There aren’t two sides on abortion. There aren’t two sides on gun control. There aren’t two sides on immigration. There are far more than two. But reducing a complicated issue to two sides is politically useful—as Hitler noted, it’s easier to persuade people if you make issues very simple, and as people have noted about Hitler’s rhetoric, that’s most effectively done by reframing the policy issue as simply one instance of the war between Us and a common enemy (Them). That reduction of complicated issues to “us v. them” is appealing to people and therefore profitable for media.
I’m not saying that everyone who uses that method is Hitler, since we all do that when it comes to issues that trigger what is often called “hot cognition”—that is, trying to make a decision about an issue that pushes a lot of your buttons, that gets you hot under the collar. It isn’t just that these issues set off all sorts of passions (fear, anger, desire for revenge, outrage) but that they are issues (or settings) that suggest connections between this argument and beliefs central to your sense of self. In conditions of hot cognition, we tend to think in binaries.
For instance, if your being a dog owner is important to your sense of self—you often describe yourself that way to others, you post a lot about your dogs on social media, you see yourself as someone who loves dogs–, and you read an article about an abusive dog owner, you’re almost certainly in the realm of hot cognition because a dog being abused is very upsetting, and another dog owner (an in-group member) has behaved badly. You’re triggered in three ways: your feelings about dogs, your in-group membership, your need to condemn bad behavior in public (virtue signaling).
People trying to think in the midst of hot cognition tend to rely on binaries, and the binary in this case is likely to be the defensiveness/outrage one. If you take the defensiveness track, you might respond with #notalldogowners (as though that needs to be said), that person was not A Real Dog Owner (the no true Scotsman fallacy), or that person didn’t really abuse the dogs (which, by the way, might be true—this is the person who will go into deep research to find out what really happened, and they might then find that the media coverage is false, or they might end up in embarrassing pedantry).
If you take the outrage track, it might be outrage that an in-group member behaved badly, a need to vent, a need to show that not all dog owners behave that way (so #notalldogowners has two options).
If you aren’t a dog owner, you aren’t necessarily responding differently. If, for instance, dog owners are an out-group for you, then you’re also in a world of hot cognition—this story triggers your sense of yourself as good because not a dog owner. So, you are likely to take this story as an example of how all dog owners are bad without any consideration of whether the report is valid, credible, internally consistent.
If you are a dog owner but that isn’t important to your identity, or you aren’t a dog owner but don’t see dog owners as an out-group, you don’t care. You didn’t click on the link.
Also, if, in fact, it was a really complicated situation, and it’s hard to tell whether this is really is a case of abuse, and media reported it that way, then only that third person—willing to try to figure out what really happened—is going to click on the links.
In other words, topics that trigger hot cognition simultaneously get our attention more effectively than ones that don’t and they trigger binary thinking.
And here is how I’m not sure how to describe it: it isn’t actually the topics; it’s how those topics are presented and interpreted. In a for-profit media, the best way to get the most readers (and therefore, have the best advertising revenue) is to present issues in ways that trigger hot cognition in as many ways as possible.
For instance, imagine that Millard Filmore has been accused of abusing his dogs. An article about Millard might note that he is Irish, Libertarian, left-handed, a member of Toastmasters. Or, it might note that the person accusing him of abusing his dogs is Irish, Libertarian, left-handed, a member of Toastmasters.
If you are running a media outlet in a community (or world) in which pro- or anti-Toastmasters triggers hot cognition you will mention if anyone is in Toastmaters. (If you aren’t, you won’t.) In a community polarized by membership in Toastmasters, an article about a Toastmaster will get more clicks, even if Millard’s membership in Toastmasters is irrelevant to the question of his treatment of dogs (or the reliability of the critic) or transient (he was a member for a brief time years ago). An article about Millard Filmore that gives no information other than that he is accused of abusing dogs only gets those people for whom “dog owner” is in- or out-group.
The world is not actually divided into pro- or anti-Toastmaster, and Millard may or may not have abused his dogs, a question that has nothing to do with whether he is a member of Toastmasters.
But, and this is important, the media has no motivation to report what happened in a nuanced and non-Toastmaster way. That won’t get them clicks.
More important, why should we care about Millard? Does he represent some bigger issue about how dog abuse cases are handled? If the case of Millard exemplifies a common case, then let’s use it for the bigger policy issue. If not, let’s include Millard in our Two Minutes Hate (during which we emphasize his out-group membership) and go on. Or maybe we could skip the Two Minutes Hate, or at least recognize it for what it is.
There are two problems with Millard’s case: first, if we are in an informational enclave, we let our in-group media frame the question of Millard’s behavior as part of the zero-sum argument between pro- and anti- Toastmasters. Second, once that’s the issue, then anyone who does a little research and finds it’s more complicated than what our in-group media says gets condemned by the people in in-group enclaves as Them.
Talking about a complicated issue in terms of outrageous behavior on the part of Them (out-group) is more profitable for media because we don’t click on things that say, “Here is the complicated situation regarding dog abuse.” That doesn’t trigger hot cognition.
The issue of dog abuse isn’t us v. them. Almost no one is in favor of abusing dogs, but there are lots of complicated arguments about how to define it, write laws about it, enforce those laws, finance the enforcement of those laws, prevent it. That argument is boring. Who clicks on links that are nuanced explanations about the vexed situation of animal control?
Who clicks on links about how awful Millard Filmore is?
I’m not saying that being passionate about dog abuse—or politics in general—is bad. It’s great. What I’m saying is that being passionate about dog abuse should mean we know that we are prone to thinking about the issue as a binary, and we need to step back from that. We should care enough about dog abuse that we try to find a policy solution not grounded in hot cognition. We need to be so passionate about preventing dog abuse that we don’t think about it as a binary of two positions.
If, however, thinking about dog abuse effectively and politically (that is, in terms of our policy options) gets filtered by the demagogic assumption that all policy issues are really a zero-sum battle between us and them, then it all gets mixed up with virtue signaling or performances of in-group loyalty, and we’ve got a train wreck. We’ll only get information from in-group sources, we’ll make Millard out-group (and thereby not only condemn him pre-trial, but never have the more important argument about dog abuse—it isn’t and never has been an in- v. out-group issue).
My point is simply that political issues are complicated, and assuming that anyone who disagrees with you does so because they’re bad means that you lose, as a citizen, from understanding other points of view, and our community as a whole loses, because we all slouch into demagoguery. It’s fine if you have a short list of individuals (Uncle Fubar), contexts (Thanksgiving dinner), or positions (I never engage with 9/11 truthers—there’s no falsifiability), but, if you never have the confidence in your beliefs to expose them to argument with people who deeply disagree with you, and who show all the signs of being willing to engage in good faith argumentation, then even you are admitting that your beliefs are indefensible.