Tag: tribalism

Let’s Play Ball!

cassandra.dahnke

A Fictional Adaptation of Tribalism in Politics in the United States

by Mea Ayers

 

The bets are in. The Facebook posts are up, and the flags are out, lining the front yards. This is the day everyone has been waiting for. Countless hours of preparation and training paired with many days on the road have led to this built-up moment. First, there were the trials. Then, the lineup was released, and fans from every crevice of the nation – city and country, coastal and inland – began to anticipate what the future months would hold. Now, it’s here. The time has finally come! This is a day that will bring a great joy to many and a disappointing upset to an equal amount. This is the first day of the World Series… through the eyes Jenna and Todd Harrington.

***

“Aha!”

When she finally finds the mustard in the back corner of her fridge, Jenna looks down at her phone and realizes that fifteen minutes have passed. Fifteen minutes…

“It’s 12:07! The Party has already started!”

What could possibly be a better way to meet all your new neighbors than to host a pre-game barbecue? As she approaches the front door, Jenna sees through the window a crowd huddled around her husband in the front yard. She assumes the hot dogs must have been a hit!

She straightens her indigo sundress before opening the front door to make her way to the table covered in hotdogs. New York Yankees flags clad her front yard filled with guests. Could this day be more perfect? However, the closer she gets to the crowd, the more she begins to realize that the faces of her neighbors seem…far from pleasant.

That’s not casual conversing. No, that’s shouting! A crowd of angry neighbors is screaming. To whom and for what reason she does not know.

“Todd! What on earth is going on here?” She shouts.

It looks as if the hate is directed towards her husband, but she realizes he’s not the other person yelling. It’s the tall, young guy who lives on the corner lot in the small, red brick house. What’s his name? Joe, Jim, Justin? It’s something with a J, she thinks. She takes a look at the crowd and notices a color trend. Shades of red pop out in a broad range of attire from subtle red buttons to full red tracksuits and painted faces.

For the first time today, she takes a real look around her street. Somehow, she failed to realize that their flag is the only blue flag that lines the street – theirs, and the guy who lives on the corner, the guy who is yelling,

“You can’t rip down their flag! They have a right to have it there.” The man from the corner house shouts.

A middle aged man in a red jersey cackles before responding. “Right? Wow Jamie. You’re one to talk!”

A younger man wearing a ridiculous red morph suit pipes up. “The last thing we need is another person in the neighborhood supporting that team. One is already more than enough to handle.”

Laughs rattle throughout the crowd before the morph suit man’s wife takes the stage. “Yeah, Jamie. Everybody knows the Red Sox are the leading team around here. Their stats are good. Plus, they haven’t had the slip-ups your team has had. Need I mention the pitching scandal?”

“They never found any proof!” Jamie screams.

“Oh please. Everyone knows they’re to blame! I don’t care if there is proof. I don’t care if there isn’t proof. They should definitely be kicked out of the MLB!” The woman responds.

Jenna interjects. “Does anyone want a hot do—“

“WHY DON’T YOU JUST SHUT THE HELL UP Marsha.” Jamie interrupts. “Everyone knows you only spit back out the bullshit your husband feeds you. And he’s an oaf, for crying out loud. Everything he spouts is garbage anyway!”

“OH REALLY! I’m spitting up bullshit now am I. Why don’t I just go ahead and spit up some more!” Marsha takes a step forward and spits in Jamie’s face.

Jamie, seething, wipes his face with one hand and clenches the other into a fist. For a second, it looks to Jenna as if he is actually about to punch Marsha in the face. Feeling that it’s about high time to end this very… unpleasant soiree, Todd steps forward. “You know what, party’s over. Why don’t we all go back to our houses and enjoy the game there? Everyone can grab a hotdog to go. I think this way, things will be more…pleasant.”

The man in the morph suit grabs a hot dog, and proceeds to walk over towards Jamie to pat him on the back. “Have fun!” He says with a smirk. “Enjoy watching your team lose.”

“I’d rather see the whole stadium burn down than watch the Red Sox win. So you better hope they don’t or I’m going to raise hell!”
Dumbfounded by what they just witnessed, Todd and Jenna hastily grab their flag and tins of food and hurry inside. While Jenna prepares two places at the kitchen table, Todd flashes on the TV. A pack of men painted completely blue flash up on the screen

“The Red Sox Suck!” A man on the TV shouts.

Todd flashes the TV back off and makes his way over to the kitchen table. He and his wife sit across from each other, in silence, eating cold hot dogs.

Breaking the silence, Jenna finally speaks up. “I really don’t know what has become of this country.”

***

 

Visualize the two largest rival teams of any sport you can think of. Now, think about those two friends you know that if left in a room to discuss their teams together, the outcome would be a shouting match or brawl. This event is not so unique. Similar acts of uncivility occur all throughout the country between countless teams and people from all walks of life. Kids in middle school all the way up through senior citizens join in on the fight.

Now, pretend that the two “teams” you are visualizing are no longer for baseball, but for political parties instead. Visualize the banners decorating front yards as campaign signs and not flags. The analogy may be unconventional…but it works. We live in a tumultuous time for American politics, a time where people raise their voices and lose their civility. What does it say about our political culture that we can compare our politics to a temporarily consequential sports championship?

