If You Can Imitate Them, Maybe You Can Understand Them — BCB #122
Also: elections don’t do much to reduce polarization but other things do, and how to talk about race in an Evangelical megachurch.
It’s easy to expertly role-play the other side
Sun Tzu famously said that in order to win a battle you need to know yourself and know your enemy; we could say the same about making peace. We’ve written previously about the perception gap and all the problems caused by our distorted views of people on the other side. And reducing misperceptions seems to be one of the best ways to improve how people feel about each other. But here’s a twist: new research indicates that the problem might not be that we don’t understand each other. In fact, it turns out that average Republicans and Democrats can role-play the other side so well that no one can tell the difference.
Researchers in this study asked Republicans and Democrats to write statements explaining why they belonged to their political party. Half of them were told to tell the truth, and half were told to pretend to belong to the other side. Then, another group of Republicans and Democrats had to guess which of these statements were real or fake. No one could tell the difference between an ally and a pretender! As one of the researchers points out:
Neither side did a good job discriminating between real and fake, no matter which party the statement claimed to come from.
Republicans said “REAL” at pretty much the same rate to all four kinds of statements.
Democrats were more likely to flag all Republican statements as fake, whether those statements were actually fake or not.

These results are striking because they seemingly directly contradict the perception gap results, where surveys show that each side thinks the other is a lot more extreme than it actually is.

In fact, it seems that both side understand each other about as well as they understand themselves. (If you want to test yourself and see how well you can do, the researchers have built a tool for that here.)
So what accounts for the difference between these two ways of studying polarization? One thing worth noting is that in the real/fake political statement study, researchers offered incentives to statement writers if they were able to persuade a majority of readers, and paid readers a bonus if they were able to correctly guess whether a statement was real or fake. In other words, they were given reason to try to represent the other side accurately rather than defaulting to stereotypes. (Similarly, people are able to detect fake headlines far better when they are paid for accuracy.) By contrast, researchers investigating the perception gap may be asking people questions about the other side that seem likely to generate interesting answers—and thus may be more extreme.
The fact that participants were able to accurately represent their opponents when encouraged to do so could be a hopeful sign. Perhaps with a little thought and care, we can correctly perceive and empathize with the other side.
Elections don’t have much impact on polarization—but plenty of other things do
It’s easy to think that polarization is at its worst right before elections, when people are being bombarded with campaign ads and escalatory messaging on all sides. But new research finds that that isn’t actually the case. By studying interviews with 66,000 Americans, University of Pennsylvania researchers found that support for violating democratic norms, support for political violence, and affective polarization barely changed at all among voters before and after the 2022 midterms. What’s more, people who voted for the winning candidate were no less polarized after the election than those who were on the losing side.
Okay, so if getting past November 5 won’t mitigate our polarization woes, what will? As researchers at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace have found:
it is possible for democracies to depolarize. In these cases… the public and the political elite were able to find ways to reduce the tensions that have divided them. The diversity of these cases shows that there are many ways of doing this: in some instances, divides over the future of the country were able to be resolved through democratic processes, while the rule of law checked polarizing leaders who were concentrating power elsewhere. For example, Brazil’s newly restored democracy allowed for the successful impeachment and removal of its president following a corruption scandal in 1992, and a decade later managed the smooth transition to a government led for the first time by the leftist Workers Party. In Colombia between 2009 and 2010, an independent Constitutional Court restrained a president attempting to push through a constitutional amendment to allow him to run for a third term.
If elections don’t meaningfully affect polarization, that means there’s never a bad time to start thinking about and engaging with depolarization efforts. And there’s another hopeful upshot. As one of the Penn researchers points out:
Partisan animosity appears to be deeply embedded in American society, rather than being a short-term response to electoral campaigns… However, all hope is not lost. Our results suggest that efforts by future political candidates to stoke hatred and division during campaigns are likely to prove ineffective, particularly when such efforts promote violence or the erosion of democratic norms.
Talking about race in a big white church
In her new book Undivided, political scientist Hahrie Han tells an unlikely story of a Black pastor, a white-dominant evangelical megachurch, and a faith-based program that has helped bring Christians together and encourage them to reckon with the prejudices they might hold.
The book tells the story of four people—a white man, a white woman, a Black woman, and Black pastor Chuck Mingo—who participated in Undivided, an initiative designed by Mingo to combat racial injustice from within the context of church. His work began when he came to Crossroads, a sprawling Cincinnati megachurch with a mostly white congregation, to deliver a sermon on race. Soon after, he and the church launched Undivided, a six-week workshop that prodded participants to think about their biases and work towards transforming themselves and their communities. Amazingly, Han finds that the program changed the lives of some of its participants.
Perhaps you would not expect this kind of programming at an evangelical church. Yet Han points to the religious context of Undivided as reason for its success. Workshop sessions opened with prayer. Participants innately trusted each other because of their shared faith. The shared context of church creates a useful starting point for discussing third rail issues like race, even for people who really don’t have any experience of (or inclination towards) addressing those topics at the outset.
Further, according to Han the top 9% of American churches contain 50% of the churchgoing population, which means these large congregations are growing rapidly and can be much more diverse and variable than outsiders give them credit for.
At an event for Han’s book, Jess Knight, a member of Crossroads, shared her own journey to participating in Undivided:
Her family mingled regularly with Ku Klux Klan members who taught her that integrating white supremacist politics with her faith in God was normal. Knight admitted that she was terrified to walk into Undivided and expose her controversial views. So what made her get out of the car, go into the meeting, and keep attending? She said she knew the only way past it was through it.
“I was very, very drawn in by the ability of Chuck … to stand up in front of the third largest megachurch as a Black man in an all-white denomination, and challenge them,” Knight said. “It was very inspiring to me.”
When churchgoers participate in Undivided, the six weeks of programming are just the beginning (though that isn’t to say the program has been without its share of backlash). As Han explains, one of her main takeaways from researching and writing was that:
Social transformation—even in an evangelical megachurch—is not about finding extraordinary people and giving them extraordinary opportunities (e.g., find like-minded people and turn them into DEI warriors!) Instead, it's about creating the social and structural conditions ordinary people need to take risks and connect their work to something larger than themselves.
Case in point: she first discovered the program when she realized that Crossroads volunteers—who had been a part of Undivided—were instrumental in bringing universal preschool education (an initiative sometimes opposed by Republicans) to Cincinnati, the same year that Donald Trump decisively won Ohio.
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