The Psychological Roots of Political Failure | Dr. Bernhard Hommel

## Societal Polarization & "Naïve Theories" Political conversations now routinely dead-end. What appears at first to be a clash about facts often reveals itself as a deeper mismatch: competing subconscious blueprints of what humans are and how they behave. The recorded exchange with Dr. Bernhard Hommel frames political failure not primarily as an information problem but as a problem of incompatible “naïve theories” — implicit assumptions about human nature that participants rarely articulate, debate, or even realize they hold. These hidden premises shape how people interpret identical events, whether a pandemic, electoral outcomes, or international conflict, and they help explain why arguments so often spiral into mutual incomprehension rather than convergent insight. The conversation highlights that ordinary explanations — blaming misinformation, stupidity, or maliciousness — are insufficient. Labeling half the electorate as irrational is logically incoherent and practically useless. Instead, the idea is to locate the source of disagreement deeper: people are operating from different, tacit models of why others behave as they do and what outcomes are plausible or desirable. When two groups hold divergent axioms about agency, motivation, or causality, they can point to the same phenomenon (mask-wearing, casualty counts, voting patterns) and derive irreconcilable conclusions. Recognizing that the debate is often about underlying human-images reframes polarization as a cognitive and developmental mismatch that requires different remedies than mere fact-checking. ## Human Image vs. Worldview & Genetic Influence One might ask: why focus on the imagined human rather than competing worldviews? Dr. Hommel’s reply is instructive. As a psychologist by training, he directs attention to how people conceive of individual actors — as doers, as passive recipients, as rational calculators, or as emotionally driven beings — because these images govern the interpretation of external events. Two observers might agree about observable realities (hospitals filling, troops mobilizing) but diverge radically in appraisal if one imagines humans as primarily responsive to incentives and the other as primarily reactive to threats or identity. Those differing anthropological assumptions then generate different policy preferences and narratives. The discussion also entertains genetic and developmental contributors to political orientation. Hommel cites empirical findings suggesting heritable components to voting behavior and stresses that diversity in human temperaments has evolutionary logic: variation is adaptive. That does not imply genetic determinism but rather that predispositions shape how people learn about means and ends, how they prioritize values, and how they respond to social cues. In short, our political disagreement is partly rooted in stable, partly biologically informed tendencies that influence what kinds of “human images” we cultivate through experience and culture. ## Ideomotor Theory: Intentions, Means, & Outcomes At the center of Hommel’s explanatory framework is ideomotor theory — a classical psychological account of action control revisited to illuminate political cognition. The theory rests on two linked propositions. First, actions are learned through coupling movements with their sensory outcomes: infants discover that shaking a rattle produces sound, and those motor-effect associations become bidirectional. Second, adult intentions are anticipations of outcomes; imagining a result can activate the learned motor patterns that historically produced it. Thus intention, means, and outcome form an associative triad. Hommel extends this micro-level mechanism to social cognition by proposing that people differ slightly in whether their cognitive bias leans toward the means (how actions are produced and by whom) or toward the outcomes (what the end state looks like). Those biased toward means are attuned to agency: they think in causal chains, responsibility, and interventions. Those biased toward outcomes privilege the end-state itself, caring less about who effects it and more about whether it is achieved. These small, experiential biases can cascade into vastly different political styles: one side emphasizes interventions, enforcement, and control; the other prioritizes tolerance, systemic outcomes, and care for aggregate consequences. When these styles collide, talk stalls because interlocutors fail to share the same locus of concern. ## Conflicting Values: Safety vs. Freedom An immediate political corollary is the perennial safety-versus-freedom tension. The ideomotor-informed division maps neatly onto value conflicts amplified in crises. Some citizens prioritize immediate protective actions — masking, lockdowns, arming allies — because they see agency as a tool to prevent harm. Others prioritize preserving autonomy and limiting coercive interventions, because