What drives the Trumper herd mentality?
Peer pressure and social forces — longing to belong — play a determinative role in why Republicans and especially Trump supporters are impervious to reality, researchers say.
This is evident in people’s responses to both the pandemic and Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud. In an article published on November 19, 2020 (read it here), USA Today reported,
“Experts says partisanship is not just a political identity, it’s a social one. The views people express signal which political group they belong to. If what it means to be a Republican now is to not worry about COVID-19 and not wear a mask, then people who identify as Republican feel they must embrace that”
or risk exclusion or rejection from the group. The same phenomenon is seen with respect to the unproven and sometimes ridiculous claims and conspiracy theories about the election; in an article published on November 22, 2020 (read it here), ABC News reported,
“Since Election Day, numerous false allegations of fraud have been published on social media and repeated elsewhere, most of which have been easily debunked, yet a large swath of the population still appears to believe them. According to a recent poll roughly three-quarters (77%) of Trump backers say former Vice President Joe Biden’s election win was due to fraud despite there being no evidence to back this up. So what is it about the human psyche that makes us so susceptible to disinformation?
“’The short answer is that it has less to do with the content of the information and more to do with the social identity of the person,’ Dannagal Young, political psychologist and associate professor at the University of Delaware, told ABC News. ‘What’s driving some of these inclinations is about who these people feel they are, what groups they’re associated with, who they identify as and who they identify with.'”
This isn’t news to people who grasp the enormous influence of culture on human behavior, and why seemingly intelligent people say and do things that defy rationality. The people who burned “witches” at the stake weren’t ignorant clods, and anyone who knows anything about war is aware that soldiers fight for their buddies, not for causes. Paratroopers jump out of planes, despite their natural fear, because their buddies are doing it (read about that here). So, too, defying pandemic edicts and buying into Trump’s lies are all about belonging to a group and conforming to its norms, and most people will do that even when it requires ignoring plain realities, because no one wants to be unfriended and cast out of the only tribe they know.
Photo above: No thinking person associates Trump with Jesus, so something else is behind this behavior. Below: scene from the movie ‘Doctor Zhivago’ showing Yevgraf (Tom Courtenay) leading a charge from the trenches.