America is a politically polarized nation. There likely aren’t many people out there who would disagree with that statement. Political incivility is everywhere; from bumper stickers to Thanksgiving dinners, from my Twitter feed to the floor of Congress, it’s hard to find a place where American conservatives and liberals get along. Since the 1980’s, the ideological gap between the Right and Left has widened significantly, with political moderates becoming fewer and fewer. Several research studies and surveys from Pew Research Center demonstrate this, among others. Conservatives have become more conservative, liberals have become more liberal, and if these trends continue, moderates and nonpartisans may soon become an endangered species.
But this partisan divide is not only ideological. It’s also intensely social and emotional, with high amounts of conflict and hostility between those of differing political orientations. Hate speech gets thrown around on social media every day, with the liberals and conservatives of the Internet at each other’s throats. Pew Research Center has quantified some of this hostility by surveying thousands of Americans and finding that feelings of disgust and animosity toward the opposite political party have surged since the ‘80’s, and more people than ever before claim that the opposite party is a threat to the country.
Yet the true threat to this country may in fact be this extreme level of partisanship in itself. Scholars and writers such as Jonathan Haidt of New York University, author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion think so. The consequences of political polarization – and hatred towards anyone on the opposite side of the political spectrum – extend beyond just making family get-togethers uncomfortable. Politically-motivated hate crime has been on the rise (Kalmoe & Mason, 2018). Americans are segregating themselves into different residential communities based on political affiliation (Florida, 2016). Congressional gridlock has stalled the passage of badly-needed legislation (Jilani & Smith, 2019). And much, much more.
This issue of American hyperpartisanship is what I decided to dig into for my senior thesis here at JMU, through the Terror Management Lab. One of the core tenets of Terror Management Theory is that death anxiety makes us identify more strongly with our social groups and our preexisting belief systems. What I wanted to investigate was whether death anxiety could be contributing to extreme political polarization, and if so, whether this contribution is primarily emotional or ideological.
We ended up sending an online survey-based experiment to hundreds of JMU students to test my hypothesis that death anxiety, triggered by a mortality salience (MS) induction, would increase expressions of hostility towards political opponents. By random assignment, about half the participants were put in the MS condition, in which they answered a few questions about their feelings toward death, and the other half were put in the control condition, answering the same questions, but about physical pain rather than death. After that, they were all tested on their political ideologies and their feelings towards Democrats, Republicans, liberals, and conservatives. We collected all of this data in the couple of months leading up to the 2020 presidential election, which was already a time of high political tension. Based on all the previous TMT literature I had reviewed, I was expecting to see more negative feelings being expressed toward political opposites when participants were in the MS condition.
But this is not what we found. Instead, something very curious happened. The participants in the MS condition ended up expressing more positive feelings towards political opponents than participants in the control condition. Liberals expressed slightly more liking of conservatives and Republicans when in the MS condition, and conservatives expressed slightly more liking of liberals and Democrats when in the MS condition. In short, mortality salience made conservatives and liberals like each other more.
Why?
In my eyes, this went against everything I had come to learn about Terror Management Theory, so I started to search for alternative explanations. One of those is called the “Scrooge effect,” which describes a phenomenon in which death anxiety makes people more altruistic. Just like how Ebenezer Scrooge became a kinder man after being transported into the future to visit his own grave, everyday people can be made more altruistic by reminders of death. Perhaps the kinder ratings of conservatives by liberals, and of liberals by conservatives, was a form of altruism. Similarly, it’s also possible that these kinder partisan evaluations are a form of virtue signaling, in which people make an effort to express opinions that they think will be well-received by others. Perhaps mortality salience gave participants the desire to prove themselves by demonstrating less prejudice towards opposing partisans. In essence, this is a lot like the Scrooge effect, except the virtue signaling stems more from a desire to be seen as a good person rather than from genuine, selfless altruism.
If the virtue signaling hypothesis has merit here, then it would require us to assume that participants saw it as virtuous to be kinder to those on the opposite end of the political spectrum. This makes me wonder what would happen if this same study were conducted on a more representative sample of American people rather than just college students at JMU. It’s possible that college students represent a more open-minded and tolerant population than the average American. These values of open-mindedness and tolerance may be heightened while on campus or while participating in the JMU curriculum, and mortality salience may have actually succeeded in strengthening participants’ reliance on their own belief systems, if those belief systems include such values.
Indeed, I can’t help but feel an intention of unity while here at JMU, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though efforts are being made to keep people physically apart and safely distanced while on campus, there is still the powerful sense that as members of the JMU community, we are all working together, united against a common threat. Perhaps other students are feeling this kind of unity as well, and maybe that’s why the death reminders in this study caused students to express more liking toward those who are different from them. Whatever the reason, the MS induction in this experiment served to soften a little bit of the animosity between partisans, at least among these students. I hope that future research continues to investigate how we can reduce this animosity and bridge the gap between the Right and Left even more. The health and well-being of our country depends on it.
Madi Sarlo – Biology & Psychology double-major, TMT lab member since Fall 2019
For further reading
Florida, R. (2016, Oct 25). America’s “Big Sort” is only getting bigger. Bloomberg. Retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-25/how-the-big-sort-is-driving-political-polarization.
Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York, NY: Random House, Inc.
Jilani, Z., & Smith, J.A. (2019). What is the true cost of polarization in America? Greater Good Science Center, University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved from: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_is_the_true_cost_of_polarization_in_america.
Kalmoe, N.P., & Mason, L. (2018). Lethal mass partisanship: prevalence, correlates, and electoral contingencies. Presented at 2018 American Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting, Boston, MA.
Pew Research Center. (2014). Political polarization in the American public: How increasing ideological uniformity and partisan antipathy affect politics, compromise and everyday life. Retrieved from https://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/.
Pew Research Center. (2016). Partisanship and political animosity in 2016. Retrieved from https://www.people-press.org/2016/06/22/partisanship-and-political-animosity-in-2016/.
Pew Research Center (2019). In a politically polarized era, sharp divides in both partisan coalitions. Retrieved from https://www.people-press.org/2019/12/17/in-a-politically-polarized-era-sharp-divides-in-both-partisan-coalitions/.