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Episode 45: Blame and Political Attitudes: Gail Sahar
41 Plays1 year ago
We talk with Professor Gail Sahar about her new book, entitled "Blame and Political Attitudes: The Psychology of America's Culture War", where she applies social psychology to understand where and why we assign blame in the political sphere.
https://www.amazon.com/Blame-Political-Attitudes-Psychology-Americas/dp/303120235X
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Transcript
Introduction to Blame in Politics
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome to Cognation. On this episode, we speak with Professor Gail Sahar about her new book, Blame and Political Attitudes. We wanted to speak with Dr. Sahar because this issue of blame and how we attribute
00:00:24
Speaker
whether something is the fault of an individual or the fault of society is a concept that permeates a lot of issues in the political sphere today and really for all time. But there's new interesting research that she explores that helps us understand how we think about issues like issues of abortion, homelessness, racial divides, inequity,
00:00:49
Speaker
And how our thinking and attribution about faults, blame, but also credit reads on those issues. It's a wide ranging conversation, very topical
Attribution Theory in Politics
00:01:04
Speaker
and interesting. And I think you will all enjoy it. Welcome to Cognition. I'm your host, Rolf Nelson. And I'm Joe Hardy.
00:01:13
Speaker
And today on the show, we have with us Gail Sahar, who is the recent author of a book on social psychology and politics called Blame and Political Attitudes, The Psychology of America's Culture War, which is published very recently by Pelgrave Press. So welcome, Gail, great to have you here. And I should say also that Gail is a colleague of mine at Wheaton College, and we've known each other for quite a while. So it's great to have you on the show. Thanks. Well, thanks for inviting me.
00:01:42
Speaker
So maybe we can just start out by talking a little bit about the book and what the main idea is and how you apply some social psychology concepts to things in the political arena. Great. So I work, as you said, in social psychology and particularly in something called attribution theory, which is the study of how people attribute
00:02:08
Speaker
causes for events in their lives and in the lives of other people. And that that has been something that's been being researched since the 60s, roughly. And most of it had originally focused on things like academic context, like what is the effect of a child, for example, failing a test and attributing it to
00:02:32
Speaker
low effort versus low ability, that kind of thing. And so social scientists began to see that the kinds of causes we attribute for events have big effects on us, they affect our emotions, our behaviors, etc.
Ideology and Blame Attributions
00:02:45
Speaker
And what I was particularly interested in, just because I've always been interested in political psychology, was how that theory might operate in the political realm.
00:02:54
Speaker
So are there similar effects of the attributions we make for, for example, social problems, you know, political context, et cetera. And so what the main theme of the book really is, is that causality matters a lot, that in spite of the fact that we tend to focus particularly now in this country on ideology a lot and on people being polarized and having really different kinds of worldviews,
00:03:19
Speaker
We've been sort of ignoring that people do actually process information about politics. Maybe not as much as we would like them to, but people do think about politics. And so one main theme of the book is that one of the ways we think about politics is what causes social problems and that our ideologies influence us in part by dictating how we place blame for social problems.
00:03:45
Speaker
And then that blame then has big effects on how we feel, whether we feel sympathy or anger for the people who are suffering from the problem. And even our attitudes, whether we're pro-choice versus pro-life or pro-welfare versus anti-welfare, that sort of thing.
00:04:03
Speaker
Do you want to speak a little bit about the concept of blame and how that's defined in the context of social psychology and maybe some of the factors you just mentioned a few of them, but maybe go into some detail about some of the factors that social psychologists have identified as determining whether and who gets blamed for a certain thing that happens?
00:04:26
Speaker
Absolutely. Maybe this is deeper than you want to get into it, but also just in terms of what we call operational definitions in the social sciences. Blame, I'm using as a blanket term. What social psychologists typically measure are usually three things, controllability, how much control did the individual have over the cause, responsibility, how much do you perceive them as responsible,
00:04:56
Speaker
And then blame, which some social scientists think as more of almost a hybrid between cognition and emotion. So blame has a force beyond just cognition, right? It's like, not only are you responsible, but I blame you, right? So the book is meant to take a broader kind of brushstroke to these ideas. But in fact, that's, that's usually how it is assessed is controllability, responsibility, and blame.
00:05:22
Speaker
And people combine those differently. They're highly correlated. So I've sort of taken the liberty of using blame. But as you say, there are a lot of factors that influence how we attribute blame. So in attribution theory, there are a number of biases that have been identified that I talk about things like the fundamental attribution error, the tendency to always see an individual as their actions as their responsibility or something about them. It's about their disposition. It's not about the situation, right?
00:05:51
Speaker
Um, so the typical, this is a really overused example, but I see someone trip and fall. I don't typically think, oh, there must be an uneven sidewalk. I'll usually think that person is clumsy, something like that. And so that sort of bias is, is really, really prevalent. Um, but I'm also interested in something that you could call a bias or you could call
Biases in Blame: A Political Perspective
00:06:14
Speaker
it an ideology. This idea that the, our, the way we construe the world influences the way we place blame.
00:06:21
Speaker
So if I tend to lean, for example, more conservative, I will have a tendency to believe in more individualistic causes. The individual is responsible for his or her own actions. If I lean more liberal, I see society as having more responsibility in situations. So I'm sort of taking it outside a little bit of the typical cognitive biases we talk about in social cognition and looking instead at
00:06:50
Speaker
What kinds of biases are particularly relevant for blame for political issues? So this is obviously closely related to the idea of causality, which has a long history in philosophy and psychology. So what's the distinction between cause and blame? Because you could think of,
00:07:14
Speaker
you know, some more neutral circumstances where you wouldn't call it blame. You could say, you know, this billiard ball caused this billiard ball to move, but you wouldn't blame the ball for its action. I mean, it's sort of a combination of cause plus negative outcome, I guess, or how, what's the, how do you, how do you distinguish, you know, the scope of what we mean by causality and then what we mean by blame? That's a really good question.
