Community Conformity: Who Is In Your Voting Booth?

Politically America is a highly divided nation along several dimensions. That there are divisions on various issues and topics is not especially surprising. We are a democracy after all; and with that social structure comes a certain natural level of different views on what the right or best answers, policies, and social norms should be. Our current divisiveness however seems super-charged and dangerously excessive. There are many reasons for the toxicity polluting our political landscape and threating to render our national and societal environment unable to sustain a democracy. The politicians and political parties have focused all their energies on “either-or” politics. On every issue, their separate views don’t just differ but they hold that the nation or the whole world suffers a loss if their own side doesn’t win. Either it is their way, or it is the wrong way. Of course, if they don’t individually win then they won’t have the position and power that they personally desire; and the political party won’t have the power that it requires to be able to abide by its ideologies or that of those who pay them to hold those ideologies. This ‘win at all costs’ motivation requires that they thus obtain sufficient voters which necessitates getting those voters to align with their messages and ideological views. Politics requires your party have its adherents. Fortunately for politicians this is not as difficult as one might first think. And if thinking were required after all, that would significantly challenge politicians.

This is where divisiveness comes in, and where human nature plays a role. One factor energizing the divisions is a natural human social dynamic: the need to belong. We are a social animal. To survive and to thrive we need a community to live in, groups to be part of. We need our tribe(s). All the benefits that humans have acquired and the progress that we have made comes from this collective existence. If it were just that simple, then we would all be living in a paradise. Since we are not, there must be some other aspects of our human nature or our tribes that prevents communal bliss.

An extreme example of this political divisiveness is playing out before our eyes. The Jan. 6th Congressional hearings are engaged in Act Three of this dramatic “case study” in how our individual needs for belonging come into conflict with the different groups that we seek to be members of, with our own individual views/opinions, and with the aspirational goals of our democracy. What do these competing dimensions portend for our poor politicians, political parties, and unfortunately us? Maybe if we asked ourselves a few questions, we might at least see how tenuous the need to belong is when viewed through a set of “either-or” political alignment lens. The political parties want, in fact need, you to think and believe that there is just a choice between belonging to “us” or to “them”. Certainly, there are some who can only see the world and issues through those lens, just as there are color-blind individuals who cannot see what a full-sighted person can. There are even some individuals who have an additional visual physical capacity that enables them to see ‘colors’ that the rest of us cannot.

These questions may offer some informative insights into your own “need” to belong, which makes the answers perhaps more revealing about where one falls along a spectrum of “community conformity” to fulfill that need.

Regardless of your political alignment or non-alignment, consider that your answers themselves are a measure of the human need to belong.

Question 1: Are you or do you consider yourself a Democrat or a Republican or align, lean, or tend to one party because of their ideological principles?

Question 2: Do you live in a community where almost everyone is of the same political orientation, and/or of the same religious group, and/or of the same ethnic or racial background?

Question 3: Have you ever voted for a US President, Senator, or Representative that is not of your political party?

Question 4: When someone, even a family member, doesn’t support one or more of your most important strongly held beliefs, opinions, or social policies do you actively avoid them, dismiss them, or eliminate them from your life? If your alternative response is to argue and fight with them every time you get together, how does it affect the likelihood of your seeing them?

Question 5: You know the ‘rules’ that everyone in your social group(s), religious group, sports group(s), professional group, or political group follow when together; but when at home or not with members of a particular group, do you act according to those ‘rules’ or to your personal view of those ‘rules’ or don’t follow them yourself?

Answer to Question 1: If you don’t know the answer to this question, it explains a lot about US politics Some of you are Republican or Republican-tilted, some are Democrats or Democrat-leaning; and some of you are not either. The reason for this question is that it provides context for the answers to other questions.

Answer to Question 2: Another context question. How varied your community is on any dimension or number of dimensions is specific to you and your particular circumstances. Those characteristics of your community defines the nature of the societal environment in which you live and interact. It creates some centers of gravity for what makes “belonging” in the community easy, hard, or problematic. It is that “belongingness” and how it manifests itself in your thinking, behaviors, and decisions that is of interest. There is human need to ‘belong’ and that has implications for many things.

Answer to Question 3: Some have, some have not, and some have no choice. The question isn’t really about have you done it or not. Rather, there can be many reasons for why you did or do; and some of these can be attributed to how your need to “belong” operates within what your own beliefs are and how they do or don’t fit within your community’s beliefs and attitudes.

Answer to Question 4: There are a number of different responses; and those responses can range from how the community responds or to how individuals respond. The community can ostracize an outlier, which can have consequences to one’s business/employment, social interactions, or to future prospects. The community can also act more aggressively toward someone who doesn’t comply with the views and norms of the community. Individuals’ reactions can vary to deviations from community expectations, but it is the aggregate reactions which form the community’s approval or disapproval toward anyone, even you, that isn’t seen to be appropriately aligning with the community.

The relevance of such community reactions to how members of the community conform is an important aspect of what it means to “belong”. Meeting that human need to ‘belong’ and how a community that you want to belong to reacts to individual’s actions, views, and decisions can create a public reality on a question or issue versus a private reality on that same question or issue. This misaligning of the group’s view from the individuals’ own views can lead to decision and consequences which are distortions of what most individuals in a community privately agree with or even approve of. It can suppress any questioning or discussion of a issue or topic.

Answer to Question 5: It’s the rare individual who doesn’t alter their behavior(s) and views when not actively among other members of one of their communities. Whether this is just when they are alone or with their own family or when they have left the sphere of influence of one community and entered the sphere of influence of another’s. People have learned to be quite adaptive in their behavior, demeanor, and opinion in order to ‘fit in’ with the people (community) that they are in, especially the more important it Is to them to “belong”.

So, Why does this Matter?

It matters because the need to ‘belong’ operates in virtually every context in which we humans exist. “Belonging” is a factor in forming us. Your family shapes you. Your neighborhood shapes you. Your friends, school(s), sports, religion, culture, work, and of course politics shape you. All these communities cross-influence each other of course. And this is where the politically divided America that was noted at the start is important. Our politics while being one dimension of our community, it is and has been increasingly playing a more and more influential role in our lives, society, and government. This is not unexpected if we consider that there are many communities that are very monolithic in nature. We have states that are highly uniform on factors like: race, religion, culture, and political alignment; and within these states communities which are even more monolithic. “Belonging” in these states, and especially in the concentrated communities, necessitates adopting at least the appearance of agreement on the views and attitudes of the community.

This is where politics has seized the power of ‘belonging’. Find issues and attitudes which resonate with some members of a community, and you can use those issues to politically dominate the community. By making an issue or view as a criterion for ‘belonging’, you gain political control. It doesn’t mean that everyone in the community or even most people in the community agree with the political position, issue, or view. What is important is that there is no public display of disagreement or rejection of these community positions and views on those salient issues.

But at home, these issues may not be of interest or relevance to individuals. The positions and views are not just discounted, they are dismissed and disregarded. At home, you can violate the community norms as you want. This same anonymity applies within the voting booth. The point being, in a community population there are some members who don’t support what the community thinks everyone supports. Think of all the political issues which may be distorted by the community’s views versus the views of individuals who follow the public’s view in public but their own view outside the community when its ‘belonging’ expectations are not at risk. This “going along to get along” behavior helps to be accepted among your community members, but it is vulnerable to what the private individuals think and do that is unknown to the community.

A successful democracy depends upon both the conformity to community norms and the independent behavior of individuals. The difficulty is finding the proper mix, so that ideological views don’t become the tyranny of the mob, or worse the politicians and political parties.