US 2.0: Not at the Dinner Table

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This is Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam. We typically divide the United States into 2 political categories: conservative—

Democrats have blocked us at every turn.

—and liberal.

The Republicans are not serious.

Finding common ground between these 2 groups—

You shut up, man.

—reaching across the aisle—

—their far-left radical base—

—has become increasingly rare. Because we keep trying to find a way to win without help This is true not just in a metaphorical sense. In one study, researchers looked at more than 1,400 hours of tape—

Live Senate coverage on C-SPAN.

On C-SPAN 2. The Senate will come to order.

Hour after hour of hearings—

Roads and bridges and airports.

Committee mockup sessions—

Congress is a very important pillar.

Testimony—

Keystone XL TransCanada.

Resolutions.

The clerk will call the roll.

After all these hours watching C-SPAN, researchers concluded that since the 1990s, Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Senate have physically crossed the aisle less and less to interact with opposing colleagues. That means senators are staying with their like-minded colleagues, not just in the legislation they are trying to pass, but also by literally steering clear of the carpeted pathway that splits the Senate floor. Today, we continue our Us 2.0 series by taking a few steps back and looking at the challenge of political division through a new lens. We hope it will provide a new way to understand the people sitting across from us at the dinner table.

People don't seem to dislike somebody just for being a member of the other side. They're concerned that somebody's going to talk to them about politics And if somebody is going to talk to you about politics, of course you'd rather talk to somebody of your own side.

This week on Hidden Brain, why the division you hear about all the time in our politics might not be what really divides us. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real, hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet initiative. This is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

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Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com/hiddenbrain. Progressive.com, Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Yana Krupnikov is a political scientist at the University of Michigan. She studies a subject we hear about a lot, the bitter political divide in the United States. But Yana has a counterintuitive thesis. She thinks the real fault line in America is actually not between Republicans and Democrats. Jana Krupnikov, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Thank you for having me.

I want to play you a clip, Jana, from a CNN program titled Welcome to the Fractured States of America.

The number of parents who would be unhappy if their child married someone of a different political party, that number has exploded over the last several decades, from 4% in 1960 to 35% of Republicans and 45% of Democrats in 2016.

Jana, you have a critique of this notion of a fractured country, but I want you to start by laying out the conventional wisdom first. What are we all told about the state of political polarization in the United States?

A lot of what we're told about the state of political polarization is that polarization has increased quite vastly over potentially the last decade. What's interesting about this polarization is that there's a twofold approach here. On the one hand, polarization can be ideological, but on the other hand, it can be affective. Affective polarization is the sense of disliking somebody just because they're a member of the other party, without their issues, without their positions, just because they belong to this opposing group. When we talk about Democrats not wanting their child to marry a Republican or Republicans not wanting their child to marry a Democrat, We are talking often about this idea of affect, just this sense of dislike, this antipathy for the other side. And there's this tremendous kind of pattern showing increases in this level of antipathy, that people who are from one party just dislike the other party much more than they did in years past.

And some of this is almost to an extreme. I mean, some people have even asked whether ordinary Americans see their political opponents as even fully human.

Indeed, there's actually a lot of examples of this antipathy. There's research suggesting that people wouldn't want somebody to, as I just said, marry somebody from the other party, that they wouldn't want to hire somebody from the opposing party, that they don't see the other party as human, that they might actually want to do something that would make life for somebody from the opposing party much worse. So there are a lot of these almost nonpolitical examples of places where partisanship and dislike for the other side has quite profoundly affected the way we see the world and the way we see other people.

So we're told Americans don't want to live next to one another, political partisans, that is. They can't bear to talk to one another. And of course, they don't want their children marrying people from the other party. You conducted a survey some years ago when you drilled down specifically on the marriage question. What was the hunt you were exploring? And what did you ask?