00:07:43
Speaker
Well, a couple things that you said in terms of sort of how we study it, we normally think that the attribution of a cause sort of precedes blame, right? You don't place blame until you've determined what the cause is. And a lot of the work actually breaks down causes too into both negative and sort of positive things. So you're right that a
00:08:05
Speaker
In order to have blame, you have to have a negative event. I'm not gonna blame someone for succeeding at something, right? So we often divide it into positive versus negative sorts of events. And as I talk a little bit about in the book, we're particularly inclined to look at causes for negative events. Positive events, we spend a lot less time thinking about, right? You don't hear a lot of, oh my God, why did that great thing just happen?
00:08:30
Speaker
Yeah, and that's the other side of it too. You know, taking moral responsibility for an action is just the flip side of taking, well, taking credit for an action, right? Doing something bad, taking credit for doing something good. Yes. But we're less likely to, just in general, maybe we're less likely to see positive or notice positive things than negative things.
00:08:58
Speaker
Absolutely, or surprising things, for example. But there actually is a literature, too, on positive events. So there's literature, for example, on when we experience the feeling of pride. It has to be a good event. And we have to feel personally responsible for it, either because we're really smart or because we work really hard. That part matters less. But we do have to make sort of an internal attribution. And I have sort of left that aside. I mean, the dimensions of causality are the sort of intervening piece.
00:09:28
Speaker
You're right, we determine a cause according to the idea and that cause can be categorized across a few different dimensions in attribution theory. So one is, is it internal to me or is it external to me? And here I'm talking about a self-directed sort of cause, right? So I succeed. Was it something about me or was it just luck or the teacher's easy or whatever it is?
00:09:53
Speaker
Is it controllable by me versus uncontrollable? So was it just because I'm gifted or was it because I worked hard? And then there's another one I'm sort of leaving aside because it's less critical in the political realm. And that is the idea of stability, this idea that we also can categorize causes as temporary or relatively permanent. And those things affect stuff like hope for the future, right? If I fail and I think it's a stable cause, this is the evidence with little children in school, for example.
00:10:23
Speaker
I fail because I'm not very smart. I think I'm never going to be smarter. Therefore, why should I try kind of thing? But you're right. There is that distinction. And the way we generally think about it is that the controllability piece is the part that's sort of missing for
00:10:41
Speaker
Um, you're in your pool and if I, if I hit a ball and it moves, it's not moving of its own volition. So there's no agent. Exactly. So blame is sort of requires that the person had agency that they could have done otherwise.
00:10:56
Speaker
Yeah, I wanted to maybe double click on the issue of what you mentioned that people are spending more time in general thinking about assigning blame, thinking about negative outcomes than they are thinking about signing responsibility for a positive outcome.
The Social Function of Blame
00:11:14
Speaker
Do we know why that is or do we have ideas about why that is?
00:11:19
Speaker
There are theories about it, and they are, as Ralph said, some of them more philosophical, though there are now a couple of empirical studies looking at kind of related issues. And one of the theories about it is that human beings have a need to hold each other accountable and that it serves a social function. So it could be like an evolutionary advantage, right, to be in a society where people are held accountable because we have to count on each other. Human beings are social animals, right?
00:11:48
Speaker
So we have to kind of be able to check each other for behaving outside of what we see as appropriate in the society. So there are theories, and I think philosophers have been talking about this for a very long time. And Nietzsche, for example, talked about the need to punish and hold other people accountable, that the only reason we really look at blame is because we want to punish people kind of.
00:12:10
Speaker
And I would say I have a slightly less dim view than that, although I'm not a philosopher, but if I were. And that is, I think it's not necessarily a terrible thing to want to blame people. And it is a way that we hold each other accountable and keep society functioning properly. So if there's no blame, then people could get away with doing terrible things, and it might be, in fact, harmful. So it's this kind of tricky line we're walking, I think, between
00:12:40
Speaker
you know, holding each other accountable and then the most extreme form where blame is really can be quite damaging, right? But someone can be blamed for something and condemned and, you know, either they're not to blame at all or even if they are, perhaps the response is over the top. And that brings up something too. So you say, you know, maybe they're only partially to blame.
00:13:05
Speaker
And, you know, as psychologists, I think the three of us are trained to think of any effect as having complicated multiple causes that come from, you know, many different areas. So that to say that, you know, one thing is responsible or to blame for a certain problem is always, you know, vastly understating the complexity of things, right?
00:13:29
Speaker
I mean, given that, it's really hard to, sometimes in a lot of circumstances, it's really hard to figure out sources of blame or sources of cause. And I mean, it's kind of that fog that makes it difficult for people to figure out, especially in politics. And then it also makes it easy to suggest blame. You can convince someone else that blame is responsible.
00:13:56
Speaker
And you make this point in the book too, that it's never a single cause, so we're always overstating things. And sometimes two people can be right about causes, that both things are responsible, just to a different degree or to some respect. Yeah, you're right. And as you know, human beings do like to simplify things, if possible. But you're absolutely correct. I think in real life, there are usually multiple causes, or not always, but many, many times.
