Social media platforms allow us to openly express our beliefs and share them with people across the globe. From there, we create larger communities that share ideas — and those ideas ultimately contribute to America’s polarized political climate. However, this divide is not necessarily driven by politics alone; it is a psychological occurrence that causes people to divide into groups based on an inclination to conform.
When people become obsessed with media trends, politics, people, news and the ideas that they represent, they tend to attach their personalities to these interests. Even though we may be inclined to blur the line between our personalities, beliefs and interests, we need to establish a degree of separation between the three.
In the days following Nov. 5, many people took to social media to express their perspectives on the outcome of the presidential election. My Instagram feed was overflowing with posts that either celebrated another Trump presidency or condemned the president-elect. While these are normal reactions in the aftermath of a presidential election, I found that too many people who felt a strong, personal connection to their party — on both sides — contributed to harmful or offensive dialogue, with many of my own followers and following personally attacking their opposition.
Rather than recognizing nuanced political realities and perspectives, people tend to caricaturize those who hold different beliefs as nothing but their politics. Each party tends to view the opposite as a threat to the country and influences its members’ perspectives on their own personal relationships and the world around them
The need to conform to a single belief group stems from human psychological tendencies. This desire to conform causes individuals to align themselves entirely with a group that shares their same beliefs. In a society polarized by political beliefs, this can lead to societal separation — and, later, verbal or physical violence.
Along with the tendency to conform, media consumption gives way to things like “comparison syndrome,” or the constant need to compare ourselves to others, in order to meet the perceived societal standards that we tend to find online. When we learn of a community composed of people who seem to think or act the same way as us, “comparison syndrome” can cause us to shape our own identity entirely around that community’s ideals.
These psychological phenomena and feedback loops can lead to echo chambers online and in our personal lives, as people isolate themselves from seeing or interacting with opposing perspectives. Feedback loops and echo chambers stifle the nuance in our personalities, making it easier to blend in than stand out.
The media heavily influences individuals’ desire to seek a single identity group. This prevents people from acknowledging that they can have a number of beliefs, and therefore a nuanced personality, rather than having to conform to one. This conformity is not just isolated to political beliefs, but includes any arena where group norms are present. Those who support hyperalignment — strong conformity to these groups — may do so because their personal ideological attachments facilitate meaningful engagement in these communities. However, becoming too emotionally attached to a trend or idea clouds our judgment and logical reasoning. It makes us more susceptible to biases, which may ultimately increase the divide between social groups. By establishing a degree of separation between yourself and your beliefs, you leave room for changes in thinking and openness to new knowledge, reducing the potential to fall under faulty reasoning patterns.
When we align our personality too closely with our political beliefs, we risk contributing to chains of negative social media posts attacking individuals who do not conform to an identity group. By falling into echo chambers and failing to notice the toxic habit of comparison, individuals lose their nuance, which contributes to a loss of nuance in our identities and diversity in our communities. Because we currently live in such a polarized climate, it is important to allow ourselves to update our beliefs and learn a variety of ideas. Conformity leads to a lack of individuality, which can lead to extreme divides — like with political parties — that make healthy consumption of media and news impossible.
Enforcing a degree of separation between your personality, your beliefs and your interests means recognizing that your beliefs do not have to shape your personality and, by extension, your identity. Humans are complex. Instead of embodying one belief, we need to lean into our nuance and allow ourselves to be a mess of different ideas, passions and complexities.
Giselle Sesi is an Opinion analyst who writes about the human condition. She can be reached at gigisesi@umich.edu.
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