People get super passionate and downright angry about politics - to the point that researchers
believe it might be making us less racist.
How does that work?
Hi guys, Lissette here for DNews.
I love debating, but realizing that it can lead to fierce arguments, my wiser than I
best friend always advised me to keep my mouth shut at family dinners when it came to politics.
But what is it about political disagreements that gets us so riled up?
Well, it has a lot to do with what anger IS at its core.
Biologically, your heart rate, blood pressure, and testosterone increase.
Your body also releases norepinephrine which numbs our physical and emotional pain, and
epinephrine - also known as adrenaline - which acts like an amphetamine making you feel in
control.
Your cortisol levels or stress hormones decrease; What’s more, you become irrational.
Because while anger can activate the left prefrontal cortex which increases logical
thinking and reasoning, it only does so if there seems to be a solution to the situation.
This perhaps explains why people keep at it for hours - arguing and debating with no end
in sight.
So if rationality goes out of the window, what’s the evolutionary advantage of getting
angry?
Well, Darwin once observed that expressing anger affects “animals of all kinds, and
their progenitors before them, when attacked or threatened by an enemy, to fight and protect
themselves.”
Anger’s evolutionary advantage then, seems to be connected to a protection mechanism
that shields us and our clan from the threats of outsiders.
And as part of this protection system and its development, it would have been incredibly
evolutionary advantageous to accurately determine who is and who isn’t part of our group.
Obviously, grouping ourselves in terms of who has smaller or longer pinky toes isn’t
very useful…what is important when picking someone to be a part of our group is whether
that person might cooperate or compete with us.
Researchers at The University of California Santa Barbara, the London School of Economics
and Aarhus University teamed up to discover if political ideology is one of the categories
we use to determine if someone is “one of us.”
They were particularly interested if the alliance detection system, as they call it, would be
activated in participants minds when the political views of others were presented.
Each study volunteer was shown a video of a conversation between eight people, what
they didn’t know was that four of them were republicans and four were democrats - also
half of the republicans were white and half were black - same for democrats.
Once the video was complete, the participants were then given snippets of the transcript
from the discussion and asked to categorize the individuals.
What the researchers found, was that the study volunteers predominantly categorized individuals
in the video by political beliefs and not by race.
Through other variations of this experiment they discovered that while that while things
like age and sex are social categories that help us organize the world, political leanings
and race are part of our alliance categories that help us figure where we belong.
And the fact that politics overrides race when it comes to choosing our alliances, means
there is something special about our political views that can bond us together or break us
apart.
This is probably why we get so angry when talking politics.
It’s not really about economic policy, abortion, or health care - it’s actually about group
affiliation - about identifying members with whom to cooperate or compete.
And, it might be especially infuriating when it’s a family member or friend who disagrees
with because you may have considered them a part of your group in other situations.
When it comes to politics, it’s not debate, it’s war.
Which is why when you’re talking politics around the family dinner table, you can end
up feeling betrayed.
Sometimes to the point of fist fighting and full-on brawls.
Which makes you wonder if humans are naturally violent.
Lucky for us, Trace did an episode on just that.
Check it out.
Do you enjoy watching or participating in political debates?
I hate to admit it, but the primary debates have been one of my favorite things to watch
this year.
Share your thoughts in the comments and remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode
of DNews.
Thanks for watching.