Avoiding Politics At The Dinner Table

You can always rely on your family to bring up two highly controversial topics during the holidays: what you’re doing with your life, and politics. Some of us manage to avoid the former, while the latter always seems to be a topic full of conflict. Being a gay, liberal, Democrat in the middle of a religious, conservative, and proudly Republican family, I’ve learned to keep quiet whenever topics such as welfare, Bernie Sanders, and the existence of transgender people come about at the dinner table. As of late, rather than daydreaming about closing the wage gap or Michelle Obama, I’ve started asking myself why? Why is it that my beliefs go against everyone else’s in my family? What causes us to form the views we have, whether they be political, religious, social, or other? I took to the streets of Google to find out.

While analyzing the personalities of adolescents, many psychologists look to the Bobo Doll experiment of 1961, where children were shown to have mimicked either the violent or affectionate behaviors of adults on a doll. The results of this study helped scientists to prove the Behavioral Learning Theory, which states that children learn from the people they surround themselves with. This includes their life among friends at school along with their family life at home. This theory extended to practically every aspect that makes up our personality; we enjoy cooking because we watched our grandmas in the kitchen, we like to read because our parents would read with us when we were younger, and we support Donald Trump because our uncles constantly go off on tangents about how Hillary Clinton should receive the death penalty.

As time has gone on, many have questioned this theory in an attempt to explain the outliers. Psychologists have become intrigued with those who defy the basic morals and beliefs that our family teaches us. Lindsay Hoffman, a professor of communication and political science at the University of Delaware, explains why in an article by the Huffington Post.1 “...we have seen that children from more socio-oriented families [strong political views] tend to be less critical of information and are exposed to less disagreement at home and in the media.” She goes on to explain that, “...in families that encourage open communication and ideas, we see the highest levels of news use, discussion, critical thinking, and political knowledge…” The results that Hoffman mentions concur with those of the Bobo Doll experiment, stating that the views of adolescents mostly depend on those expressed throughout the home.

All in all, the evidence proves to show that the reason some people have such strong political beliefs is because that’s how their families taught them. If our family consistently praises the Republican Party while disavowing Democrats, chances are we’ll grow up to share those same beliefs - and vice versa. Those who oppose their families when it comes to facing off in the election typically do so because the people they spend the most time around never showed any strong political beliefs. I speak from experience in saying that my mother rarely ever shared her views, leaving me to create my own moral compass to follow. From this stems the possibility that the views that I’ve developed from watching the world through an unbiased lens are different than those of my family, where opinions are very often vocalized. I still have yet to inform my family of my treacherous support of gay marriage, raising minimum wage, and Hillary Clinton. But once I do I’ll make sure not to let their prominence in my life affect what I believe as wrong and right.

1 Huffington Post article referenced:

Hoffman, Lindsey. “How Family Communication Can Influence Our Political Identities.”

Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. 16 July 2012. Web.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lindsay-hoffman/how-family-communication-_b_1664970.html