Our Need For a Sense of Belonging Might Be Slowing Down Our Return To Normal
It has been approximately 18 months since all of us were abruptly sent back home, unaware of the despairing and strenuous situation that we have been put into. Ever since then, there has been continuous effort to eradicate, if not slow down the spread of COVID-19. However, there also has been endless number of debates and disagreements, some on-going, surrounding the ways in which we should fight the virus. From initially disinfecting anywhere we can lay our eyes on to wearing masks with social distancing and ultimately getting vaccinated, there has been many different course of action that proved to be effective in preventing further spread of the virus. And only starting few months back did we sense a return of normalcy, although we still have a long way to go. But what if I told you that our return to normal could have happened a lot sooner if it wasn’t for politics and our need for a sense of belonging?
The cited article credits the country’s delayed response to the pandemic due to the country’s ever growing political polarization. In fact, according to the article, even the media portrayal of the virus influences people’s behavior as access to information is heavily distorted by our media diet, and that has real consequences for attitudes and behavior (Rothwell and Makridis 2020). Data below illustrates the vast difference in behavior people with opposing political stance as shown in red (Republican) and blue (Democrat) line. 
Arguably, today’s political polarization comes from our innate desire/need to be an accepted member of a group, which is reinforced by the concept of homophily. Homophily, as discussed in the textbook, is the principle that we tend to be similar to our friends. Collectively, your friends are more or less similar to you in some aspects, whether that be their political stance, interest, and many more. Try to think about what common similarities made you and your social group close-knitted. You’ll be surprised by how similar you guys are than you think. Although this might make things sound unified and coalesced, it can lead to exaggerated cases of homophily where extremely polarized social networks compose of groups of similar people, but where the groups don’t have many connections between them. This is exactly what we see with our response to the pandemic as well. With the dispute in regards to wearing masks or getting the vaccine, we can see that generally those in support of masks and vaccines will closely align themselves with the Democratic party. Whereas with those opposing vaccines and masks, mostly Republicans, they are also establishing their closely-knitted group based on similar opinions/beliefs. As people are looking for their sense of belonging and deeply confining to their set beliefs/relationships within their respective group, it exacerbates polarization of opinions; hence the increasing gaps in the data set above. Consequently we see in different states and counties, the level of policy enforcement is inconsistent, which leads to fluctuating number of cases. Additionally, Capitol Riot, though the incident was a culmination of all sorts of issues in addition to pandemic policy, is still a great example that shows homophily on an extreme scale. Almost everyone who participated in the riot shared the same political stance.
After going through this demanding time altogether, it would be interesting to see if there was to be another pandemic, God forbid, if we can disregard each other’s dissimilarity and work together for faster return to normal.
Source:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/09/17/politics-is-wrecking-americas-pandemic-response/