Why is American politics so polarized around issues of race, class, and social identity? And why do some people act in prejudiced ways even when they intend to be fair?
Keith Payne uses experimental psychology methods to understand the cognitive and emotional reasons behind these questions at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. His research on identity and political division is explained in his recent book, Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide.
The book starts from the premise that most people don’t actually have political ideologies in the form of a coherent set of political principles and issue stands. What they do have is a social identity, and those social identities are tied to their sense that they’re a good member of their group, whether that’s a political party or a racial, national, or religious group.
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Payne believes what we’re really fighting about is the assertion that we’re good, reasonable members of our group, and politics, policies, and issues are just the tools we use to wage that battle. Payne suggests that if we understand that, we can set aside the evidence, tools, and weapons that come with issue positions and relate to each other by understanding that we are all just defending our sense that we’re good, reasonable people, too.
We sat down with Keith Payne to talk about Good Reasonable People.
Sahar Habib Ghazi: Your research tries to understand how inequality shapes the human mind. How did you end up writing Good Reasonable People?
Keith Payne, Ph.D.
Keith Payne: I found myself getting into arguments with my family members, mostly about politics, especially on social media.
I had two conflicting thoughts at once. One is, how could my family members, who are on the other side of the political divide from me, be so unmoving, so unthinking, so stubborn? And on the other hand, I know that they’re not stupid people, and they’re not bad people. These are people I love.
And so I kept going around and round in my own mind how both of those things can be true. Because in the heat of the argument, they surely seemed ignorant, irrational, and, sometimes, downright evil. But I knew that wasn’t true. So what was it about the conflict, of being on two sides of the political divide, that made it feel like that? I feel like so many people in the U.S. are sharing that experience these days, so I wanted to take a look at what psychology has to say about that.
SHG: One of the questions you ask is around how we feel and how things actually are. What were your big learnings around issues such as social identity and race, when it comes to how we perceive things and how things actually are?
KP: The key idea behind what’s called social identity theory is that we derive a lot of our sense of self-esteem from the groups that we belong to, the groups that are most important to us, whether that’s groups like race, ethnic groups, or groups like national groups or religious groups. We all want to believe that we’re good and reasonable people, and that we’re good and reasonable members of our groups, and that the people who belong to those groups are good people, too.
And that’s sort of what I call the psychological bottom line, that whatever new argument or piece of information we’re presented with, we process it in a way that has to add up to maintain the belief that I’m good and my groups are good, too.
So, if I’m presented with a piece of information that suggests that my group is wrong or has done something bad, there are a thousand ways that we can counter, argue, or change the subject, or switch attention, or move the goalposts rather than engaging with the facts. We go around and around in these patterns of thinking to find some way to justify that I am right, my groups are right, and we’re good people. Both sides are doing this. There is a competition of mental gymnastics in which we use facts or figures or evidence as tools, or even as weapons, to just defend my sense that I’m a good person. Politics is almost a proxy for racial group identity now.
SHG: What does social identity data say about Americans right now?
KP: The basic principle that people respond based on their social identities is pretty universal. What that means for people differs based on different racial and ethnic categories, and also geography.
About 85-90% of Black Americans vote for Democrats. That by itself should be astounding to people. Eighty-five to 90% of Americans don’t agree on anything, but there’s that much consensus among Black Americans in terms of their political preferences.
About 60% of white Americans vote Republican, but if they live in a place that had extensive slavery in 1860, that goes up to about 80%. So, 80% of white Americans in counties that had a lot of slavery are voting for one party. That level of uniformity is amazing.
So, you have to ask, well, what is it about that? Some of the research that I and other people have done has looked at the history of slavery and Jim Crow laws and segregation, and how that has led people in parts of the country that 150–160 years ago were heavily dependent on slavery to still see this conflict as one about maintaining status-quo power structures. And they see groups like African Americans or Mexican immigrants as people who are trying to tear down those power structures. It’s not just a general north-south difference. You can see it from one county to the next, within the same southern states, based on historical variables such as the pattern of enslavement.
That’s why I say it is about social identity, but it’s about what that social identity means in the context of the history of where you live. Counties that had a lot of slavery in 1860 have more segregation, more racial inequality today. So think about how people from different racial groups make sense of that. If you live in a place with extreme racial inequality, and you’re African American, you look around and what makes more sense, given your psychological bottom line that you’re a good and reasonable person? Is it that Black people don’t work hard, or is it that there’s a lot of discrimination and lack of equal opportunity? Well, of course, most Black folks faced with inequality see it as a lack of opportunity and discrimination. Now, that happens to be consistent with all the scientific and historical data, but it’s also consistent with their social identities.
