Last week, I interviewed media scholar Daniel Kreiss about a paper he co-wrote with Shannon McGregor criticizing what I'd call the issue prioritization of polarization. Kreiss told me, "Polarization becomes a way to talk about politics without talking about politics at all, without actually getting at the underlying issues."
But if polarization talk obscures underlying issues from above, a new book by behavioral economist Daniel Stone, "Undue Hate," dissects how "objectively false and overly negative beliefs about the other side's character traits" similarly obscures them from below—below our level of consciousness, that is. At first glance, Stone's book might seem to be just the sort of thing that Kreiss and McGregor were criticizing, and some of the things he says would seem to justify that. But most significantly, he's not pretending to explain everything with an over-arching narrative. What he is doing is providing a carefully qualified account of how a handful of universal cognitive biases play a significant role in exacerbating perceived divisions, along with fueling disaffection in everyday non-political settings—even among friends and family. And, to his credit, he recognizes these biased tendencies in himself.
