These gatekeepers—
people like editors, producers, even reporters—chose what stories to cover.
Network executives, network censors, and advertisers also exerted control over
what messages were produced and distributed and what they looked like. But the
internet was designed to be decentralized and horizontal, with little room for a
centralized gatekeeper who could control (or limit) the flow of information. It
was also designed to facilitate many-to-many communication—interconnected
message recipients become message creators and distributors.
Gatekeepers are like the bouncers at the entrance to a nightclub. Depending
on your choice of attire, who you know, how much money you have, or even
your gender, the bouncer (my students like to give him a name, like Biff) might
allow you to enter the club, or not. Before the era of the internet and social
media, Biff had total control over who got into the club or information space. In
this analogy, Biff is the powerful newspaper editor, television producer, or
record label executive who determines what gets “in” to the flow of information
—the stories on TV, on the radio, or in the pages of the newspaper. If Biff didn’t
let you into the club, you weren’t getting in.
But digital technologies and social media are the equivalent of a dozen new—
unguarded—doors around the back of the nightclub. Note that Biff the bouncer
is still there at the front door. Newspaper editors, TV producers, and record label
executives do still exist, after all. But now, if Biff doesn’t let you in the main
door, you can just go around back and enter the club through another door. You
could write a blog post, upload your video to YouTube, share your song online,
or perform your stand-up comedy bit on social media.
From the early days of the internet, scholars and journalists wrote with
overwhelming optimism about the likely impact of this shift, which took control
away from elites and formal organizations (away from Biff) and sent it
downstream to citizens, consumers, and audiences. This was especially true with
the birth of Web 2.0 in the mid-2000s, characterized by user-centered platforms
that better capitalized on the networked and interactive nature of digital
technologies. These included the social media platform Myspace launched in
2003, Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Twitter in 2006—all platforms
designed to promote horizontal, interpersonal communication between users and
to empower individual users to create content and distribute it through the
network. Scholars (including me) were especially optimistic about the likely
impact of this transformation on democratic health.5
As formal gatekeepers lost their monopolistic control over what got into the
flow of information, regular people became the new center, with more
opportunities to have their voices heard, raise issues and stories that were
important to them, and share their own perspectives in a way that the traditional
gatekeepers hadn’t allowed. The networked nature of the internet also helped
groups of individuals mobilize toward collective action. In the spring of 2011,
the world watched as citizens throughout the Middle East made use of social
media platforms to challenge authoritarian leaders. Across the region, citizens
demanding economic and political reform capitalized on the decentralized
control of the internet to communicate, criticize their existing political regimes,
and organize protests. In Tunisia and Egypt, activists used Twitter and Facebook
to help mobilize democratic revolutions.
Historically marginalized groups capitalized on these same features of digital
technologies and social media to create counternarratives, organize, and
mobilize toward representation and justice—as we saw with movements such as
Black Lives Matter and #MeToo.6 With fewer gatekeepers and a networked
communication infrastructure, social media platforms offer power and voice to
those whose stories are often excluded from mainstream media content. As
social movement scholar Sarah Jackson writes of Twitter, “It expanded the set of
voices all of us have to hear.”7 Scholars have documented how the use of social
media hashtags “allows users who are territorially displaced to feel like they are
united across both space and time,”8 and how the interests and perspectives of
Black users can enter the national conversation through #BlackTwitter.9
Anthropologists Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa document how minority
communities use hashtags like #HandsUpDontShoot to “construct
counternarratives” and “reimagine group identity” surrounding police violence.10
The decentralized control of digital technologies allows less powerful
communities to influence the decisions of traditional media gatekeepers, thus
amplifying their perspectives through mainstream media. Through a
computational analysis of over 40 million tweets, for example, digital politics
scholar Deen Freelon and his team showed how the social movement Black
Lives Matter was able to attract mainstream press coverage through their
engagement on Twitter.11 In sum, while social media do not create social or
political movements, they certainly facilitate the kind of decentralized,
horizontal, networked communication that empowers marginalized voices,
amplifies counternarratives, and helps people organize and mobilize.12
But this same combination of a lack of information gatekeepers and
hypernetworked communication also places a powerful new tool in the hands of
propagandists.13 If Biff the bouncer allows only his friends or people who slip
him some cash to enter the club, then the existence of a dozen other unguarded
doors around back is a win for good folks who are now able to get inside. But if
Biff had stopped a guy from entering the club because that guy regularly
threatens violence, and then that guy comes in through an unguarded back door,
that is probably bad for everyone.

The Exploitability of Social Media by Disinformation

Peddlers
If you were on social media during the 2016 US presidential election campaign
between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, you may have seen posts or memes
arguing that American police departments consisted primarily of KKK members
or that Black Lives Matter protesters were responsible for the deaths of police
officers. Maybe you saw or shared a meme featuring a photo of a woman
holding a gun that reads: “Why do I have a gun? Because it’s easier for my
family to get me out of jail than out of a cemetery.” Crucially, none of these was
authentic content created by American citizens. They were all Russian
disinformation created by internet trolls; the Kremlin paid people to spend hours
online using false social media accounts to post memes and videos, and to
comment on and share information that would divide Americans and weaken
American democracy.14
In her book Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a
President, political communication expert Kathleen Hall Jamieson illustrates
how Russia took advantage of the decentralized and networked nature of social
media to spread divisive, hateful, and false information among the American
public, to weaken American democracy. Russia is a repeat offender in this
space.15 In the summer of 2021, Facebook removed hundreds of Russian-linked
accounts that were part of a COVID-19 vaccine disinformation network.16
Various investigations have found that the Russian and Chinese governments
were drivers of COVID-related conspiracy theories and disinformation through
their state-run news media organizations, which then spread through social
media.17 They also used fringe websites to spread conspiracy theories through
social media platforms with stories doubting the vaccines’ safety and falsely
alleging the Biden administration was launching a “forced” vaccination
campaign.18 In the summer of 2022, US security experts warned of Russia’s
inevitable plans to use disinformation to suppress American voter turnout in the
2022 midterm elections, exacerbate cultural divisions, and sow public doubt
about the fairness of the elections.19
In the spring of 2020, communication scholar Shannon McGregor and I
published an essay in the Washington Post reflecting on how social media are
particularly well suited to exploitation by malicious actors.20 We framed the
piece using the same criteria outlined in the influential 1948 essay by social
psychologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton discussed in chapter 7. Their
essay was intended to quell societal fears about the potential for media to have
direct, powerful effects on individuals and society.21 They argued that three
criteria would have to be met for propaganda to be successful. And because
these three criteria were nearly impossible to satisfy in the United States (in
1948), such powerful media effects were unlikely. But 2020 was a long way—
and many technological advances away—from 1948. McGregor and I explained
how today’s social media are tailor-made to satisfy the very criteria that
Lazarsfeld and Merton argued had safeguarded us back then. Those three criteria
were as follows:

Monopolization—Mediated propaganda can only thrive in the absence of

counterpropaganda.
Canalization—Mediated propaganda can only succeed if it capitalizes on
preexisting attitudes and beliefs.
Supplementation—Mediated propaganda can only work if the message is
supplemented by interpersonal communication with trusted people.

So, how are the three unmet criteria that safeguarded us in 1948 being facilitated
by social media today?
Monopolization (the absence of counterpropaganda): Because mediated
communications in 1948 were disseminated to large, unfragmented masses, big,
diverse media audiences were bound to hear the “other side” (or at least “an
other side”) of a story or issue. But today users can curate their social media
experiences to receive content that is favorable to their worldview or bolster
their social identity. And while social media users still tend to encounter
information that opposes their views,22 in carefully curated spaces, users can be
exposed to belief-disconfirming content while still having their beliefs
reinforced in the process (more on that later).23
Canalization (capitalizing on preexisting attitudes and beliefs): Without
intimate knowledge of audience members’ preexisting beliefs, designing
propaganda that takes advantage of those beliefs is impossible. And without a
personalized medium to reach individual people, distributing propaganda that
taps into individual beliefs is also impossible. But the interactive nature of
digital technologies gives platforms access to endless data that capture individual
user preferences, attitudes, and behaviors. Today propagandists do know
individuals’ attitudes and values, and they use this information to develop
attitude-consistent messaging and to target small (tiny) groups of users who will
be most receptive to those messages.
Supplementation (supplementing mediated propaganda with interpersonal
messaging): In the mid-1900s, audiences of newspapers, radio, and television
were largely anonymous to one another, with little ability to connect or
collaborate. Media content was not experienced within interpersonal
communication networks. Researchers soon learned that the influence of media
messages on audiences was filtered through friends, family, and community
members, dubbed “opinion-leaders.”24 But today, media messages are embedded
within and experienced through interpersonal networks. We encounter media
messages that have been liked and shared by friends and family. We engage with
others in replies and react to media content—together. Platforms that offer a
hybrid of interpersonal communication and media messaging are excellent
places for media-fueled interpersonal conversation, meaning supplementation is
baked into social media logics.

Identity-Driven Disinformation
Together these features make social media an efficient apparatus for
disinformation peddlers to push out false narratives—especially those that center
on social identity. As Jamieson documents in Cyberwar, Russian disinformation
efforts in 2016 were designed to highlight cleavages along racial, religious, and
cultural lines, most directly by trying to mobilize white evangelicals and
veterans while demobilizing Blacks and progressives.25 And they are still at it. A
Facebook report published in 2021 revealed that in the months leading up to the
2020 election, the Kremlin-affiliated online troll farms were still reaching
identity-based target audiences with “Facebook Pages” geared toward
Christians, Black Americans, and Native Americans.26 As many as 140 million
Americans per month received identity-centered messaging from these
inauthentic pages.
Communication scholars Madhavi Reddi, Rachel Kuo, and Daniel Kreiss
coined the term “identity propaganda” to refer to disinformation efforts that
leverage social identity in service of power or profit.27 They show how
propagandists weaponize social identity through rhetorical strategies including
“othering,” “essentializing,” and “authenticating.” Identity propaganda
persuades and mobilizes by exploiting primal constructions of identity—
especially those tied to race, gender, and culture. It often includes false and
misleading information in the process. But even in the absence of explicitly false
information, identity propaganda facilitates false narratives by subtly affecting
how we seek to satisfy our needs for comprehension, control, and community.
In a study of Russian-generated disinformation during the 2016 election,
Deen Freelon and his colleagues found that the fake Russian social media
accounts with the highest user engagement were those that presented themselves
as Black.28 The authors conclude, “Race is a critical variable in the analysis of
disinformation uptake and should be a key focus area in future research on the
topic.”29 Russian disinformation is not just about spreading false information,
explains propaganda expert Nina Jankowicz. It’s also about eliciting emotional
responses and building online communities centered on shared social identities.30
It’s crucial to recognize that false information spread by bad actors isn’t the
only way that social media platforms encourage identity-driven wrongness. The
platforms facilitate wrongness indirectly, by encouraging us to always think of
ourselves in terms of our social identity. This dynamic, as we already know,
encourages us to understand the world in keeping with who we are and who we
want to be like, rather than in terms of what is empirically true. As media
sociologist Zeynep Tufekci writes, “Belonging is stronger than facts.”31

The Identity Distillation Machine

What makes social media so well suited to the activation of social identity isn’t
just their defining features—decentralization, networked communication,
interactivity—but the economic model that capitalizes on them. Just as the
content and function of cable news are influenced by the economics of
advertising, so, too, are the content and function of social media. Back in 2015,
Facebook’s advertising sales generated $17 billion in revenue.32 This represents
advertising sold across all Facebook’s holdings, including Facebook, Instagram,
Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. Since then, the company’s ad revenue has
increased exponentially, to $114.9 billion in 2021 alone (see figure opposite).33
In October 2021, Facebook changed its parent company name to Meta; that year,
ad sales were responsible for 99.4 percent of Meta revenue. Whatever the
company’s name, it’s clear from its financial reports that the social media
behemoth is best described as an advertising company.
 Meta/Facebook Annual Advertising Revenue in Billions of US Dollars

In contrast to the ads on cable television, advertising on social media is based

on the sale of huge numbers of highly customized, microtargeted ads delivered
to tiny specific audiences. Thus, data analytics are king. But when we use social
media, we don’t generate data just from being on Facebook or YouTube. We
generate data when we do things on Facebook and YouTube—when we click on
something, like something, react to something, share something, comment on
something. These behaviors are how we leave evidence of who we are, what we
like, and what we might do or buy in the future. These activities leave bread
crumbs that data analysts can follow and extrapolate from. Recommendation
algorithms prioritize content that will get us to leave those bread crumbs, content
that makes us do something.
And content that makes us do something is content that makes us feel
something.
And content that makes us feel something is content that taps into our social
identity.
In the fall of 2021, former Meta employee Frances Haugen made headlines
for leaking secret internal Facebook documents and testifying before the US
Congress about Facebook’s recommendation algorithms and their potential harm
to users and society.34 Through Haugen, we learned about the logic governing
Facebook’s newsfeed and tensions between Facebook researchers and executives
about the ethics of their programming decisions.35 Haugen’s testimony and the
leaked documents highlighted how Facebook’s programming decisions
prioritized user engagement (stickiness) and upweighted content that was
emotionally evocative. We learned that Meta (Facebook) researchers had found
that Instagram users experienced “stress and anxiety” related to the number of
likes their pictures received, but when likes were hidden, engagement decreased,
so the company brought the feature back. We learned that in August 2019
researchers were concerned that Facebook’s “core product mechanics”—namely,
“virality, recommendations, and optimizing for engagement”—contributed to
misinformation and hateful speech. We learned that employees had written with
concern in 2020 about how Facebook’s recommendation system can “very
quickly lead users down the path to conspiracy theories and groups.” We learned
that Facebook researchers found high rates of misinformation shared through
“reshares,” where users share a post that was shared with them by someone
else.36
In 2016, Facebook increased users’ options beyond the mere “like” and
“share” buttons with the introduction of new emoji buttons that allowed users to
emotionally react to posts with the “love,” “ha-ha,” “wow,” “sad,” and “angry”
emojis. In the internal documents shared by Haugen, known as the Facebook
Papers, we learned that these features not only were a mechanism to optimize
user engagement but also were relied on to inform newsfeed recommendations.
From 2017 through 2019, Facebook’s algorithm gave emotional reactions (like
“love” or “anger”) five times the weight of a traditional “like” in determining
what posts to prioritize in individuals’ newsfeeds.37
Each individual piece of content (i.e., each post) is scored by Facebook on
thousands of criteria, or “signals” specific to each user. These scores determine
where each piece of content should appear in a specific user’s feed. And
although Facebook sought to “demote” potentially problematic posts by cutting
scores, savvy users knew how to exploit the algorithm. As reported by the
Washington Post’s Jeremy Merrill and Will Oremus, the angry emoji button, in
particular, was known to be problematic among Facebook’s data scientists. They
saw that hateful, harmful, and misleading content was disproportionately likely
to elicit the angry emoji, even though, on average, it was the least used of all the
reaction buttons. Researchers had concluded that the angry button rewarded
emotionally evocative content and was “being weaponized” by political elites
who used it to rile up supporters and get algorithmic priority in the process.38
Features that increased user engagement and encouraged virality, then, were
the ticket to Facebook’s capacity as a microtargeting advertising juggernaut.
Facebook facilitated user interactivity not to empower people but to extract
meaningful data from them. These data became valuable bread crumbs. From the
introduction of the “like” button in 2008, the company realized its unique
capacity to sell ads on the basis of an unheard level of user specificity. In Sheera
Frenkel and Cecilia Kang’s book, An Ugly Truth, they explain how “[the like
button] represented an entirely new capability and scale of collecting insights
into users’ preferences”39—insights that could be used to inform the creation and
dissemination of identity-reinforcing and identity-threating content.40