If you’re a white person in that same environment of extreme racial inequality, what makes more sense for you with your social identity? For the average white American, it simply feels more comfortable to believe that it’s Black folks not working hard, rather than some system of inequality that they themselves might be involved in. It’s hard to accept that we are part of a system that did that, or needs to have some accountability or reparations around it.
SHG: What do we do about the people who are not good and reasonable?
KP: Just to be clear, the claim in the book is not that everybody’s a good and reasonable person. The claim is that everybody thinks they’re a good and reasonable person, and they insist on thinking that, regardless of how good or bad or unreasonable they actually are in terms of their behaviors.
I think it’s helpful when dealing with people who are antisocial in their behavior or irrational in their thinking to remember that they don’t see themselves that way. If you have to deal with people with supremacist thinking and extremist groups, they think of themselves as upholding the right kind of traditions and upholding the good from their racist point of view. So it doesn’t mean you need to engage with them. I’m not arguing that we need to stay connected with people, no matter how awful their behavior is. It’s fine to sever ties with people whose views are just too objectionable to us. In some cases, I think that’s what we have to do. But if we want to engage with people who are part of our friend network or our family and we want to stay connected with them, the book gives us some tools for doing that. But, absolutely, there’s no argument that we should put up with violence or racism, or any kind of rhetoric like that.
SHG: Your book got released before the election results. Were you surprised by how immigrants from Latin America voted in this election? Did it fit into the kind of data that you’ve been studying?
Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide (Viking, 2024, 272 pages)
KP: I don’t think I was as surprised as a lot of people are. People have made a big deal about the fact that in 2020 Donald Trump got a larger share of votes from both Black American and Hispanic American men than in the past couple of elections. But you have to keep those trends in the context of the overall pattern. It’s too big of a group to say Latino voters as a whole, because you have to look at what people’s social identities are. Many Hispanic voters have no social identity bound up with Mexico from their grandparents’ generation or their parents’ generation, or they may not feel any solidarity with immigrants today. So their social identity might be much more similar to white Americans in terms of who they identify with. We have to go beyond race and ethnicity categories that people check on the census and look at what kind of groups they identify with. Somebody may be labeled as Hispanic, but they might identify as sort of a white Republican or a white American or a Republican.
SHG: You lay out some solutions in your book, as well. Would you like to highlight a few of them here?
KP: My solutions are about trying to teach the psychology of this intergroup conflict. The research suggests that most people don’t have a political ideology in any traditional sense of the term. If you ask people who strongly identify as a liberal or a conservative what those terms liberal and conservative mean, most people can’t tell you. Some researchers suggest about 85% of Americans don’t have anything that’s a recognizable political ideology. Instead, what we have is social group identities. One solution is to recognize that.
The second thing that we can do is realize that when we’re engaging with somebody else in a political debate, what both sides are doing is really trying to defend their sense that they’re a good, valuable, and reasonable person.
So, if somebody says they believe something about vaccines or about elections or about tax policy and we disagree with what they say, a better way forward is to ask, how is this person using this argument to defend their sense that they’re a good and reasonable person? By asking a question like that, we can stop engaging in fruitless arguments about the issues that seem to go nowhere, and start asking: What is this person doing to defend their worldview and their social identities? And how might I be doing the same thing?
“The research suggests that most people don’t have a political ideology in any traditional sense of the term”
If you get really deep into the human psychology of social identity, there’s a way of short-circuiting a lot of the defensiveness that we see, because the whole game that we’re playing is trying to defend and justify yourself as a good, reasonable person. So if you walk into the conversation saying, look, I know you’re a good person, I know you’re reasonable, it cuts right to the heart of the matter, and then you can have a more productive conversation.
SHG: There was this one line in your book that really struck me. You write, “We are working with the same cognitive hardware that elevated kings and queens and beheaded them.” So when you’re sitting on the opposite side of a loved one, with that kind of hardwiring, how do you start having that conversation?
KP: One way to deal with it is to set aside the politics and interact with each other just as people or as family members or as friends.
What’s wild is that so many of these divisions happen even within families. And where we have so much similarity, we’re not only dealing with the same sort of cognitive hardwiring, but we’re dealing with the same set of genes, the same set of environments. When you’re dealing with family members, you’ve got so much in common. And yet politics can put this giant wedge between us, because it has so much to do with how we see the world and how we think the world works.
And, again, even two people raised in the same house can have two very different social identities based on education level or where they now live. It’s still a struggle, for me, talking to family members. We haven’t come any closer to an agreement about anything on political issues, other than some of us have agreed to stop talking about it, which is one perfectly valid way to do it, as long as that doesn’t mean you stop talking.
