An us vs them mentality is the habit of sorting people into a group you trust and a group you do not, and then reading everything they do through that sorting. It is normal, it is fast, and it costs almost nothing until the line runs through your own family.
The reason it does so much damage at close range is that the sorting was never designed for people you already love. It works on strangers, where the shortcut is cheap. Applied to a brother, it converts thirty years of evidence about who he is into one data point about which side he is on.
What the sorting actually is
It is group identity doing its ordinary job, which is to tell you quickly who is likely to be on your side. The uncomfortable finding from decades of social psychology is how little it takes to start it. People assigned to groups on a coin toss, with nothing at stake and no history, begin favouring their own within minutes.
Which means the content of the group is close to irrelevant to the mechanism. A football club, a school, a nationality and a political party all run on the same hardware. This matters for a practical reason: if you assume the intensity is coming from the importance of the issue, you will keep trying to settle the issue, and settling it will not release anything.
The step that turns ordinary group feeling into something corrosive is moralisation. Researchers describe modern political division as a combination of three ingredients: othering, treating the other side as fundamentally different; aversion, actively disliking them; and moralisation, regarding them as immoral rather than merely mistaken. [finkel-sectarianism] The first two are survivable at a dinner table. The third is not, because a moral judgement about somebody’s character does not have an off switch.
Why it lands in families and stays there
Because families cannot exit, and everything that would normally dissipate the feeling depends on exit. Two colleagues who dislike each other politically simply see less of each other. A parent and an adult child cannot, so the friction is repeated on a schedule at Christmas, birthdays and Sundays, and each repetition is read as confirmation.
There is a second reason, less obvious and more important. Inside a family, the disagreement is not really about the policy. It is about whether the person who raised you, or the person you raised, turns out to hold a view you find shameful, which is a question about the whole relationship rather than about the view. That is why these arguments escalate so much faster than the equivalent argument with a stranger. Far more is being tested.
A schematic of the shift described in this article, not measured data.
The practical consequence is that winning the argument does nothing, because the argument was a proxy. People sense this, which is why the same conversation can be had eleven times without either side updating.
What the research measures, and what it does not
The measured finding is that hostility across party lines is automatic rather than reasoned. Work published in 2015 tested party feeling in the United States using implicit measures as well as surveys and behavioural tasks, and found partisan hostility present on the fast, non-deliberate measures, at a strength comparable to some measures of racial hostility. [iyengar-westwood]
Three limits on that are worth stating, because this finding gets overextended. It was conducted in one country with a two-party system, and the strength of the effect does not transfer automatically elsewhere. Implicit measures show a fast association rather than a fixed belief, and they predict behaviour less reliably than the headlines suggest. And it describes an average, not you.
What it does establish is the thing most people get wrong about themselves in these arguments: the reaction arrives before the reasoning does. You do not choose to feel the flare when a relative says the thing. You choose what happens next, which is a much smaller decision and a much more useful one.
The name is not the cause
The name people give when asked what split their family is almost always a politician’s, and in the United States since 2016 that name is most often Donald Trump. The research points the other way round: the group psychology described above is older than any current figure, works identically on people who have never heard of them, and would be running on some other label in their absence.
This is not a defence of anybody or a claim that the politics does not matter. It is a claim about what to do on a Sunday afternoon. If a person is the cause, then the only route back to your family runs through changing their mind about him, which is a project with no completion date and a poor record. If the mechanism is group identity attaching to whatever label is available, then there are things you can do this week that do not require anybody to concede anything.
It also explains something that surprises people: the same split, with the same intensity, appears in countries with entirely different politicians and entirely different issues. The furniture changes and the shape does not.
What helps, and what quietly makes it worse
Most of the standard advice is aimed at the disagreement, which is the wrong target. The interventions that hold a relationship together are aimed at the structure around it.
| Instead of | Do this |
|---|---|
| Hoping everybody has the tact to avoid it | A named, explicit agreement about which two or three subjects are off |
| Sending evidence and articles | Asking what happened to them or to somebody they know, and not replying |
| Arguing until somebody concedes | Ending the exchange at the first character judgement, by either of you |
| Reducing contact to holidays only | Short, frequent, activity-based contact with no unstructured talking time |
| Waiting for them to apologise for a view | Repairing the last specific rudeness, which is a thing that can be done |
The agreement is the load-bearing item, and it fails in a predictable way: one person makes it silently and expects the other to observe it. It has to be stated out loud, apply to both of you, and include what happens when it is broken, which should be a change of subject rather than a second argument about the rule.
The other half is harder and matters more. A relationship that consists of carefully not mentioning one subject is still mostly about that subject. Something else has to be actively built, which usually means an activity rather than a conversation, because activities generate new material and conversations recycle the old. [apa-relationships-usthem]
If the strain is mostly about how much of the conflict you are carrying rather than about any particular relative, our piece on political anxiety covers the intake habits that keep it topped up, and the relationships guide covers the wider picture. Where the pattern is one person consistently redefining what happened, that is a different problem and is covered in emotional manipulation.
When to seek help
Speak to a therapist if a family relationship has narrowed to nothing but this, if contempt has become the normal register rather than an occasional lapse, or if you are considering cutting contact and want to do it deliberately rather than in a bad week. Individual therapy is a reasonable starting point; family therapy is worth asking for by name where more than two people are involved and the pattern is entrenched.
Go sooner if the conflict is affecting your sleep or your work, if you are drinking more, or if you have started avoiding people generally rather than one person specifically. Where there is intimidation or abuse, the political content is not the issue and the safety question comes first.
Contact your local emergency services or a crisis helpline if you feel unsafe or have thoughts of harming yourself.
How MyFreud can help
MyFreud is a mobile app that helps you find solutions to problems that have affected your mind and productivity. Live coaching sessions are useful here specifically because the coach has no stake in the argument and no relationship to protect, so the conversation can be about what you want the relationship to look like rather than about who was right, and each session ends with an actionable plan. Daily tracking shows whether the strain tracks contact with one person or tracks the news cycle, which are different problems with different answers. The notepad is where the explicit agreement gets written down in words you can actually say out loud.
Download MyFreud and start today: App Store or Google Play.