Social Identity: The Backbone of Social Media Logics

Countless scholars working in this space have all argued that social media logics
capitalize on social identity. MIT’s Sinan Aral explores how the
“hypersocialized” world of social media encourages us to rely on social cues
about how we should think, feel, and consume.41 Sociologist Christopher Bail
emphasizes how social media allow us to efficiently monitor our social
environments and “give us much more flexibility to present carefully curated
versions of ourselves.”42 Drawing on sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of
the “presentation of self,”43 Bail proposes that we are deliberate and careful in
our online presentation of self. “Social media is … like a prism that refracts our
identities—leaving us with a distorted understanding of each other and
ourselves.”44 He shows how social identity, social comparison, and status-
seeking all contribute to the harmful effects of social media, including political
polarization, radicalization, and the appeal of misinformation. He even illustrates
how anonymizing our social media platforms might disrupt these harmful
dynamics. If our social media contributions were not tethered to our social
identities, perhaps we’d feel less compelled to defend in-groups, threaten out-
groups, or contribute to hateful and polarizing discourse.
In Siva Vaidhyanathan’s Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us
and Undermines Democracy, the media scholar characterizes user behavior on
social media as “a public performance of our cultural affiliations.”45
Vaidhyanathan sees social media expression more as a performance of who we
are and who we want to be like and less as proclamations of information or truth.
“We share content regardless of its truth value or its educational value because
of what it says about each of us. ‘I am the sort of person who would promote this
expression’ underlies every publication act on Facebook.”46 Research by Gordon
Pennycook and his colleagues illustrates how the fast, automated nature of social
media use exacerbates this trend. Pennycook concludes, “People may share news
that they do not necessarily have a firm belief in. As a consequence, people’s
beliefs may not be as partisan as their social media feeds seem to indicate.”47
Well, that’s good. I guess.
Which brings us to one of the most compelling books I’ve read about these
dynamics. It comes from political scientist Jaime Settle. In Frenemies: How
Social Media Polarizes America, Settle explains why the reality we experience
through social media is so unreal. She illustrates how social media encourage
psychological aspects of political polarization through three processes that all
center on social identity: “identity formation and reinforcement, biased
information processing, and social inference and judgment.”48 Her END
Framework (for expression, news, and discussion) outlines how social media
expression, news consumption and sharing, and interpersonal discussion are
“seamlessly interwoven into a wider variety of socially informative content.”49
Her model is based on the same political concepts we have covered here, like the
social sorting of the parties, the alignment of partisan sociodemographic
categories, and the disproportionate likelihood of strong partisans to be the most
engaged in political discussion and news consumption. Settle shows how social
media provide endless skewed “signals” that leave us with stereotyped
perceptions of our friends’ and families’ political beliefs and values. These
signals lead us to make inaccurate inferences about what regular members of the
other party are like, so we overestimate ideological differences and are left with
more hostility toward members of the other party. Writes Settle, “Using
Facebook strengthens people’s recognition of political identity. The users
generating END content are the most partisan and likely have polarized attitudes
at the outset; their motivation to express their identities while informing and
persuading other people in their networks only serves to reinforce these already
strong identities.”50 In fact, according to a 2021 report by the Pew Research
Center, 25 percent of all Twitter users are responsible for posting 97 percent of
all Twitter content.51 That is one hyperpolitical, ideological, identity-conscious
bunch. And research spearheaded by my graduate students Brooke Molokach
and Erin Oittinen suggests these folks may also lack intellectual humility.
Remember that trait, “intellectual humility” that captures whether we
acknowledge the limits of what we know and are open to updating our views?
Molokach and Oittinen found that in 2021, among Americans 50 and over,
people who reported posting and sharing information on social media the most
also reported the least intellectual humility.52 Given that they also found the
highest rates of COVID misinformation beliefs among the least intellectually
humble, it stands to reason that we should be concerned about just what kind of
content expressive social media users are contributing to our information
environment.
 It’s Not the Echo Chambers—It’s Our Identities
Scholars have long feared that social media would encourage us to bathe in like-
minded content while avoiding content (and people) that disconfirmed (or
contradicted) our views—a phenomenon referred to as “filter bubbles” or an
“echo chamber.” But study after study has suggested that, by and large, most
people are exposed to belief-disconfirming content online.53 Today, most
scholars in this research space push back against the narrative of filter bubbles
on social media.54 R. Kelly Garrett describes the echo chamber conversation as a
“distraction,” warning that “effectively responding to disinformation campaigns
requires that we find ways to undermine beliefs that persevere despite
encounters with counter-evidence.”55 Media scholar Axel Bruns says that a focus
on echo chambers is causing us to misunderstand the roots of our current
political crises, which are more about affective political polarization and social
sorting than about social media “silos.”56 Most revelatory here is the fact that the
people who are most ideological, most divided, and most likely to dislike the
other side are more, not less, likely to be exposed to belief-disconfirming
content. Writes Bruns, “It turns out that those whom we most expect to be
caught in filter bubbles—hyperpartisans on the political fringes—are also most
actively engaged with the mainstream media, even if they read them from a
critical, oppositional perspective.”57
Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen argues that the term “echo chamber” conflates
two different things: (1) a lack of exposure to belief-contradicting viewpoints
and (2) exposure to belief-contradicting viewpoints in a way that signals distrust
by discrediting or delegitimizing them.58 It’s one thing for my liberal aunt Sally
to see a story critical of gender-affirming care for transgender youth (exposure to
belief-contradicting content). It’s another for that story to be shared by her friend
Rita along with the comment: “These Republicans are barbaric. This is an
outrage!” (thus discrediting those beliefs). In the context of social media, it is not
mere exposure to belief-disconfirming information that matters, but the
discussion around belief-disconfirming information that matters. Media
sociologist Zeynep Tufekci highlights how it is our social identities and the
embeddedness of communication within networked communities that complicate
the echo chamber concept:

The problem is that when we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media, it’s
not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone. It’s like hearing them from the opposing
team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium. Online, we’re connected with our
communities, and we seek approval from our like-minded peers. We bond with our team by yelling
 at the fans of the other one.59

Although Aunt Sally initially read the belief-disconfirming story about

transgender youth while she was sitting at her kitchen table, now she sees it
online, shared by her friend Rita along with the comment about barbaric
Republicans. Now Sally’s entire experience of reading that article about that
belief-challenging topic is framed in terms of the identity-activating comment
from Rita.

The Problem on the Margins

For more than a decade, social media researchers have been trying to learn how
these dynamics affect users. How do these features influence user attitudes,
beliefs, and behaviors? How do advertisers use individual data to microtarget
their appeals, and what do these customized appeals look like? Social media
companies, especially Meta, make this kind of research very difficult to do—or
at least to do well.60 But despite the difficulty in getting adequate access to user
data or to internal decisions relating to algorithms and recommender
programming, scholars have found creative ways to study social media processes
and effects. We’ve conducted surveys that ask folks about their beliefs,
knowledge, and behaviors, as well as their social media use. Some scholars go to
social media users directly to ask for access to their newsfeeds and social media
behaviors while also studying their attitudes and behaviors offline. Academics
have also used novel experimental methods to re-create the conditions of the
social media experience to see how these dynamics play out. Some platforms
collaborate with academics. For example, prior to a policy change announced by
Elon Musk–led Twitter in February 2023, for years the platform had granted
researchers and developers free access to the “firehose” of tweets and supporting
APIs (application programming interfaces) that allowed researchers to study
how information diffuses across the network.61 And yes, Facebook has facilitated
academic studies related to certain aspects of misinformation and belief
correction.
Yet another obstacle to our accurate understanding of the influence of social
media stems from the fact that many of the most problematic dynamics are
occurring on the margins, among a small number of people. And since the most
dangerous behaviors and outcomes are most prevalent among this small
percentage of users, they are difficult to find with traditional sampling
techniques, techniques that capture a cross-section of typical users.
But if it’s a small percentage experiencing problematic outcomes, does this
matter? Yes, it matters. It matters because the total number of social media users
is so massive, a tiny percentage of users on the margins can still wreak havoc. In
2021, Pew reported that almost 70 percent of Americans reported using
Facebook.62 With the US population at 331.9 million, a harmful trend among just
one-half of 1 percent of Facebook users would still be experienced by about
1,161,650 people. Brandon Silverman, cofounder of the research analytical tool
CrowdTangle, writes, “Instead of using measurements that try and capture some
sort of mythological average experience across the entire user base of these
platforms, I think we need to focus more on the potential harms within
particularly vulnerable communities where there are outsized implications.”63
Stanford’s Matthew Gentzkow echoed these sentiments, observing that most
researchers have been focused on “how social media affects the average person.”
But he suggests we ought to be most concerned about the margins, where “a
small number of people with very extreme views are able to find each other and
connect and act.”64
By and large, research on the effects of social media on information
polarization, affective polarization, or belief in misinformation and conspiracy
theories all points to the problems on the margins. The people who encounter the
most false information on social media are those who spend a lot of time
online.65 The people most likely to come away from social media believing in
conspiracy theories are those who already have a strong propensity toward belief
in conspiracy theories.66 And the people most likely to consume fringe political
content on social media are highly engaged and highly politically partisan.67
These engaged partisans are the same people creating most of the user-generated
political content on social media.68 Social media effects on political knowledge
and attitudes are strongest in the context of these extreme partisans as well.69
Today, scholars around the world are studying online radicalization and the
dangers that may exist on the margins. Some research shows that
recommendation systems occasionally result in users escalating from moderate
to fringe political and cultural content. This appears to be happening in small
numbers, as in less than 0.001 percent,70 but again, even tiny percentages of
individuals being pushed to more extreme content online can still be
consequential when the user base of these platforms is so large.
Perhaps the more challenging problem is the problem of demand—that is,
people seeking out extremist content. In a study of exposure to fringe and
extremist content on YouTube, for example, Annie Chen and her team found
that the small number of users who see fringe and extremist content on YouTube
have largely self-selected into those channels. These are people who “previously
expressed high levels of hostile sexism and racial resentment.”71 There has been
an increase in the production of right-wing online cultural content (so-called
intellectual dark web, alt-lite, or alt-right content) on YouTube over the past
several years. YouTube’s recommendation systems are capable of exposing
people to more extreme content the more they consume the “lighter” right-wing
fare.72 However, to receive an offer of deluxe extremist content, users would
need to choose to view hate-adjacent content in the first place. Is this better or
worse than social media algorithms radicalizing “normies” and luring them into
the margins? The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus suggests that “algorithmic
radicalization is presumably a simpler problem to solve than the fact that there
are people who deliberately seek out vile content.”73
While consumers of extremist online content score high in hostile sexism and
racial resentment, the ones most likely to generate hostile online content are
those who are status-driven risk takers.74 Meanwhile, those folks who are least
concerned with status are unlikely to talk about politics online. Which leaves the
online world dominated by a lovely lot of folks, it would seem. These findings
are consistent with work by Emily Sydnor that shows that people who are
“conflict approaching” (individuals who find arguments interesting and
entertaining and who are not made uncomfortable by disagreement) are more
likely to consume political media and experience positive emotions in response
to political conflict.75 A project led by my doctoral student Huma Rasheed points
to a similar pattern when predicting who expresses their political views on social
media.76 People who are “conflict approaching” are significantly more likely to
post, comment on, or share things about politics online, whereas those who are
conflict averse do not. So, not only is social media dominated by the most
ideological and partisan voices among us, but it’s also dominated by people who
like to fight and who are status seeking. What kind of content might these highly
partisan, conflict-approaching, status-seeking people create when on social
media? Well, provocative, identity-protective, and identity-threatening content,
of course. Or, as a team of psychologists and political scientists from Yale and
NYU call it, “moralized emotional content.”77