So the way we looked at the marriage question happened during these conversations I'd had with my co-authors, John Barry Ryan and Samara Klar. And so we were talking about this marriage question, that something about it seemed quite unusual to us. You are in a survey, you're being asked whether you want your child to marry somebody from the other party, but that's really all you know about this person. All you know about them is that they are a Republican or that they are a Democrat, and when that's all you know about them, one, you can't really put that person into context, but the other thing you might think about them is essentially, if they're telling me this person's partisanship, that person's partisanship is probably something that's really, really important to them.

Hmm.

So if I was inviting you to meet one of my friends, And we had just a brief moment, and I used that brief moment to tell you, you're going to meet my friend. She likes cats. You might imagine that you're about to meet somebody who's essentially going to talk nonstop about cats if that's the only thing I shared with you about this person.

Mm-hmm.

And so what if this is what's happening in a survey? What if when people are asked about this hypothetical in-law and the only thing they know about this person is that they are a member of the opposing party, What if they're imagining somebody who will literally talk about politics for every dinner from now on as their in-law?

And what did you find when you actually asked Americans this question? How did you tweak the question, and what did you find?

So what we ended up doing is we amended the question a bit. We basically added a qualification. We told people that this future in-law, this hypothetical in-law, was actually never really going to talk about politics. They might be from the other parties, but they were never actually going to discuss anything political. And so we ran an experiment in which people were randomly assigned to either a group in which they got asked the normal question, how happy would you be if your child married somebody from the opposing party, versus a question in which they were told, how happy would you be if your child married somebody from an opposing party, but this person was never going to talk about politics? And what we found is significant differences in people's preferences for the other side. Once people were told that their child's future spouse was actually not really going to talk about politics, their animosity toward the other side quite profoundly decreased.

Hmm. In other words, if I was a Republican parent, the thing that I might be most worried about is not that my child is going to marry a Democrat. My child's going to marry a Democrat who's going to talk politics all the time. If I had the reassurance that politics was not going to come up all the time, my feelings about my future Democratic son-in-law or daughter-in-law changed quite profoundly.

Exactly. In theory, what people were concerned about is essentially politics coming up in their day-to-day lives. They actually were not as concerned about the opposing partisanship component of it.

To better understand how this played out in people's lives, Jana and her colleagues ran the study again, but changed whether the hypothetical new daughter or son-in-law talked about politics frequently, occasionally, or rarely. They found that what people cared about the most was not whether a future son-in-law or daughter-in-law had different politics, but how much the future in-law wanted to talk about politics.

People don't seem to dislike somebody just for being a member of the other side. They're concerned that somebody is going to talk to them about politics. And if somebody is going to talk to you about politics, of course you'd rather talk to somebody of your own side. If that's going to be part of your life at every dinner, certainly, of course, you wouldn't want it to be contentious. But the key aspect there is, is conversations, not necessarily partisanship.

So I'm thinking of a clip from Saturday Night Live that I think your research speaks to. It's actually about a wedding celebration, and the celebration is interrupted by the character known as Debbie Downer.

Yeah, these mashed potatoes look like heaven.

After we eat, I vote we get a line dance going.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Hey, speaking of voting, how do you guys feel about Trump? Meh.

Meh.

Meh.

What do you think, Jana? Do you think that clip speaks to your thesis?

I think it speaks to the thesis quite profoundly. I think actually that is exactly what people are quite worried about. You're having kind of a nice celebration. Somebody comes in for whom politics is incredibly important, who is essentially going to change the conversation to that particular bent. So imagine that every dinner you're now incredibly tense trying to figure out, is there something political that's going to happen here? I think that's what people are deeply concerned about.

Imagine sitting at dinner with friends and family. Someone mentions a tweet from Trump. Everyone freezes. Will this become an argument? Jana's data suggests that if the people around your table were a cross-section of America, most would prefer to change the topic. But some people would get super excited. It's these people who would also be really upset if a child of theirs were to marry someone from the other party.