00:14:25
Speaker
also you say human beings like to simplify things which what you talk about fundamental attribution errors where people make the mistake of basically oversimplifying and making a conclusion based on not very much data, or just a single observation. But usually those kinds of heuristics, you know, in cognitive psychology, or, or, you know, in
00:14:48
Speaker
I work in visual perception, so an illusion usually tells you something about how vision normally work. What are attributions like this say that we make sort of snap conclusions quickly about others, but we attribute our own actions to external things or to more complicated factors? Yeah, it's like we want both efficiency and some sort of self-serving
00:15:14
Speaker
aspect. I feel like there's sort of two, well, we think of them as sort of the cognitive and motivational biases, right? The idea that sometimes it's about lack of information or lack of time to process information. So it's really quick to come to a conclusion, oh, it's that person, you know, he's a klutz or whatever it is. But there's also the motivational, which is we want to protect ourselves from being blamed, right? And maybe we have some desire to blame other people, because it makes us feel superior, things like that. I've noticed that teenagers tend to do that.
00:15:46
Speaker
Saying this from personal experience. Just a casual observation. That teenagers tend to use self-serving attributions. Yes. Yeah. Well, I'm sure there's a lot of developmental literature about this, too. I mean, it's clear that younger kids try to avoid blame and take responsibility when they can, right? Yeah, I mean, we all do. And in some ways, I think that's psychologically healthy.
00:16:14
Speaker
You know, you can't go around feeling terrible about yourself all the time and some evidence suggests that these biases actually do serve a positive function as well and that they keep us going. We are able to get past our mistakes and things like that because we don't perceive ourselves as fully responsible and therefore we're not kind of paralyzed by it, right? So yeah, I think it has an upside and a downside.
00:16:40
Speaker
because I think sometimes we probably should take more responsibility than we do for our mistakes. But on the other hand, we would probably be depressed. So. In the book, you know, you talk a lot about how our psychology impacts politics and talk and things that are issues that come up in the political sphere, things like economic issues and racial issues.
00:17:08
Speaker
and how we perceive blame filtered through those lenses.
Blame, Emotion, and Ideological Differences
00:17:13
Speaker
Do you wanna talk a little bit maybe starting with the economic piece, how our perception of blame and how we assign attribution to different people is affected by issues and affects issues of economics?
00:17:29
Speaker
Sure. And I would say interesting. I mean, one of the things that's been fun about this work is it's taken me into political science as well as psychology. And political scientists have typically kind of ignored the more psychological aspects of a lot of issues. And I could say more about that if it's of interest. But yeah, the stuff on poverty is sort of the easiest application. And it was where I started my own work. My honors thesis was on attributions for poverty and attitude start.
00:17:57
Speaker
welfare. And the idea is that individuals, when they're confronted with an issue like poverty, are sort of coming at it both from an ideological framework of, OK, if I'm more conservative, perhaps I see the individuals more responsible. If I'm more liberal, I may be prone to thinking of society as responsible. But for all of us, liberal or conservative,
00:18:24
Speaker
The cause that we attribute poverty to does make a difference in how we respond. So in these studies, I would and others have done this work too, but typically what we would do is present a bunch of possible causes of poverty and ask people to rate how important they are, ask them to rate how much they blame the poor person for each different cause, their emotional reactions, etc.
00:18:47
Speaker
And so one thing besides the ideological difference that's interesting to me is that both liberals and conservatives feel more sympathy for a poor person who is poor through no fault of their own, right? That's kind of universal. Though, of course, as I said, our ideologies do kind of nudge us to place blame in one direction or the other. So liberals are more likely to endorse causes like society doesn't provide enough jobs, we don't have access to education, we have discrimination.
00:19:16
Speaker
Conservatives are more likely to endorse causes like the poor are lazy or don't manage their money well, or they use drugs or that sort of thing. So low motivation is a really critical one. And once those attributions are made, then it affects us in all kinds of ways. So if I see the individual as responsible, I blame them, I feel not very much sympathy for them, I may even feel anger, because I think they want free money from the government, right? And therefore I would oppose things like welfare,
00:19:46
Speaker
And a different pattern would emerge for people who are more liberal who would tend to say, you know, this is more society's fault, I blame society, therefore I feel sympathy for the poor person, not angry at all, and I would tend to endorse wanting to help them. So it's a model that, and you'll see it in all the different issues that I talk about, it does presuppose, and this not everyone agrees with,
00:20:09
Speaker
that our cognitions dictate our emotions, right? That making a particular blame attribution will then dictate whether I feel sympathy or anger and then attitude. But I think it's so straightforward as to almost be common sense. When I talk about it, I often feel like people are thinking, well, duh, of course. But I think it is useful to sort of dissect it and to really think about exactly what's happening. And also to look at the fact that
00:20:38
Speaker
Liberals and conservatives come up with different attributions, but given a particular attribution, they respond not so differently. Nobody particularly likes helping someone who they see as to blame.
00:20:52
Speaker
Well, it's interesting. There's a lot to unpack there. And I agree with you. I mean, I think it's intuitive when you explain it in that way that how you attribute the source of someone's misfortune really, really impact how you feel about that person in terms of whether they're blameworthy or praiseworthy.
00:21:12
Speaker
but you know maybe I wonder first of all like how much of that is just because this is something that's well established in the literature and we've been you know we've learned about this in you know in school and in the media and so on and so forth but no it does it makes a lot of sense but I agree it's it's worth thinking through uh but the other thing you mentioned was um you know the the cognition sort of comes first
00:21:35
Speaker
I wonder, is it possible that we could look at it from the more like James Lang kind of perspective and say, well, maybe it's that the liberal person feels some sympathy, this is inclined to feel more sympathy initially, and therefore, you know, says, well, now I attribute that and, you know, in the corresponding way. Mm hmm. Absolutely. There are people who, and I often get comments like that from reviewers that some people really believe emotion precedes
00:22:06
Speaker
cognition. And then we use the cognition to justify our feeling a little like Jonathan Heights stuff to about, I'm trying to remember the values theory that he espouses. It's a little bit like that that we come to some quick conclusion, then we have to go back and rationalize.