“This Is an Outrage!” The Moralized Emotional

Content Problem
“Moralized content” is content that argues something is “good” or “bad” for
society and articulates what should be happening in a perfect, just, proper
world.78 As psychologists William Brady, M. J. Crockett, and Jay Van Bavel
explain, moralized content is typically expressed through emotional language—
as in the case of your aunt Sally’s friend Rita sharing the news story about
transgender youth being denied gender-affirming care, prefaced by, “These
Republicans are barbaric. This is an outrage!” Content that highlights events,
people, or objects as good or bad for society and does so using emotional
language is especially likely to spread through online networks.79 It is shared a
lot. It’s “contagious.” And it’s good at going viral, Brady explains, because it
taps into our social identities. When we experience threat from an out-group (as
Rita did when she read this “value-violating” news story), our sense of what is
right or wrong is violated and we respond emotionally. We respond with outrage
and contempt (as Rita did) or with gratitude for our in-group, elevating who
“we” are and what “we” stand for. Remember, we are social animals: we survive
in groups, we monitor for threats to our group, and we are readily mobilized to
protect our group. Given all that, this moralizing emotional content rooted in
identity threat grabs our attention in a way other content does not. Take, for
example, this moralized emotional tweet from conservative activist and writer
Christopher Rufo from July 2022 that was rewarded with over 34,000 likes and
7,000 retweets: “No child has an innate sense of being ‘genderqueer,’
‘pansexual,’ ‘two-spirit,’ or ‘gender-fluid.’ Adults impose these ideological
constructs on children and facilitate their adoption as sexual identities. It’s
manipulative, destructive, and wrong.”80 By stating that “adults impose these
ideological constructs on children,” framing the concept of gender identities in
terms of “sexual identities,” and using the words “manipulative, destructive, and
wrong,” Rufo succeeds in identifying a threat, tapping into conservative morals,
and emphasizing his points with the emotional language of outrage.
Moralized emotional content happens to be one of the most common vehicles
for misinformation as well.81 This is because the sharing of misinformation
online is rarely about the truth value of the content. It’s about contempt for the
out-group.82 Its truth value is beside the point.83 This also helps explain why
authoritarian populists make expert use of social media, often spreading
misinformation in the process. Railing against what’s wrong, what needs to be
different, and how mad we should be while pitting the pure people against elites
is the bread and butter of populist rhetoric.84 It also offers the viral combination
of being identity based, emotional, divisive, and moralized. And so social media
logics reward identity-driven misinformation and populist messaging.85
 The Problem of Asymmetry (yes, again)
Like most things in this book, the prevalence and impact of moralized emotional
social media content in the US are lopsided.86 Conservative leaders and causes
benefit more from it than do liberal leaders and causes. In a study of the
diffusion of Donald Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s social media posts in the
2016 campaign, William Brady and his colleagues found that Trump benefited
significantly more than Clinton did from using moralized emotional language in
his posts—meaning, his moralized emotional posts were more likely to be shared
than hers were. Looking at how moralized emotional language affected the
diffusion of social media posts by Senate candidates in the 2016 election, Brady
and his team again found a “conservative advantage in moral contagion.”87 And
when his team extended the analysis to all congressional candidates in the 2016
election, the ideological asymmetry was even more pronounced. Conservatives
benefited more than liberals did from including moralized emotional language in
their social media posts.
Political and data scientist Joshua Tucker has found political asymmetry in
Americans’ exposure to inauthentic “social bots” online during the 2016
presidential election. He found that while most Americans never came across
one of these bots, Republican men came across them a lot.88 Politics professor
Andy Guess and his colleagues found that conservatives were more likely to
share false information online than were liberals.89 In the context of the 2016
campaign, Guess found that Facebook was a “key vector” sending people to
websites containing false information—sites that were overwhelmingly
conservative and pro-Trump. Although most people were not consuming false
information online, the data showed how the consumption of false information
was highly concentrated among the most conservative Americans, concluding,
“6 in 10 visits to fake news websites came from the 10% of people with the most
conservative online information.”90 In 2022, researchers found evidence that a
2018 tweak to the Facebook algorithm, in favor of posts from closely connected
friends and family (called “meaningful social interactions”), “likely increased
the visibility and spread of information from local conservative political
groups.”91 Researchers have also documented an asymmetry in how well people
identify and respond to false information they encounter online, with
conservatives more likely to believe false information than liberals.92
With this asymmetry in misinformation engagement comes asymmetry in the
misinformation supply, with false content online favoring conservative views
and causes over liberal ones.93 A sweeping examination of images shared on
Facebook in fall 2020 conducted by Yunkang Yang, Trevor Davis, and Matthew
Hindman found conservative-leaning images contained more than five times the
amount of false information that liberal-leaning ones contained.94 While part of
this asymmetry may stem from the sociodemographic homogeneity of American
conservatives that lends itself to identity-driven wrongness, it is also facilitated
through the well-organized right-wing media machinery. As Deen Freelon and
his colleagues explain, the conservative media ecosystem “is a densely
interlinked region of the media network that stands far apart from other media in
terms of digital, professional, and ideological connections.”95 Ring-wing
disinformation is distributed more broadly on social media than left-wing media
content.96 Even though the Center Left has greater overall representation on
Twitter, Freelon and his colleagues found a vastly broader reach of
disinformation from right-wing media sources on the platform.97

The Trouble with Policing Misinformation on the Side

of Supply
In 2018, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained that there’s no way
to know whether an individual is intentionally trying to deceive people by
sharing information they know to be false (disinformation) or is sharing
something they believe is true but just happens to be false (misinformation).98
Through a partnership with independent fact-checking organizations that
launched in 2016,99 the company promised to tackle misinformation by flagging
it, reducing its distribution, and demonetizing it.100 Yet, misinformation
continued to spread on the platform, even when it had been debunked by fact-
checking organizations.101
The tandem misinformation crises related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the
2020 US election put new pressure on Facebook to tackle the problem of
misinformation on the platform. In December 2020, Facebook decided that
regardless of intent, users were not allowed to be “wrong” about COVID.102 The
site’s updated policy mandated removal of certain inaccurate COVID-related
claims.103 In early September 2020, Facebook also announced a revised policy
on US election-related misinformation, banning false claims relating to voting
(like fake poll locations and voting rules), imposing warning labels on false
claims (including claims that sought to delegitimize the election), and changing
its algorithms to promote stories from credible news organizations and reduce
distribution of questionable sources.104 Although Facebook eliminated the “Stop
the Steal” Facebook group in November 2020 (the group pushing the Big Lie
and whose page was the site for the organization of the January 6 DC rally), the
platform continued to allow posts that questioned the legitimacy of the election
outcome through the insurrection.105 The early months of 2021 marked the first
work of the Facebook Oversight Board, a quasi-independent body of experts and
scholars who would be called on to review particularly contentious content
decisions and issue binding verdicts. Most notably, these reviews included that
of Facebook’s decision to suspend President Trump’s Facebook account
following the violent insurrection on the US Capitol—a decision that the
Oversight Board upheld, noting that Facebook would need to clarify how it
would handle future cases dealing with disproportionately influential public
officials.106
If the problem is the supply (sources and content) of misinformation online,
then an obvious solution would be to suspend those accounts and remove those
posts. But who decides what is true? The platforms? Meta? And if we define
misinformation in terms of “evidence and expert consensus” as many scholars
do, which evidence and which experts?107 Journalists? Government? Academics?
At present, the governments that have laws against misinformation include
China and Belarus, where information critical of the regime is often declared to
be “misinformation.” The potential exploitation of misinformation laws by bad
acting public officials has led most scholars in this space to consider speech
freedoms paramount to the protection of democratic health.108 Even though
misinformation poses a problem for democratic health, democracy experts
overwhelmingly oppose the idea of governments getting in the business of
regulating misinformation content.
So, should users decide what is true? Twitter has experimented with a user-
based effort known as the Birdwatch Community, which uses crowdsourcing to
find and flag misleading content. Such efforts reduce belief in and sharing of
misinformation,109 as do “accuracy prompts”110 and other friction-based
interventions designed to slow users down and encourage them to think critically
before clicking.111 These efforts are effective and even scalable, which is
promising. But if interventions slow us down and reduce our emotional
responses, wouldn’t that also reduce the number of bread crumbs we leave? If I
pause and think critically, that means I am less likely to like, share, and
comment on a post. With fewer bread crumbs, the platform has fewer data points
to inform my ad targeting. And with 99.4 percent of Meta’s almost $115 billion
in profits in 2021 coming from ads, why would the company ever want to
support such interventions unless required to do so?
 I’ve thought a lot about Lazarsfeld and Merton’s larger point about the limits
of media effects back in 1948. They argued that powerful media organizations
had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo—the existing political, social,
and economic order. And I’ve asked myself, is the same true today? More
specifically, do social media platforms benefit from a stable American
democracy? I think that while social media platforms might benefit from the
economic stability and prospects for innovation afforded by American
democracy, they might benefit even more—in the short term—from identity-
based political sectarianism.
Social media’s targeting criteria, metrics, rankings, and recommendation
algorithms are shaped by users’ emotional responses, which are the easiest
responses to capture, quantify, and leverage through identity appeals and identity
threats. Political sectarianism primes the pump for this kind of engagement and
makes it easier to extract the fuel that powers their machinery. So, just as I’m
skeptical that Meta would support efforts that slow users down, I’m also
skeptical that Meta (or any advertiser-supported social media platform) would
voluntarily support efforts that would disrupt political mega-identities.
Identity-fueled wrongness is a synergistic process, one that involves not only
our own social psychology but also the behaviors of political elites, institutions,
journalists, and technology executives. So, in considering why American life has
become, in the words of Jon Haidt, “uniquely stupid,” my sense is we need to
move upstream and think about how powerful entities interact with our innate
social and psychological needs—and with each other. Americans did not fall
from the sky, land on YouTube, and search for “critical race theory.” We didn’t
show up on Facebook and join a group that believes big government is tracking
us through microchips. These behaviors are tied to our need to comprehend our
world, to control those things that feel chaotic or threatening, and to be a part of
a community—needs that take shape in keeping with our political mega-
identities, which have become easy to ignite and exploit. Yes, the content of
social media may accelerate these processes on the margins, but much of the
groundwork for identity-driven wrongness originates upstream. In the final
chapter we’ll head upstream to consider some of the ways we might disrupt
these dynamics. We’ll explore various changes that might disrupt our political
mega-identities, reduce our identity-driven attraction to misinformation, and
maybe even improve American democratic health in the process.
 Chapter 9

Disrupt Us
Solutions to Identity-Driven Wrongness

BEING WRONG ISN’T ABOUT BELIEVING factually inaccurate pieces of

information. It’s not even about believing lies people tell us. It’s about our
psychological and social needs: our need to understand our world
(comprehension), have agency within it (control), and feel socially connected to
people on our team (community). And when endless dimensions of identity all
fit together in a little partisan package, this multidimensional political mega-
identity influences all three needs. We look to comprehend our world in ways
that advantage our team, we seek to control our world in ways that benefit our
team, and we think and behave in ways that better connect us to our team. When
false beliefs satisfy these needs, we will embrace them—even demand them.
This explains the stickiness of false claims of a rigged election. It also accounts
for many Americans’ misperceptions of the origins and severity of COVID-19.
Yes, fact-checking this information as it appears is crucial. But the well of
identity-driven misinformation never runs dry. There are infinite falsehoods we
(and others) can formulate to satisfy these needs, and this is why we must disrupt
the system that distills political mega-identity in the first place.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed at the scope of identity-driven wrongness and
how it is embedded within America’s political, journalistic, and media
institutions. It can feel like there’s no way out. But when there are synergistic
factors that work together to make a system go, it means that altering even one
of these factors could make the system stop, or at least slow down. When it
comes to identity-driven wrongness, there are many levels we could explore to
disrupt this apparatus. Chief among them are structural changes that would, in
the words of Eli Finkel and his colleagues, “create incentives for politicians and
other elites to reduce their sectarianizing behaviors.”1 These include curbing
partisan gerrymandering and altering campaign finance law to stop rewarding
voices on the extremes. The behaviors of elected officials and political
candidates play an outsized role in activating identity threat and in defining the
“normal” behaviors and expressions of members of our team. Changing the
electoral and financial incentives that govern their political and media behaviors
could bring the identity distillation machinery to a halt. Unfortunately, as long as
political elites benefit disproportionately from political sectarianism and the
identity-driven needs it fosters, there is little incentive for them to change on
their own or to push for structural changes that would disrupt these processes.
Similarly, in the land of partisan media like Fox News, the industry of identity
threat remains highly lucrative. Absent a moral obligation to the health and
longevity of American democracy, executives at these outlets have little reason
to change how they do business; they are likely to continue until their identity-
threatening content stops padding their pockets.
In this chapter, which looks at solutions to identity-driven wrongness, I focus
on the aspects of identity distillation that I think are disruptable: in journalism,
in social media, and among individuals. Because these entities operate
synergistically, changes at these levels might also alter the calculus of partisan
elites in the realms of both politics and media. To that end, I recommend the
following:

In journalism: engaging in democracy-centered reporting, not rewarding or

incentivizing partisan performances of identity, abandoning conflict
framing in the coverage of politics, and expanding community-centered
local news and funding for public media
In social media: transparency requirements regarding algorithmic content
rankings and ad targeting, making data available to social science
researchers to understand these trends and develop research-based
recommendations for the platforms and lawmakers
Among regular people: cultivating intellectual humility, disrupting our
performances of political identity, making a seat at the table for those
unlike us, and increasing our demand for democracy-centered political
information

Underlying this work and the solutions I outline below are several
nonnegotiables.2 First, America is a multiracial, multiethnic, multifaith society
that requires a pluralist vision of democracy to survive and thrive. Unequal
power, voice, or democratic representation by race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual
identity or orientation is incompatible with a pluralistic liberal democracy.
Second, freedom of expression is paramount to democratic health. To the extent
that solutions to the problem of identity-driven wrongness violate any of these
nonnegotiables, they are not solutions at all.