There certainly is a group of people who are, in fact, effectively polarized. No matter how we describe this in-law, they are displeased with their child marrying somebody of the opposing side. I would bet that even if we told them politics will literally never come up ever, ever, ever, they would still be displeased that their child married somebody of the opposing party.

Mm-hmm.

These people struck us as being what we would term unconditionally polarized. They were sort of polarized exactly in the same way sense of hating somebody just because they are from the other side.

Hmm.

And as we dove into this question further, we wanted to investigate exactly what contributes to this unconditional polarization. What correlates with somebody disliking somebody just from being a member of the other side, which led us to this idea of certain people being deeply involved in politics, people for whom Politics has become so profoundly important that it is something beyond just an interest in politics.

So as you say, the deeply involved care a lot about politics. Like Debbie Downer, they want to talk about politics even to people who want to talk about something else. But you make a remarkable claim. You say the central fault line today in the United States might not be between Republicans and Democrats, but between people who are deeply involved in politics and everybody else. What do you mean by that?

When we think about deep involvement, we think of somebody for whom politics is front and center. It is something that they think about on a daily basis. It's something that they think about actually probably on an hourly basis. It is something that is a center to the way that they view the world. And so, John Ryan and I in describing these people and thinking about these people conceive of them as being quite different from actually the majority of Americans and the majority of people. We see the fault line is how central you view politics to the world, how much attention you pay to politics, how you interpret political events, how much of an impact you believe that politics has in your life. And we see it as a fault line in the sense that for people who are deeply involved, politics is of such profound importance that it dominates their world perspective, it dominates how they view others, it dominates what they do with their day. And we see that as being profoundly different from a large group of Americans for whom politics is less important And for whom politics seems more as something that is happening on the side, something that is potentially troubling, something that is potentially problematic, but something that they don't necessarily want to think about all that much.

I want to spend some time talking about the characteristics of the people you describe as deeply involved because, of course, it's one thing to say this is a distinct group, but you go further than that. Through a series of surveys and experiments involving thousands of Americans, you find the deeply involved have a set of very distinct characteristics. And the first identifier is something that you hinted at a second ago. These are people who spend a lot of time on politics.

Yes. When we think about the deeply involved, we think about a set of psychological characteristics that lead somebody to sort of really care about politics, to think about it a ton. In fact, for our research, we began with the psychology of people who are fans of things. And one of the things that emerges when you think about something being important to you is time. Why would you spend time on something that's not important to you? Obviously. What makes this a particularly unique moment for these people is now you actually can spend a tremendous amount of time on politics. You can basically wake up, You can unlock your phone, you can immediately start scrolling through the news, and you can basically be connected to politics for your entire day.

Another trait of the deeply involved on both sides of the political spectrum is that they're interested in minor political developments. They see deep significance in events that may or may not be important. Think back to 2017, for example. When former President Donald Trump posted the single word covfefe on Twitter, the social media site now known as X.

The covfefe tweet, that mercurial late-night presidential sentence fragment with one of the best words, stayed up with no explanation for hours and hours and hours. And then as dawn broke, the president suddenly deleted it and wrote, quote, who can figure out the true meaning of covfefe?

Yana, I remember watching the story and getting a laugh out of it, but I also remember people going on about how the tweet might reflect a neurodegenerative disorder in the president. They took this really, really seriously.

And I think that is sort of profound. The covfefe tweet is in some sense, I think, a profound example of deep involvement. This thing happens, this thing that is ostensibly ridiculous, right? It's obviously a typo. But it becomes something that is of import to people. There are people who are anxious that they missed this tweet. There are people wondering what this tweet means. And as people think about it more, especially people who are deeply engaged in politics, they start to make more and more connections, right, to political events. Is it something meaningful? Is it something about the president? What's going to happen next? And the reality about politics is that a lot of what happens in politics is, in fact, a matter of life and death. But for the deeply involved, even typo tweets can become something that is actually very, very, very important. And that sort of makes sense. If you spend so much time with politics, if you spend so much time following it, you know enough Where almost everything can be of profound importance, where the president making a typo could be a signal of kind of what's to come, something about the political state of the world. So for the deeply involved, the engagement with politics kind of contributes to the perception that any next event could be the event that kind of changes everything.

