Polarization Is a Product of Fear

So maybe they’re dumb on the other side, but are they dumber than your side? I’m skeptical. We’re all trying to do our best with big, complicated concepts, and a little humility behooves all of us.

What about the idea that the other side hates us and wants to destroy us? I call this the destruction narrative, and it’s the story told by media elites and by folks who have been termed “conflict entrepreneurs” by the journalist Amanda Ripley. It pushes the notion that those who oppose us are trying to burn it all down, like some supervillain.

But research, including mine, suggests that people don’t believe what they believe because they want to destroy something but because they’re trying to protect things. Our moral convictions are born of a desire to protect ourselves, our communities, and our societies.

We’re filled with moral conflict because many of us are worried about our safety and because we feel victimized. We get morally outraged when we feel threatened or attacked. That sense of vulnerability is part of human nature. We live in a society that’s incredibly safe compared to the ancient past, but if you look back in the anthropological record, our prehistoric ancestors had to deal with a lot of threats and probably spent a great deal of time being afraid. Outrage is how we combat the threat that we see coming from the other side of the debate.

Matters of perception

America is really divided by different understandings of threats or concerns about harm. If you want to understand how someone on the other side thinks and feels, consider what they fear.

A person who supports gun rights might be afraid of someone breaking into their house and hurting their kids. A person who supports gun control might be afraid of someone shooting up a school. Both people are afraid for children, but they perceive the threats differently.

We all condemn harm. The problem is that harm is a matter of perception. And every moral issue that we disagree about is grounded in disagreements about perceived harm: guns, gay rights, immigration, you name it.

So when we’re disagreeing, our real disagreement is often about who seems the most vulnerable to victimization or suffering. We all agree that kids are vulnerable to harm, which is why every moral cause from the beginning of time has said, “Think of the children.” But how vulnerable to harm is a pregnant woman? Is she more or less vulnerable than the fetus that’s inside her? Your perception may determine your views on abortion.

Assessing vulnerability is a subjective exercise, but we do have data about how people assess it. In fact, my coauthors and I have asked thousands of people about how vulnerable various entities are to harm, and we’ve settled on four broad clusters that help explain political debate in America today.

• The environment: Think coral reefs or rainforests.
• The other: Undocumented immigrants, trans people, Muslims—in other words, marginalized people, people who are outside the center of American power.
• The powerful: Corporate leaders, state troopers, and others with access to the traditional levers of power in America.
• The divine: Jesus, God, holy texts, and other religious figures or entities.

In the chart below, you can see that—maybe not surprisingly—if you are on the political Left, you are more likely to see the environment and the other as more vulnerable to harm or victimization compared with those on the political Right. The opposite pattern holds true for perceptions of how vulnerable the powerful and the divine are. If you want to understand how people feel about a policy that could hurt the environment but help industry, or a policy that might harm the rich through transfers of wealth, this goes a long way.

When you think about how the other side perceives victimhood, there is a tendency to doubt that they authentically believe it. When someone says that police officers are vulnerable to harm, or another group is vulnerable to harm, you might think, “You’re just saying that. You don’t believe it. You’re just trying to create some conflict.” But data back up the notion that people deeply hold their perceptions about these things.

Even if you think their perception can be factually disproved, morality isn’t about what you know; it’s about what you feel. To understand moral divides, you have to understand the harms that people see as most salient, and accept that these can come from their upbringing, from their religious beliefs or lack thereof, or from any number of other sources.

Tell stories

Perceptual gaps about who or what is at risk may explain our current state of polarization, but what can we do to discuss these gaps more productively? How can we disagree better?

In research, my colleagues and I have asked people, “Imagine you’re having a conversation with someone on the opposite side of an issue. What should they do to make you respect them?” The majority of people say, “I want them to use facts and evidence. Don’t give me stories; don’t editorialize; give me the facts.” But do facts really help us see the harms that other people are worried about? Do they help us see that other people are concerned about protecting themselves?

