Political Parties & In-Group Bias

Artifact #4: These graphs demonstrate the amount of democrats in the study who transferred money to those in their in-group (people who voted for the same candidate as them) and out-group (people who supported a different political candidate) in the dictator game during the 2008 election cycle. There were clearly a lot more transfers to members of one’s in-group who supported the same political candidate, until after the DNC. This is proof that in-group favoritism clearly exists in politics, and is so strong that it can impact the course of an election. More significantly, this was just looking at the division within the democratic party itself–which means healing the divide from the 2020 election, between two completely separate political parties, will take much more time.

Artifact #5: This is a New York Times Instagram post from November 15th, showing pro-Trump and anti-Trump protestors at a protest. You can see a visible, physical line in this picture between each group. This is a very clear example of the division between political parties, or those who support different political candidates, in America today. On one side is all Trump supporters, and on the other is people opposing Trump. Both sides are screaming at each other, clearly not attempting to any sort of mutual understanding. This is relevant to my podcast because it is a visual demonstration of just how huge the curent political divide is, and how hard it will be to mend. This also took place after Joe Biden had been called the winner of the election, meaning that the concluding results were not even enough to make people band together.