Shankar Vedantam

This seems deeply important and central to their life and who they are.

And I think that's the thing psychologically is whatever conflicts are driving your own life,

seem real and the conflicts of other people halfway around the world might seem absurd, but it's very much the same psychology that seems to be at play in all of these types of situations.

What I've noticed is there's an increasing trend towards polarization that's linked to out-group hate more than in-group love.

And this is where politics in the U.S.

and many places around the world looks much more like sectarianism because it's connected to our morality.

And what happens then is people on the in-group are good, but the out-group really is evil.

And you'll do anything you can to stop them.

You'll even support an in-group member or vote for a leader who you don't like or don't respect or don't trust simply because you can't let this evil out-group take control.

And so this is now a driving factor behind many people in their decisions to vote, volunteer, donate money.

Research suggests that our Thanksgiving dinners are getting shorter by roughly half an hour over time.

If you're interacting with family members in a place where there's going to be disagreement politically, it becomes intolerable and people just, you know, don't stick around for dessert basically.

It's affected dating.

So I ran a study with a radio station in New York City at Trump's inauguration, and we found the biggest form of discrimination we observed is simply that people refuse to date somebody who voted for the other party.

And so now there's, in fact, dating websites dedicated specifically to your political preferences.

Are you serious?

There's blue Tinder and red Tinder now?

I don't know if it's called that.

There's one that's like a, if you're for Trump fans only and stuff like this.

Yeah.