David McRaney is an internationally bestselling author, journalist and lecturer who created the You Are Not So Smart blog, books and podcast. He is working on a third book about how minds are made up and how they can change.

Americans like to imagine that their views are independent from their surroundings, but the way you vote in the next election will be heavily influenced by where you brush your teeth and shower the day that election occurs.

“Mississippi consistently votes more Republican than San Francisco, and it’s not because people with Republican temperaments moved to Mississippi and people with Democratic temperaments moved to San Francisco,” says University of British Columbia psychologist Steven J. Heine. “There is a set of historical experiences in these different regions that shape the kinds of concerns that people have.”


The power of our locations to affect our politics is of particular importance in the United States, which has always been a nation of people constantly packing boxes and exchanging house keys. In a recent Gallup survey, 24 percent of Americans reported that they had moved to a new home in the last five years, compared to around nine percent in the European Union and about five percent in China.

We’ve traditionally imagined that those transplants will slowly become accustomed to eating new foods and cheering for new sports teams but will bring with them the ideas and beliefs of their hometowns. But experts now say that people likely form new identities once they move, and may even shed their old ones.

Hazel Markus, a social psychologist and the Davis-Brack professor in the behavioral sciences at Stanford University, tells me if you live in Mississippi and you move to San Francisco, you will develop a “San Francisco self,” one that will make different decisions about everything from voting to what kinds of food you shouldn’t eat.

“You can develop a new self, yes,” says Heine. “We are very much influenced by the places where we live. That’s because it shapes who we talk to, the media we encounter. We are influenced a great deal by the people around us, and that can have this persistent psychological change.”

“It would not be wrong at all” to assume moving to a new state or country could change your political ideology over time, says Markus. She adds that more studies needs to be done on the subject, but that it “almost has to be true” because you’re switching out the people in your neighborhood, workplace, gym and so on. The new people “are going to have different ideas, and different answers” when you discuss political topics, and that will change your worldview. Some may stick to outsider colonies after a move, like churches or political clubs, but most won’t.

A change in political attitudes becomes much more likely “when the individual moves from her more congenial environment to a new one in which she has less social support for her old views,” says Marjorie Hershey, a political science professor at Indiana University. “For instance, a liberal Democrat who marries into a conservative Republican family and gets a job with a small business may slowly see the good points of the conservative philosophy. These things don't tend to happen quickly, though, and sometimes they don't happen at all.”

Heine adds that this shedding of an old political persona for a new one isn’t simple or easy, and it tends to get more difficult the older you become, like learning a language. Older individuals will often find the acculturation much more stressful than youngsters, and it can take years, but in the end, Heine says, most “people are going to ultimately be persuaded by the dominant views around them.” Those who can’t assimilate often return home. The result is that the blue states stay blue and the red states stay red.

“We like to think of ourselves as autonomous, as independent, that ‘I’m going to decide what’s going to influence me. I’m in control,’” says Markus. “We don’t like the idea of cultural shaping.” Americans’ conviction that they are in control of their beliefs is known in psychology as “culture blindness.” It’s a form of naive realism, a state of mind that causes people to think they see the world as it truly is and that other people would agree with them if given access to same information.

In their book, Clash!: How to Thrive in a Multicultural World, Markus and her co-author, cultural scientist Alana Conner, explain that cultural blindness is a prominent feature of independent cultures like that of the United States, which tends to focus on internal character traits over environmental factors when explaining human behavior.

“The Western idea of the individual is that you should be separate from the context, from the physical context, from the human context,” says Markus. “You should be independent from that, and you should not be unduly influenced by that context. That, in many ways, is the whole idea of the West, the idea of being a free individual who could govern oneself.”

To understand something, Western thinkers have usually preferred to disassemble it as one would a machine, to understand how its parts fit together. Eastern philosophers took a different approach, imagining the human mind less like a clock, whose behavior can be traced to the parts whirling inside, and more like a living thing, whose behavior is the combination of forces from both within and without. As a result, people who grow up in Eastern cultures are generally more conscious of human interdependence and therefore less culturally blind.

“Your environment, where you’ve grown up, where you are living now, the local neighborhoods, the interactions that you have there, the ideas that are prevalent there, the ways of doing everything there, that shapes us so powerfully, and we seldom pay attention to that—especially if we are not mobile,” says Markus. “If you’ve lived in a place, grown up, gone to school nearby, gotten a job nearby, stayed in a place, then your zip code is not apparent to you; it’s water to a fish, it’s not there.”

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The origins of America’s red vs. blue divide can be traced back to the histories’ of Northern and Southern states. Psychologist Dov Cohen, now at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, put together a study that produced probably the finest example of how historic experiences lead to such powerful cultural divisions.

“Cultures often outlive whatever the material basis was for that culture,” says Cohen. “There are lots of examples of cultures that live on past whatever created them.”

Considering that, Cohen and his colleagues gathered a group of men from the American North and South for an experiment. The hypothesis was that modern people in the South would have unknowingly absorbed the cultural norms required to survive in that region generations ago.