In other words, the deeply involved follow politics in the same way that some people follow a favorite sports team. Or the twists and turns in a beloved TV show. Yana draws an analogy between people who are deeply involved in politics and fans of the sci-fi show Doctor Who. Multiple actors have portrayed the Doctor in the television show, and for years, fans have argued obsessively about which actor is the best Doctor.

With the exception of the very bottom slot, which We'll get to in a second. I don't think there is a bad version of the Doctor.

What's the connection between Doctor Who aficionados and politics, Yana?

So Doctor Who, I think, is a really interesting kind of example, because in some sense, to have a favorite Doctor Who, you have to be a fan of the show.

Because one of the beautiful things about Doctor Who is everyone gets to have their Doctor. Your pick does not have to be anyone else's. You do not have to rank them the way anyone else does.

Somebody who does not have a favorite Doctor Who is, is probably not a huge fan of the show, or maybe a more peripheral fan of the show. And so what your criticism is when you criticize somebody's favorite Doctor pick is that they are involved, but they are involved in the wrong way.

So starting at the bottom, Colin Baker.

When we read research on this sort of support for the doctor, the psychology seemed almost similar to politics, of course with much lower stakes.

Mm-hmm.

But there's the sense that somebody could be on your political side, but they could be on your political side in not exactly the right way, and there is going to be something frustrating to somebody who is deeply involved, that this person is coming So close to getting it, but is actually not there.

There's another connection between Doctor Who fans and political fanatics. Neither can stop talking about their obsession. When we come back, how journalists favor the zealous voices of the deeply involved.

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Political scientist Jana Krupnikov argues that most Americans are not seeing the defining political fault line in the country. It's not Republican versus Democrat, but the gap between people who live, breathe, and talk politics all the time and those for whom politics is a small part of their lives. The deeply involved spend lots of time learning about politics, thinking about politics. But they also do one other thing that the less engaged rarely do. Jana, you say the most defining feature of the people who are deeply involved in politics is something you call Expression. What do you mean by that?

When we think about expression, we mean the desire to communicate politics. We mean the desire to not just speak about information or, or speak about ways that you might change politics, but really expressing your own beliefs and feelings about politics. So really speaking your mind in the sense of something happens and you immediately want to tell others how you felt about it, whether it was good, how it made you think. But it's the idea of essentially expressing your views, expressing what others should do, just literally talking about what politics means to you.

Now, social media, you argue, is an important part of the story. How so?

Well, in the past, if I wanted to talk to somebody about politics, I would have to find a person to literally talk about politics to. And maybe I couldn't find somebody to talk about politics to that day, and so I just wouldn't get to talk about it. Or maybe I found a friend and I just told them all about my political feelings And they just didn't really care. But now, if I can go to Twitter and I can type a political opinion—

I just changed the channel from the Trump town hall to the Biden town hall and immediately fell asleep.

There is a high probability that a number of people will chime in. Oh my God, it was so boring.

We need to support Trump 100%.

And potentially a lot of them might tell me that I'm right. It was like listening to Grandpa after— I taped Biden's town hall to help me fall asleep. And certainly, because it's Twitter, it's possible that a bunch of people will also chime in and tell me that I am a terrible person.

I'm pretty sure America could do with a good night's sleep.

I cast my ballot for Joe Biden.

Is the role of government to entertain its people or to protect them?

But at least there will be somebody who allows me that expression.

You have a story about social media from your own life that isn't about politics, but it says so much about how many of us, I think, engage with politics. Can you tell me the story of your toddler and the plane trip?