00:22:21
Speaker
So attribution theorists do sort of see cognition as preeminent and not everyone agree. Actually, that's not entirely true. Most attribution theorists think there is an initial emotion of positive or negative in response to an event, but the specific emotions like sympathy and anger are directed by attributions, the kinds of cognitions you have about the cause. And that's a real tough one to disentangle. No, I can see that that becomes,
00:22:49
Speaker
epistemic in a way where you're just, yeah, it becomes really difficult to tease those apart. But no, that's interesting. The other thing that came up when Rolfe and I were talking about this, about the book, was thinking about it from the perspective of like information theory and predictive coding. So for example, when you see someone on the street who's homeless, for example,
00:23:15
Speaker
in the attribution sense, like all you know, but you just see them. The first thing and only thing you know about them is that they're on the street and they don't have a, you know, they apparently don't have a place to be. You don't have a home.
00:23:25
Speaker
Uh, and so your information about that person is extremely limited. So in some sense, you know, as that deviates from the norm of like most people in our society, you know, the majority of them do have, you know, do have homes. Um, and so that the one piece of information, the one piece of data that you have about the person is that this person appears not to.
00:23:47
Speaker
It's natural in some sense from just like a statistical informational standpoint to attribute that to that particular individual just because that's the one data point that you have that's specific to that person that's distinct from everybody else in a sense.
00:24:05
Speaker
tripping example too, because it's not as loaded, but you might tend to say that person's clumsy after seeing them tripping, whereas the person who's tripping themselves is saying, well, now it's because that stone was in front of me. But from your point of view, you've seen that person one time, and they trip 100% of the times they're in front of you. So based on your single point of information, in a Bayesian sense, that it means that you have
00:24:34
Speaker
you know, maximal information that they're clumsy, it would take a lot of information to change your mind about that. So anyway, I mean, so you might make that attribution just based on, so I mean, it's a heuristic and obviously it's gonna be wrong a lot of the times, but you might jump to that conclusion because it's actually a useful, you know, it is a useful piece of data and it's something that can be predictive. You just don't have enough information to make a really good prediction.
00:25:01
Speaker
Yeah, I guess, sorry, just to follow on from that, and maybe to bring it back around, you know, that would suggest that as you get to know, like say, then you
00:25:12
Speaker
they take a person who is homeless, then you meet that person and you learn about them and you learn about their story. This model would predict that you would be then more likely to attribute whatever negative is happening to them to some other external causes. Does that make sense? Is there evidence for that kind of approach?
00:25:35
Speaker
Well, the thing that Ralph was talking about reminds me a little of another attributional sort of giant in the literature was Hal Kelly, who was at UCLA also. And he talked a little bit about something related to what you're talking about, Ralph, which is the idea that if something is relatively unique, we will tend to attribute it to a person, right? So if you see 10 people behaving in one way and one person behaving in a different way, yeah, that's unusual. And therefore, we might assume
00:26:05
Speaker
that it is something about him. Similarly, if that person behaves that way consistently, right? So there are, you're right that these other little dimensions, which I don't really touch on in this book, but are certainly powerful that we do take into account that information. And there's some literature suggesting that in some ways, you know, making an individualistic attribution for almost anything is kind of
00:26:32
Speaker
the easiest route to go. It requires the least cognitive effort, right? That's a good point. Yeah. So that there are a couple of researchers, I can their names are now escaping me, but they're in the book. So I could look that up. But who have suggested that a lot of what we see as bias might in fact, be something to do with cognitive sort of sophistication, right? But
00:26:57
Speaker
it's a lot easier to see a homeless person and think, ah, lazy guy, than it is to imagine the myriad of societal factors that could have influenced. Sort of that system one versus system two kind of thinking, the quick and easy thinking versus conscious sort of deliberative thought. Right, right. And there's even evidence that from some studies that both liberals and conservatives, for example, probably have an initial gut reaction, which is sort of similar.
00:27:25
Speaker
there is a homeless person stay away, kind of a negative first impression, but that liberals in fact are then doing this kind of cognitive shift. They recognize that that is not consistent with their values. And I can say, I think I've experienced this personally, like, you know, it's uncomfortable, right, to confront people who are suffering in some way or that we might be afraid are dangerous or whatever. And so we might initially have this kind of visceral
00:27:55
Speaker
What's wrong with that person reaction? And then we realize, wait a minute, that's not what I believe. I don't know, Joe, if that totally gets at what you're saying. It does a little bit, but I guess what I was sort of suggesting was, let's take the person who's blaming the homeless person for their situation. If they got to know that person, if they actually talked to them and learned more about what their life story, for example,
00:28:23
Speaker
would they feel differently?
Cultural Perspectives on Blame
00:28:25
Speaker
Or would they be, you know, more likely to feel differently? Yes, I think that is the case that individuals can sort of change their attributions. And I think the kind of information you might gather would certainly influence you. There's, you know, more of a personal relationship for one thing, but I but I think even there's literature showing that even having a mild experience of what it's like to, for example, be poor,
00:28:52
Speaker
makes us less likely to make individualist attributions for poverty. So I think absolutely getting that kind of information would have an impact. And there is a lot of evidence, I think, like people who were more sympathetic to a friend who's been raped, for example, than a stranger. Because we know that something about the person, whereas someone who's more distant from us, we're more likely to sort of go with the victim blaming approach.
