(…) Yet this diagnosis is also crucially incomplete, in ways that distort our search for solutions. When we understand the problem in epistemic terms, we naturally seek epistemic answers: better fact-checking, more deliberation, better education, greater media balance. We aim to develop the “civic” and “epistemic virtues” of unbiased, fair-minded citizens. And indeed, such projects are surely worth pursuing. The epistemic failures they aim to address have deeper roots in our political psychology, however—and overcoming them requires grappling with those roots more directly.

In short, decades of research have demonstrated that our political beliefs and behavior are thoroughly motivated and mediated by our social identities: i.e., the many cross-cutting social groupings we feel affinity with. And as long as we do not account for this profound and pervasive dependence, our attempts to address the epistemic failures threatening contemporary democracies will inevitably fall short. More than any particular institutional, technological, or educational reform, promoting a healthier democracy requires reshaping the social identity landscape that ultimately anchors other democratic pathologies.