Solutions in Journalism
In 2020, I was one of over 60 political communication scholars from around the
country to help develop guidelines for journalists to center democracy in their
coverage of politics and elections. That group, the Election Coverage and
Democracy Network, came up with specific actions and practices that journalists
and news producers could do (or avoid doing) to protect American democracy
when reporting on elections.3 The recommendations that I offer here are rooted
in that same literature but extend beyond election coverage to political news
more broadly.
Democracy-centered reporting is a kind of journalism that puts voters and
democratic institutions (rather than partisan elites or political operatives) at the
center of political stories. In election reporting, this means centering stories on
issues, voters, and election workers rather than on the contest between the
candidates. In the context of political news more broadly, it means centering
stories on issues, policies, institutions, processes, and citizens. Abandoning
partisan conflict framing in our coverage of politics is an efficient way to
recenter journalism on democratic processes rather than on political mega-
identities.
Consider headlines like “The Biden-Trump Rematch, in Many Ways, Has
Already Begun”4 in the Washington Post, or Politico’s “Biden and Trump Step
into a Pennsylvania Proxy War,”5 or NBC News’s “The 2022 Midterms Are Just
Another Battle between America’s Entrenched Divides.”6 Stories framed as
battles between the Left and the Right reinforce the notion that our political
divide is insurmountable while reinforcing the audience’s partisan identity
salience.7 They also contribute to the practice of “bothsidesism” as they imply
that both parties are equally engaged in conflict and thus equally responsible for
the mess of political life. Instead, framing political stories in terms of issues and
policy would encourage readers and viewers to think about concrete solutions to
social, economic, or environmental problems, rather than just where the good
members of their team stand on those issues. And framing political stories in
terms of the functioning of democratic institutions and processes, instead of
Right versus Left, would encourage readers and viewers to think more in terms
of one’s allegiance to American democracy than to one’s political party.
At present, partisan performances of identity (like Senator Ted Cruz holding
up the Antiracist Baby book in Judge Jackson’s nomination hearing) are
rewarded and incentivized by the press. Political leaders engage in these displays
not only because they mobilize voters but also—as explored in chapter 6—
because they get covered in the news. But imagine news producers and editors
deliberately exercising restraint in the face of these elite identity displays.
Instead of replaying them, including direct quotes, or centering their stories
around them (even to criticize them), imagine journalists working to center the
democratic process in the story—and relegating those identity displays to a
footnote.
Sure, it’s hard to envision an industry pivoting away from potential profit to
serve the public good, but a century ago, in the shadow of the Spanish-American
War, the American Society of Newspaper Editors did just that. During the great
newspaper war between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer in the
1890s, their rival newspapers, the New York Journal and the New York World,
earned them massive fortunes for their exaggerated and deceptive accounts of
Spanish atrocities against the people of Cuba. This “yellow journalism” not only
made these men very rich but also ignited the passions of the American public,
pulling the United States into the Spanish-American War. In the decades that
followed, journalism was at a crossroads. The market for sensationalism, rumor,
and celebrity news was growing. But there was also a professional recognition
that the health of American democracy depended on a responsible, ethical press,
one that recognized that “its opportunities as a chronicle are indissolubly linked
[to] its obligations as teacher and interpreter.”8 It was in this spirit that the
American Society of Newspaper Editors authored their Canons of Journalism,
emphasizing members’ professional obligation to “considerations of [the] public
welfare” and “fidelity to the public interest.”9 The canons included a dedication
to sincerity, truthfulness, accuracy, impartiality, and decency, as well as a duty
to avoid “deliberate pandering to vicious instincts.” While the professional
association sought to formalize these professional norms, they also understood
the limits of their authority, writing, “Lacking authority to enforce its canons the
journalism here represented can but express the hope that deliberate pandering to
vicious instincts will encounter effective public disapproval or yield to the
influence of a preponderant professional condemnation.”10
In response to conflict-framed, personality-centered, mega-identity-
performance-rewarding political journalism, we need both “effective public
disapproval” and “the influence of a preponderant professional condemnation.” I
offer this book as a springboard to both.
Two additional changes to the journalism industry would serve the goals of
democracy-centered reporting: expanding community-centered local news and
increasing funding for public media. We saw in chapter 6 how the devastation of
local news in the United States has indirectly primed political mega-identities
through a predominant focus on national over local news. Investing in editorially
independent community newspapers is thus a way to anchor Americans within
their geographic communities, increase the salience of local issues, and facilitate
interaction through shared community goals and activities.11
In a recent edition of my local independent community paper, The Retrospect,
the front page featured the headline “Anti-ragebait, Pro-community.” The
publishers wrote,

If you, like me, are not happy with online conversations about important civic topics, I suggest the
antidote is to subscribe to thoughtfully produced media like this newspaper. … The only thing that
engages more clicks and time than funny animal videos and voyeurism into celebrity lives is
stoking anger among everyday citizens and family members. … These headlines serve only the
masters of profit who add more gold to their hoard, the price paid for a culture war among friends
and family.12

When we think of ourselves as members of a shared geographic community

—concerned about the local fire department and the welfare of our neighbors,
celebrating the achievements of our town’s promising high school students and
sports teams—we share tangible aspects of life in common with one another.
And when we activate our community identities, our political mega-identities
become diluted, perhaps even disconfirmed through meaningful interactions
with category-violating members of partisan in- and out-groups.
Democracy-centered journalism will also require our ongoing investment and
support. In a study of over 30 countries, journalism scholars Timothy Neff and
Victor Pickard examined various measures of democratic health along with
details about the countries’ funding and support for public media. The countries
with the strongest, healthiest democracies were those whose governments had
made secure, long-term investments into public media infrastructure. Neff and
Pickard suggest that a deliberate reinvestment in a robust American public media
infrastructure would elevate the interests of democracy over commercial profits
and increase democratic health. Without corporate pressures, independent public
media is better equipped to hold public officials to account, interrogate elites at
the center of power, and cover democratic processes and institutions in a manner
that is informative rather than political-identity-igniting.13 This would help to
remedy some of the other related crises as well, including the “diminishing
supply of reliable news and information and proliferating misinformation and
low-quality news media.”14

Solutions in Social Media

We know that certain social media logics and algorithms reward and incentivize
moral emotional content rooted in identity and identity threat.15 We also know
that some features (like Facebook’s angry emoji) are more likely to drive these
dynamics than others. Some of the things we know about how social media
contribute to identity-driven wrongness we learned from academic research, and
some of it we learned from industry insiders, like whistle-blower Frances
Haugen.16 The opacity of many social media platforms’ algorithms, internal
research, priorities, and decision-making processes make it challenging for us to
address how or why these platforms tap into and reinforce our political mega-
identities. So, rather than making recommendations about specific ways in which
social media ought to change how their platforms operate, my major
recommendations are the same ones scholars and lawmakers have landed on for
years: increased transparency requirements regarding algorithmic content
rankings and ad targeting and making more data available to social science
researchers to understand these trends.
Historically, the worst offender in this space in terms of the opacity of its
algorithms, reluctance to share data, and the general runaround given to
researchers has been Meta—the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and
WhatsApp. Someday, someone will write a book about the hurdles that Meta
constructs to stop academic researchers from getting adequate access to its data;
about how, instead of granting researchers access to anonymized data adequate
to study these processes at scale, the company offers “research collaborations”
and “visiting research” positions that tie the hands of academic researchers;
about how Facebook bought the analytical tool CrowdTangle, which researchers
used to analyze popular Facebook content, and how, after pushing back against
critical findings published using CrowdTangle, Facebook began shutting it down
in 2022.17 In that book will be stories about Meta’s disingenuous excuses for
shutting down research activities of scholars like those at NYU’s Ad
Observatory studying microtargeting of political ads on Facebook,18 as well as
Meta’s failure to fulfill its basic obligation to Social Science One, a consortium
where academics and Facebook researchers were supposed to come together to
answer crucial questions.19 That last tale will chronicle academics’ years-long
wait for access to an anonymized Facebook data set that, once received by over
100 academic researchers, excluded about half of all US Facebook users.
Perhaps it will even include a quote from Stanford Law professor Nate Persily,
who had worked tirelessly for years to develop these relationships and establish
the consortium. Persily described the data disaster to the Washington Post as “a
friggin’ outrage and a fundamental breach of promises Facebook made to the
research community. It also demonstrates why we need government regulation
to force social media companies to develop secure data sharing programs with
outside independent researchers.”20 That tale will probably also include insights
from CrowdTangle cofounder Brandon Silverman, who tweeted in 2022, “There
is a lot of phenomenal research being done and brilliant people leading it, but
they don’t have the data & access they need. That’s where we need to make the
most progress. … We need more regulation to make it easier and in some cases,
mandatory, for platforms to share more data.”21 But, until someone writes that
book, this paragraph in this book will have to do.
The need for transparency is not just to scratch the itch of researchers
interested in understanding how social media logics affect user identity,
attitudes, beliefs, and behavior. Such research would subsequently empower
individuals and entities to effectively produce and disseminate “counterspeech”
—that is, messaging that contradicts, corrects, or disrupts messages in the
information environment.22 Without an adequate understanding of how a given
piece of content ends up prominently displayed in a person’s timeline or
newsfeed, it is impossible to offer that same person counterspeech. Transparency
in algorithms and in ad targeting criteria would allow other entities to create and
appropriately target content to counter the dominant narrative, emotional
appeals, and moral certainty a given audience is exposed to. It could also be
designed to disrupt identity-reinforcing content that repeatedly taps into and
reinforces a user’s political mega-identity. But again, none of this is possible
without a binding commitment on the part of the platforms—or a requirement of
the platforms—to increase transparency and data accessibility.
Which leads me to the final point regarding the need for transparency, both in
social media platforms’ decision-making processes, algorithms, and content
policies and in the form of anonymized data made available to researchers. Such
transparency and data access would allow scholars to offer evidence-based
insights that could empower lawmakers to pursue regulatory pathways rooted in
empirical evidence. Without this, lawmakers run the risk of addressing the
wrong problems—or addressing no problems at all.

Solutions from Regular People (you, me, us)

Tackling individual-level solutions to identity-driven wrongness is a risky
business. Certain citizen-based “solutions” might look promising at first glance
but run the risk of violating the nonnegotiable commitments I outlined earlier
regarding democratic rights and representation. It might be tempting, for
instance, to see “political polarization” as the core problem in need of a solution.
But if one racially and religiously homogeneous political party works to curtail
the democratic rights and representation of members of other ethnic and
religious groups, “depolarization” is not the answer. If one party is pushing to
reduce the representation and voice of members of ethnic and minority groups
who tend to align with the opposing political party, then are efforts to push back
against those antidemocratic forces normatively bad? Probably not. In this case,
then, “polarization” is the wrong concern. Daniel Kreiss and Shannon McGregor
urge us to think of the current political culture not in terms of polarization but in
terms of “radicalization” of the Republican Party, involving “a widespread
embrace of anti-democratic Christian nationalism, white nativism, an increasing
willingness to tolerate violence, an embrace of disinformation as a political
tactic, and the rejection of multi-ethnic democracy.”23
The problematic dynamics discussed throughout this book have been—and
continue to be—more concentrated on America’s political right, where racial,
religious, and cultural homogenization serve the distillation machinery
especially well. This is crucial. Identity-driven wrongness thrives as America’s
cultural cleavages widen. It is fueled when aligned racial, religious, and cultural
identities cultivate our needs for comprehension, control, and community. And
our political and media apparatus is motivated to oblige through the perpetuation
and purification of a distinct reality (and falsehoods) that serves these needs.

Reshuffling the Deck

The identity distillation machinery benefits from aligned, predictable,
oversimplified expressions of social identity. This is why politicians feed into
the culture war and why partisan groups push to make local politics about
national issues such as critical race theory. It’s why moralized emotional content
rooted in identity goes viral on social media and why partisan cable news covers
the stories most likely to outrage their partisan audiences. So, how do we, as
cogs in this machinery, complicate social identity considerations and disrupt
these dynamics? How do we reshuffle the deck without compromising our
commitments to the nonnegotiables listed earlier?
 First, we must remember that although Americans are socially sorted, most of
us are not in perfect issue alignment with the political side that our race,
ethnicity, religion, geography, or even our political party might suggest. For
example, after the repeal of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that had
protected a woman’s right to an abortion, the conservative Kansas legislature put
the future of the state’s abortion law directly in the hands of voters through a
referendum. The expectation was that reliably conservative Kansas voters would
support allowing the legislature to advance stricter abortion laws in the state. But
the results showed that expectation was wrong. Voters rejected the measure by
18 percentage points.24 Existing abortion law in Kansas was already quite strict,
including limits on abortions after 22 weeks of pregnancy and a requirement that
ultrasounds be performed before abortions can be obtained. But, to wager that
Kansas voters would approve of a constitutional amendment stating that there is
no right to abortion? That ignores the fact that voters are not as unidimensional
as our political mega-identities would imply.
Put it this way: a white, Christian, rural-dwelling ice fisherman from
Minnesota might identify culturally with folks on the political right, but his
positions on everyday issues are probably more moderate. The assumption that
people who check certain social or cultural boxes also necessarily hold extreme
views only fuels the distillation engine.25 As Mason writes, the United States is
“a nation that may agree on many things but is bitterly divided nonetheless.”26
We must, therefore, allow for and encourage disconfirming instances—allow
people the opportunity to reshuffle the deck. We can do this by offering a seat at
the table where we can witness the aspects of everyday life that we do share—
not to compromise on the fundamentals of democratic rights but to dilute mega-
identities through communication and openness.
I’m reminded of the 2016 Saturday Night Live sketch “Black Jeopardy,”
featuring Tom Hanks playing the character of Doug, a white Trump supporter.
As Doug and the Black contestants respond to clues about kitchen junk drawers,
scratch-off tickets, and their shared love of Tyler Perry films, they realize just
how many aspects of life they share. This continues until the Final Jeopardy
round, where the clue is the one nationalized cultural issue that is, in fact,
dividing Black and white Americans: “Lives that Matter.” (Note the correct
answer was “What is Black,” but we are left to assume that Doug will inevitably
respond “What is Blue.”) The “Black Jeopardy” sketch embodies what Buddhist
author Pema Chodron refers to as the practice of “Just Like Me.” Despite
cultural, religious, and political cleavages, Chodron reminds us of some basic
aspects of the human experience that we all share, including that “every living
being desires happiness and doesn’t want to suffer.”27 The same is true of Doug.
Doug desires happiness and does not want to suffer. Like the rest of us, he’s
figuring it out as he goes.
Engaging with—or simply being around—people from an out-group can
complicate the identity distillation machinery, which then alters how our needs
for comprehension, control, and community are articulated. Neutral interactions
with members of our out-group encourage us to see the things we have in
common with people from the other side.28 Even just witnessing (not even
participating in) warm interactions between members of opposing groups can
reduce our own feelings of animosity toward the out-group,29 including when
those interactions occur between political leaders of opposing parties.30 Such
experiences can reduce our sense of social distance from out-group members,
suppress our political mega-identity salience, and quiet our sense of political
identity threat.
Diluting our mega-identities will also require that we work hard to resist the
siren song of moralized emotional content online—posts that enrage or inspire
us based on our primal characteristics. This is harder than it sounds. It requires
orienting ourselves to our newsfeeds and timelines with “identity disruption” as
an explicit goal. As an emotionally reactive social media user myself, I find this
challenging. I have taken to seeking out and sharing more political-identity-
disrupting content online. Video clips of pets, sports, or art foster connections
with people, are still emotionally evocative, but don’t encourage a moralized
partisan response.
We can also disrupt identity distillation by not curating our representations of
self when we present them to the world—in person or online. There may be
pressure to “perform” in keeping with the side we’re on, but it is always possible
to push back against that pressure. Imagine a yard sign with the following
message: “In this house we: believe in regulated gun ownership, believe humans
affect climate change, support reproductive health, and believe Jesus is the son
of God.” I suppose that wouldn’t fit neatly on a sign, but you get my point.
People who don’t fit their side’s stereotype may stay quiet for fear of violating
their side’s norms. But what if these nuanced folks opted instead to throw a
wrench in the works, bolstered by the notion that their self-disclosure is of
service to democratic and epistemic health?
Take my dear friend David. David is a former college football player who is
six feet six. He and his wife drive a giant GMC Yukon Denali. David wears his
Oakley sunglasses atop his baseball hat, goes deep-sea fishing, and shows up at
our house in a cotton-candy-pink tank top adorned with a rainbow pride flag.
When he’s not in his gay pride shirt, people make assumptions about who David
is and what he believes. They imagine that he holds certain views about race and
sexuality. But rather than going along with their imagined sense of who he
probably is, he challenges them and asks them why they made assumptions
about him. David has decided to act as a disrupter.