they value long-term freedoms or fear that means-oriented strategies produce corrosive secondary effects. Both camps can plausibly claim the high moral ground: one emphasizes concrete mitigations; the other emphasizes the preservation of civil liberties and the avoidance of harm from heavy-handed policies. What the conversation makes clear is why these disputes are so resistant to compromise. When each side’s valuation is rooted in distinct cognitive emphases — agency versus outcome salience — simple trade-offs (more evidence, more persuasion) have limited power. Demonstrating that a policy reduces infections may not convince those who see agency as creating long-term harms; conversely, pointing out liberty costs may not sway those whose primary schema is minimizing immediate threat. Effective resolution requires recognizing these different value architectures and designing dialogues that translate concerns across frameworks rather than insisting on a shared metric that does not exist. ## The Reflexive View & Bias in Sociology The exchange also critiques certain sociological reflexes that dominate public debate. A reflexive view — in which people reduce others to their informational environment, social class, or consumption of certain media — risks flattening psychological diversity into tidy sociological categories. Hommel’s perspective warns that such reductions miss the interplay of developmental action mechanisms and individual cognitive biases. When explanations over-emphasize external determinants and underplay internal, learned models of agency, they may misidentify levers for change. Bias in social explanation can produce policy missteps. If sociologists or policymakers assume that correcting misinformation will fix disagreement, they may ignore the deeper mismatch of human images. Similarly, treating political opponents as merely misinformed overlooks the ways that habit, early learning, and genetically influenced temperamental tendencies shape responsiveness to different kinds of arguments. A more nuanced sociology would incorporate psychological development, acknowledging that people’s narratives about who they are and how others act are not just epiphenomena of media consumption but emergent properties of lifelong interactional learning. ## Policy Dangers & Reduced Emotional Resilience A striking and sobering theme of the discussion is the political cost of reduced emotional resilience. Enlarged threats and rapid social change demand collective coping mechanisms. Yet when public discourse collapses into intractable moralization, societies lose the adaptive flexibility they need. Hommel suggests that persistent framing of opponents as insane or immoral erodes the capacity to negotiate, experiment, and tolerate policy innovations that may be necessary under uncertainty. Policy design that ignores these psychological roots risks intensifying polarization. Interventions that rely on coercion without account for deeply held images of agency provoke backlash; conversely, l

The Psychological Roots of Political Failure Why do our political debates inevitably hit dead ends? Why do we dismiss opposing views as madness? I suspect the issue isn't just about facts, but about the subconscious blueprints we hold of human nature itself. To help me decode these hidden psychological frameworks, I’m joined by Dr. Bernhard Hommel, a full professor of psychology at the Shandong Normal University in China. Until 2022, Professor Hommel held the chair of “General Psychology” at Leiden University and he is a member and senator of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina). He is the author of many academic and popular books, the most recent one in German language being „The power of the imagined human: why we talk passed each other and sound politics fails." Links: Hommel's Website: https://www.bernhard-hommel.eu/ Hommel's books (German):https://westendverlag.de /author/detail/018d2216f51f724985a7f1b3d5421182 Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz. substack.com (Opt in for Academic Section from your profile settings: https://pascallottaz.substack. com/s/academic) Goods Store: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com Timestamps: 00:00:00 The Power of the Imagined Human 00:03:49 Societal Polarization & "Naïve Theories" 00:09:06 Human Image vs. Worldview & Genetic Influence 00:15:42 Ideomotor Theory: Intentions, Means, & Outcomes 00:24:16 Conflicting Values: Safety vs. Freedom 00:32:33 The Reflexive View & Bias in Sociology 00:37:16 Policy Dangers & Reduced Emotional Resilience 00:45:29 Objective Reality, Truth, & The Humanities 00:53:11 Conclusion & Works #Pascal Hello everybody, Pascal here from Neutrality Studies, and today I'm joined by Dr. Bernhard Hommel, a full professor of psychology at Shandong Normal University in China. Until 2022, Professor Hommel held the chair of general psychology at Leiden University, and he's a member and senator of the German National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of many academic and popular books, the most recent one in German being—if I translate the title—*The Power of the Imagined Human: Why We Talk Past Each Other and Sound Politics Fails.