Do Americans Have to Like Each Other to Cooperate?
Making friends isn’t necessary for solving political polarization.
Amid two crises—the pandemic and the national reckoning sparked by the killing
of George Floyd—there have been anguished calls for Americans to come together
across lines of race and partisanship. Change would come, a
USA Today contributor wrote, only “when we become sensitized to the distress of our neighbors.”
By
Francesca Polletta
But after studying how Americans cooperate, both in moments of political upheaval and in ordinary times, I am convinced
that tackling America’s political divide demands more than intimacy—and less
than it.
Ordinary people, talking
Science bears out the idea
that intimacy can make people more understanding of others.
A
venerable tradition of social psychological research shows that people who
interact with members of a stigmatized group may
change their opinion
of the whole group. The original research by Gordon Allport suggested that
contact between members of different groups worked by giving people knowledge
of the other group. But
later studies
found instead that it increased their empathy and willingness to take the
other’s perspective.
That’s why a
growing industry of professional facilitators
champion carefully structured conversations as key to solving workplace
conflicts, community development disputes, Americans’ political disengagement,
and racial division.
As partisan political divides became
vitriolic, civic leaders brought ordinary people together to talk. You could
join people from the left and right at a
Make America Dinner Again
event or a
Better Angels
workshop, where “you can actually become friends and colleagues with people
you don’t agree with.”
Joan Blades, who created the online
political advocacy group MoveOn.org in 1997, seemed to have her finger on the
pulse again when she launched
Living Room Conversations
in 2011. Small groups would host conversations across partisan lines.
“By the time you get to the topic you’ve chosen to discuss, you’re
thinking, ‘I like this person or these people,’” Blades promised.
By the end of the 2010s, these were the terms for building unity:
personal conversations in intimate settings that would produce friendship
across gulfs of difference.
Commonalities and differences
The pandemic made the idea of living room conversations with
anyone outside one’s household sadly unrealistic. But it may not have been the
solution people were looking for in the first place.
Initiatives
that bring together members of different groups,
researchers have shown, are less effective in reducing prejudice when the groups participating are
unequal in power and status—say, Black Americans and white ones.
Dominant group members tend to insist on
talking about their commonalities
with members of the disadvantaged group. That’s frustrating for the latter,
who more often want to talk about their differences and, indeed, their
inequalities.
Taking the perspective of someone different, moreover, works to diminish the prejudices of members of dominant groups
but not those of members of disadvantaged groups. Research also shows that
when people are
asked to take the perspective
of a person who fits a stereotype, they negatively stereotype that person even
more than if they had not been asked to do so. Asking a Democrat to put
herself in the shoes of a MAGA hat–wearing Republican, in other words, may
backfire.
Nor does empathy always overcome political beliefs.
A
recent study from the University of Houston
found that people who are naturally empathic are more likely to feel anger
toward those in the opposite party and feel pleasure when they suffer. Empathy
tends to be biased toward one’s own group, so it may fuel political
polarization rather than counter it.
Naturally empathic people are
also more likely to suppress their feelings of compassion when those feelings
conflict with their ideological views, becoming less compassionate as a
result. In
one study, subjects who had individualistic beliefs opposed government welfare
programs even after reading a story about a man in financial need, but
individualists who were naturally empathic opposed welfare even more strongly
after reading the story.
Friendship isn’t necessary
Since
dialogue initiatives are voluntary, they probably attract people who are
already predisposed to wanting to find connection across difference. And no
one has figured out how a friendly meeting between Democratic and Republican
voters, or even a hundred such meetings, can have a discernible effect on
political polarization that is national in scope.
Certainly,
participants who change their minds may share their new opinions with others
in their circle, creating a ripple effect of goodwill. But dialogue
initiatives may also crowd out ways of tackling political divisions that are
likely to have wider impact.
Americans committed to living in a
functioning democracy could demand that national political representatives,
not ordinary citizens, sit down together to find common ground across
difference. Or they could work to bring back some version of the
Fairness Doctrine,
a federal policy once endorsed by both the conservative National Rifle
Association and the liberal American Civil Liberties Union, that required
television channels to air diverse points of view. Or people could rally to
demand that Congress pass legislation like gun control that
overwhelming majorities of Americans
across the political spectrum want—working across party lines to win policy,
not become friends.
Treating friendship as a prerequisite to
cooperation also misses the fact that people have long worked together for the
common good on the basis of relationships that do not resemble the intimacy of
friends.
The protests after George Floyd’s death, for example,
introduced many white Americans to the idea of
allyship. Allies—whether white anti-racists or straight people or men—commit to
listening more than talking and to taking direction from people without the
privilege they enjoy. Allies don’t require intimate connection as the price
for their involvement. They recognize that intimacy has often served to keep
relationships unequal, and that is exactly what they want to change.
It is not just movement activists who expose the limits of
intimacy for building unity. Black participants in the interracial dialogues
studied by political scientist
Katherine Cramer
were frustrated when they described what it was like to be discriminated
against and white participants responded with their own stories about how they
had never treated their Black friends any differently than their white ones.
But when participants ignored their facilitator’s plea to
“dialogue, not debate,” and challenged each other on the evidence for their
claims, the white participants, in particular, were stopped from sliding by
with bromides about how “under the skin, we’re all the same.” It was the
confrontational exchanges that led participants to recognize their real
differences while still building a relationship.
In the post-9/11
public forum about rebuilding Lower Manhattan that
I studied, organizers instructed participants only to share experiences and values,
not bargain over options for rebuilding.
But participants
described themselves as “like a mini-United Nations,” and used that metaphor
to effectively hash out compromises despite their very different starting
points.
Intimacy is great, but democracy requires something more
demanding: a willingness to tolerate, and even cooperate with, people with
whom we share a purpose, but not much else.