Is rise of far right, worldwide, fuelled by decline in people’s social skills and social judgement?

Is rise of far right, worldwide, fuelled by decline in people’s social skills and social judgement?

Democracy is dying because we’re clinging to a dangerous and outdated myth that talking about politics can change people’s minds when it doesn’t. Well, such is the premise of a new book called Don’t Talk About Politics. It combines modern neuroscience and psychology to look at what does and does not change people’s minds and why Prince can debates apparently don’t. Well, social theorist and author Sarah Stein Lebrana joins us now to bring us her insight on it all. Uh Dr. Stein Lebrana, thanks for joining us. Tell me, first of all, talking about politics, I mean, debates are such an integral part of campaigns and yet it seems like they’re a waste of time. Yes. Um, at least in terms of changing people’s minds directly and perhaps in terms of helping people think about politics at all. In my first chapter of this book, I look at all of the evidence, for example, about people watching television debates. And you’re right, they’re a huge part of our political culture. But social scientists have looked at the effect they have on people’s voting habits and their political beliefs, and they appear to have roughly zero effect. It’s an amazing thing if you think about it because so much of parliamentary debate or uh television in general involves debates. But it seems that when people are given new information or new arguments about their beliefs, especially if they already hold strong beliefs in that area, they often experience something called cognitive dissonance where they feel discomfort about the contradiction between new information and ideas and their existing ideas. And this often causes them to re-entrench, to double down on their existing ideas. Um, additionally, there are other forces in our lives that have more effect than anything we might encounter, you know, in a in a TV program or a debate, even a debate with our friends a lot of the time. So, it takes much more than debate to change people’s minds about politics. So, we like to stick to our comfort zones, our brains like consistency basically overall. But, we are seeing politics around the world change. I mean, we’re seeing people move to the far right. Yes. Yes. And one of the arguments that I make in this book, looking at a lot of data from social science and psychology, is that one of the reasons that people might be moving to the far right is that we’re experiencing something called social atrophy, which is what happens when the brain is isolated. Um, neuroscience shows that when the brain is isolated, that is when human beings are socially isolated and the brain reacts to that, we’re essentially losing use of a muscle in our brain, a metaphorical muscle. We’re using we’re losing use of the parts of our brain that are used to interacting with other people. We lose some of our social skills and our social judgment. And one of the main things that happens is that people become more paranoid. They’re less good at reading social cues. They attribute negative intentions uh to neutral interactions with other people. And they also just have fewer people to rely on in terms of getting information about the world. So this might help explain why we have a number of uh rising um areas in the world, sorry, areas in the world that experience the rise of the far right because a lot of the far right’s ideology is about suspicion of other people. Uh it’s about saying, you know, can’t trust our neighbors, we can’t trust migrants and so on. And that corresponds with the level of social isolation we’re seeing in Western countries over the last 50 to 70 years. In the UK and the US for example, uh we’re seeing a massive decline both in social trust and in uh people’s decline in friendships, time spent face to face with other people and things like that. Okay. So, how do you think we can go about turning that around? That’s a great question. Um, in sociology, there’s a term called social infrastructure, which is, uh, anything really that causes us to interact with human beings, especially ones we don’t know that well, but might know a little bit on a daily basis. My favorite example is the waiting areas for parents outside of schools. It matters a lot how those are designed. If parents are waiting alone in their cars in a long line, they’re not talking to other parents. They’re not listening to what other issues people in their community might have, and they’re not getting that face-to-face interaction with people. They know a little bit but not so much. If however you have a space where people can chat, maybe they can even have the kids play on the playground while they talk, then you’ve got a piece of social infrastructure. And it’s not just about getting more social infrastructure. It’s about preserving the infrastructure, social infrastructure that we have uh from often cuts to budgets. Um and it’s also about designing that infrastructure to help people see each other as equals. There’s a lot of evidence from something called social contact theory that it really matters whether we are we see the people in that social infrastructure as our equals whether institutions position them as equals and whether we see ourselves as having shared goals. So I would argue that this kind of social infrastructure whether it’s a restaurant or a pub or a school or a park is a big part of