00:29:19
Speaker
Yeah. And I guess another sort of, you know, question along the political spectrum is, you know, how in, in your work, do you see America, the United States being
00:29:34
Speaker
similar or different to other countries in this way? Like, are we more likely to blame an individual for a negative circumstance than other places? Or is it about the same in other countries? Is it generally a pretty universal kind of thing? Or how different it is in different places? That's a really good question. So the model that I talked about where blame leads to certain emotional reactions, et cetera, that seems to be relatively universal.
00:30:05
Speaker
But it is absolutely true that the West, but particularly the US are extremely individualistic in our attributions. So a lot of cultures will tend to more collectivist cultures in particular. So Latin America, Asia, and even the Middle East and a number of other places will tend to see individuals as kind of embedded in a whole web of relationships.
00:30:30
Speaker
And that they see causality, I think you could even say, as a little more nuanced and complicated. I think Americans are really quick to jump to the conclusion that an individual is responsible for his own situation. And I think it probably has to do with the way we're socialized to have, you know, the US is very much about individualism. It's everywhere, you know, from the time we're little kids.
00:30:54
Speaker
Right. It's always kind of, it's your responsibility to do this. If something bad happens to you, it's, well, you shouldn't have been doing that. So I think we tend to really be very strongly focused on individualistic causes. We don't believe much in luck. A lot of cultures have a lot more belief that certain random things happen to people for no
00:31:14
Speaker
a parent reason that has to do with them. And I think Americans are very resistant to that idea. So it does make us sort of tough politically in a way. I think we're not given to a lot of sympathy necessarily because we sort of think, okay, well pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Yeah, I could see how that intersects with the homelessness issue in particular that we were just discussing. Yeah. And may exacerbate some of our, yeah, may exacerbate that issue for us.
00:31:44
Speaker
And I would say I'm going off a little off the chart here maybe, but I think to some degree that's true of liberals as well as conservatives. I mean, I really feel that there are a number of people who call themselves liberal, but when push comes to shove, it's kind of like, well, I don't want a lot of homeless people in my neighborhood, right? So I think that although it characterizes conservatives more than liberals, I think that part is relatively universal in American culture.
00:32:13
Speaker
Well, as I said, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so yes. The answer to that question is yes, for sure, right? This is like the NIMBY capital of the planet, pretty much. In this area, in this particular issue, there's a movement, the Yes In My Backyard, the YIMBY movement, trying to change that.
00:32:37
Speaker
It's definitely swimming up the stream. There's a decent amount of hypocrisy that we who call ourselves liberal need to look in the mirror and recognize. Yeah, I've been reading about the Berkeley housing situation, for example.
00:32:54
Speaker
Yeah, it's bad. So do you want to maybe speak to another section of your book and some other ways that this framework plays out in other political issues or on other situations politically? Yes, absolutely. So the poverty example works so well because so much about economic success in the US we do see as kind of part of our individual
00:33:20
Speaker
individualistic capitalist system. But I'd started working on this as also as a grad student, so I did my PhD dissertation on abortion attitudes. And I began to wonder, and it was actually triggered by, I think it was an episode of 60 Minutes or something where they interviewed a pro-life and a pro-choice activist, and they asked them to talk about their beliefs about abortion. And the first thing I noticed was that the pro-choice person talked about causes of abortion, such as rape,
00:33:50
Speaker
The pro-life person, on the other hand, tended to see it as about women using abortion as birth control. So they had these very different kind of stereotypes of what they saw as the typical women seeking an abortion.
00:34:04
Speaker
that relates to stereotypes, but it also relates to sort of perceptions of causality. What is the cause of unwanted pregnancy typically? And when should abortion be allowed? And so that was sort of got me thinking about whether causality was something important there too. And then I did a study about, um, attributions for unwanted pregnancy and found that indeed
00:34:26
Speaker
Most people are pretty permissive about abortion if it's for a reason that they see as not the fault of the woman. So as you know, in many states, right, we're now moving in a direction where there will be states probably will have an exception for sexual assault and incest, but abortion will not be allowed in any other case. Why is that? Well, some people think that it's because that's a cause that can't
00:34:55
Speaker
be blamed upon the pregnant woman. So people would feel okay about denying abortion access to someone who they held as responsible for having gotten pregnant. So that was sort of what got me into the question about sort of what are the issues going on here. And in addition to looking at liberalism and conservatism, obviously religiosity comes in there, people who are more religious
00:35:18
Speaker
and have more strict kind of moral views tend to endorse causes of unwanted pregnancy that are the fault of the woman. Therefore blame them, don't feel that they should help by granting abortion, right? And people who are more liberal, less religious, and I'm totally stereotyping here, there's obviously nuance, but as a general trend, people who are more conservative, more morally traditional and more religious,
00:35:47
Speaker
will respond differently. They will tend to see the woman as responsible, blame her and not want to give abortion as an option. And people who are more liberal will do the opposite. So that sort of got me into this and then I began also thinking about things like
00:36:04
Speaker
people's attributions for homosexuality, for example. There's a lot of evidence that society has gradually come to see sexual orientation as not a choice, but something someone is born with.
00:36:19
Speaker
And therefore, even if you think homosexuality is a bad thing, you can't really blame someone for it if they were born that way, right? And so this is something that's been coming up quite a bit. There's a great quote of Buttigieg talking about, God made me this way.
