If you’re among the many who have slowly become disillusioned by modern politics, I can’t blame you.

The discourse, particularly in countries locked into two-party systems, resembles locker room trash talk more than the kind of deliberation the Greeks had in mind centuries ago. Gone are the days when logos and ethos ruled alongside pathos, the appeal to emotion, which has now kicked its brethren out of the nest.

If we want to find the villain in this story, we need to start by looking in the mirror.

We are the ones who not only enable what is happening but also actively encourage it. If we are ever to reclaim a saner political landscape, we need to understand what in our own evolved psychology is pulling us into this hole.

We seek identity over truth

Not to upset the epistemologists among us, but truth or true beliefs matter far less in evolution than we would like to think.

What really has some heft to it is the consequences, and whether our cells and the software that runs them make it into the next generation. Whether someone does so while believing in Santa Claus or while correctly inferring it was their parents all along is largely irrelevant. Yes, some beliefs need to track reality closely enough to keep us alive, but most can drift surprisingly far without any meaningful penalty attached to them.

But the same can’t be said about identity. In our ancestral environments, knowing who we were, and how others saw us in particular, directly impacted our access to protection as well as our ability to continue the Ponzi scheme of life itself. Identity, in short, was a matter of survival.

This helps explain what Dan Kahan and colleagues described as identity-protective cognition (Kahan et al, 2007). Our brains did not evolve to process information with perfect fidelity as much as they found ways to protect a version of us that maintains our place within our groups. And when new facts threaten the identity we know we need, we often bend the facts rather than risk the social cost of suddenly standing apart.

A cursory look at cable news shows how politics pulls on these evolved levers with gusto, making it clear that party identity often outweighs any attempt at objective truth, no matter whether the reporting is for CNN or Fox News.

Which takes us to the second psychological driver you need to be aware of.

The Influence of Cheerleading

John Bullock and his colleagues have shown how partisan bias distorts factual beliefs through what they call cheerleading (Bullock et al, 2015). In a series of fascinating experiments, participants gave answers that aligned with their political side even when they knew those answers were wrong, or were not confident in their veracity.

We know this because when researchers paid people to be as accurate as they could, something interesting happened. The views of Democrats and Republicans began to converge. And once the researchers paid them for admitting uncertainty, the gap narrowed even further.

The implication of their research is that much of what looks like disagreement is not about the underlying facts at all, as much as it is signaling loyalty to our team.

And perhaps we shouldn’t be all that surprised. Our species developed in environments where demonstrating allegiance to the group brought a bevy of benefits. Quite the contrary, being known as the person who pointed out inconvenient truths did not always end well, as Socrates’ sip of hemlock suffices to prove.

As a result, we defend positions while under the influence of politics that we would question in any other context. And cheerleading is only to be outdone by the final mechanism on our list.

Understanding motivated reasoning

Once our group identities are locked in and the pom-poms are out, the next step is to argue for whatever needs arguing for. If we can dress whatever we come up with as something that resembles logic, even better.

Welcome to Motivated Reasoning 101, where we begin with the conclusion we want, and then work backward to assemble a set of arguments that support it.

There’s a wealth of research on political behavior that shows how people selectively seek out information, interpreting ambiguous evidence to confirm their prior beliefs and avoiding sources that might challenge them (e.g., Peterson and Iyengar, 2021). Over time, our tendency towards motivated reasoning creates a form of intellectual tunnel vision where opposing arguments do not even seem plausible.

And when the above pieces of research hold true, we can expect the effect to only get stronger among those who operate inside politics itself. When the reputational and career stakes are higher, the rewards for staying on the party-approved message, and the risks of deviating from them, are only amplified.

Which is why waiting for politicians to fix this is not something we can afford. Instead, we need to take action ourselves. .

What you can do today

One of the most effective ways to reclaim our thinking is to limit our exposure to high-identity environments where ideological performance matters more than truth. That can begin by something as simple as cutting back the time our eyes linger on partisan media, where the goal is to win attention rather than to explain and understand reality.

And if you want to learn what you actually think deep inside of you, you will benefit from creating even more intellectual distance. You can begin by reading more deeply on a topic that piques your curiosity instead of skimming headlines and the ragebait left for you to react online.

While in conversation with others, shift the goal from trying to win to trying to understand why someone might arrive at a conclusion you disagree with. Remember, understanding an argument, even if it is as faulty as two plus two equaling five, doesn’t mean you have to accept it.

But the moment you stop trying to understand others and their potentially faulty premises, you step into the same patterns that drive the system you are frustrated with.