our democracy and we have a lot of reasons to think that’s shrinking. Shrinking due to neoliberalism in the last 20 to 40 years but also shrinking for reasons of uh people kind of retreating into their homes and and using public spaces and resources less in various ways. Now you’ve alluded to it a little bit this idea of self, but from what I’ve gleaned it’s not equal around the world. I mean it seems that the idea of the self is a concept that’s stronger in a lot of western countries and that impacts how we react and how we digest information. Can you explain a bit more about this and how it is different depending on the countries? Sure. Yes. This isn’t as much a focus of the book but it’s true that a lot of the findings in this book are dependent on what psychologists and cultural theorists call weird psychology. The psychology of western educated industrialized rich democratic countries. And when you look at psychology studies, there are aspects of human psychology that are not only different in western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic countries, but they are extreme. So people in these countries are very individualistic. They also see traits and human beings as fairly fixed. So if somebody does a crime, for example, they say that’s because of that person’s internal characteristics. They’re a bad person. Rather than thinking maybe that person was hungry, maybe they had a bad experience when they were younger, maybe this is changeable. And many of the aspects of weird psychology make us think about ourselves as individuals with fixed traits. Um whereas in other c cultures we people tend to see this a bit differently. They see people as flexible. They see people as interdependent. They might attribute um situations when they think about why a person behaved the way they did. And that probably helps explain a little bit about why it’s so difficult for Western people sometimes to change their minds about political views. They think I’m a fixed individual. it’s a huge threat to my sense of self if I change even one belief. What does that mean about my prior character when I held this other belief? So yes, the the concept of the individual here is crucial and it is somewhat culturally determined. And it’s fascinating how we can how we can justify um certain decisions like a lot of people say they do see climate change whatsoever or they they say they wouldn’t vote for a convicted criminal but then they can justify that by their through their two various actions that go against their belief. Yes, I give an example in the book of Trump voters. So before Trump was elect um sorry convicted of a number of crimes, many of his voters, people who were planning to vote for him said that they didn’t want the president of the United States to be a felon or to have done a number of other things that he had done. So you know paying a porn star to stay quiet about an affair. And pretty much as soon as Trump was convicted of these charges, they switched their views. A lot of them, a huge percentage, maybe roughly half of people who were planning to vote for him said, “Actually, it’s okay if the president is a felon. It’s okay if the president of the United States has done these things.” And we do this again to reconcile discomfort between uh this is the cognitive dissonance theory again uh discomfort between our existing beliefs and our actions. These folks plan to vote for Trump. They did generally vote for Trump. and to feel more comfortable with their own beliefs. They swapped their beliefs towards their actions and said actually it’s okay. It’s okay if the president has done this kind of felony because we needed to stick to that bigger picture of what uh we believed on the on the wider scale of things. Very briefly, can I just ask you what prompted you to to go down this road of study? Well uh I firstly I’ve always been concerned about politics. I think that it is important for all of us to think about it. No one is outside of politics. I say this as the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor. Uh, and when Trump was elected in 2016, it made me realize that there were many, many things about people’s political psychology that I didn’t understand and that I wanted all of us to understand better so we could do politics in a more constructive way. And I don’t think we’re there yet, but I hope that reading the book for some people will help them think about it a bit differently. And Dr. Sarah Stein, Lebron, thanks so much for bringing us your insight on it all. In any case, here to France 24, your book, Don’t Talk About Politics, hits shelves very shortly.

Nearly three-quarters of the world’s population now lives under some form of authoritarian rule. As illiberal leaders continue to gain power, often through democratic elections, the question looms large: is democracy in decline? We are witnessing a pivotal moment in living history, where far-right movements are capturing hearts and minds of voters, reshaping political landscapes across the globe. For an in-depth exploration of this seismic shift, FRANCE 24’s Eve Irvine is pleased to welcome Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano, researcher at Oxford University and author of the newly released, thought-provoking book Don’t Talk About Politics, which unpacks the science, psychology and politics behind our political behaviours.
#FarRight #SciencePsychologyPolitics #Democracy

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