Inventing Division

ST AUGUSTINE – When the Flagler College sophomore Logan Guidry, 19, saw the Occupy Wall Street protests spread across the world, he thought: “Let’s bring it to our town.” He cobbled his friends together and began to organize the first OWS protest in their small historical seaside town of St Augustine, Florida. They invited every group that was fed up with the status quo to join them, including the local Tea Party. “We certainly plan to be there, but we’ll be there to protest them,” was the response from a local Tea Party leader, Lance Thate. He organizes regular small-scale protests of his own, complete with period costumes and the revolutionary Gasden Flag that depicts a rattlesnake over the words “don’t tread on me.”

Logan was as disappointed as he was surprised: “They were the first to protest these issues like the bank bail-outs. You could say the Tea Party movement in some ways was the original ‘Occupy’ protesters.” After all, the exact same Gasden flag has been waved at OWS events from Boston to Los Angeles to New York. Both have seen much of their wealth vanish, both are frustrated at the banks and the politicians who have sided with them. “I’m 84 and MAD as HELL,” read the sign of an elderly lady in a little gray blouse at Zuccotti Park, but it would have been right at home at Glenn Beck’s 9/12 rally in Washington, D.C. Some Tea Party activists have been spotted at various OWS protests around the country, but the crossover has been minimal. Why? Why is the common frustration at the status quo divided in two?

Imagine, for a moment, an entirely different kind of division. An artificial one; one we’ve just made up. Perhaps we tossed a coin in front of a crowd of students and divided them into the “heads” team or the “tails” team. Or randomly put one team in red bibs and another in blue ones. How would they respond? Would they care about their arbitrarily defined group? An array of psychological experiments stemming from the work of Henri Tajfel suggests that they would. They’d care a lot. If you asked them to divide up money, they’d give more to members of their own team than the other team. If you asked them to describe any success they had they’d put it down to ingenuity and hard work, but the other team’s victories they’d put down to chance and good fortune. If you asked them to tell you about who made up each team, they’d see their own group as diverse and varied but the other group as an homogenous block characterized by their most extreme member. If you gave them a statement on a social or political issue, they’d say that it probably came from their group if they agreed with it, and the other group if they didn’t.

In other words, you can invent divisions just by labeling people. This is because social divisions – “heads” v “tails” or “red bibs” v “blue bibs” – quickly became cognitive divisions. They became the basis of how we perceive, judge and favor one another. What’s so surprising about these experiments is that in every case the students knew that the division was random and arbitrary. And when we turn to labels in the real world – “red” & “blue”, “Democrat” & “Republican”, “traditional” & “cosmopolitan” – we’ll see that the psychological effect is exactly the same.

The power of “red” and “blue” to distort our judgments was explored by Abraham Rutchick at California State University, Northridge, Joshua Smith at Syracuse, and Sara Konrath at the University of Michigan. They created two maps of the 2004 presidential election. The first map colored states in blue that went to Kerry, and red that went to Bush. The second map was subtler: each state was a shade of purple. The redder the shade, the more votes Bush received and the more it was blue, the more it leant to Kerry. They then made another change: half of the maps reported the precise share of the vote and the other half didn’t. Participants were given one of the four maps and were asked a series of questions about what they thought Democratic and Republican voters were like in general and what they were like in individual states. Amazingly, they found that the presence of statistics had no impact whatsoever. Instead, people worked off the visual labels of “red” and “blue” entirely. Those who had the first map divided into red and blue saw Democrats and Republicans as more extreme and more divided than those who had the second map colored by hues of purple.

In this experiment, the 2004 map showed us how the labels we use to organize information isn’t just descriptive – it’s prescriptive. But the 2004 map was more than just an experimental device. It was a symbol that embodied the geographical battle lines of a nation-wide “culture war.” As Pat Buchanan put it, in his now legendary 1992 address to the Republican National Convention, it was a battle that could be neatly divided by faith and family. It was between those who believed in the “freedom to choose religious schools” and for the “right-to-life” and those who believed that “gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women.” While Buchanan’s characterization of this division is controversial, the notion of a “divided America” is not. And this consensus among politicians and pundits flies in the face of two decades of social scientific research that has consistently debunked the idea. It persists for precisely the reason that subjects in the “tails” or “heads” groups will agree that both groups are fundamentally different with the same passion as that with which they’ll disagree over what those differences are.

The power of “red” and “blue” to distort our judgments was explored by Abraham Rutchick at California State University, Northridge, Joshua Smith at Syracuse, and Sara Konrath at the University of Michigan. They created two maps of the 2004 presidential election. The first map colored states in blue that went to Kerry, and red that went to Bush. The second map was subtler: each state was a shade of purple. The redder the shade, the more votes Bush received and the more it was blue, the more it leant to Kerry. They then made another change: half of the maps reported the precise share of the vote and the other half didn’t. Participants were given one of the four maps and were asked a series of questions about what they thought Democratic and Republican voters were like in general and what they were like in individual states. Amazingly, they found that the presence of statistics had no impact whatsoever. Instead, people worked off the visual labels of “red” and “blue” entirely. Those who had the first map divided into red and blue saw Democrats and Republicans as more extreme and more divided than those who had the second map colored by hues of purple.

In this experiment, the 2004 map showed us how the labels we use to organize information isn’t just descriptive – it’s prescriptive. But the 2004 map was more than just an experimental device. It was a symbol that embodied the geographical battle lines of a nation-wide “culture war.” As Pat Buchanan put it, in his now legendary 1992 address to the Republican National Convention, it was a battle that could be neatly divided by faith and family. It was between those who believed in the “freedom to choose religious schools” and for the “right-to-life” and those who believed that “gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women.” While Buchanan’s characterization of this division is controversial, the notion of a “divided America” is not. And this consensus among politicians and pundits flies in the face of two decades of social scientific research that has consistently debunked the idea. It persists for precisely the reason that subjects in the “tails” or “heads” groups will agree that both groups are fundamentally different with the same passion as that with which they’ll disagree over what those differences are.

And this difference lies in the way these groups have labeled themselves. It isn’t just a matter of semantics. Like the red and blue maps or red and blue bibs, it’s also aesthetic. It’s the piercings and tattoos, the drum circles and tie-dye T-shirts at Zuccotti park. It’s the homemade tea-bag hats and period costumes, the guns and trucks. But the semantics polarize these images. They bend our perception to focus on what is extreme, what is the most visibly different, and then use those characteristics to define the whole group as a homogenous mass. We block out those who don’t conform to this picture. We block out those who look just like us. The prism that refracts our perception also functions as a social prison. It invents division.

This piece also appeared on the Huffington Post