* Professor Hommel, welcome. Thank you for having me. Well, thank you very much for writing this book. I mean, it's a short book, but a very insightful one, because you’re using a concept we use regularly. I mean, it's a common concept in German—*Menschenbilder*—or how we imagine that humans function. And then you extrapolate this into the political realm. Can you tell us what the main argument is, and why this imaginative human is so important? #Bernhard Hommel Well, it may help if I explain how I came to write this book, but we can talk about that later if you're interested. The basic idea is that before we start thinking and talking about our arguments—like in a political discussion, say we have an argument about, I don’t know, abortion—and you have a -- 1 of 14 -- different opinion than I do, typically what we see when people start discussing is that they end up nowhere. We hardly find any conclusions, any agreement, any shared interests. So we are no longer, or perhaps we never were, able to translate disagreement into interesting new perspectives. And I want to know why that is. And that’s not just—it cannot be just—the arguments, because in science we also have arguments, and we commonly disagree but still come to better conclusions. But not in real life, let’s say, outside of the ivory tower. And I think one of the reasons, perhaps *the* reason, is that our arguments are typically based on something we’re not very conscious of—namely, the way we think humans work, how they are, how they operate—the *Menschenbild*, the image of a human being. And we typically don’t discuss this. It’s not like I say, “Oh, I think humans operate like this,” and then you say, “No, you forgot this aspect; you should consider that.” But I may not even know. I may not even—so this is what the psychologist Fritz Heider called the naive theory. We all have our naive theories that assume things as a given, as an axiom that we don’ t defend and perhaps don’t even know we hold. But it’s these underlying assumptions that no longer, or perhaps never, allow us to find reasonable agreement. And then I try to explain: where might that come from? What might it look like? How could it operate in real life? How could it prevent us from finding agreement? And what can we do about it? So that’s the basic structure of the book. #Pascal I find this highly fascinating because we see it all the time. And in your book, too, you discuss the societal disagreements during the corona pandemic—how people saw or perceived each other. You can trace that back to almost any kind of disagreement, when two or more groups have a fundamental clash in how they interpret reality, and how we then try to ascribe something to the other side—how we see them, how we interpret those who don’t share our basic assumptions, our axioms. Right? Can you elaborate on that a bit? #Bernhard Hommel I mean, there are consequences to this. One is that basic assumption, and that already leads you in very different directions. For instance, let's take the pandemic as a case example. That was obviously very different in different countries, so it’s hard to generalize. I don’t know whether our listeners will share my experience, but I was mainly in Germany during that time, in the East—and the East of Germany is, let’s say, the newer part of unified Germany. And people there were very different from the people I know. I grew up in the West, but during that time, we just lived there. So, for instance, people had enormous difficulties wearing a mask—a paper mask. And I thought, how difficult is it, in such a threatening situation, to wear a paper mask? Let’s say you go on the tram or take a train or whatever—how hard is that? I mean, yes, your freedom is limited, but not -- 2 of 14 -- much. It’s not a dramatic restriction of your daily life. And yet people had enormous difficulties. So I wondered—somehow this triggers different things in their minds than in mine. Or, for instance, my wife is Italian, so we were also exposed to the Italian press and the reports in the newspapers about the pandemic. And there, when we saw those many dead bodies in Bergamo—40,000 people—and the military was actually busy transporting the corpses to other places because they couldn’t handle the sheer number anymore, I thought, that should give everyone an idea that something serious is happening. And yet many people said, “Oh, this is just the flu, don’t worry about it,” and so on. I just couldn’t understand people anymore. And that often happens. Also, if you think about voting behavior in the United States, it basically broke the common ground within many families. #Pascal Just to interject, we see it right now with the war in Ukraine, where there are two very different interpretations of reality—and that breaks