Driving Wedges and Losing Connection Between Us

Hyperpolarization can take a toll on our mental health.

Reviewed by Lybi Ma

Our election seasons have been repeatedly filled with hyperbolic, doomsday arguments of culture wars that are meant to drive our vote. Divisive statements take our attention away from lived experiences, data, and potential policy solutions, and instead focus on feelings of fear, anger, distrust, and othering of people. This hyperpolarization can take a toll on our mental health, drive wedges into families, and fuel the demise of democracy. I also see some solutions.

Our country’s motto in the Revolutionary War that established this experiment in democracy was, “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.” That iteration of this idea was articulated in the Liberty Song, but the idea pre-dates this by millennia and spans cultures and contexts. United We Stand does not mean we all agree. It means we choose to stand together.

Too many entities, however, profit from moving our inherent differences into partisan division. Self-interest in getting elected, remaining in power, or maximizing profits and personal gain fuels this. As noted in a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, social media algorithms elevate these divisive statements to garner attention, and the tunnel vision that is created when algorithms personally curate our content can hyperpolarize us. Differences of opinion can become demonized; nuance and context are lost. When we “like” or watch the most polarizing content, we become individually complicit in this.

As with any technology, there are both benefits and costs. Social media can help connect us and has been an organizational part of justice movements. It can allow often unheard voices to be elevated and expose users to a wider range of ideas if they seek them out. We can become wiser consumers.

Social media creates a perception of reality that is not real. Differences of opinion are born out of our different lived experiences. Rather than being a source of division, they can be a great asset (Galinsky and colleagues, 2015) when we have a diversity of thought and experience, we can think of better solutions to our most pressing problems. We try and keep trying to improve it.

But we are losing. We lose connection and discourse when we fall into othering people who think or live differently than us. when we spend too much time and energy arguing over solutions, we miss the solutions to problems.

From a psychological perspective, there are things individuals can do to engage with traditional and social media but not become complicit in the culture wars. This can help us take steps to transform our civil discourse, but also help restore our mental health.

Scroll past polarizing content.
"Like” and elevate bipartisan and non-partisan civil discourse on social media.
(Some memes and videos are entertaining, but if they are dehumanizing, a cat or animal video will work instead.)
Attack the problem, not the person (a foundational conflict resolution strategy).
Engage, discuss, disagree, get emotional, but do it as if your best friend’s face was in front of you.
Connect outside of “social” media and discuss and debate in nuance and with mutual respect.
Fact-check before sharing on social media

A series of studies by Ford and colleagues (2023) found that people’s daily engagement with the news can lead to negative emotions that affect physical and mental well-being. The emotion regulation strategies of distraction and positive reappraisal helped people manage their well-being, but people were less inclined to take meaningful political action. The authors rightfully asked if there is a trade-off between feeling good and doing good.

Psychological science on media exposure to traumatic events, like terrorism, can help us consider what to do. Research notes that people who spend the most time viewing media coverage of an event are more likely to experience distress. This suggests moderation, such as watching just the traditional evening news, and or consuming a variety of news sources to challenge our perspectives and biases.

And if a headline seems outrageous, it is likely taking something out of context or is an exaggeration. The rise of artificial intelligence, deep fakes, and disinformation, mandates us to be smarter than our feeds. Recent psychological research notes that if we choose to debunk misinformation with corrective information, we can avoid repeating the popular framing of the false information, as that inadvertently increases a person’s familiarity with, and perceived credibility of, the false claim.

Finally, we can likely learn more and hear more perspectives by being open to changing our minds. This is not flip-flopping, it is growth. It is how we center our humanity.