Yes. So my daughter and I were on a flight, and my husband was there as well. My daughter was about 1 and a half at the time. It was a 7-hour flight. My daughter was basically being herself. She was being a 1-and-a-half-year-old. And into this flight, I started noticing this woman ahead of us would constantly just turn every time my daughter would make a slight noise. And this frustrated me. This made me quite upset. And it's this feeling of, am I doing a terrible job? Am I a terrible parent? Why does this woman keep turning around? Is my kid being this bad? And so I did the first The first thing that came to my mind, I paid for internet so I could go to Twitter. And I tweeted about the fact that I'm on this flight and this woman keeps turning around and just looking at my daughter. And the thing is, I want to emphasize here that it was pretty safe for me to tweet that, right? I knew pretty much what my network was like. Immediately the replies kept pouring in telling me that it was definitely not me, that it was definitely her. In fact, I think it was one of my most engaged tweets, right? I don't get that much engagement when I tweet about my research. And in that moment, so 2 things happened. So first, I felt really good. It was actually very good to have this social support from a bunch of internet people. The second thing is that it made me just much angrier at this woman. Because it was this kind of feeling of all these people on the internet think that you're wrong, airplane lady, and they're telling me that I am right.

Eventually, the 7-hour flight was over. The plane landed, and Yana's husband took his phone off airplane mode and went online, where he saw his wife's post and all the responses.

And he was actually really surprised. He did not notice the woman, even though she was actually more in his eyesight than mine. He did not see her turning around at any point. He thought everything had gone really well.

Yeah.

And it was a sort of a notable moment. I had had this moment, and yet here was somebody sitting next to me who had no idea what I was talking about. He didn't notice anything at all.

And I can see the really wonderful metaphor here with the way our politics unfolds on social media and the way we— so many of us engage with politics on social media. But there's also something of a mystery here. You say that the people who are deeply involved are a minority of all Americans. So why is it, Jana, that we feel like we hear their voices all the time?

We hear the deeply involved because they are actually very loud, and I don't mean that they're necessarily screaming, but I mean that in the sense that they are more likely to occupy our social media feeds. Their voices are more likely to be talking about politics, so it seems like they're everywhere because whenever we encounter politics, it is quite often the voices of these people. who are very, very deeply involved. And so if you're constantly seeing these posts about politics, you might not realize that they are from a very small set of people, or you might think to yourself, well, I guess I'm the odd person out. I never talk about politics, but I guess everyone else is. And so you kind of come to this idea that the politically involved are much more around us than they actually are in numbers.

Jana, you also make the case that one reason we hear the voices of the deeply involved everywhere is because journalists have a deep affinity for the voices of the deeply involved. Why is this?

If we think about what media coverage includes, it's a lot of conflict. And the deeply involved are kind of readily there to provide the conflict. They're going to be the people who can be most critical of the other side. They're going to be the people who are going to talk most passionately about politics. And so it sort of follows that journalists are going to be heavily drawn to people who are deeply involved. And so part and parcel of this coverage is actually coverage of political polarization. If journalists are drawn to coverage of political polarization, then they are almost by definition going to be drawn to the voices of the deeply involved. And so they come to dominate these stories as examples of just how terrible partisan relations are.

Jana has run studies with hundreds of journalists across the United States. She has asked them the marriage question we discussed earlier. How many Americans would be unhappy if their child married someone from the opposing political party.

And what we found is that journalists vastly overestimated this level of polarization. They believed that something like half of Americans would be quite profoundly polarized, when that is actually not the case. When we look over our sample, it was a tremendous kind of difference between what journalists suspected was the case and what actually was the case in our sample.

Many journalists also have a love affair with social media, particularly X, also known by its former name, Twitter. What do they see when they get on their feeds? The people who love to talk about politics.

There's this fascinating work by scholar Shannon McGregor that shows that journalists are often turning to Twitter as a gauge of public opinion. Well, if the deeply involved are much more likely to express themselves on Twitter, And if journalists are looking to Twitter for stories, for public opinion, they are certainly having a higher probability of landing on the opinions of the deeply involved and then elevating those perceptions to stories on polarization, of stories of discord, of stories of violence.