The Benefits of Giving the Benefit of the Doubt

Given the alignment of sociodemographic and cultural identities on the right, it
may be unlikely for our right-leaning friends to want to engage in these identity-
disruptive behaviors. But recall that identity dynamics are responsive. Political
mega-identities become salient when we feel they are under threat. When one
team’s members disrupt their presentations of self, reshuffle the deck, offer seats
at the table, and diversify their perceptions of their out-group, it will reduce the
identity threat perceived by the other side, thereby reducing the other side’s
political identity salience … and round it goes.
When partisan actors seek to destabilize democracy, it is not easy to articulate
ways to safeguard democracy without explicitly invoking—and thus reinforcing
—partisan identity. One way of pushing back against politically asymmetrical
attacks on American democracy is to highlight the daylight that exists between
the political and media elites benefiting from identity-driven wrongness and the
people whose interests (and identity) they claim to represent. This was the
method of choice of the January 6 Congressional Committee during their
hearings in the House of Representatives. The committee made a distinction
between the political elites who knowingly sold the Big Lie to the American
people, on the one hand, and the regular Americans who came to the nation’s
Capitol on January 6, 2021, on the other.
The committee created a contrast between violent militia groups like the
Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, who were seeking to exploit a moment of
political chaos, and the regular people who had been told by President Trump
that there would be a “big protest in D.C. on January 6th” and they should “be
there” since it “will be wild.” In one of the hearings, the committee heard
testimony from Stephen Ayres, a Trump supporter and rioter who entered the
Capitol during the insurrection. Ayres discussed the importance of Trump’s
message in encouraging his trip to Washington: “I followed … President Trump,
you know, on all the websites, you know. He basically put out … come to the
Stop the Steal rally, you know, and I felt like I needed to be down here.”
Committee chair Bennie Thompson described Trump’s cynical exploitation of
supporters like Ayres that day, saying, “The president’s goal was to stay in
power for a second term despite losing the election. The assembled crowd was
one of the tools to achieve that goal.”31 By emphasizing the distinction between
the regular Americans who trusted the president and the powerbrokers on the
right who cynically sought to exploit them, the committee invited viewers and
journalists to complicate their understanding of political mega-identity.
One of the central roles that we can all play in combatting wrongness comes
when we encounter family or friends who confidently believe information that
contradicts evidence and expert consensus. When our loved ones believe in
conspiracy theories or misinformation, it feels frustrating—even heartbreaking.
But, remembering that the roots of wrongness often reside in confusion,
powerlessness, and a need for social connection might help us find the emotional
fortitude (and perhaps even compassion) to draw us closer to that person rather
than retreat. Given that belief in conspiracy theories stems from needs for
comprehension, control, and community, offering our friendship and solidarity
as a means to satisfy those needs might reduce the appeal of the conspiracy
theory. Offering our friendship and connection (rather than mockery and
derision) might also interrupt the very dynamics that fuel mega-identity
reinforcing belief systems.
Of course, depending on the nature of the misinformation beliefs held by our
friends and family, they might include sentiments that are hateful and harmful.
Offering compassion and friendship only makes sense if you are able to offer
that kind of emotional energy without causing undue harm to yourself, your
loved ones, or your psychological health. But if the relationship was—and is—
important, perhaps engaging with them, reminding them they are loved and
respected, and tapping into aspects of your shared history or identity unrelated to
their “wrongness” will build trust and connection. Over time, that trust and
connection might reduce the appeal of—and need for—political mega-identity-
reinforcing falsehoods.

Intellectual Humility
The dynamics of identity-driven wrongness benefit from the fact that they are
self-reinforcing. It is through our identity-laden observations of the world that
we remind ourselves again and again who we are and what we know to be true.
But imagine if we slowed down that engine on our own—by reducing the
influence of our preexisting knowledge and beliefs on our observations, and
conversely, by allowing disconfirming observations to inform and update our
knowledge and beliefs. When we practice and value intellectual humility (IH),
we do both. Recognizing the limits of our own knowledge encourages us to
allow identity-conflicting evidence to update our beliefs. It also reminds us to
not hold on so tightly to the things we already know as we observe the world,
because, after all, we might be wrong.
IH can be learned. It can be practiced.32 It can be modeled. And it can be
valued. For example, social psychologist Jonah Andrew Koetke and his
colleagues implemented a “fallibility salience” intervention that successfully
increased IH. They asked people three seemingly simple questions that had three
counterintuitive correct answers. After they revealed the correct answers to
participants (which most had gotten wrong), the researchers had the participants
reflect on “why it is okay to recognize that their knowledge and beliefs may be
inaccurate.”33 This simple reflection by the participants increased their IH. Better
yet, it also increased the kinds of skepticism and investigative behaviors that
reduce belief in misinformation.
Children as young as middle schoolers have demonstrated an increase in IH
when exposed to teaching methods that emphasize individual-level
improvements and normalize making mistakes.34 Shifting classrooms from
answer-oriented to question-oriented knowledge can encourage IH as well.35
Imagine a school assignment that asks students to articulate what they believe,
and then what kinds of evidence they would need to point to in order to show
that their belief is incorrect. Or an assignment that asks them to state someone
else’s point of view on a topic, bolstered by evidence. Or an essay about the
limits of what they can know on a given topic—and how fallibility is OK. Over
the years, my two children have written countless persuasive essays designed to
convince the reader of something. They have yet to write a single essay
exploring how they might be wrong.
Encouraging people to embrace their own fallibility will certainly be
challenging. It is uncomfortable to consider the limits of one’s own knowledge
—especially on the cultural right, where tolerance for ambiguity is lower and
where intuition and emotion (what we already know and feel) may be privileged
over evidence and data.36 But we know IH is associated with endless positive
pro-social outcomes, including empathy, gratitude, altruism, and curiosity.37 We
can decide that this is a virtue that we want to value in our world; that we want
to watch performed on our televisions by thoughtful experts, journalists, and
lawmakers; that we want to reward in everyday life, at the ballot box, and in the
social media algorithm; that we ourselves want to model in our conversations
with others. We can seek out and reward those who perform IH, who
acknowledge the limits of what they know, and who model epistemic fallibility.
When such individuals are criticized as wishy-washy or indecisive, we can use
our platforms to remind others that the act of updating knowledge in the face of
new information is a virtue, not a vice.

Reframing How and Why We Use Political Media

This last suggestion—to reward performances of IH by political and media elites
—is part of a much-needed transformation in how and why we consume political
media. By understanding the mechanisms contributing to identity distillation and
identity-driven wrongness, it becomes apparent that political and media entities
are operating in anticipation of our identity-driven emotional engagement.
Whether it’s MSNBC covering Ted Cruz talking about baby books in a
nomination hearing, Tucker Carlson pushing great replacement theory, or just a
headline that frames an issue as a partisan battle, the political culture producers
are giving us what they think we want.
But now that we have awakened ourselves to the agency that we have in this
equation, we can deliberately alter their calculus by choosing not to reward that
content and by calling it out when we see it. This might even mean deleting our
own emotionally reactive social media posts (like retweets of content that, in the
moment, really riled us up). We’re human. We respond to moralized emotional
content, but through mindful actions we can deliberately work to minimize or
undo how those emotional responses feed the identity distillation apparatus. And
rather than encouraging or selecting political news framed as a battle between
Democrats and Republicans, we can choose to consume media content that
places democracy and human rights at its center, as characters in a battle with
destabilizing or authoritarian forces. These stories would satisfy the press’s need
for conflict and drama but without explicitly priming us to view the world
through the lens of our political mega-identities.

Conclusion
I wrestled for months over this final chapter on solutions to identity-driven
wrongness. After numerous false starts, my husband P. J. tried to put my mind at
ease. “Just explaining how and why these dynamics operate the way they do is a
step towards a solution,” he said. I hope he is right. This political moment feels
chaotic. It feels like America’s political and cultural worlds are drowning in
random lies and hate. However, my reader friend, I hope you see that they are
not random. They are all quite explicable, in fact. And when things are
explicable, they are predictable. And when they are predictable, they are often
controllable.
When I used to think about how media and political elites benefited from the
distillation of our social identities, I would get angry. But after writing this book,
I see anger as part of the identity distillation apparatus. Over time, instead of
anger, I began to feel sorrow, coupled by a commitment to help people
understand the dynamics of identity-driven wrongness. I am now convinced that
every person—every journalist, every public official, every media and
technology executive, and every one of us—has the capacity to disrupt this
process. Each of us has the capacity to awaken our hearts and become purposeful
and deliberate as we (a) enact our social identities, (b) allow our observations to
update our knowledge and beliefs, and (c) reframe how and why we use political
media. Our needs for comprehension, control, and community may be here to
stay, but how these are enacted—and the motivations that drive how they take
shape—are very much up to us.
But, of course, I could always be wrong.
 Acknowledgments

When I started talking with friends and colleagues about the idea for this book, I was fortunate to find many
cheerleaders of my idea to “go big.” My goal was to offer up a public-facing book that would translate vast
empirical work from communication, political science, sociology, and psychology to help folks make sense
of our mediated political world, understand the threats to American democratic health, and consider why so
many of us are so wrong. Friends and scholars such as Shannon McGregor, Regina Lawrence, Kathleen
Hall Jamieson, Mike Wagner, Emily Falk, Jennifer Mercieca, Daniel Kreiss, Lily Mason, Tresa Undem,
Cathlin Sullivan, and Jess Feezell all made me feel like these ideas were smart and helpful. From the
beginning, my editor, Laura Davulis, lifted me up. In fact, when my agent Mark Gottlieb sent her the
proposal, she responded immediately by complimenting my Vox article “I Was a Conspiracy Theorist,
Too,” which she had read and recalled from months prior. Laura, you may not know it, but I have kept that
praise in my pocket to keep me going, so thank you.
I am grateful for the generosity of early readers, including Amanda
Cronkhite, Matthew Carlson, Julie Wronski, and Daniel Kreiss, who spent
significant time offering supportive—and critical—feedback on early drafts.
Their comments and those of the anonymous reviewers helped make this book
so much better. In the early days of my empirical work on epistemic
motivations, ideology, and misinformation, both Christopher Federico and Erin
Cassese were kind enough to offer critical feedback. Many of these ideas
crystallized as Joanne Miller and I developed our joint chapter on political
communication written for the Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology. Huge
thanks to Gordon Pennycook and David Rand, who were willing to go on the
record and share their thoughts on the misinformation problem, and to journalist
Judd Legum, who kindly gave me permission to include one of his images in the
book.
The survey data explored here come from a wonderful collaboration with
Amy Bleakley and Jessica B. Langbaum, who were kind enough to bring me
into a project funded by the National Institute on Aging completed during the
COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Some of the research included in this
book was made possible by Grant No. 3R01AG063954-02S1 from the National
Institute of Aging. The contents of this book do not necessarily represent the
official views of the NIA.
As part of that project, I had the great fortune of working with Erin Maloney
to study how different ways of knowing related to belief in misinformation and
political attitudes. That work features prominently in chapter 5.
 The communication department at the University of Delaware is such a
supportive community, with excellent colleagues like Amy Bleakley, Scott
Caplan, John Crowley, Jenny Lambe, Lindsay Hoffman, and Paul Brewer. This
book wouldn’t have been possible without the support of department chair Kami
Silk, who makes sure that I am making the right choices for myself as a scholar,
a teacher, a person, and a mom.
My graduate research team was an invaluable resource throughout this
process, not only for their tireless enthusiasm and research assistance but also for
giving me a wonderful sense of community. Special thanks to Huma Rasheed,
with whom I studied the link among conflict orientation, political attitudes, and
masking behaviors, and to Brooke Molokach, whose expertise in the literature
on intellectual humility has shaped my work. Brooke was also the fearless
research assistant who dared help me copyedit the final manuscript. But it seems
the task was rewarding: she reacted with glee as she made the same comment to
me that I have written on so many student papers in the past: “Danna, Is this
even a sentence?”
Thank you to the rigorous scholars from around the world whose vast
research has made this project possible. I hope you find your work accurately
represented in these pages. Any errors are mine and mine alone. Thank you also
to Ezra Rodriguez for their help with visualizations throughout the book.
Behind the scenes are the people I love, who keep me from flying off into
outer space. Jae, Stephen, Susan, Heide, Cathlin, Grace, Liz, Karen, and my
entire Gallagher family, your love and friendship keep me tethered. Mimi and
Poppi, thank you for always giving me a home to return to, for your continued
intellectual curiosity, and for your enthusiasm for whatever it is I’m working on.
Kylee, I can’t wait to read your first book.
To PJ, my awesome partner—you have never once made me feel like
anything less than the smartest person you’ve ever met. And since you’re a
tough reviewer, careful writer, and brilliant thinker, your confidence in me helps
me talk back to my nay-saying self-critic. Thank you for always reshuffling the
deck, keeping me intellectually honest and grounded, making sure I eat breakfast
and do yoga, and reminding me to speak to myself and of myself with kindness.
Baxter and Edie, I am so grateful for the lessons you teach me about life,
priorities, love, and compassion. You are two shining lights. I am so proud to
know you and feel so lucky to have you as my guides.
And to Mike Young and Michelle Kennedy, I love you and miss you every
day.
Thanks, friends.
 Love,
DANNA
 Notes