Many people can probably visualize a recent instance when a pleasant time was ruined by a political argument. Maybe you were having dinner at the in-laws’, travelling with your friends from the other side of the country, or just enjoying a street barbecue with your neighbors; maybe you didn’t physically witness this uncivility in person but were horrified by something remarked by a news anchor, pop-culture figure, or radio show host. Political incivility has no gender, no age, and no political alignment.

As social beings, we naturally gravitate towards groups, our “tribes” so to speak. It is very easy for us to associate with like-minded human beings, sharing in ideas and belief systems. It is also just as easy to lose sight of respect and bash those with beliefs contrary to our own. According to Psychology Today, this form tribalism in politics causes us to lose our ability to “admit the other side has a good idea because of our own egos, especially if we have publically criticized the other side and rallied for our side.”

While we may associate exclusively with groups that share our belief systems, let us not forget the tribe we are all a part of: The United States. It is OK to debate with others and perfectly fine to agree to disagree. However, when we value the well-being of our personal tribe over the well-being of the country as a whole, that is when we lose our civility. Civility demands, by name, a certain level of courtesy and politeness; it does not demand that we agree with others, but that we respect them and their well-being. When we remark in a manner such as the statement “I’d rather see the whole stadium burn down than watch the Red Sox win,” we are not only being uncivil to others, but to ourselves. We are all part of the “arena” that is this country, and we owe it to the common good of our national tribe to practice civility towards the people we share our home land with.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Playing “Controversial Opinion.”

Adam Zolkover

Earlier this month, Sean Blanda, writing at Medium.com, had this thought-provoking essay that relates to a lot of our recent content here at The Civility Blog. Titled The “Other Side” Is Not Dumb, he comments on the impulse toward a team mentality when it comes to matters of opinion from politics to taste, and observes some of the ways that this leads to closed minds and an outright dismissal of anybody we perceive to be part of the opposing faction.

The problem, he says, stems from a psychological concept called false-consensus bias: the assumption we make that our values and beliefs are normal or widely held. It is fed by contemporary media outlets, which are increasingly segregated by ideological point of view. And it leads to the worst kind of echo chamber, one where those inside are increasingly convinced that everyone shares their world view, that their ranks are growing when they aren’t.

Blanda writes that the unfortunate results of this are a fundamental rejection of the possibility to consider that the people who don’t feel the same way you do might be right, and an assumption that opinions work like menu cards, where people who like the same TV shows, or movies, or music you do must also share the same views on social welfare, or banking reform, or immigration. It is a preference to see the Other Side as a cardboard cut out, he says, rather than as complicated individual human beings. And it is ultimately about belittling people rather than trying to understand them.

The problem that Blanda is describing is related to several we’ve talked about here before. False-consensus bias, like confirmation bias, is exacerbated by filter bubbling – the situation where media outlets, and especially websites, serve us content that is tailored to our established viewing preferences. And it is parallel to some of the research we wrote about in December: the idea that party affiliation in the United States is increasingly a matter of tribalism rather than mere electoral politics.

It is difficult, on the one hand, to fight the notion that our own points of view are what’s normal when – because of the sum of our previous search queries – companies like Google and Facebook adapt some or all of what we see to what they think we want. And on the other hand, it is difficult not to conceive of political identity as team identity when the filters account for aesthetic and political choices in exactly the same way. If our personalized list of Facebook trending topics, for example, consistently places filtered political news next to science, business, and culture, it only makes sense that our brains begin to fit them all together.

In any case, in his essay, Sean Blanda offers some useful suggestions for how to overcome this kind of thinking. He tells us that it is imperative that we have conversations with people with whom we disagree, and that in those conversations, we must not try to “win”:

Don’t try to “convince” anyone of your viewpoint. Don’t score points by mocking them to your peers. Instead try to “lose.” Hear them out. Ask them to convince you and mean it.

He suggests that we reconsider how we use social media. The next time you feel compelled to share a link, he suggests, ask yourself why you are doing it:

Is it because that link brings to light information you hadn’t considered? Or does it confirm your world view, reminding your circle of intellectual teammates that you’re not on the Other Side?

And he offers a compelling idea for a game that is, fundamentally, about instilling civility. He calls it Controversial Opinion, but it might as easily be called the same thing as his essay: The “Other Side” Is Not Dumb. The rules are simple, Blanda writes: don’t talk about what was shared during Controversial Opinion afterward and you aren’t allowed to “argue” — only to ask questions about why that person feels that way.

Each player in turn reveals opinions that they hold, but that they assume are unpopular, about any topic at all. And in the other players’ surprise, the illusion of homogeneity – of having a team or a tribe – is systematically destroyed. Like the intimate discussions that we somehow never seem to quite be able to have, Controversial Opinion reveals our collective diversity and requires that we seek to understand each other as people — not essentialize, or belittle, or make fun.

It requires respect to play. It requires empathy to play well. And it has the potential to be a gateway from which we can exit the filter bubble and move from adversarial confrontation to the sort of meaningful, civil discussion that has the potential to get things done.