There's a fact that many journalists themselves live and work in Communities of deep involvement in politics play a role in this as well? I mean, I'm thinking of journalists certainly within the Washington Beltway. They're embedded in communities and neighborhoods where lots of their friends and neighbors are probably among the ranks of the deeply involved.

I would think that it does. When I think of myself, for example, when I log on to Twitter, I am in a network of people who are deeply involved in politics. And so often, it's almost difficult for me to remember that there are all these people in my own survey data for whom politics is actually much, much less important. And I imagine for journalists it actually must be exacerbated. They're also in these kinds of networks. They're often in networks with other journalists. So essentially there's constantly somebody there reinforcing your view of what is important and what politics looks like and what the world looks like. And so in that sense, it is a perspective on the world that is actually completely in line with the world you see around you. But the world you see around you may not necessarily be reflective of a large group of people.

One of the most troubling things I took away from your work is how privilege might intersect with political involvement. So the person working 3 jobs to make ends meet, it's probably not the person who really cares that the president was up at night tweeting made-up words. Many working parents, they might be too exhausted with work and childcare to be up in arms about the latest brouhaha on Twitter. So when we privilege the voices of the deeply involved, at some level, are we also privileging the voices— Of the uninformed.

I think there are 2 ways to look at it. On the one hand, I think there is a certain privilege to not following politics, where you sort of feel so comfortable about your state in the country that you don't necessarily care who wins. But I think there's another privilege, and that is spending a lot of time following politics. I feel like I have a tremendous amount of privilege in my job that I can check in and see what's happening on the news. that I'm afforded the flexibility to do so, that I can follow a debate or that I can follow a congressional hearing, for example, if I so chose. But when I think about kind of the world of people who are working hourly jobs, who are single parents, who are basically living kind of paycheck to paycheck, politics may not be something they just have time for. Mm-hmm. Spending a lot of time figuring out the latest presidential tweet is not necessarily going to be something that when they have downtime they're going to be able to do, right? They'd probably rather spend time with their kids or their families. So I think there is certainly a privilege to actually being able to spend the time on politics that I think a lot of people in this country just don't have.

How do people who are deeply involved in politics affect our larger discourse, our ability to find solutions and make compromises? That's when we come back. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online Working as a dedicated Fidelity advisor, I always ask, what's important to you?

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They care.

They believe that if they can only get other Americans to care as much as they do, we would all be better off. Are they succeeding? University of Michigan political scientist Jana Krupnikov studies the deeply involved and how their outsized role in politics and media coverage shapes our understanding of partisanship in the United States. Jana, people who are deeply involved in politics want to engage people who are not involved because they want to effect change.

They want others to see the importance of political issues and political causes.

Are they effective at doing this?

So I think the goals of the deeply involved are actually coming from a good place. If you are looking over the spectrum of politics and you see things happening in front of you that you think are horrifying and terrible and problematic, you want other people to know about this. You want other people to know that they should be anxious and they should be afraid and bad things could be coming. But I think there is this sense of deep involvement that may not necessarily translate to others. When others see somebody who is profoundly involved in politics, it might send the message that to be at all engaged, that is how you should behave, that it's not enough to just kind of sporadically follow the news or to pay attention during elections, but you have to sort of live and breathe politics, and that's how you become somebody who is politically engaged or knows anything political.

Hmm.

And I think that's tough for people. I think for people who may not necessarily have the time or the strong interest, believing that this is how political engagement works may be kind of a tough example to swallow, which I think can undermine the effectiveness of those who are politically involved encouraging others to become more engaged as well.