Prologue
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University of Chicago Press.
2. Mason, Uncivil agreement.
3. Mason, Uncivil agreement.
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(2018). Enchanted America: How intuition and reason divide our politics.
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American party politics. Columbia University Press.
59. Balmer, R. H. (2021). Bad faith: Race and the rise of the religious right.
 William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
60. Balmer, Bad faith.
61. Brenan, M. (2022, October 18). Americans’ trust in media remains near
record low. Gallup, https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-
media-remains-near-record-low.aspx.
62. Doherty, C., & Kiley, J. (2019, July 29). Americans have become much less
positive about tech companies’ impact on the US. Pew Research Center,
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/29/americans-have-
become-much-less-positive-about-tech-companies-impact-on-the-u-s/.
63. UChicago News (2022, January 8). Trust in science is becoming more
polarized, survey finds. UChicago News,
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survey-finds.
64. Cohn, N. (2021, September 8). How educational differences are widening
America’s political rift. The New York Times.
65. Pew Research Center. (2016, April 26). A wider ideological gap between
more and less educated adults. Pew Research Center: US Politics and
Policy, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/04/26/a-wider-
ideological-gap-between-more-and-less-educated-adults/.
66. Pew Research Center. (2018, March 20). Trends in party affiliation among
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trends-in-party-affiliation-among-demographic-groups/.
67. Badger, E. (2019, May 21). How the rural-urban divide became America’s
political fault line. The New York Times.
68. Hmielowski, J. D., Heffron, E., Ma, Y., & Munroe, M. A. (2021). You’ve
lost that trusting feeling: Diminishing trust in the news media in rural
versus urban US communities. The Social Science Journal, 1–15.
69. Galston, W., & Mann, T. (2010). Republicans slide right: The parties aren’t
equally to blame for Washington’s schism. Brookings Institution,
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arent-equally-to-blame-for-washingtons-schism/.
70. Grossmann, M., & Hopkins, D. A. (2016). Asymmetric politics: Ideological
Republicans and group interest Democrats. Oxford University Press.
71. Grossmann, M., & Hopkins, D. A. (2015). Ideological Republicans and
group interest Democrats: The asymmetry of American party politics.
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72. Leonard, N. E., Lipsitz, K., Bizyaeva, A., Franci, A., & Lelkes, Y. (2021).
The nonlinear feedback dynamics of asymmetric political polarization.
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73. Mann, T., & Ornstein, N. (2012, April 27). Let’s just say it: The
Republicans are the problem. The Washington Post,
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are-the-problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_story.html.
74. Mann & Ornstein, Let’s just say it.
75. Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How democracies die. Broadway Books,
p. 53.
76. Pew Research Center. (2018, March 20). Trends in party affiliation among
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77. Ray, J., & McElwee, S. (2018). The urban/suburban/rural divide in the
2018 midterms. Data for Progress,
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the-2018-midterms.
78. Klein, Why we’re polarized, p. 231.

4. What Does My Team Think?

1. Onorato, R. S., & Turner, J. C. (2004). Fluidity in the self-concept: The
shift from personal to social identity. European Journal of Social
Psychology, 34(3), 257–278, p. 258.
2. Reimer, N. K., Schmid, K., Hewstone, M., & Al Ramiah, A. (2020). Self-
categorization and social identification: Making sense of us and them. In D.
Chadee (Ed.), Theories in social psychology (2nd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell, p.
3.
3. Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Addison-Wesley, p. 20.
4. Tajfel, H. (1969). Cognitive aspects of prejudice. Journal of Biosocial
Science, 1(S1), 173–191, p. 177.
5. Reimer et al., Self-categorization and social identification, p. 3.
6. Gerard, H. B. (1963). Emotional uncertainty and social comparison. The
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 66(6), 568–573,
https://doi.org/10.1037/h0045226. Tajfel, H., Turner, J. C., Austin, W. G.,
& Worchel, S. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict.
Organizational Identity: A Reader, 56(65), 9780203505984-16.
7. Turner, J. C., & Oakes, P. J. (1986). The significance of the social identity
concept for social psychology with reference to individualism,
interactionism and social influence. British Journal of Social Psychology,
25(3), 237–252, p. 239.
8. Berger, P. L., Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social
construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Anchor, p.
51.
9. Van Bavel, J. J., & Packer, D. J. (2021). The power of us: Harnessing our
shared identities to improve performance, increase cooperation, and
promote social harmony. Little, Brown Spark, p. 25.
10. Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by
politics and religion. Vintage, p. 224.
11. Oyserman, D., Coon, H. M., & Kemmelmeier, M. (2002). Rethinking
individualism and collectivism: Evaluation of theoretical assumptions and
meta-analyses. Psychological Bulletin, 128(1), 3–72,
https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.128.1.3.
12. Jetten, J., Postmes, T., & McAuliffe, B. J. (2002). “We’re all individuals”:
Group norms of individualism and collectivism, levels of identification and
identity threat. European Journal of Social Psychology, 32(2), 189–207,
https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.65.
13. Tajfel et al., An integrative theory of intergroup conflict, p. 36.
14. Rubin, M., & Hewstone, M. (2004). Social identity, system justification,
and social dominance: Commentary on Reicher, Jost et al., and Sidanius et
al. Political Psychology, 25(6), 823–844.
15. Trepte, S., & Loy, L. S. (2017). Social identity theory and self-
categorization theory. In The International Encyclopedia of Media Effects
(1–13). The Wiley-Blackwell ICA.
16. Tajfel et al., An integrative theory of intergroup conflict, p. 36.
17. Jost, J. T. (2020). A theory of system justification. Harvard University Press.
18. Tajfel, H. (1970). Experiments in intergroup discrimination. Scientific
American, 223(5), 96–103, p. 98.
19. Oakes, P. J. (1987). The salience of social categories. In J. C. Turner, M. A.
Hogg, P. J. Oakes, S. D. Rieche, and M. S. Wetherell (Eds.), Rediscovering
the social group: A self-categorization Theory (pp. 117–141). Oxford:
Blackwell.
20. Hornsey, M. J. (2008). Social identity theory and self-categorization theory:
 A historical review. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2(1),
204–222.
21. Hogg, M. A., Terry, D. J., & White, K. M. (1995). A tale of two theories: A
critical comparison of identity theory with social identity theory. Social
Psychology Quarterly, 58(4), 255–269, p. 261.
22. Hogg, M. A., & Reid, S. A. (2006). Social identity, self-categorization, and
the communication of group norms. Communication Theory, 16(1), 7–30, p.
11.
23. Van Bavel & Packer, The power of us, p. 41.
24. Hackel, L. M., Coppin, G., Wohl, M. J., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2018). From
groups to grits: Social identity shapes evaluations of food pleasantness.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 74, 270–280.
25. Van Bavel & Packer, The power of us.
26. Van Bavel & Packer, The power of us, p. 41.
27. Mason, L. (2018). Uncivil agreement: How politics became our identity.
University of Chicago Press.
28. Hetherington, M., & Weiler, J. (2018). Prius or pickup? How the answers
to four simple questions explain America’s great divide. Houghton Mifflin.
Young, D. G. (2020). Irony and outrage: The polarized landscape of rage,
fear, and laughter in the United States. Oxford University Press.
29. Klein, E. (2020). Why we’re polarized. Simon and Schuster, p. 136.
30. Huddy, L., Bankert, A., & Davies, C. (2018). Expressive versus
instrumental partisanship in multiparty European systems. Political
Psychology, 39, 173–199.
31. Green, D., Palmquist, B., & Schickler, E. (2008). Partisan hearts and
minds. Yale University Press.
32. Green, Palmquist, & Schickler, Partisan hearts and minds.
33. Levendusky, M. (2009). The partisan sort: How liberals became democrats
and conservatives became republicans. University of Chicago Press.
34. Huddy, L., Mason, L., & Aarøe, L. (2015). Expressive partisanship:
Campaign involvement, political emotion, and partisan identity. American
Political Science Review, 109(1), 1–17. Huddy, L., & Bankert, A. (2017).
Political partisanship as a social identity. Oxford research encyclopedia of
politics.
35. Huddy, Mason, & Aarøe, Expressive partisanship.
36. Mason, L., & Wronski, J. (2018). One tribe to bind them all: How our
 social group attachments strengthen partisanship. Political Psychology, 39,
257–277.
37. Mason & Wronski, One tribe to bind them all.
38. Bartels, L. (2002). Beyond the running tally: Partisan bias in political
perceptions. Political Behavior, 24(2), 117–150. Gerber, A. S., & Huber, G.
A. (2010). Partisanship, political control, and economic assessments.
American Journal of Political Science, 54(1), 153–173. Tilley, J., &
Hobolt, S. B. (2011). Is the government to blame? An experimental test of
how partisanship shapes perceptions of performance and responsibility. The
Journal of Politics, 73(2), 316–330. Bisgaard, M. (2015). Bias will find a
way: Economic perceptions, attributions of blame, and partisan-motivated
reasoning during crisis. The Journal of Politics, 77(3), 849–860.
39. Sigelman, L., & Sigelman, C. K. (1984). Judgments of the Carter-Reagan
debate: The eyes of the beholders. Public Opinion Quarterly, 48(3), 624–
628. Rouner, D., & Perloff, R. M. (1988). Selective perception of outcome
of first 1984 presidential debate. Journalism Quarterly, 65(1), 141–147.
40. Feldman, L. (2011). Partisan differences in opinionated news perceptions:
A test of the hostile media effect. Political Behavior, 33(3), 407–432.
41. Webster, S. W. (2020). American rage: How anger shapes our politics.
Cambridge University Press. Huddy, L., Mason, L., & Aarøe, L. (2015).
Expressive partisanship: Campaign involvement, political emotion, and
partisan identity. American Political Science Review, 109(1), 1–17.
42. Webster, American rage. Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Progress on a cognitive-
motivational-relational theory of emotion. American Psychologist, 46(8),
819–834. Sherif, M., & Cantril, H. (1947). The psychology of ego-
involvements: Social attitudes and identifications. John Wiley and Sons.
43. Mason, Uncivil agreement.
44. Mason, L. (2016). A cross-cutting calm: How social sorting drives affective
polarization. Public Opinion Quarterly, 80(S1), 351–377.
45. Abramowitz, A. I., & Webster, S. W. (2018). Negative partisanship: Why
Americans dislike parties but behave like rabid partisans. Political
Psychology, 39, 119–135. Abramowitz, A. (2010). The disappearing
center: Engaged citizens, polarization, and American democracy. Yale
University Press.
46. Martherus, J. L., Martinez, A. G., Piff, P. K., & Theodoridis, A. G. (2021).
Party animals? Extreme partisan polarization and dehumanization. Political
Behavior, 43(2), 517–540.
47. Cassese, E. C. (2021). Partisan dehumanization in American politics.
Political Behavior, 43(1), 29–50.
48. Low, medium, and high identity salience were based roughly on the bottom,
middle, and highest thirds. COVID data (ages 18–49: N Democrats = 119,
N Republicans = 119; ages 50+: N Democrats = 506, N Republicans = 421).
National survey data were obtained by SSRS (October 20–November 2,
2020) and included oversamples of racial and ethnic minority groups.
Analyses were conducted on weighted data (weighted within each age
group) to match general population demographics.
49. Low, medium, and high identity salience were based roughly on the bottom,
middle, and highest thirds. Election misperception data (ages 18–49: N
Democrats = 172, N Republicans = 94; ages 50+: N Democrats = 497, N
Republicans = 443). National survey data were obtained by SSRS
(November 26–December 4, 2020) and included oversamples of racial and
ethnic minority groups. Analyses were conducted on weighted data
(weighted within each age group) to match general population
demographics.
50. CNN. (2021, September 12). How believing the Big Lie has become central
to being a Republican,
http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2021/images/09/12/rel5c.-.partisanship.pdf.
51. Hetherington, M. J. (2008). Turned off or turned on? How polarization
affects political engagement. Red and Blue Nation, 2, 1–33.
52. Iyengar, S., & Krupenkin, M. (2018). The strengthening of partisan affect.
Political Psychology, 39, 201–218.
53. Iyengar & Krupenkin, The strengthening of partisan affect.
54. Kalmoe, N. P., & Mason, L. (2022). Radical American partisanship:
Mapping violent hostility, its causes, and the consequences for democracy.
University of Chicago Press.
55. Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How democracies die. Broadway Books,
p. 102.
56. Levitsky & Ziblatt, How democracies die, pp. 8–9.
57. Levitsky & Ziblatt, How democracies die, p. 170.
58. Levitsky & Ziblatt, How democracies die, p. 22.
59. Enyedi, Z. (2016). Populist polarization and party system
institutionalization: The role of party politics in de-democratization.
Problems of Post-communism, 63(4), 210–220. De la Torre, C., & Ortiz
Lemos, A. (2016). Populist polarization and the slow death of democracy in
 Ecuador. Democratization, 23(2), 221–241. Ezrow, L., Tavits, M., &
Homola, J. (2014). Voter polarization, strength of partisanship, and support
for extremist parties. Comparative Political Studies, 47(11), 1558–1583.