00:36:39
Speaker
to I think it was to Mike Pence. And it was sort of like you can't hold someone responsible for even something you think is wrong if it was not of their own volition. Right. I think I remember that. It was what your quarrel, sir, is with my creator. He's very skillful at turning these things around. And plus, he kind of represented himself then as religious. Right. So it's also violating the stereotype of immoral
00:37:06
Speaker
you know, non-traditional behavior or something like that. So those were a couple of the directions that I got interested in going. Also in regard to, oh, sorry, go ahead, Joe. No, no, no, no, continue, please.
00:37:19
Speaker
Another one that, again, I have not myself researched, but I found sort of fascinating was the role of blame and attitudes about race issues. So there's a ton of literature going back decades about people's attributions for racial inequality. Why overall do black people have less financial resources than white people, for example. And it's really evolved over time early on when racism was really
00:37:48
Speaker
rampant and even acceptable in our culture. People said, well, black people are just genetically inferior to white people. Fortunately, very few people say that anymore, a few do. But most often what they do say is the reason for the economic inequality is that black people aren't motivated enough. So they're still making an internal attribution, this time a controllable one. And therefore, not believing in things like affirmative action or other kinds of government
00:38:17
Speaker
policies that could ameliorate the inequality. Whereas liberals are more likely to say, no, it has to do with the history of discrimination. And so I really started thinking about this more recently when all this stuff about critical race theory started coming up. Why are people so upset about critical race theory?
00:38:35
Speaker
It's making an external attribution for racial inequality. And conservatives don't like that sort of an attribution, right? It suggests, okay, it's society's fault. We have to do something, maybe reparations or some other kinds of ways of fixing the problem. So I became, the more I thought more deeply about other issues, the more I became sort of amazed at how much blame has really been overlooked, because people don't talk about it that way generally.
Media Influence on Political Polarization
00:39:04
Speaker
Yeah. So another one, too, just to sort of return a little bit to information processing and how we collect information for these attributions. So, you know, since you started this research, I mean, you've seen huge differences in the way that information comes to people through social media and just through dinner in general. And I wonder if there's anything, you know, that you've specifically encountered about how
00:39:34
Speaker
or you've thought of in terms of how attributions might, you know, siloing of communities and sort of clustering tribalism, things like this that cause information to be distributed in a different way. And is that a good way to think about it, that maybe someone in a polarized position is only collecting very selective data about, you know,
00:39:59
Speaker
about their opponent and collecting really nuanced information about their side, right? So have you seen things, have you seen things change in a way as sources of information change? That's an interesting question. I think things have certainly changed. And I think that the way we get information probably is part of it.
00:40:25
Speaker
I sort of feel like, I mean, I'm arguing in the book that in fact, political polarization has sort of been exaggerated. And by that, I mean, I don't think Americans on the average have super extreme positions on most issues. A lot of Americans tend to be moderate or don't even pay attention at all. So this, I think we generalize from seeing like what happens at a Trump rally to- Right, what we have as a typical Republican or a typical Democrat is probably much more extreme than the reality.
00:40:55
Speaker
Right, exactly. So I think, but what has gotten more polarized is people's attitudes toward the other side. So there's a lot of evidence that Democrats and Republicans' level of hatred for each other is escalated in a disturbing way. I mean, there was a study that, for example, showed that as bad as racism is in the United States that it actually maybe, like most, there are people who in fact,
00:41:23
Speaker
prefer their child marrying someone of a different race than marrying someone from the other political party. So that's really saying something, right? This is something that has a very strong history in our culture. Usually things like who you can marry are the last vestiges of prejudice that are still allowed. And here, we're even more hostile toward people in the other party. So I think that fact makes the blame placing even more
00:41:50
Speaker
extreme and and as you say less nuanced right we're so quick to jump to the conclusion that oh it's those people doing this right they're responsible and I think it's partly why we some of us believe in these conspiracy theories that are so outlandish because it's it's a small step away from having that level of hatred to imagine these people are capable of you know say
00:42:14
Speaker
running a pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor, whatever the latest one is, right? And I do think that social media probably exaggerate those things. I think social media, I think news outlets losing all their nuance and taking strong positions in one direction or another.
00:42:33
Speaker
And then as you say this siloing where we keep reinforcing, I mean, we all know we love consistency, right? There was an old theory in social cognition balance theory that we like things to be in balance. So I feel uncomfortable if I have a friend who's pro-life when I'm pro-choice, for example, right? But at least it challenges me to think a little bit. Whereas I think now we are so isolating ourselves into groups of like-minded people that we don't even consider alternative versions of causation.
00:43:03
Speaker
other ways of thinking about blame or really anything. Yeah, in that sense, maybe partially just the overwhelming amount of information and having to select sources from, you know, from everywhere, right? And pick up selective ones that are consistent with your worldview and you can believe in.
00:43:27
Speaker
And that said, when we encounter things that we don't agree with, we just discount them. They've done lots of studies where they'll have liberals and conservatives hearing different information. And if a liberal hears something negative attributed to Joe Biden, they will quickly find a way out of it. And the same with a conservative and some Republican figures. So it makes it a little bit hard then to get out of the spiral.
00:43:54
Speaker
Yeah, and then it's all supported by the way the media works now with social media, for example, your is already automatically filtering for things that you support your confirmation bias that the things that based on your previous behaviors, the algorithm thinks you will enjoy or like or click on. Exactly. Yeah, continues to compound and compound and compound.
