I began practicing psychotherapy during the Reagan administration. Thirty years went by before distress about politics became a clinical issue for any of my clients.

I remember the moment it first happened: There was a long voicemail from a distraught woman requesting therapy for anxiety and depression in reaction to the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump. I listened twice to make sure I hadn’t missed something. I hadn’t. There were no other issues. This woman wanted therapy for political distress.

That was a new one for me and every therapist I knew. But now I see no sign of this clinical challenge abating.

Political polarization in the U.S. is at the highest level ever measured. Growing majorities of both Republicans and Democrats say they consider members of the other party to be unintelligent, dishonest and immoral.

What I’m calling political distress is a bipartisan mental health problem. It is based on a belief that, because the country is in the hands of bad leaders, awful things might happen. Many people experience intense fear about what the other side might do. Both Republicans and Democrats have experienced this anguish, but it peaks at different times for the two parties, depending on who won the last election.

We psychotherapists like to base our interventions on research-based strategies that have been vetted in clinical trials or, if not that, at least strategies grounded in the clinical expertise of master therapists who wrote classic books. There’s none of that for how to deal with political distress.

But therapists cannot tell a client in distress that future research is needed before we can help. Instead, we pull from what is known about how best to handle related issues. Here’s the advice I’m sharing with my clients who are upset about the way the world is going.

Taking a longer view

Information about American history is relevant to political distress because, psychologically, people evaluate their situations by comparing them with anchors or norms. You compare current dangers and threats with what you’ve faced and survived in the past.

A Democrat comparing today’s United States with the country a decade ago may feel gloomy. But broader comparisons can produce a more grounded, calming perspective.

The U.S. has faced major trials and tribulations over the course of its history. The country has proven itself to be a resilient democracy. Basic information about the Civil War, the Great Depression and World War II yields a sense that the present political moment is not the only perilous time our republic has ever faced.

The Serenity Prayer is an effective summary of research on coping. As I discuss in my book “Finding Goldilocks,” the well-known invocation identifies two basic strategies and tells you when to use which one. People need the strength to change what can be changed and the serenity to accept what cannot. Political distress, like many stressors, calls for a combination of both tactics.

Doing what you can means funneling political anxiety into political actions, including voting, volunteering, donating money and serving as a poll worker. Can one person’s actions make a difference? They can make one person’s worth of difference. You can’t do everything, but you can do something.

In addition, taking action about a problem, even if it does not produce a solution, often reduces distress, especially if it brings you together with like-minded people.

Once you’ve done what you can, it’s important to acknowledge how much is beyond your control: The whole world doesn’t rest on your shoulders alone. Then you can in good conscience turn your attention to the good things in your own personal life.

It helps to limit your consumption of political news; past a certain point, you’re not learning anything new and just fueling your agitation.

The best things in life aren’t political

One basic tool of cognitive therapy for anxiety is asking the question, “What is the worst thing that could plausibly happen?” The purpose of this question is not to get anxious people thinking about worst-case scenarios – they’re doing that already – but to move their thought process forward to a picture of how they could survive their worst fear. This is a strangely effective form of reassurance.

Democrats believe Donald Trump’s second administration will hurt people. But with important exceptions – such as undocumented immigrants who could be deported – when many people try to picture exactly how their lives will be damaged in specific, concrete, serious ways, they usually do not come up with much.

This does not mean nothing bad will happen. It does mean you likely can cope with whatever does. While Trump’s policies might be unfortunate and even infuriating for those on the other side of the aisle, they are unlikely to be disastrous on an immediate, day-to-day level for large groups of people.

A very broad perspective will remind you that democracy is a rarity in world history. For most of civilization, people have lived in monarchies or tyrannies of some sort, and most of them managed to be OK.

I’m not suggesting that people disengage from the political world. I believe it’s important to stand up for what you believe is right. My advice is not to put on your rose-colored glasses and withdraw into your own safe space, the rest of the world be damned.

But the main sources of human well-being are family, friends, meaningful work, hobbies, the arts, nature, spirituality and acts of kindness. None of these depend on political systems. We can cope with political distress by falling back on the best things in life.

Jeremy P. Shapiro is an adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychological Sciences, Case Western Reserve University. This article is republished from The Conversation.

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced big changes in how the company addresses misinformation across Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Instead of relying on independent third-party factcheckers, Meta will now emulate Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) in using “community notes”. These crowdsourced contributions allow users to flag content they believe is questionable.