When they arrived at Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, the subjects believed they had agreed to be part of a study measuring how quickly people could solve word problems. In truth, the response time story was a cover for the real research, which involved asking the men to fill out a preliminary questionnaire and place it on a table at the other end of a long, narrow hallway. A filing cabinet made the hallway even tighter for a few feet. When each man began his walk down the hallway, paperwork in hand, an actor appeared, pulled out a drawer in the file cabinet and pretended to be lost in thought. When the subject approached, the actor begrudgingly pushed in the drawer to make space. As soon as the man passed, the actor went back to work. Then came the crucial moment. After the subject dropped off his paperwork and turned around to make the return trip, the actor pretended to become upset after realizing he would have to make space a second time. The actor then slammed the cabinet shut, purposefully shoulder bumped each man, called him an “asshole” and promptly disappeared into a side room.

The psychologists found that subjects from the North tended to respond to the bump and the insult with amusement. They saw the angry person as laughable and the situation as silly. The Southerners reacted differently. For them, the insult was infuriating, and in the moment it produced pronounced changes to their faces and body language, which were not present in the Northern subjects.

In later runs of the experiment, the psychologists tested the men’s cortisol and testosterone levels, hormones associated with stress and aggression. After the insult, Southerners’ levels of cortisol rose nearly 80 percent, while Northerners rose 33 percent. Similarly, testosterone levels rose 12 percent in Southerners and six percent in Northerners.

Looking at the evidence, the researchers concluded that even at the unconscious and biological level Southerners and Northerners reacted differently. They wrote, “Southerners became upset and prepared for aggression on the physiological level.” The Northerners, on the other hand, “were hardly affected by the insult.”

Cohen and his coauthors speculated that Southerners responded differently than Northerners because the original settlers of the American South were primarily herders. As the researchers explained, people whose very existence depends on tending herds of animals “must be willing to use force to protect themselves and their property when law enforcement is inadequate and when one’s wealth can be rustled away.” Cohen’s team wrote that these cultural norms only got stronger once settlers began to populate the frontier South, a place even more lawless. In that environment, they wrote, people couldn’t afford to let little insults go without a response. Even with small matters, “retribution had to follow as a warning to the community.” You push me; I’ll push back ten times harder.

The Southerners in the study didn’t choose to feel angry at the insult, and they assumed their automatic reactions were justified, not that they were unique to citizens of red states. Even today, Cohen says, Southerners reading about his study ask him why the Northerners were such wimps. In their minds, it’s the North that makes people soft, not that the South that gives people a hair-trigger temper.

“We don’t realize how deeply encultured we all are,” says Cohen. “We tend to think the way we are is the way humans are and other people are the ones who got socialized. We don’t realize how deeply we got socialized. A completely neutral person doesn’t exist. I can’t even imagine such an organism.”

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In the United States, we typically believe that our political disagreements can be blamed on our opponents’ misinformation or just plain ignorance. But in recent years, journalists and scientists have used a slew of pop-science bestsellers and well-rehearsed TED Talks to start a conversation about the genetic origins of our ideologies.

“What your attention is drawn to daily is all the fascinating work with genes. There is so much more attention in media to what is inside us and trying to track that down as the source of our behavior than there is to the context,” says Markus. “That’s not to say that what’s on the inside isn’t important. I think nobody today wants to deny the impact of genes and neurons and hormones. We are finding more and more, and that’s terrific, but that’s at best half the story.”

A society that’s culturally blind, Markus says, will tend to focus on character traits, often to a fault. In their book, Markus and Conner contrast independent and interdependent cultures by detailing how English and Chinese-language newspapers differ in their reporting of mass murders. In Western media, typically more culturally blind, a murderer was described as being “disturbed” and “sinister,” terms inferring his mental state. When covering the same story, Chinese-language newspapers described the murderer in terms of his situation at the time of the incident, detailing relationships and conditions at his job.

“[Americans] think that we are basically the same across the world with some occasional difference here and there, as you can see this sometimes gets us into trouble,” says Cohen. “The whole foreign policy under George W. Bush assumed that everyone is like we are and likes what we do, that we would be seen as liberators in Iraq.”

“When you encounter someone who is living with a different set of norms, they are going to not look as good as your norms,” says Heine. “You are going to think of your way of doing things as better, and their way as inferior. Historically, people from other cultures have been called things like ‘barbarians’ because there is this idea that there are backwards people out there. It is so common that this is considered a human universal.”

As cultural psychology begins to rise to the surface of our awareness, especially in the United States, it may provide a much-needed balance to this worldview. “Culture is a product of human agency, it is a product of us," says Markus.

“Just as culture is making us, we are making culture,” she says. “That is such a startling and potentially profound insight, because once you get to thinking about it, you start to think, ‘Well, ok. Since I am making culture, what am I doing? Am I just doing the same old thing? Am I just reinforcing what is already there? If I am unhappy with something, what could I do in my daily interaction and my daily context to make a change?’”

Curing your cultural blindness would allow you, wherever you are reading this, to see how the surrounding human world is altering your behavior, molding the mind you are using to understand these words—and shaping the self you think of as the protagonist of your life story. If you move, that self will eventually change, even if that move is just one town over, but especially if you flip coasts. Markus and Conner sum it up like this, “In charting the course of your self, your postal code is just as important as your genetic code.”

If you want a glimpse at the future political landscape in America, follow the moving trucks.