friendships. #Bernhard Hommel Israel–Gaza. Yes, yes—sometimes even worse. And then the standard thing: if you talk to people and ask, “How do you explain this, that we can no longer talk to each other?” they start with the typical tricks. They say, “Oh, the other side”—and of course it’s always the other side—“is ill- informed. They read the wrong papers, or visit the wrong internet forums, or, I don’t know, believe the wrong politicians,” or things like that. Or they’re just stupid, or they’re mentally ill. And yes, there are mentally ill people, but 50% of the population—that’s logically impossible, because mental illness is defined by deviation from the norm. But if 50% are, then they’re the norm. And that means no one is actually mentally ill, logically. It’s an impossible statement to make. So it’s not a solution—it’s just a helpless attempt to explain something people don’t have a good explanation for. So we need another one. And that was one of the driving forces for writing this book. I was interested in another explanation that doesn’t, let’s say, discredit or undermine other people’s mental health, but rather offers a more, let’s say, respectful way to deal with each other. #Pascal I find it fascinating, but why is it that you're focusing on the mentioned “Bild,” the image of the human—or the imagination of how we imagine humans? Why not on the other word you could use, which is the *Weltbild*, the way we imagine the world? Because at the end of the day, we’ve got this problem that some people believe things about how the world works that are fundamentally different from ours. Let’s take Corona. One group says it’s just the flu; the other group says it’s a humanity‑threatening pandemic. And these two ways of looking at the world are as different as -- 3 of 14 -- saying the sky is blue or the sky is red. You can point to it and say, “Look, it’s obviously one or the other.” And once the other side denies that, you get angry—you get mad at them—because they reject reality. Why is it that you focus on the human and not on the interpretation of the world? #Bernhard Hommel Well, there are at least two reasons. Everyone has a perspective and is bound to it somehow— limited, you might say. One of the driving forces is that I'm a psychologist, so I'm interested in individuals, the differences between them, and how those differences account for behavior. That doesn’t mean other perspectives are less interesting, but this is mine. And I’m not, let’s say, a natural popular book writer. I’m more of an academic—an ivory‑tower person. I do basic science. And only because of this puzzlement—because of my exposure to things in the real world—I was trying to translate my knowledge from basic science into popular issues, into, let’s say, political ones, or things that we negotiate in real life every day. So that’s social behavior. And this is my limitation, you might say. If you’re a sociologist, you may find that totally uninteresting, and that’s fine. But this is my bit—let’s say, my five pence to contribute. The other motive for writing the book was my puzzlement about a finding I read in another book. Namely, that there is research—which I didn’t know before—that shows you can predict voting behavior in political elections from genes. And then I thought, what? I’m not one of those people who ignore genes or think that genes shouldn’t matter, because, I mean, many—especially in the woke community—see even talking about genes as an absolute no‑go. Because we’re all the same, we’re blank slates. And, I mean, I know that we’re not. And I’m not disgusted by this; I take it as a fact. The rest is, let’s say, the empirical science—about how, in which sense, how much, and what’s left, and things like that. And I'm happy to talk about all these things as well. But I'm not an idiot. Let's say I know that there are genes, and I know that they do something with respect to creating differences. And being a good Darwinist, this is absolutely logical and necessary, because what is survival based on? It’s based on random diversity. The idea is to take, let’s say, random diversity so that we all have diversity. We get some of our genes from our parents, but there’s also some unpredictability in the way they are distributed, and so forth and so on. This is why even brothers are not the same. And why is that? Well, let’s say there is no “why” in true Darwinian evolution. Don’t take me wrong, but the idea is that this allows us, as humanity, to deal with circumstances. Because let’s assume we are still picking fruit from the tree. And then we had all these very tall guys who would bump into the tree, into all these fruits all the time. And we thought, why do we have them? Well, at some point, perhaps the trees get higher, and only the tall people can help us get the fruit. So now, overnight as it were, those people became a useful contribution to, or members of, society. This is why we should stay open to diversity— because we never know what things will