“Trumpian Thinking” Is Why the World Has an Empathy Problem

Simple, biased answers for incredibly complex problems may be social media-friendly, but they’re not doing you any good.

Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash

It’s very easy to blame all your economic problems on foreigners.

It’s simple to think the reason you can’t get a girlfriend is because all women are the devil incarnate.

It’s no biggie to assume people are poor because they don’t work hard enough.

These ideas sit within what I call Trumpian Thinking, named after the 45th president of the USA.

Trumpian Thinking is our predilection for creating too simple answers — based on biases and prejudices — to extremely complex problems. Much like the man himself likes to do.

Easy. Digestible. Tweetable (or is that X-able?).

The internet loves Trumpian Thinking from all sides of the political and cultural spectrum. It thrives on sweeping statements without much thought behind them because you’re guaranteed to either incense or encourage big swathes of the population. And that means plenty of the online world’s most precious commodity.

Clicks.

What the internet is less concerned with is what Trumpian Thinking is doing to us. To society. To our interactions.

To our humanity.

Because it ain’t good, folks.

“The problem with our country is the foreigners”

So said a dude I recently met who was not very pleased with “the likes of me” living in his country.

In his mind, the only reason his country has problems is because of rich foreigners (and according to him, all Brits and Americans are wealthy).

His reasoning was the very epitome of Trumpian Thinking and is nothing I’ve not heard before. The “foreigners ruin everything” is a trope as old and tired as time itself.

In this situation, the reality is that a country’s economic status is an incredibly complex system that can’t be reduced to the modern equivalent of git off my laaaaand! *Runs with pitchfork*

Honestly, it’s a little bit stupid to think it can be.

But it’s not unusual—or entirely that guy’s fault.

In part, it’s because of the illusionary truth effect.

This is a phenomenon where repeated information — for instance, foreigners are ruining countries — is perceived as more truthful than new information — for instance, remote workers abroad reverse brain drain.

In other words, find enough people to believe something is true — even if it’s been widely disproved — and they’ll believe it.

It’s what the internet thrives on. Find enough people to believe a complex problem can be solved with a simple answer, and you, my friend, have a Facebook group — likely one your Uncle Rod is a part of.

Despite my modern name for it, Trumpian Thinking has been around forever, but since the dawn of the internet, its influence on the world has grown. Nowadays, you can hold any opinion, however, over-simplified, and find your people online.

The antidote to Trumpian Thinking is critical thinking. The kind of thinking that engages your brain and considers more than your one, single, emotional POV.

The type of thinking the man himself hates, as Stephen Sullivan, a professor at Pennsylvania Edinboro University and teacher of critical thinking says in an academic paper:

Donald Trump has been a godsend for those of us who teach critical thinking. For he is a fount of manipulative rhetoric, glaring fallacies, conspiracy theories, fake news, and bullshit

It’s not easy to think critically. It means thinking harder for longer. It means reigning in your lizard brain that likes easy, obvious answers.

But it can kick Trumpian Thinking in the ass.

Trumpian Thinking removes humanity from an argument. Critical thinking puts it back in

So much Trumpian Thinking is incredibly inhumane.

It's inhumane to think the reason your country is in trouble is because you’re too friendly as a nation, as that guy said to me. It’s inhumane for incels to think women are the scourge of the earth. It’s inhumane to tell poor people to just pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Trumpian Thinking pulls humanity out of an argument. As the Foundation of Critical Thinking says:

Much of our thinking, left to itself, is biased, distorted, partial, uninformed, or downright prejudiced.

Critical thinking has this reputation of being cold and emotionless but nothing is further from the truth.

It’s a return to humanity.

To think critically — to see POVs that are not your own or to consider more than surface-level information — is to think about other people.

Take that guy I met this week. If he was a high-level or critical thinker, he might consider:

• What role does the government have in his country’s economic problems? Should he lay some blame on them rather than the people it claims to serve (foreigners included)?

• If rents in his city are high, should at least some of the blame lie with those increasing the rents (landlords) than those forced to pay it, whether they can afford to or not?

• How has inflation or other economic mechanisms impacted the situation?

• What role does a lack of knowledge play in this game? Can this guy assume he knows everything about how economics works? Or could he humble himself and realize there is more to this subject than he understands?

With those considerations, perhaps he wouldn’t be so quick to point the finger at one group of people and claim it’s all their fault.

Perhaps he would be more empathetic.

But he wasn’t. He was determined to think of this incredibly complex situation as reductively as possible.

It’s hardly surprising — critical thinking is freaking hard and so much of the world is set up to discourage us from acting on it. According to this academic paper, we’re a world of anti-critical thinkers because of factors like:

Post-truth politics. Disinformation is rife amongst politicians who seem to no longer care if anything is true or not.

Social media and traditional media. Like I say. The internet relies on Trumpian Thinking.

Cognitive thinking. To think critically is to deny our brain its natural tendencies. It means rejecting social and cultural norms that back in our tribal days kept us from being killed.

Socially, we are expected to follow the rules and bend to the wills of those who supposedly know more than us, like our parents, bosses, and subject experts. None of this leads to a critical mind.

And not everyone is, by design, a questioner. Sixty-eight percent of people are what social scientist Gretchen Rubin — the founder of the Happiness Project — calls Upholders or Obligers—people who follow the rules almost without thinking.

But we’re no longer in our tribal days. Going against the pack is not going to get you killed anymore.

In fact, it could save you.

Didn’t your mama teach you to think before you speak?

Social media is literally structured to encourage Trumpian Thinking. We’re forced to reduce arguments down to 140 characters or 30-second reels, no nuance required.

How quickly does the first judgmental tweet show up under a reasoned argument? How quickly do DMs fill up with hate speech the moment someone dares to suggest something that rattles a cultural norm?

I get it. Trumpian Thinking is comforting. It gives the illusion that you — and your opinion — are in control of big, complex issues.

But nothing dubbed “Trumpian” is going to further humanity. It’s not going to promote kindness.

Critical thinking, on the other hand, does because it forces you to think about bigger answers to complex problems. And it can be as easy as doing what your mama probably told you to do as a child.

Think before you speak.

Pause before you send a tweet. Listen to what someone is trying to tell you. Know you don’t know everything.

Be kind.

Be everything the man behind the name never was.

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This essay was originally published in the publication The Point of View