Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights into the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman,

and in each episode I have a conversation with a guest who will stimulate your mind

and give you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world we live in.

Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into human possibility.

Thanks for listening and on the podcast.

Mason is Associate Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park,

and author of Uncivil Agreement,

How Politics Became Our Identity with the University of Chicago Press.

She received her PhD in political psychology

from Stony Brook University and her BA in politics from Princeton University.

Her research on partisan identity, partisan bias, social sorting, and American social polarization

has been published in journals such as American

Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, public opinion quarterly, and political

behavior, and featured in media outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post,

CNN, and National Public Radio. Dr. Mason, what a honor it is to chat with you today.

Thank you so much for having me. When you were writing this book, did you ever imagine just how relevant it would be to June 13th, 2020?

Yeah, I, so I actually started writing this book in 2009 because it was my dissertation and so I kind of came up with the idea of this when we were sort of still in the like hope change early Obama time and I we still had plenty of you

know clearly partisan animosity but I and I was trying to explain that, but I didn't, I certainly didn't know how bad it would get in the future.

Yeah, you are, you talk in the book, I thought it was really interesting. You talked about hope leaders and fear leaders. I hadn't seen that distinction in the literature. That's a real distinction that people have noted throughout the course of human leadership.

I mean, not really.

This is more thinking about the emotion,

work on a sort of emotions and behavior,

...