5. What Guides My Team, Intuition or Evidence?

1. Vickers, N. [@nathanvickers]. (2021, August 5). One parent speaking out
against masks and vaccines: “I have a bachelor’s degree in logic, a master’s
in motherhood, and I’m board certified in American freedom.” Twitter,
https://twitter.com/nathanvickers/status/1423334872777699330.
2. Epstein, S., Pacini, R., Denes-Raj, V., & Heier, H. (1996). Individual
differences in intuitive–experiential and analytical–rational thinking styles.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(2), 390–405, p. 401,
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3. Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The elaboration likelihood model of
persuasion: Central and peripheral routes to attitude change. Springer.
Chaiken, S. (1980). Heuristic versus systematic information processing and
the use of source versus message cues in persuasion. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 39(5), 752–766, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-
3514.39.5.752.
4. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan.
5. Alós-Ferrer, C., Garagnani, M., & Hügelschäfer, S. (2016). Cognitive
reflection, decision biases, and response times. Frontiers in Psychology, 7,
1402.
6. Arceneaux, K., & Vander Wielen, R. J. (2017). Taming intuition: How
reflection minimizes partisan reasoning and promotes democratic
accountability. Cambridge University Press.
7. Garrett, R. K., & Weeks, B. E. (2017). Epistemic beliefs’ role in promoting
misperceptions and conspiracist ideation. PLoS ONE, 12(9), e0184733.
8. Garrett & Weeks, Epistemic beliefs’ role, p. 5.
9. Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (2007). Natural myside bias is independent
of cognitive ability. Thinking & Reasoning, 13(3), 225–247. Baron, J.
(1993). Why teach thinking?—An essay. Applied Psychology, 42, 191–237,
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1464-0597.1993.tb00731.x; Stanovich, K. E., &
West, R. F. (1997). Reasoning independently of prior belief and individual
differences in actively open-minded thinking. Journal of Educational
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(2018). Actively open-minded thinking: Development of a shortened scale
 and disentangling attitudes towards knowledge and people. Thinking &
Reasoning, 24(1), 21–40.
10. Bronstein, M. V., Pennycook, G., Bear, A., Rand, D. G., & Cannon, T. D.
(2019). Belief in fake news is associated with delusionality, dogmatism,
religious fundamentalism, and reduced analytic thinking. Journal of
Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 8(1), 108–117,
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11. Frederick, S. (2005). Cognitive reflection and decision making. Journal of
Economic Perspectives, 19(4), 25–42.
12. Bronstein et al., Belief in fake news.
13. Rand, D. & Pennycook, G. (2021, October 22). Personal communication
[zoom interview].
14. Pennycook, G., Ross, R. M., Koehler, D. J., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2016).
Atheists and agnostics are more reflective than religious believers: Four
empirical studies and a meta-analysis. PLoS ONE, 11(4), e0153039.
Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J. A., Seli, P., Koehler, D. J., & Fugelsang, J. A.
(2012). Analytic cognitive style predicts religious and paranormal belief.
Cognition, 123(3), 335–346. Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J. A., Koehler, D. J.,
& Fugelsang, J. A. (2020). On the belief that beliefs should change
according to evidence: Implications for conspiratorial, moral, paranormal,
political, religious, and science beliefs. Judgment and Decision Making,
15(4), 476–498.
15. Rand & Pennycook, personal communication.
16. Bronstein et al., Belief in fake news, pp. 8–9.
17. Finkel, E. J., Bail, C. A., Cikara, M., Ditto, P. H., Iyengar, S., Klar, S., … &
Druckman, J. N. (2020). Political sectarianism in America. Science,
370(6516), 533–536.
18. Hibbing, J. R., Smith, K. B., & Alford, J. R. (2013). Predisposed: Liberals,
conservatives, and the biology of political differences. Routledge.
19. Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political
conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3),
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epistemic motivation: Implications for attitude structure, depth of
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J. Elliot, Advances in Motivation Science, Vol. 1 (181–231). Elsevier
Academic Press.
20. Jost, J. T. (2017). Ideological asymmetries and the essence of political
 psychology. Political Psychology, 38(2), 167–208. Federico, C. M., &
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with epistemic needs. Psychological Science, 29(6), 901–913. Jost, J. T.,
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psychological functions. In M. Freeden, L. T. Sargent, & M. Stears (Eds.),
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Jost, J. T., Sterling, J., & Stern, C. (2017). Getting closure on conservatism,
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real world: A Festschrift in honor of Arie W. Kruglanski. Psychology Press.
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22. Ruisch, B. C., & Stern, C. (2020). The confident conservative: Ideological
differences in judgment and decision-making confidence. Journal of
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23. Van der Linden, S., Panagopoulos, C., Azevedo, F., & Jost, J. T. (2021).
The paranoid style in American politics revisited: An ideological
asymmetry in conspiratorial thinking. Political Psychology, 42(1), 23–51,
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Bleakley, A., & Langbaum, J. B. (2022). “I feel it in my gut”: Epistemic
motivations, political beliefs, and misperceptions of COVID-19 and the
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Everett, C., … & Murthi, M. (2020). Why do people believe COVID-19
conspiracy theories? Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review,
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related misinformation? Journal of Computational Social Science, 3(2),
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25. DeVerna, M. R., Guess, A. M., Berinsky, A. J., Tucker, J. A., & Jost, J. T.
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26. Enders, A., Farhart, C., Miller, J., Uscinski, J., Saunders, K., & Drochon, H.
(2022). Are Republicans and Conservatives more likely to believe
 conspiracy theories? Political Behavior, (July 22), 1–24.
27. Deppe, K. D., Gonzalez, F. J., Neiman, J., Pahlke, J., Smith, K., & Hibbing,
J. R. (2015). Reflective liberals and intuitive conservatives: A look at the
Cognitive Reflection Test and ideology. Judgment and Decision Making,
10(4), 314–331. Saribay, S. A., & Yilmaz, O. (2017). Analytic cognitive
style and cognitive ability differentially predict religiosity and social
conservatism. Personality and Individual Differences, 114, 24–29. Yilmaz,
O., & Saribay, S. A. (2017). The relationship between cognitive style and
political orientation depends on the measures used. Judgment and Decision
Making, 12(2), 140–147.
28. Hare, C., & Poole, K. T. (2014). The polarization of contemporary
American politics. Polity, 46(3), 411–429.
29. Layman, G. (2001). The great divide: Religious and cultural conflict in
American party politics. Columbia University Press.
30. Oliver, J. E., & Wood, T. J. (2018). Enchanted America: How intuition and
reason divide our politics. University of Chicago Press.
31. Oliver & Wood, Enchanted America, p. 92.
32. Oliver & Wood, Enchanted America, p. 114.
33. Tripodi, F. B. (2022). The propagandists’ playbook: How conservative
elites manipulate search and threaten democracy. Yale University Press, p.
19.
34. Tripodi, The propagandists’ playbook, p. 19.
35. Federico, C. M., & Ekstrom, P. D. (2018). The political self: How identity
aligns preferences with epistemic needs. Psychological Science, 29(6),
901–913.
36. Bakker, B. N., Lelkes, Y., & Malka, A. (2021). Rethinking the link between
self-reported personality traits and political preferences. American Political
Science Review, 115(4), 1482–1498.
37. Bakker, Lelkes, & Malka, Rethinking the link between, p. 1496.
38. Arceneaux, K., & Vander Wielen, R. J. (2017). Taming intuition: How
reflection minimizes partisan reasoning and promotes democratic
accountability. Cambridge University Press.
39. Young et al., “I feel it in my gut.”
40. Valuing intuition and emotion and valuing evidence and data were
measured using items from Garrett and Weeks (2017). Respondents were
asked to what extent they agreed or disagreed with the following: “I trust
 my gut to tell me what’s true and what’s not.” “I trust my initial feelings
about the facts.” “My initial impressions are almost always right.” “I can
usually feel when a claim is true or false even if I can’t explain how I
know.” Items were averaged to create an “epistemic feelings” score (ages
18–49: mean (M) = 4.62, standard deviation (SD) = 1.11, α = .80; ages 50+:
M = 4.80, SD = 1.03, α = .79). Respondents were also asked to what extent
they agreed or disagreed (on a scale of 1 to 7) with the following
statements: “Evidence is more important than whether something feels
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instincts, to tell me what is true.” “I need to be able to justify my beliefs
with evidence.” Items were averaged to create an “epistemic evidence”
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.98, α = .71).
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groups. Analyses were conducted on weighted data (weighted within each
age group) to match general population demographics (ages 18–49: N =
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 Index

abortion rights, 67–68, 114, 236

accessibility, 81, 87
Acker, Michele, 46–47
actively open-minded thinking (AOT), 106–112, 127
advertising revenue, 206, 223
affect, 60–61, 105, 156, 175, 215
agency detection, 46
algorithms, 208–209, 216, 220, 227, 232–234
Allport, Gordon, 75
analog media, 197–198
anger, 47, 66, 92, 125, 208, 244
animus, 56, 59–63, 67, 100–101
anthropomorphism, 46
Antifa, 186
anti-Semitism, 28
AOC (Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez). See Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria
Aral, Sinan, 209
Arceneaux, Kevin, 105, 115, 121
arrogance, 127
asymmetry: American political, 52–54
false information sharing, 109
identity distillation, 182–183
polarization and, 152
problems of, 219
sense-making and, 102
of social sorting, 11, 71–72, 88–89
of wrongness, 152
attention, 86
audiences, 192–193, 204
Ayres, Stephen, 239–240
Babbitt, Ashli, 18
Badger, Emily, 70
Baier, Bret, 184
Bail, Christopher, 210
Bakker, Bert N., 114–115
Balmer, Randall, 69
Barbaro, Michael, 133
Barr, Jeremy, 185
Barrett, Amy Coney, 132
Bartiromo, Maria, 188
Becker, Ernest, 39
beliefs, 43, 86, 126
Bennett, W. Lance, 137, 139, 150
Berger, Peter, 77
Bergstrom, Carl, 22
Berry, Jeff, 147, 181
Biden, Joe, 17–18, 20, 43, 100, 184
Birtherism, 65
Bishop, Bill, 70
Black Lives Matter movement, 200–201, 237
Bleakley, Amy, 116
Boebert, Lauren, 166–167
Boehner, John, 72
Bond, Robert, 53
Bonilla, Yarimar, 200–201
Booker, Cory, 145–146
Boston Marathon bombings, 109
“bothsidesism,” 152, 228
Brady, William, 217, 219
Bronstein, Michael, 108
Brower, Danny, 39
Bruns, Axel, 212–213
Bump, Phil, 121, 135–136

canalization, 203–204
Cappella, Joseph, 142
Carlson, Matt, 153–154
Carlson, Tucker, 132, 181, 185–187
Cassese, Erin, 92–93
categorization, 75–76, 81, 87–89
Chen, Annie, 216
Cheney, Liz, 149
child pornography, 132, 134–135, 139, 150
Chodron, Pema, 237
Christianity, 67–69, 90, 111–112, 235
Clinton, Bill, 58
Clinton, Hillary, 67, 201, 219
Coe, Kevin, 176
cognition, 37–38, 105, 107, 113, 122
collectivism, 79
communism, fears of, 166
community, 21–22, 40–41, 50
human need for, 9, 34–35, 49
insurrection and, 18, 49
journalism and, 231
mask-wearing and, 125–126
social identity and, 87
comprehension, 9, 18, 21–22, 34–38, 45–46, 87
Confessore, Nick, 47, 179
confirmation bias, 29–30
conflict, 139, 141–145
conservatism, 58, 110, 183
conservative interest groups, 133
conspiracy theories, 5, 7
community through, 49–50
comprehension through, 45–46
control through, 46–49
around COVID-19, 5, 8–9, 44–45
about election (2020), 185
as fiction, 41–45
gatherings around, 21
as nonfalsifiable, 44
about Obama, 118
QAnon, 41–42, 135, 150, 154
research on, 110
rhetorical use of, 135
on social media, 8
content: biases in news, 137–138, 153
 echo chambers of, 212
identity distillation and, 182–183
incentivization of, 13
moderation, 22, 221
moralized emotional content problem, 217–219
offshoring of, 160
revenue generated by, 207
Contract with America, 58, 97
control, 9, 18, 21–22, 34–35, 38–40, 46–49, 87
counterspeech, 233
COVID-19 pandemic, 5
belief in misinformation, 20, 95, 117–119, 225
conspiracy theories around, 5, 8–9, 44–45, 48–49
Delta variant, 19
isolation from, 8
local vs. national news, 157
misinformation around, 18, 202, 221
mortality from, 18
partisanship shaping beliefs about, 93–100
Republican rhetoric around, 154
restrictions, 125
scientific findings about, 124
television and, 191
transmission, 125
critical race theory (CRT), 132, 134–135, 161, 163–164, 181–182
Crockett, M. J., 217
CrowdTangle, 215, 232–233
Cruz, Ted, 132–133, 139, 141, 145, 150, 163–164, 181, 229
Cudd, Jenny, 17, 23, 47, 49
cultivation theory, 173
culture wars, 11, 67–69

Daily Show, The (TV show), 172, 175–176

Darr, Joshua, 157–158
data analytics, 2, 121, 178–179, 194, 207, 227, 233
Davis, Trevor, 220
death, 18–19, 39–40
Deaver, Michael, 138
deductive thinking, 24–25, 32–33
democracy, 100–102, 128, 163, 199–200, 228, 230
Democrats and Democratic Party, 17, 19–20, 56, 68–69, 71–72, 90, 94–96, 138
DeSantis, Ron, 154–155
DeSilver, Drew, 58
disinformation, 35, 53, 201–206. See also misinformation
Dominion Voting Systems, 187–189
DonorsTrust, 164
Douglas, Karen, 46
Dunaway, Johanna, 157–158
Durbin, Dick, 136

echo chambers, 212–213

education, 69–71, 242
Egypt, 200
Ekstrom, Pierce, 113
election (2020), 17, 20, 93, 97–99, 116–120, 184–188
Election Coverage and Democracy Network, 227–228
elections, 23, 97, 142, 228
elite polarization, 59–60
emotions: belief in misinformation and, 117
Booker’s use of, 145–146
emojis, 208–209, 232
mainstream press capitalizing on, 137–141
moralized content problem, 217–219
research on, 116
value placed in, 119–120
epistemology, 24–25
epistemic motives, 34, 105
identity and humility, 122–126
methods, 112–115
partisan identity and, 122
political parties sorted by, 108, 110
of populism, 115–121
Epstein, Jeffrey, 109
Epstein, Seymour, 104, 122
Esposito, Eleanora, 166
ethnocentrism, 79
eugenics, 28–29, 41
Evans, Jonathan, 121, 123
evidence, 105–107, 111, 115, 119, 123, 186

Facebook, 195–196, 199–200, 202, 205–207, 209, 214–215, 219–222, 232–233

fact-checking, 144, 221
fake news, 44, 108
fallibility, 242
false polarization, 60
falsification, 26–27, 30, 43–44
Fauci, Anthony, 8
Fazio, Lisa, 21, 160–161
fear, 47–48, 66, 135–136, 166
Federico, Chris, 113, 142–143
filter bubbles, 212
Finkel, Eli, 226
forbearance, 101–102
Fox News, 144, 147, 165–166, 175, 181–182, 184–192, 194, 226
Frederick, Shane, 37, 107
FreedomWorks, 133
Freelon, Deen, 53, 201, 205–206, 220
Freeman, Daniel, 51
free speech, 192

Galston, William, 71
Garland, Merrick, 131
Garrett, R. Kelly, 53, 106, 117, 212
Gates, Bill, 20
gender, 67–68, 218
Gentzkow, Matthew, 215
Gerbner, George, 173
Gingrich, Newt, 58
Gitlin, Todd, 170
Giuliani, Rudy, 187
Glaser, James, 181
Godfrey, Elaine, 158
Goffman, Erving, 210
Goldwater, Barry, 57–58
Gorsuch, Neil, 131–132
Gosar, Paul, 149
Graham, Lindsey, 132, 136, 139–140, 145, 168, 181
Grant, Adam, 127
Green, Donald, 90, 149–150
Green, Emma, 125
Greene, Marjorie Taylor, 148, 154–155, 158, 166–167
Grossberg, Abby, 188
Grossman, Matt, 71
group thinking and norms, 78–80, 82–83, 100, 113, 135, 218, 237
Grumbach, Jacob, 163
Gruszczynski, Mike, 151
Grynbaum, Michael, 185
Guess, Andy, 219–220