So there's a very interesting psychological theory that you're advancing here. In some ways, you're saying the deeply involved, in some ways, have become our role models of how it is to be involved in politics. And when we look at the deeply involved, when we turn on cable news in the evenings and we hear them, and we turn on Twitter and we watch sort of the debates raging on Twitter, we think this is how, if you're interested in politics, this is how you have to be involved in politics. And then we ask ourselves the question, do I want to be that kind of person? And what you're saying is, for many people, the answer might be no.

Yeah, a lot of times when we categorize ourselves, as research in psychology suggests, we compare ourselves to other people and we sort of say, am I like this person? Am I similar to this person? In what ways that I'm different? And I think in some sense, when people compare themselves to the deeply involved, they're obviously going to see that they are quite different.

Hmm.

Maybe they're going to think, I don't feel quite as strongly, or You know, I vote in these national elections, but I can't bring myself to vote in these local elections. I just don't know enough.

Mm-hmm.

And that contributes to our self-categorization as somebody who is ostensibly nonpolitical, which is, I think, a descriptor I actually hear quite a lot from people. I'm not political. And I think an interesting question there becomes, are you not political, or are you not deeply involved? Are you actually entirely disengaged from politics? Or do you just not believe that you have any capacity to be part of politics because you don't think you can look like the people you see on your television screen?

I'm wondering if there's another effect here, which is that if I'm a Democrat, and I'm watching television, and I'm seeing people who are deeply involved in politics who are Republicans on television, it's reasonable almost for me to draw the impression that all Republicans must be like the Republicans that I see on television.

And in fact, some research I've recently done suggests that very point. So along with co-authors Samara Klar, John Ryan, Jamie Druckmann, and Matt Levandusky, we actually actually asked people what they believe the most common member of the opposing party looks like. And then we actually measured what people from both parties look like. And what we found is that people imagined that those from the other party were constantly talking about politics and that they were very extreme. But in fact, that's not the case at all. The sort of most common member of a party a person on a survey who says they're a Democrat or a Republican is somebody who doesn't talk about politics all that much and somebody who is not all that extreme. And so the difference between what the partisans actually look like and what people imagine the partisans actually look like was quite jarring. But it's not as jarring when you think about the partisans that you see on Twitter, the partisans that you see on television, the partisans you see in the news. People who are reasonable and dispassionate don't necessarily make for the best political news, especially if you want to illustrate polarization. And so when we see people who are quite angry, it forms our idea of what a partisan is and what somebody who is political actually looks like.

When I look at the voter turnout in recent elections, the biggest party by far might not be the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. It might be the party of what you might call, please leave me out of it. Among all Americans of voting age, about 2 in 5, about 40%, typically don't vote. Now, this has been true for a long time. It probably precedes the growth and popularity of social media, but is there a connection between the story you tell about this new fault line and people who are completely disengaging from politics?

Well, this is a worry of mine when I think about deep involvement. If we sort of communicate to people that politics is about being angry, that politics is about essentially— and I don't just mean being angry about the events we see around us, because I think people should in a lot of cases be very angry about the political events we see around us— but essentially that politics is constantly about fighting and spending a lot of time expressing this, it might suggest to people that they don't have what it takes to be Part of politics. So when we think about people essentially disengaging, part of it might be people sort of saying, I don't necessarily want to be part of this. I don't want to be like partisans. I don't necessarily want to be in a group with these people I see around me.

Jana's research finds that these people are not just reluctant to get involved in politics, they feel less confident in their ability to do so.

If you think that you're nonpolitical because you're different from those you see in the news, it might suggest to you that your voice is just not as worthwhile, and you might actually even start to believe that you don't know enough to be part of the political world. You don't know enough to actually participate, which I think could lead to people kind of exiting out of the process.

Yeah. You cite a story that was once published in the New York Times about a woman who decided to sit out a recent election. She decided not to vote. And she had, I believe, friends or siblings who had very different feelings about what happened. Tell me that story.

