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No matter how it turns out, at least one message from the midterm election is clear: This is not a moment of harmonic convergence.
The campaign has been all about irreconcilable differences — on health care, on spending and climate, on who’s a lunatic and who’s a tyrant. Political handicappers expect at best a divided government, and at worst a paralyzed, feuding one: “Survivor: Washington, D.C.,” with gavels and filibusters in place of bonfires and tribal headbands.
But recent research suggests that several strong but subtle psychological factors will be pushing Democrats and Republicans in an unexpected direction — toward engagement instead of name-calling and nastiness. These forces, rooted in the nature of personal identity and the rhythm of one-on-one interaction, are present when any antagonists meet; they can blunt even sharp ideological differences.
“We’ve done a good job of documenting how harshly humans treat their enemies throughout evolution,” said Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of “Born to be Good” (Norton, 2009). “But we also have evidence of an early shift in human evolution to hypersociality — a default orientation toward trust, toward sharing resources, toward forgiveness.”
Without putting aside their differences, he went on, humans have a “profound capacity through which vicious adversaries can form alliances.”
Political insiders are skeptical that this will happen soon, especially if some of the strongest opponents of the president are elected. “These candidates believe they’re being sent to undo what’s been done,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and consultant. “They don’t even want to be seen” dealing with opponents.
Still, people tend to exaggerate their differences with opponents to begin with, research suggests, especially in the company of fellow partisans. In small groups organized around a cause, for instance, members are prone to one-up one another; the most extreme tend to rise the most quickly, making the group look more radical than it is.
For this and other reasons — including media coverage of the political fringes — Americans as a rule overestimate the policy differences between so-called red and blue voters.
A series of recent studies demonstrate how quickly large differences can be put aside, under some circumstances. In one, a team of psychologists had a group of college students who scored very high on measures of patriotism read and critique an essay titled “Beyond the Rhetoric: Understanding the Recent Terrorist Attacks in Context,” which argued that the 9/11 attacks were partly a response to American policy in the Middle East.
The students judged the report harshly — unless, prompted by the researchers, they had first described a memory that they were proud of. This group, flush with the image of having acted with grace or courage, was significantly more open to at least considering the case spelled out in the essay than those who had recounted a memory of having failed to exhibit their most prized personal quality.
Confronting an opposing political view is a threat to identity, but “if you remind people of what they value in some other domain of their life, it lessens the pain,” said the lead author, Geoffrey L. Cohen, a social psychologist at Stanford. “It opens them up to information that they might not otherwise consider.”
Psychologists draw out these memories in the lab by asking people to describe a personal strength and an occasion when it was on display. But daily life is full of triggers too, whether in an unexpected call from an old friend, a question from a child or an evocative sight — one’s family portrait, say, propped up under the desk lamp as a reminder of what matters most.
The effect of such affirmations seems especially pronounced in people who boast strong convictions. In a follow-up experiment, the research team had supporters of abortion-rights act out a negotiation with an opponent on an abortion bill. Again, participants who were prompted to recall a treasured memory beforehand were more open to seeking areas of agreement and more respectful of their opposite’s position than those not so prompted.
And most fair-minded of all were participants who recalled such a memory and also reaffirmed their beliefs on abortion rights before the role-playing. “This is contrary to what many assume,” Cohen said. “But the combination of the two made for the greatest distance traveled to meet an adversary, to look for a middle ground.”
Private values — memories, affirmations — may well have played a role in some historic compromises. During the negotiations in 1978 to achieve what would become the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt, the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, appeared ready to walk away. President Jimmy Carter, who coordinated the talks, made a personal visit to Begin, bringing him autographed photographs of the meeting, addressed to each of the prime minister’s eight grandchildren.
“That was it,” Carter said in a 1994 interview. “He looked at those eight photographs, and tears began to run down his cheeks — and mine — as he read the names. In just a few minutes he sent his attorney general to tell me he was going to look at the negotiations again.”
One reason sworn enemies may soften after the campaigning is over and they’re seated face to face is that conversation subconsciously synchronizes people physically — and, to some extent, mentally. Researchers have known for some time that a person’s gestures, movements and expressions tend to mimic those of another when they interact one on one; the closer the mimicry, the warmer the interactions.
But new research suggests that conversation partners quickly and subconsciously begin to speak alike — even when they don’t care for one another. “I think of it as a verbal dance,” said James W. Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas. “Speaking styles match up very quickly when people begin to talk to one another — any two people.”
Within about 30 seconds, strangers making small talk begin speaking with similar sentence structure, a similar tone and often the same slang. In a new study, Pennebaker and Molly E. Ireland, also of the University of Texas, found that over time, the degree of similarity begins to reflect the closeness (or coolness) of a relationship.
The researchers analyzed correspondence and writings in three famous relationships: Freud and Jung and two poetic couples, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Using a measure called language style matching — a calculation that takes into account the frequency of personal pronouns and other subconscious markers of rapport — they found that synchrony ranged from a high of nearly 90 percent (Freud and Jung, at the peak of their collaboration) down to 60 percent (Plath and Hughes, in a low period).
The new Congress, though short on married poets, will bring together in direct debate people with strong beliefs who — even if hostile — will automatically be speaking a similar language.
“It doesn’t matter whether you admire the other person, simply need information or hate their guts,” Pennebaker said. “If you’re paying attention to the other person, it’s going to happen.”
That is a big if — and one that, these days, is subject to many outside radicalizing forces, not to mention economic uncertainty.
But if members of the new Congress are secure in their convictions and willing to pay attention to their opponents, they just might get some business done.