Haidt, Jonathan, 78, 195–196, 223

Han, Jiyoung, 142–143
#HandsUpDontShoot, 201
Hannity, Sean, 132, 187
Hanson, Norwood Rusell, 28
Haselton, Martie, 122
Haugen, Frances, 207–208, 232
Hawley, Josh, 132, 135–136, 148, 150, 164
Heritage Action, 133
Heritage Foundation, 69
Hetherington, Marc, 97
heuristics, 38, 123
Hindman, Matthew, 159, 220
Hitt, Matthew, 157–158
Hmielowski, Jay, 70, 183
Hogg, Michael, 83
homeownership, 61
Hopkins, Daniel, 155–156
Hopkins, David, 71
humanness, 93
Hume, David, 26
humility, 122–127, 145, 212, 227, 241–242

identity: asymmetrical distillation of, 182–183

distillation of, 12–13, 235, 238
epistemology and humility, 122–126
mega-, 11, 88, 178
 observations laden with, 86, 91, 104
ownership (Kreiss, Lawrence, McGregor), 134
performance of, 134–136, 145–147
personal, 74, 77
politics and, 3, 11, 178–182
propaganda, 205
reinforcement, 3
self-reflection on, 74
southern, 85
threats to, 178–182
through politically mediated world, 2–3
wrongness driven by, 23, 206, 223, 225–243. See also social identity
ideology, 57–58, 72, 118, 151. See also populism
illness, 5–7
immigrants, 28, 47, 64
individualism, 79
inductive thinking, 24–27
information, 123–124, 160–161, 198–199. See also disinformation;
misinformation
Inglehart, Ronald, 66
Ingraham, Laura, 187
Instagram, 208
insurrection, 17–18, 42–43, 49, 149, 152, 186, 239. See also election (2020);
Trump, Donald J.
intellectual humility (IH), 126–127, 145, 212, 227, 241–242
intentionality, 46
internet, 109, 159, 197–201
intersectionality, 166
intuition, 12, 38, 105–106, 111, 115–123
Iyengar, Shanto, 61, 97–100

Jackson, Ketanji Brown, 131–135, 140, 145–146, 149–150, 229

Jackson, Sarah, 200
Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, 142, 181–182, 202, 205
Jankowicz, Nina, 206
January 6. See insurrection
Jetten, Jolanda, 79
Jones, Alex, 48
Jost, John, 79
journalism, 153–155, 227–231
Journatic (pink slime site), 159–160

Kahneman, Daniel, 104

Kalmoe, Nathan, 100
Kane, John, 67
Kang, Cecilia, 209
Karpf, Dave, 154, 178–179
Kavanaugh, Brett, 131–132
Kim, Yongkwang, 50
Klapper, Joseph, 169–170
Klein, Ezra, 64, 72–73, 89, 167
Klein, Paul, 172
knowing, ways of, 24–25
Koetke, Jonah Andrew, 241
Kreiss, Daniel, 134, 205, 235
Krupenkin, Masha, 97–100
Kuo, Rachel, 205

Langbaum, Jessica B., 116

lawmakers, 13, 60
Lawrence, Regina, 134
lawsuits, 187–189
Layman, Geoffrey, 68
Lazarsfeld, Paul, 169–170, 172, 203, 223
Leary, Mark, 126
Legum, Judd, 161
Lelkes, Yphtach, 114–115
Levendusky, Matthew, 60, 177–178
Levitsky, Steven, 72, 101–102
Lewis, Seth, 153–154
Lewis-Kraus, Gideon, 216
LGBTQ rights, 67–68, 114
liberals, 113, 190
Liberty Principles, 164
Lippmann, Walter, 136
Liptak, Adam, 133
local news, 157–159, 162–164
Luckmann, Thomas, 77
MacCallum, Martha, 184, 188
Maddow, Rachel, 190
magazines, 170
mainstreaming, 174
Makinen, Julie, 158
Malhotra, Neil, 60
Malka, Ariel, 114–115
Maloney, Erin, 116
Mann, Thomas, 71–72
masks, 19–20, 124–125, 154. See also COVID-19 pandemic
Mason, Lilliana, 56, 67, 91, 100, 236
mass media, 169–170, 197–198
mass polarization, 59–60
McGregor, Shannon, 134, 202–203, 235
meaning-making, 30
Media Matters for America, 165–166
mega-identities. See identity: mega-
memes, 201
Mercieca, Jennifer, 120–121, 153
Merrill, Jeremy, 209
Merton, Robert, 172, 203, 223
Meta, 206–208, 214, 223, 232–233. See also Facebook
#MeToo movement, 200
Metric Media, 160, 162
Mexicans, views on, 115
misinformation: demands for, 13–14
medical, 40
moralized emotion content as, 218–219
partisanship shaping belief in, 93–100
policing, 221–224
psychology of, 9
scholarship on, 191–192
sharing of, 210–211, 219
supply and demand of, 22–23
susceptibility to, 127
misperceptions, 36
Molokach, Brooke, 212
monopolization, 203–204
Moonves, Les, 154
Moore, Mark, 165
moral majority, 69
motivated reasoning, 30
MSNBC, 144, 147, 175
Mudde, Cas, 65, 153
Muirhead, Russell, 51–52
Musk, Elon, 214
Muslims, 164. See also religion
mutual toleration, 101
Myspace, 199

nationalization of politics, 155–158, 162–163

Navarro, Peter, 121
Naziism, 28, 75
Neff, Timothy, 231
New Hampshire identity, 82, 84, 86–87, 91
Newsmax TV, 184–185, 188
Nguyen, C. Thi, 213
Nickerson, Raymond, 30–31
Nishimura, Kent, 141
nonfalsifiable reasoning, 43–44
Norris, Pippa, 66

Oakes, Penelope, 77
Oath Keepers, 239
Obama, Barack, 53, 65, 118
objectivity, 151
observations, 28, 33–34, 86, 91, 104
obsessive-compulsive disorder, 40
Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria (AOC), 164–166
Oittinen, Erin, 212
Oliver, J. Eric, 111, 118–119
Omar, Ilhan, 164–165
Oremus, Will, 209
Ornstein, Norm, 71–72, 152

Packer, Dominic, 78, 85–86

partisanship: appeal of, 176
bipartisan support, 131, 138
 epistemic traits and, 113, 122
expressive approaches to, 89–93
liberal figures, 164–168
media consumption and, 177
misinformation, 93–100
news framed around, 143, 146–147
political mediation and, 2
pride of, 100
prototype performances, 134–136
pundit, 144
religious aspects of, 111
salience, 93, 95–96, 98–99
social sorting of, 102
use of mega-identity, 11–12
pathological behavior, 40
patience, 8
pattern-seeking behavior, 45
Pence, Mike, 17, 23
Pennycook, Gordon, 43, 107–108, 191, 210–211
performance, 134–136, 145–147, 152–155, 210
Persily, Nate, 233
personalization, 139
Petersen, Michael Bang, 49–50, 187
Peterson, Theodore, 171
Pickard, Victor, 231
pink slime websites, 159–161, 164
polarization, 59–62, 102, 150–152, 156, 175, 215, 234–235
police, 175, 201
politics: asymmetry in American, 52–54
categorization and, 87–89
identification with, 64
identity, 178–182
mainstream press and, 136–137
as mediated, 136
mediatization of, 137
mega-identity and, 88, 166
nationalization of, 155, 163
polarization, 59–63
professionalization of, 137–138
 racialization of, 64
social identity and, 11
US history of, 57
voting turnout, 97
Politifact, 144
Popper, Karl, 26, 30
populism, 63–67, 115–121, 152–155
Postman, Neil, 145
Powell, Sidney, 187
Pressley, Ayanna, 164–165
Prior, Markus, 176–177
Prooijen, Jan-Willem Van, 46–49
propaganda, 203, 205
Proud Boys, 239
psychological traits, 113–114
pundits, 144

QAnon, 41–42, 135, 150, 154

race: critical race theory (CRT), 132, 134–135, 161

ethnocentrism, 79
populism and, 63–67
racist ideologies, 28–29, 41, 47, 57, 115
Russian misinformation efforts and, 205–206
segregation, 69
radicalization, 216, 235
Rand, David, 43, 107, 191
Rasheed, Huma, 217
rationalists and rationality: about, 12
adaptive (Haselton), 122
of human knowing, 31
Reagan, Ronald, 100, 138–139
reality, perception of, 173–174, 194, 211
Reddi, Madhavi, 205
Reimer, Nils Karl, 76
reinforcement, 169–174, 176
religion, 40, 67–69, 90, 108, 111–112, 114, 164, 235
replacement theory, 47
Republicans and Republican Party, 19–20, 71
 belief in misinformation, 19
belief in rigged election, 42–43
conservative nature of, 90, 110
COVID-19 misinformation, belief in, 94–96, 109
democracy under, 163
democratic responsibility, 72
demographics, 56, 72, 138, 164, 235
distrust among, 52
ideologies of, 58–59
as mega-identity, 11
1994 revolution, 175
religious makeup of, 68, 102, 110–111
trust of, 69
vaccination uptake, 19–20
research, 6–7, 112, 189, 214–215
Reuters Institute, 192
rituals and superstitions, 39–40
Robinson, Sue, 153–154
Roe v. Wade, 236. See also abortion rights
Romney, Mitt, 65, 149–150
Rosa, Jonathan, 200–201
Rosen, Jay, 152, 154
Rosenblum, Nancy, 51–52
Rufo, Christopher, 218
rumors, 109
rural living, 63, 70, 72, 84–85
Russia, 45, 53, 149, 190, 202, 205–206

salience (cognitive psychology), 80, 84, 91, 93, 95–100, 157, 241
same-sex marriage, 67–68
Sammon, Bill, 188
Sandy Hook school shooting, 47
Schildkraut, Debbie, 181
science, 30, 69, 126
Scott, Susanne, 188
sectarianism, 63
self, the, 76–77, 210
September 11, 2001 attacks, 47–48, 132
Settle, Jaime, 211
Sicknick, Brian, 18
Sides, John, 64–65
Silverman, Brandon, 215, 233
Slater, Mike, 180
Smartmatic, 187
Sobieraj, Sarah, 147
social competition, 79
social distancing, 19. See also COVID-19 pandemic
social dynamics, 78–79
social identity, 3, 74
belief shaped by, 86
as changeable, 80–83, 85, 169–170
comprehension/control/community informed by, 35, 87
conflict and, 141–145
construction of, 9–10, 80
contextual nature of, 82
partisanship as, 91
politics and, 11
reinforcement and, 180
religion and, 90
social media logic and, 196–197, 209–212
theory, 79–80, 115
threats to, 180. See also identity
social media, 196
conspiracy theories on, 8
destructive power of, 195–196
disinfomation on, 201–204
echo chambers of, 212–213
effects on American life, 195
extremist content, 216–217
filter bubbles, 212
identity-driven wrongness in, 227, 232–234
performative use of, 210
political mediation and, 2
reputable sources, 38
research methods, 214–215, 232–233
social identity and, 209–212
social norms, 7
Social Science One, 233
social sorting, 88–89, 102, 108, 110, 114, 128
southern identity, 85, 91
Southwell, Brian, 40
Stanovich, Keith, 121, 123
Steele, Christopher, 190
Steele Dossier, 190
Stirewalt, Chris, 184
Stone, Roger, 21
Sunstein, Cass, 44
Superfund sites, 6
supplementation, 203–204
Sydnor, Emily, 217

Tajfel, Henri, 75, 79–80, 82

Tea Party, 72, 133, 160
television, 170–175, 191
terror management theory (TMT), 39
Tesler, Michael, 64–65
Thiel, Peter, 148
Thompson, Bennie, 240
Thorson, Emily, 43
Timpone, Brian, 159–161
Tipton, Scott, 166
Tlaib, Rashida, 164–165
Tripodi, Francesca, 112, 189
Trump, Donald J.: as anti-establishment figure, 102
election (2020) loss, 184
favorability as candidate, 117
Fox News and, 184–186
media coverage, 65, 153–154
misinformation purveyed by, 18
origins of support for, 64, 66–67, 148
QAnon and, 42–43
rhetoric of, 120–121, 154
social media use, 219, 222
on “the Squad,” 165
supporters, 17. See also insurrection
Trump, Eric, 21
trust, 50–52, 69–71, 138–139
truth, 104, 112–116, 186, 218–219, 221–222
Tucker, Joshua, 219
Tufekci, Zeynep, 23, 206, 213
Tunisia, 200
Turner, John, 77
Turow, Joseph, 171–172
Twitter, 141, 195–196, 199–201, 211–212, 214, 222

Ukraine, 45, 149

United Kingdom, 51
urban-rural divide, 70, 72

vaccines, 19, 44–45, 52

Vaidhyanathan, Siva, 210
Van Bavel, Jay, 78, 85–86, 217
Vance, J.D., 148–149
Vander Wielen, Ryan J., 105, 115, 121
Varki, Ajit, 39
Vavreck, Lynn, 64–65
Vermeule, Adrian, 44
Vickers, Nathan, 103
voter turnout, 97. See also election (2020)
Voting Systems, 187

Wagner, Mike, 151

Wallace, Chris, 186
Weeks, Brian, 106, 117
West, Jevin, 22
Weyrich, Paul, 69
Wood, Thomas, 111, 118–119
wrongness, 12, 23, 240
admitting to, 126–127
demand side of, 23
examples of, 31–32, 39
humbleness and, 14
identity-driven, 23, 206, 223, 225–243
nationalization of, 155–157
openness to, 242
psychological/social needs and, 225
 self-generated, 35
social-identity-driven dynamics of, 108. See also misinformation
Wronski, Julie, 67, 91

Yang, Yunkang, 220

Youngkin, Glenn, 161
YouTube, 199, 207, 216

Ziblatt, Daniel, 72, 101–102

Zuckerberg, Mark, 221
Zuckerman, Ethan, 51