How to reduce partisan gridlock

[applegrove]

How to reduce partisan gridlock

By Leaf Van Boven and David Sherman at the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/12/07/how-to-reduce-partisan-gridlock/

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Social psychological research shows that inviting partisans to affirm their sense of self-worth can help them escape political traps. Defensive partisan reactions, such as blindly opposing the other side’s ideas, are largely driven by the desire to see one’s political group — and, by extension, oneself — as moral, correct, and good. To protect one’s own political identity, people oppose competing ideological perspectives and the people who hold them — a politically destructive defense mechanism. Yet these reactions are not inevitable. When people engage in acts that affirm who they are — as good people, not as good partisans — they become more tolerant of threats to their political identity, and more open to the other side.

Examples of denigration of political opponents abound. President Obama has been called “the most evil president ever” and McConnell has had the Asian heritage of his wife linked to unpatriotic policies of shipping jobs to China. Yet affirmation of self-worth can reduce such derogatory tendencies.

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We studied this in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election among Democratic and Republican voters who viewed segments from a debate between Barack Obama and John McCain. Predictably, Democrats favored Obama’s policies and performance while Republicans favored McCain. But asking people to write about their core values unrelated to politics — a self-affirming activity — shrunk this partisan divide. Self-affirmed Democrats became less enamored of Barack Obama, and affirmed Republicans became more open to him. Ten days after the election affirmed Republicans even thought Obama would be a better president.

People also protect their political identities by applying more stringent criteria to the opposing side’s arguments than to their own side’s arguments. Self-affirmation can reduce this defensive information evaluation. More generally, affirmation can reduce barriers to conflict resolution, facilitate openness in negotiation, and enable partisans to acknowledge the wrongdoing of their groups, even in situations of seemingly intractable conflict, such as between Israelis and Palestinians.




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[bigwillq]

1. Do away with parties and the money that controls them (nt)

[applegrove]

3. That would work too.

[applegrove]

2. In otherwords love towards your brother will reconnect the world.

The antithesis of fox news.