Nautilus

How You Can Be a Less Politically Polarizing Person

Partisanship doesn’t just affect moral and perceptual judgments—even cold, quantitative reasoning can’t escape its pull. A 2013 study showed that “people with high numeracy skills were unable to reason analytically when the correct answer collided with their political beliefs.”Image by Mushki Brichta / Wikicommons

ne night last month at Union Hall, a bar in Brooklyn, I attended a show put on by the Empiricist League (“A creative community for those who believe in evidence, observation, and experiment”) called “Mind Hacking.” The event description, on Facebook, consisted of a series of questions that I, in a contrarian mood, began to answer pessimistically: “In an increasingly divided world, how can we ‘hack’ our minds to cultivate traits like compassion and trust?” . “How do partisanship and group identity impact our ability to think and analyze, especially in our social media-driven world?” . “Can we train ourselves to be more rational and less.

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Nautilus

Nautilus10 min read
The Ocean Apocalypse Is Upon Us, Maybe
From our small, terrestrial vantage points, we sometimes struggle to imagine the ocean’s impact on our lives. We often think of the ocean as a flat expanse of blue, with currents as orderly, if sinuous, lines. In reality, it is vaster and more chaoti
Nautilus7 min read
Lithium, the Elemental Rebel
Inside every rechargeable battery—in electric cars and phones and robot vacuums—lurks a cosmic mystery. The lithium that we use to power much of our lives these days is so common as to seem almost prosaic. But this element turns out to be a wild card
Nautilus13 min read
The Shark Whisperer
In the 1970s, when a young filmmaker named Steven Spielberg was researching a new movie based on a novel about sharks, he returned to his alma mater, California State University Long Beach. The lab at Cal State Long Beach was one of the first places

Related Books & Audiobooks