In times of anxiety and uncertainty, humans tend to split the world into good and evil. It’s a natural tendency, a way to feel more comfortable, says best-selling author Amanda Ripley.

Today, you see it among many, many millions of people because there’s a lot of anxiety about the future and fear about the present. We assume that the other side is more extreme than it is, partly because we hear so much from them. 95% of political tweets are written by around 10% of users, so we extrapolate and assume everyone on the other side thinks a certain way.

This tendency, which is very understandable, to split the world into good and evil, us and them, can give us short-term comfort. It may temporarily feel good, but it causes us to make a lot of mistakes in the long term. Here’s why we should avoid seeing the world in such stark divides.

AMANDA RIPLEY: - In times of anxiety and uncertainty, humans tend to split the world into good and evil. It's a very natural tendency, a way to feel more comfortable. Today, you see it among many, many millions of people because there's a lot of anxiety about the future and fear about the present. We assume that the other side is more extreme than it is, partly because we hear so much from them. 95% of political tweets are written by something like 10% of users, so we of course, extrapolate and assume everyone on the other side thinks a certain way. This tendency, which is very understandable, to split the world into good and evil, us and them, can give us short-term comfort. It feels good, it really does, but we make a lot of mistakes in the long term. You can't really divide a country into two camps. For example, there's a research group called More In Common in the United States and around the world, and they've done some really cool research on the American voter, and what they found is really there aren't two groups. There's about at least seven groups of American voters, so there's all different motivations and reasons and fears and hopes in there. Like, for example, if you look at the polling data over decades of how Americans feel about abortion, what you see is incredible complexity. People will answer differently on different days if the question is phrased slightly differently. People do not fit neatly into a pro or anti-abortion camp. People have really complicated feelings about abortion, and many people don't know what the right answer is. Most of us aren't sure what to think about everything, but we don't really see that modeled anywhere, right? You're supposed to know for sure, and there's very little intellectual humility on social media or on TV. This distortion effect causes us to misidentify and misunderstand both our enemies and our leaders and our heroes. We make a lot of mistakes, and eventually, we start to destroy the thing we went into the fight to protect, and we begin to mimic the behavior of our opponents without even realizing it. What we know from the research on emotion and conflict is that anger is okay, anger is generative. Anger's a signal that I want you to be better, but contempt and disgust and hatred, those are really hard to work with, because they signal that I have given up on you, and that is where violence becomes really, really likely to happen. As the conflict entrepreneurs get and louder, and as they get elected into office, and as they are handed huge megaphones on social media, then it becomes very hard to know what is representative of a group or what is one loud mouth who happens to have the biggest microphone. What we find is, and this is actually really good news, is that when you tell people that this is a mistake and what the real facts are, people actually reduce the amount that they hate the other side, so it is a treatment, so to speak, for high conflict, to just inform people, which is what ideally journalism would be doing to help people understand each other better as they really are. The number one antidote to splitting is to have relationships with people who aren't like you, who look differently than you or vote differently than you or pray differently than you. The more you can engage in those conversations and really cultivate healthy conflict on purpose, which is getting harder to do, but is possible, the more immune you're going to be to conflict entrepreneurs, to splitting, to humiliation, to all the things that tend to spark really destructive, malignant conflict.