00:44:17
Speaker
Right. Yeah, it's a sad thing. I mean, I grew up as a as a liberal in a very conservative place, which I think is partly what drove me to study political psychology. And I do remember disagreeing with a lot of my fellow students, but I don't remember feeling that they were totally insane. Right. And or evil or that sort of thing. And I feel like that's now how it is on both sides. Right. People really kind of see other the other group in that way.
00:44:46
Speaker
Yeah, it kind of gets me thinking back to something you mentioned earlier, which is this relationship between blame and punishment. And I was thinking about that when you're speaking on the topic of abortion, because there's this idea, particularly the exceptions for rape, incest, and health of the mother,
00:45:13
Speaker
Well, I guess, particularly the the rape and incest are the ones that are the most straightforward there, which is that it kind of puts the lie to the idea that while this is a life, you know, the fetus is, you know, has a life that is equally
00:45:30
Speaker
you know, on the same scale and order as the mother, and therefore it must be protected because it's just this, you know, moral issue. These exceptions kind of put that put the light of that a bit in my mind, right? So it seems to be more about some form of punishment. So if you can, if the mother is not to blame, she shouldn't be punished in this way. Yeah,
00:45:53
Speaker
No, I totally agree, Joe. I think it's a really good point. I was struck by the same thing, that we talk about it as a moral issue and about religion. But it really isn't. The differences across religion are not literally as big as you'd think, except maybe certain fundamentalist Christian doctrines, which say it's always wrong. But for the vast majority of Americans, most Americans are ambivalent. They say it's OK in some circumstances and not others. And I was struck by the same thing. If it's truly a moral issue,
00:46:23
Speaker
why would it ever be okay? And so it's clear that it's not that. And others have identified that. Lawrence Tribe, the legal scholar has written quite a bit about it and sort of suggests it's about wanting to hold women responsible and punish them for behavior that some people in society don't approve of. So yeah, it's a really different way of thinking about abortion. And I think it would be good if we were able to have these more nuanced conversations.
00:46:51
Speaker
Yeah, and then just as you were talking about blame in the context of the other in the political sphere with liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, as that connection between blame and punishment, where you can imagine this playing out over a few years where one side wants to punish the other for its indiscretions, things could get even worse in ways.
00:47:23
Speaker
that I guess that's how civil wars start in a way. Yeah, no, I know. And we see it in the public sphere, right about different reactions to Bill Clinton, for example, his errors as a president, if you want to call them that, in comparison to how people responding now with Trump being indicted. But you're right, I think that the long you know, the more there is hatred, the more there is a desire for punishment and retribution and things like that. So it is a bit scary.
00:47:51
Speaker
So, okay, so we don't want to be all doom and gloomy too. So what's the solution to some of this? Take social psychology courses and understand the true causes of things, understand that things are nuanced.
Changing Perspectives on Blame
00:48:07
Speaker
Is there any way to fix this or people, or is this sort of a trap people get stuck in?
00:48:19
Speaker
That's a good question also. I mean, I think there are solutions that they're not particularly easy maybe to put in place. So there is evidence that attributions can be changed, as I mentioned. So there's a lot of early literature back before attribution was even applied in politics.
00:48:37
Speaker
People use it in therapy, for example. If somebody is depressed and they're making attributions which are very stable, I feel bad, this is always going to be this bad, that kind of hopelessness that's associated with depression, those kinds of attributions can be altered. As a primary thing, changing the assignment of blame or reassigning blame or responsibility can lead to different beliefs, different ways of acting.
00:49:08
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. And so they've done things even with married couples, right? Where if we, it's a similar thing there. If my spouse does something, and I always say he did that because he wanted to make me upset as opposed to he did it by accident, right? That's going to have really different effects. And those kinds of attributions can be changed in relationships too. There's now some evidence in the political realm, though it's still kind of early on, things like exposing people to what it is to be
00:49:38
Speaker
poor. So they have these poverty simulation things, very good things you can participate in online where you try to imagine what it is like to be poor and try to balance all these, you know, different requirements of your time and effort, etc. And the kinds of you might notice all those you might notice all those externalities, those other things affecting it besides his personality.
00:50:00
Speaker
Exactly. And so those people have been exposed to that even really brief exposures can actually lower their tendency to make individualistic causes. There's other ones about things like there's a lot of really interesting stuff now about people's perceptions of social mobility in the US. And a lot of people think part of the reason we make individualistic causes for poverty is because we believe social mobility is possible. We believe if you no matter how poor you were brought up,
00:50:27
Speaker
All you need is to really work hard, right? And any little kid can become president, that kind of idea. But the evidence, in fact, is social mobility is incredibly low. Like if you're born poor, your chances of ever becoming wealthy are extremely slim.
00:50:44
Speaker
And if you're born rich, you're not very likely to end up poor. And so they've been declining over the last several decades. So it's an abysmal level of social mobility in this culture, but Americans overestimate social mobility. And if you expose them to information about what it's really like, it actually does change their attributions. Even racism, there's some examples of that where they are able to change people's attributions for
00:51:12
Speaker
for racial inequality by exposing them to information about white privilege, et cetera. Surprisingly, it always sort of surprises me that these things work. And I personally would like to head in that direction myself next to look more at some of these questions, but they offer hope, right? That if we are able to get people exposed to different information, they might actually make attributions that are less blameful and therefore, you know, shift their attitudes.
00:51:41
Speaker
I like the relationship analogy, too. I wonder if we can just get political parties into marriage counseling and see if we can use some of the same strategies. Well, I think some of it must happen on an individual level, right? You do have these politicians like Bernie Sanders, who I think we associate with, you know,
00:52:00
Speaker
pretty left progressive person, he has worked with Republicans successfully, right? And so you think that it must happen on these smaller levels, even among politicians, but sure you don't see it in the big picture.
