Jay Van Bavel
speaker
271 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 27 Jul
Jay Van Bavel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
If you really start to spill over this animosity into hatred, it can lead to violence, discrimination, and conflict.
And so we have to be very mindful that it can be very useful to have healthy competition and healthy conflict.
like the example of Houston versus Dallas and sports teams.
But we have to be very mindful that there has to be a boundary where it doesn't spill over into those negative aspects of group identity.
Yeah, the classic term for this is called the narcissism of small differences that we actually often become obsessed with people who are very similar to us in part because we're comparing ourselves to them.
And so this can be where you're competitive with a good friend or an office mate because they seem the most relevant comparison to you.
Now, that's different from the way that most people think about conflict, where they think that we have conflict with the people who are most different from us, the people who have radically different belief systems or religions or come from different countries, different skin colors, different genders.
But in most situations, it's actually the people who are similar to us because we see them as a relevant form of competition.
It is definitely part of the puzzle of polarization.
I would say there's two pieces of the puzzle of polarization.
One is that people do have genuine disagreements about some policies like healthcare or immigration.
But
On top of that, there is what we call affective polarization, where it's just you really don't like a group simply because they're part of another party, even if they agree with you on the actual policies.
And so this leads to all kinds of real discrimination.
And I will say part of it is exaggerated.
If you actually measure what people believe, the average Democrat and average Republican aren't that far apart.
But if you ask them what they think the other party believes, they imagine that people from the other party hate them way more than they do.
They imagine that people in the other party are very different from them in terms of beliefs, in terms of demographics.
And so it creates a funny situation where they tend to avoid each other.
They now move to different places and communities where
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