So this story was quite interesting to us, and it was in the back of our minds as we were working through our theoretical work. And it's this woman who talked about deciding that she wasn't going to turn out to vote, and she had these 2 close friends who basically started texting her repeatedly, almost trying to shame her into turning out and voting. And in the end, she didn't vote, so it was not effective, but it was effective in her essentially stopping being friends with these people. People who she reports actually having been friends with for a long time, I think. And the other thing that she reports that was especially kind of sad in some ways is that she actually never really engaged with politics again. It was such a poor experience for her that it led her to exit out of politics entirely. And you can see this story, I think, from both sides. I think the people who were trying to convince her to vote, Genuinely wanted to see this person engaged in politics. They genuinely believe politics is important. They genuinely want people to vote, but what happened was an entirely opposing reaction, which sort of speaks to this idea of how we communicate the importance of politics to others.

There's something deeply ironic here because, as you said, the deeply involved are deeply involved because they care so much. They have deep ideals very often about what's right and what's wrong and how to make things better. But paradoxically, in terms of actual effectiveness, they might not actually be getting their way, not just because they're driving disengagement amongst some people, but also because, as you point out, the deeply engaged are also the ones who are least interested in compromise. So compromise is a dirty word when it comes to the people who are the most deeply engaged in politics. What does it mean for for a democracy, Jana, when the people who are in the fray, who stay in the fray, are the ones who say any compromise with the other side is effectively betrayal and treason, and we are driving out the people who might in some ways be more amenable to compromise?

Oh, I think there are sort of 2 ways to look at this. I think one, as more and more people who are less involved are driven out of politics, We see more of these people who are deeply involved basically engaging with each other, fully kind of convinced of their own level of interest, basically just reinforcing each other's views. And then you have another half of your electorate who's becoming less and less and less engaged. What are we losing in this case? Are we losing— I think we're losing a lot. Certain voices that could essentially be represented? Are we changing who is being represented? Are we essentially altering the extent to which government can be responsible? I think these are all things that we should kind of think about when we think about what it means when we give the deeply involved so much voice.

One of the most surprising things about your thesis, as I was reading your work, is how many Americans think of people who belong to their own political party who are deeply involved. Obviously, many Americans dislike partisans on the other side who are deeply involved, but how do people think about people on their own side who are deeply involved?

Certainly, people like those on their own side who are deeply involved A lot better than they like those on the other side who are deeply involved. But there is also some sense that people aren't necessarily all that excited about people who are deeply involved on their own side as well. People who are not deeply involved don't exactly love people who tweet about politics even from their own side. So certainly, certainly, I think if we kind of truth serum people, they would say, well, if you're going to tweet about politics, at least do it from my side. But they don't necessarily love that either.

I sense in some ways that there is an irony in your work, Jana, because you've mentioned in a couple of different ways that you yourself might belong to the ranks of the people who are deeply involved. You talked about it briefly in the context of many of your friends on social media being deeply involved. You have a critique of the deeply involved and sort of the effects they're having on politics. At some level, are you also critiquing your own life and your own approach to politics?

By my definition, I probably am quite deeply involved. And in fact, I do in fact check the news in the morning when I wake up. In that sense, I do think that I am critiquing my own life in a way. I found at a number of points actually having to remind myself There are people out there who are much more concerned about where their next paycheck is going to come from, whether they have time to spend with their kids, than with the latest thing the president has tweeted. And I think working on this has been a helpful reminder of this constant voice that I should hear in my head of, this is not real life.

Jana Krupnikov is a political scientist at the University of Michigan. Her book, written with her fellow political scientist, John Barry Ryan, is called The Other Divide: Polarization and Disengagement in American Politics. Jana, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Thank you for having me.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Next week, we wrap up our Us 2.0 series We'll hear a fresh perspective on the man who navigated the United States through a perilous moment in its history: Abraham Lincoln. We talk with NPR's Steven Skeap about the nation's 16th president and the lessons his leadership still holds for us. If you've missed any of the episodes in our Us 2.0 series, you can find them in this podcast feed or on our website, hiddenbrain.org.

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