“Here’s a fact about abortion,” someone says. “Oh wow, I guess I’ll give up my moral convictions. You’re so right,” says the other person. A conversation like this has never happened.

In fact, when we give the facts to people on the other side, they say, “No, those are not the right facts. I want the real facts, the facts that support my view.” We’re living in different information ecosystems; we have different facts.

I’d argue that storytelling is more powerful than fact recital. We are a storytelling species. When you are sitting around the campfire, what you don’t do is start talking about the mean, the median, and the mode of a dataset. It’s much easier to convey a lesson through stories.

Stories are powerful—especially stories in which we share our personal experiences of harm. Because when we do that, people understand that we are rational. Even if they disagree with our assumptions of the world, they understand that we are trying our best to avoid harm and protect ourselves and our families.

We’ve tested this empirically. My coauthors and I enlisted a real University of North Carolina student to walk around campus, pretending not to be involved with the experiment, and then we got other people, actual participants, to talk with her. We asked the real study subjects what they thought about guns, and then our student took the opposite position. Sometimes she gave a fact—how many times guns are used in self-defense in America every year—and sometimes an experience, which was that her mom used a gun to defend their family from an intruder.

We recorded those conversations and had a separate team of participants rate those conversations for how respectful they were. We find that the conversations grounded in personal experience were perceived as more respectful than those grounded in facts.

We’ve also looked at deeper, darker places for political conversations: the comments sections of YouTube videos about abortion. These are not the places you go for civil discourse, or for being informed about the world. We looked at videos in which women told their stories about abortion, with either a pro-life message or a pro-choice message, and we looked at videos where people talked about facts. And we found that on videos focusing on personal experience, the comments were more positive and more socially supportive, suggesting that personal experiences help bridge divides.

A recipe for civil conversation

But how do you start a civil conversation with someone who disagrees with you politically? I suggest a three-part process: connect, invite, and validate—CIV. That’s the pathway to more civil conversations.

What do I mean by connect? Well, before you talk about politics, talk about something else first. We all contain multitudes—we like food, we like music, we like theater, we like video games, we like walking, whatever. Talk about anything you can that is less controversial than politics.

Research by Chicago Booth’s Nicholas Epley suggests a way to start these conversations: You ask questions. Epley’s research finds that if you randomly assign people to have deep conversations and ask each other deep questions—When’s the last time you cried in front of someone? When’s the last time you felt hope or joy?—you might think no one wants to engage with those topics, but you’re wrong. It turns out that people are craving connection. People want to tell their own stories.

Once you’ve connected, it’s time to invite people to share their perspective. Please remember that an invitation is not a demand. We love invitations to parties; we do not love demands to attend a party.

One thing you can do is really focus on the idea of understanding. You might say to the other person, “I know we voted differently in the last election, and I know there’s been a lot of talking points about it in the news, but I want to understand where you’re coming from. Maybe we can leave the sound bites behind, and just tell me your own perspective and your own stories about this idea.” That’s an invitation.

Once they’ve told you their story, you have to validate it. That doesn’t mean agreeing with them. It could just be thanking them. I talk a lot with church audiences, and I really like the idea of grace. Give a little grace to people who might say something that could be offensive, who might be feeling awkward or exposed or challenged, and you’ll be surprised at the grace they give you in return.

Polarization is not going away. Not in the midterms, not in the presidential election. But science has given us some important insights to understand it better. The other side are not monsters bent on destruction. Average, everyday people—even the average senator or representative—are trying to do their best for the country and their communities. We have different perceptions of harm, but we can bridge those divides, and create a more civil and better-functioning country in the process.

Kurt Gray is the Weary Foundation Endowed Chair in Social Psychology at the Ohio State University and is the author of Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground (2025). This essay is based on a talk he gave as part of the Think Better series organized by Booth’s Roman Family Center for Decision Research.