For most of the 20th century, political science and economics relied on the premise that people base their opinions and choices on facts and logical reasoning. More recently, though, thousands of studies have shown that people rely on emotion and ingrained beliefs far more than they do on objective facts or logic.
To understand persuasion, we must grasp two key psychological principles that are driving political beliefs in democracies around the world: social identity and confirmation bias.
Social identity is the psychology of dividing the world into us versus them, the in-group and the out-group. Science tells us that a great deal of people’s self-image comes from their social identity.
An in-group can be something as uncomplicated as which sports team a person supports. It can be an individual’s family, college, or country. Being part of the group makes people feel good. It enhances pride and self-esteem, and usually there’s nothing wrong with that. But MAGA supporters also enhance their self-image by denigrating them, the out-group. Individuals get an emotional thrill by blaming, discriminating against, or cheering the misfortunes of their out-group.
MAGA is a movement of grievance against non-whites. It employs a myth of white victimhood, an imagined decline from a past greatness supposedly caused by racial, ethnic, religious, or gender minorities, and the liberals who support them. In this way, opponents become enemies, demonized so that MAGA supporters can justify policies that repress and harm them.
This goes beyond simple racism. It requires more than discrimination; it requires debasement. The MAGA system insists that the out-groups deserve punishment, and the in-group should feel the pleasure of inflicting humiliation. (“Ha, ha! Owning the libs!”) MAGA leaders, in turn, praise followers for that crudity, cruelty, and violence, releasing them from all constraints of law, reason, and decency – from hurling inane insults to physically assaulting opponents. No matter who is attacked or who dies, Trump and MAGA never admit wrongdoing or apologize.
We need to understand the thrill MAGA supporters feel. When they celebrate being in the MAGA world, they get a shot of dopamine, the feel-good hormone, in their brains. And when they denigrate MAGA’s opposition, that gives them an even bigger dose. It is like a gambling addict; one thrill makes them want another and another.
A different, but related, way people ignore facts and logic is through cognitive biases that skew human reasoning.
Confirmation bias, one of the oldest-known and best-proven cognitive biases, is the tendency for people to seek out information that confirms what they already believe or want to believe, while simultaneously ignoring or rejecting information that challenges those assumptions.[1] Through this selective use of evidence, people reinforce their own views and can end up misleading themselves.
If people believe that violent crime keeps increasing, they will retain information about recent crimes and disbelieve or ignore the documented fact that crime rates have fallen to historic lows. (See Chapter 11.) If individuals think the Earth is thousands, instead of billions, of years old, they will not believe the truth even when shown fossils in a museum. For that matter, if people are convinced that Friday the 13th is unlucky, they will pay attention and remember when bad things happened on that date, but will forget all the Friday the 13ths when no misfortune occurred.
In short, when faced with facts that strongly contradict their beliefs, people will almost always reject the facts and hold on to their beliefs. That means, if we use language that seems to challenge our listeners’ fundamental beliefs, they will stop listening. If a person thinks we are saying “you’re wrong,” a switch clicks in their brain, turning off rational consideration and turning on negative emotions.
Why do people’s brains work that way?
Humans have two main memory systems, one that reacts instantaneously, reflexively, and emotionally, and another that is deliberate, controls abstract thinking, and stores memories such as facts and events. This second system is the one that’s rational and reflective.
Because the first is a “fight or flight” system that operates in milliseconds, its reactions can override or redirect slower reasoning. So, if your listener’s reflexive system determines that you are attacking an important belief, it will divert thinking away from the rational mechanisms in the brain to emotional ones. Simultaneously, the listener’s mind will cherry-pick memories to reinforce the preexisting belief that seems to be under attack.
Imagine you are discussing voter fraud with a neighbor who believes it’s a problem, and you say, “There is no evidence of any significant voter fraud,” which is unquestionably true. Their brain will perceive your words as an attack, they will feel a strongly negative emotional reaction, they will then remember and focus on the very real-to-them fake news that supports their belief in voter fraud, and you will have no chance to persuade them of anything. Your effort has failed.
As political activists, we wish that we could reason with people and have calm, cool, dispassionate discussions about public policy. But instead, we tend to trigger negative emotional responses in our listeners, reminding them of memories that reinforce those emotions. We are arguing with ghosts from our listeners’ pasts—and often losing.
Clinical psychologist Drew Westen of Emory University used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain activity in political partisans. After engaging test subjects with a series of openly contradictory statements from their own favored candidates, the fMRIs—not too surprisingly—showed that the subjects had not engaged the logical parts of their brains. They had engaged their emotions instead. And then, after rationalizing away legitimate attacks on their favored candidates, the brain’s pleasure center released the neurotransmitter dopamine. As Westen explained in his book The Political Brain:
Once partisans had found a way to reason to false conclusions, not only did neural circuits involved in negative emotions turn off, but circuits involved in positive emotions turned on. The partisan brain didn’t seem satisfied in just feeling better. It worked overtime to feel good, activating reward circuits that give partisans a jolt of positive reinforcement for their biased reasoning. These reward circuits overlap substantially with those activated when drug addicts get their “fix,” giving new meaning to the term political junkie.
This means that when you directly attack preexisting beliefs, not only are your arguments rejected, but you also help emotionally reward partisans for their stubbornness, deepening their attachment to false ideas.
The leaders of the MAGA movement understand this. They know their supporters aren’t seeking the truth, so the truth doesn’t really matter. MAGA supporters are, instead, consciously or unconsciously seeking out information that conforms to their preexisting beliefs. They believe what they want to believe because it literally feels bad to admit one is wrong and feels good to assert one is right.
In sum, MAGA-style social identity and confirmation bias are real psychological processes, similar to addiction. And like a drug or gambling addict or an alcoholic or smoker, supporting Trump and MAGA is a form of self-harm. MAGA policies—like tariffs, cutting the social safety net, and eliminating employment and environmental protections—directly hurt MAGA supporters and their families. MAGA policies drive up costs and drive down incomes. But like people with an addiction, they keep supporting MAGA because it feels good. And they need to feel good because, for some of them, reality can be bleak.
The far right will keep doing what works: using social identity to stoke bigotry—through overt racism, sexism, and religious intolerance, and through coded language designed to appeal to audiences already primed to believe them. And they will keep manufacturing false narratives to audiences they have already convinced that the other side cannot be trusted.
[1] We use this term generically, as others do, to encompass associated labels which describe how people irrationally confirm and defend their beliefs and desires, such as motivated reasoning, desirability bias, and disconfirmation bias.