A culture of conflict

Much was made of the red-blue divide during the recent U.S. election. It's worth taking a look at work done by University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett, who has examined cultural differences in cognition and published a book a few years back.

In another experiment described in the book, Nisbett and colleagues found that Americans respond to contradiction by polarizing their beliefs...

Polarization of the electorate would seem to have been eminently predictable.