Zuckerberg claimed these changes promote “free expression”. But some experts worry he’s bowing to right-wing political pressure, and will effectively allow a deluge of hate speech and lies to spread on Meta platforms.

Research on the group dynamics of social media suggests those experts have a point.

At first glance, community notes might seem democratic, reflecting values of free speech and collective decisions. Crowdsourced systems such as Wikipedia, Metaculus and PredictIt, though imperfect, often succeed at harnessing the wisdom of crowds — where the collective judgement of many can sometimes outperform even experts.

Research shows that diverse groups that pool independent judgements and estimates can be surprisingly effective at discerning the truth. However, wise crowds seldom have to contend with social media algorithms.

Many people rely on platforms such as Facebook for their news, risking exposure to misinformation and biased sources. Relying on social media users to police information accuracy could further polarise platforms and amplify extreme voices.

Two group-based tendencies — our psychological need to sort ourselves and others into groups — are of particular concern: in-group/out-group bias and acrophily (love of extremes).

INGROUP / OUTGROUP BIAS

Humans are biased in how they evaluate information. People are more likely to trust and remember information from their in-group — those who share their identities — while distrusting information from perceived out-groups. This bias leads to echo chambers, where like-minded people reinforce shared beliefs, regardless of accuracy.

It may feel rational to trust family, friends or colleagues over strangers. But in-group sources often hold similar perspectives and experiences, offering little new information. Out-group members, on the other hand, are more likely to provide diverse viewpoints. This diversity is critical to the wisdom of crowds.

But too much disagreement between groups can prevent community fact-checking from even occurring. Many community notes on X (formerly Twitter), such as those related to COVID vaccines, were likely never shown publicly because users disagreed with one another. The benefit of third-party factchecking was to provide an objective outside source, rather than needing widespread agreement from users across a network.

Worse, such systems are vulnerable to manipulation by well organised groups with political agendas. For instance, Chinese nationalists reportedly mounted a campaign to edit Wikipedia entries related to China-Taiwan relations to be more favourable to China.

POLITICAL POLARISATION AND ACROPHILY

Indeed, politics intensifies these dynamics. In the US, political identity increasingly dominates how people define their social groups.

Political groups are motivated to define “the truth” in ways that advantage them and disadvantage their political opponents. It’s easy to see how organised efforts to spread politically motivated lies and discredit inconvenient truths could corrupt the wisdom of crowds in Meta’s community notes.

Social media accelerates this problem through a phenomenon called acrophily, or a preference for the extreme. Research shows that people tend to engage with posts slightly more extreme than their own views.

These increasingly extreme posts are more likely to be negative than positive. Psychologists have known for decades that bad is more engaging than good. We are hardwired to pay more attention to negative experiences and information than positive ones.

On social media, this means negative posts – about violence, disasters and crises – get more attention, often at the expense of more neutral or positive content.

Those who express these extreme, negative views gain status within their groups, attracting more followers and amplifying their influence. Over time, people come to think of these slightly more extreme negative views as normal, slowly moving their own views toward the poles.

A recent study of 2.7 million posts on Facebook and Twitter found that messages containing words such as “hate”, “attack” and “destroy” were shared and liked at higher rates than almost any other content. This suggests that social media isn’t just amplifying extreme views — it’s fostering a culture of out-group hate that undermines the collaboration and trust needed for a system like community notes to work.

THE PATH FORWARD

The combination of negativity bias, in-group/out-group bias and acrophily supercharges one of the greatest challenges of our time: polarisation. Through polarisation, extreme views become normalised, eroding the potential for shared understanding across group divides.

The best solutions, which I examine in my forthcoming book, The Collective Edge, start with diversifying our information sources. First, people need to engage with — and collaborate across — different groups to break down barriers of mistrust. Second, they must seek information from multiple, reliable news and information outlets, not just social media.

However, social media algorithms often work against these solutions, creating echo chambers and trapping people’s attention. For community notes to work, these algorithms would need to prioritise diverse, reliable sources of information.

While community notes could theoretically harness the wisdom of crowds, their success depends on overcoming these psychological vulnerabilities. Perhaps increased awareness of these biases can help us design better systems — or empower users to use community notes to promote dialogue across divides. Only then can platforms move closer to solving the misinformation problem.

(Author: Colin M. Fisher, Associate Professor of Organisations and Innovation and Author of “The Collective Edge: Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups”, UCL)

(Disclosure Statement: Colin M. Fisher does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)