You’ve likely heard the old adage “birds of a feather flock together”—but did you know that this idea is actually backed by psychological research? Decades of research support the idea that people generally like others who are similar to them, especially when it comes to political beliefs.
For example, people tend to become more romantically interested in potential partners if they discover they share political beliefs, or on the flip side, less interested if they find out they do not have similar ideologies. After the 2016 election cycle, dating apps took note of this and added political badges to help users find more success in their relationships.
Somewhat unbelievably, people are also more attracted to politically similar others on an olfactory level. Yes, olfactory, as in they think they smell better. Researchers at Harvard University had people come to a lab and smell the sweaty t-shirts of others and rate which smelled the best. It turns out, people could “sniff out” political ingroup members and rated their dirty laundry as smelling better than the outgroup’s.
But these interesting (and weird) studies are all actually missing something important in this discussion. Is political polarization driven by people liking political ingroup members more or is it that they like political outgroup members less?
My lab recently tested this question across two studies by presenting participants with fabricated Facebook profiles to judge. The profiles they encountered were always the same—a man from San Jose, California, who had a photo with his wife as his profile picture, shared some funny memes, some hot takes on binge-worthy TV shows, a recipe, and vacation photos from a recent camping trip to Big Sur. The only difference in the profiles was that his most recent post endorsed a specific political candidate, shared support for a political party, shared his beliefs on a specific policy, or—and this is important—did not share anything political at all.
We didn’t just ask participants to give a thumbs up or down. Instead, we dug into the details of their impressions. Was this person trustworthy? Likable? Would they want him as a neighbor, friend, or coworker?
The results of our study were surprising. While decades of research would lead us to believe that people would prefer someone who shared their political views over someone who didn’t share their political views, that actually wasn’t the case. The profile of shared political views and the control profile without political views rated very similarly. Instead, if the profile had voiced opposing views from our participants, only then did they view him differently, and in this case, significantly less favorably.
In other research from my lab, we’re digging into why this might happen. Using a similar experimental paradigm, we found that people view politically similar others to be more moral, at least in the ways that matter to them. Studies have consistently shown over the years that liberals and conservatives tend to endorse different kinds of morals—liberals prioritize morals such as fairness or justice and preventing harm against others; whereas conservatives prioritize morals such as respecting authority, being loyal to the ingroup, and having physical or spiritual purity. And, as it turns out, we generally seem to implicitly know about these moral differences. So, finding out someone’s political beliefs are different from your own can also signal to you that their morals are different, whether that’s actually the case or not.
So what does this mean? Well, it might shed a bit of light on why our country feels so particularly divisive right now. Despite the statistics behind political affiliations remaining fairly constant over the decades, the emotions tied up in those affiliations have changed. It’s no longer just birds of a feather wanting to flock together. Instead, half of the birds passionately want to not flock with the other half. And vice versa.
Unfortunately, this research offers no easy solution to the problem, but from a psychological perspective, it does help us understand what we’re up against. This is not a problem that will figure itself out. In fact, the emotions many of us feel about politics are likely to only lead to further political polarization because they decrease the chances of ever connecting with someone across the aisle. The only solution is recognizing this reality within ourselves and taking steps each day to breach the partisan divide.