Study shows how to talk politics and be civil during Thanksgiving dinner

23 November 2023

With millions of Americans gathering this evening to share a Thanksgiving meal with relatives on opposite ends of the political spectrum, discussing sensitive topics could result in early exits and hurt feelings. However, a study shows it doesn't have to be that way.

Bloomberg opinion columnist F.D. Flam recently covered a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that delved into how we can train ourselves to be more conscious in how we perceive the issues we talk about. According to the study, Americans actually agree on more than we realize despite increased political polarization, and we can have far more productive conversations about hot-button issues by staying away from making what researchers refer to as "generic statements."

"Sweeping generalizations are apparently embedded in the way we speak and think," Flam wrote. "[Generic statements] aren’t completely logical, but they sound normal to most ears. Generic statements not only influence how we express our thoughts, but how we think."

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The study — which was authored by University of Michigan psychology and linguistics professor Susan Gelman along with her brother, Andrew Gelman, who teaches political science and statistics at Columbia University, as well as two other researchers — asked both Democrats and Republicans questions about 62 topical issues in the news cycle including abortion, a border wall, police funding and taxes. Researchers wrote that their findings "indicate a tendency toward holding mental representations of political claims that exaggerate party differences."

They found that when presented with generic statements about these topics, participants tended to assume one political party was all-in on an issue while the other party was completely opposed. But when asked directly about issues — like whether the federal income tax was too high, for example — a majority of participants from opposite sides tended to agree. While current polling trends show that support for both blanket student debt relief and abstinence-only sex education don't have majority support from either party, participants tended to accept generic statements that Democrats supported the former and Republicans supported the latter.

Researchers also discovered that when presenting participants with more nuanced statements like "many Ohio farmers depend on trade," participants still had a tendency to convert them into generic statements in their memories. Susan Gelman — who studies how children learn — wrote in the study that this traces back to children using generic statements as early as age two to make sense of the world around them. She pointed to generic statements like "birds can fly" and "dogs are friendly" as examples, even though both statements have exceptions. This means that the way we view sensitive and complex political issues stems from patterns learned during infancy.

"These findings suggest that the use of generic language, common in everyday speech, enables inferential errors that exacerbate perceived polarization," they wrote.

"Hatred and animosity eat away at our body politic, opening people to anti-democratic policies and attitudes. And political polarization over the Covid vaccines cost thousands of lives," Flam wrote. "[T]he other side is not nearly as deluded or immoral as you might think. That’s something to be thankful for."

Read Flam's full column here.

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