Large family dinners can already be tricky to navigate, but recently, politics has added a fresh, new layer of malfunction. A recent study published in the journal Science shows that Thanksgiving dinner 2016 was considerably shorter than other years. (If you need a refresher, the holiday hit just shortly after Trump‘s surprising victory.)

The report suggests that annual holiday meals were cut short that year by an average of 30 to 50 minutes when people of opposing parties were seated at the same dinner table.

To gather their data, researchers went pretty deep, and yes, creepy. They first collected 21 billion smartphone location pings from cell phone users all across the United States. Then they overlaid that information on an election map with the election result for 172,000 precincts. Essentially, the researchers figured out each person’s home using pings, extrapolated their political ideology based on where they lived, tracked where they went on Thanksgiving Day, and how long they stayed at that location. Again, quite alarming for the consumer.

None-the-less, the results were consistent. They discovered that people who lived in areas solidly Republican or Democrat who traveled to zip codes where residents were likely to have different political views than their own, were likely to spend less time together — up to 69 minutes less overall.

Democrats were more likely not to go to dinner at all, while Republicans were likely to leave more than an hour early, in many cases.

Also of note, when people lived in politically saturated media market areas, they were up to three times more likely to leave early. The researchers figured out that for every 1,000 political advertisements, 2.5  minutes were shaved from their Thanksgiving gathering.

Researches told the New York Times that while they hypothesized this outcome, nobody is excited to learn that politics are damaging family relationships.

(h/t Grub Street)


ALSO TRY: 9 of the funniest Thanksgiving TV scenes. 

Follow us on Instagram.

Comments

comments

Author

Meghan is a full-time writer exploring the fun facts behind food. She lives a healthy lifestyle but lives for breakfast, dessert and anything with marinara. She’s thrown away just as many meals as she’s proud of.