How “circles of trust” explain the political divide
Pi Day + eggflation (Issue #287)
Last month, Nichola Raihani — British psychologist and author of The Social Instinct, a book about the history of human cooperation — published a fascinating story on Medium. It made me think differently about why (in the U.S., at least) we’re so divided politically.
A Gallup poll released in January reveals that people have grown more politically extreme in the last 30 years. Even if you compare polls from the last 2–3 years, the number of people who label themselves “very conservative” or “very liberal” is increasing.
Raihani sees political division through a specific lens: circles of trust. We mentioned this briefly in issue #261, but essentially, political differences (in Raihani’s view) come down to how we envision our obligations to people who are not close family or friends. She cites a behavioral study which found that political conservatives “profess greater love for their family, but less love for humanity as a whole (with political liberals showing the opposite pattern).” Conservatives’ circles of trust are smaller (family + township come first); liberals’ circles of trust are larger (love for humanity writ large). By extension, conservatives trust institutions less than liberals, because institutions (e.g. banks, schools, governments) are basically manifestations of care for people beyond your core family/friend group.
For an institution to exist, its users must have a pretty wide circle of trust.
More interestingly, our circles of trust expand and contract over time. If we perceive our institutions as untrustworthy, our circles of trust shrink; if our institutions serve us well, they expand. Raihani concludes: “Our moral boundaries are, therefore, determined as much by the society that we live in as they are by our own personal values and beliefs.”
🥧 Also today…
Tomorrow is Pi Day, a holiday instituted by “Prince of Pi” Larry Shaw — a physicist and artist who worked at San Francisco’s Exploratorium (a science museum) for 33 years. The celebration once featured a parade at 1:59 p.m. (pi’s next 3 digits after 3.14). Everyone in the processional would hold a sign bearing a single digit of pi, and of course… they would eat a ton o’ pie.
On Medium last year, data scientist Eric Silberstein shared 14 “dumb, serious, funny, creative, or boring” ways to calculate pi, like dropping matches at random and counting how many cross a series of equally spaced vertical lines. Another creative (and unexpected) way to calculate pi? Simulate sliding two blocks together. If one of the blocks weighs more than the other by a power of 100, the number of collisions between them will be… pi. This YouTube video demonstrates it better than I can, but it’s kind of magical to watch, proof that pi is hiding all around us — not only in circles, but in oscillations, magnetic fields, and in the way sunlight radiates through space.
🥚 A dose of wisdom
Quick callback to yesterday’s issue on eggflation: the best substitutes for eggs in cooking? Applesauce, mashed bananas, and a “flax egg” (1tbsp ground flax + 2.5tbsp water).
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb
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