00:52:14
Speaker
No, for sure not. One kind of little bit different angle that I was interested in exploring a bit with you was the idea of artificial intelligence and how we attribute in the future, how we think about this, blame as things go wrong when AIs go wrong.
AI and Future Blame Challenges
00:52:39
Speaker
So this is a legal issue for sure, and it's going to be a cultural issue for us. It is already a little bit, and we'll be increasingly so. So the example that I'm particularly thinking about is in driving. So if I'm driving and I get an accident, let's say that my car swerves
00:53:02
Speaker
I'm in traffic and my car swerves to the left and my car strikes the car to my left. The car to my left was just going straight.
00:53:10
Speaker
That accident is my fault according to the law. It's like 100% my fault. This is a real example. This just happened to me. Oh, no. I'm sorry. Yeah. In this case, the car lost control because of conditions on the road. And I think I was driving fine. But I totally understand that it is my fault. That all makes sense to me. In the future, when the AI is driving, now we've got a different situation.
00:53:40
Speaker
Is it my fault that I was in an accident when the AI was driving? How do we deal with that as a society? Yeah, that's really an interesting question. And at first, I thought you were heading in the direction of, can we blame the AI itself? When I read about some of these things and about some of the way that these AI things respond, it does make me wonder whether people won't see them as, in fact, having intention.
00:54:09
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I kind of wonder about that. Yeah, if you're just the passenger, but you own the car. It's a really interesting question. And I don't know, I guess I'm trying to think of if there's a way that someone could make maybe an internal controllable attribution could be well, you shouldn't have been driving these because they're risky. You're at fault because you know, they're not tested enough or something like that.
00:54:36
Speaker
But you're right, I would say in the traditional way we think about it, you shouldn't really be blamed because you weren't the one at the wheel. So would people, what would they do in that case? It's also tricky because you wouldn't really blame the car, or you wouldn't blame almost the individual car since it's the same as every other car with the same AI, right? So where does responsibility lie?
00:55:05
Speaker
I don't know what the answer to that is. I mean, it could be in the people who constructed it, the people who are regulating it. There's lots of places where you could place blame. Yeah, I have this hypothesis that a lot of the reason why self-driving cars are not more available
00:55:26
Speaker
I mean, they do exist, right? The Teslas have their autopilot mode, and there are fully autonomous vehicles on the streets today. But they're not very prevalent. There's not a lot of them out there, comparatively. And my hypothesis is that, not that because they're more dangerous inherently, actually. I'd have to imagine today that the median driver is worse than the
00:55:50
Speaker
than the median autonomous vehicle. But if the car gets in an accident as an autonomous vehicle, ultimately the car company is liable, potentially liable. We don't know. This is the whole thing. This is all that needs to get worked out, right? And then so those companies are holding back in some sense in terms of how much they're putting their cars out there because they don't want to get blamed.
00:56:17
Speaker
Yeah. And I wouldn't, I imagine, you know, assuming that in the future there are many more on the road, I imagine as it becomes prevalent, it will change too. I think, I think it is easy to blame the car company, for example, when, or even the individual driver, a non-driver, but the person who owns the car, because we maybe have a particular attribution for people like that who own Tesla, for example, the Tesla stereotype or things like that.
00:56:43
Speaker
that they, well, they wouldn't buy that car if they cared about other people anyway, or something like that. But yeah, it's an interesting question, I wonder in the future. I think we need to get a serious actuary in here who thinks about these things and can give us real answers about who's to blame, because they have to put their money where their mouth is on these things, right?
The Intersection of Psychology and Politics
00:57:03
Speaker
Right. Exactly. The insurance companies. They might have, I mean, I bet you insurance companies are already thinking about liability for these kinds of issues, because it's going to be, it would be real.
00:57:13
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So I think we're getting towards the end here. I would like to ask you one sort of wrap up question, which is just simply, you know, what are you really excited about going forward in terms of, you know, where this field is going? Like, where do you think the exciting, interesting new findings are going to be coming from?
00:57:34
Speaker
Oh, interesting. So you mean just generally in political psychology? Yeah, I guess in your specific approach and angle to the work, and maybe just even in your work specifically. I think right now, for me, the most exciting part might be the part I just talked about that people are now beginning to say, okay, now that we understand how these attributions are affecting attitudes,
00:57:57
Speaker
Let's look at whether or not they can be influenced. And to me, that's very exciting to feel like there's enough now established that these are the factors that influence how people make attributions for political issues. And now let's talk about doing experiments where we actually try to see what the effect is of manipulating those things. I find that very exciting because it's
00:58:19
Speaker
It's not only kind of cool and interesting and fun stuff, but I think it's more hopeful. It brings with it this idea that there may be
00:58:30
Speaker
ways of sort of bridging the gap between the way liberals and conservatives think about, at least they can understand each other's viewpoints and maybe get to a point of saying, oh yeah, okay. Well, maybe sometimes it is society's fault or vice versa. I mean, I have a very liberal bias. So vice versa might be liberal saying, oh, you know, you're right. There are situations perhaps when people don't deserve help or whatever it might be. I'm not endorsing that, but suggesting I think it could go in either direction.
00:58:59
Speaker
So I find that to be particularly exciting. And on a more general level, I'm just really happy to see that psychology and politics are continuing to be
00:59:10
Speaker
merged a little more or at least overlap. Because years ago, there was just none of it. And same with economic theory, like economics, economists just believe we voted based on our pocketbook and ignored all these biases, right. And people studying international relations talked about politicians as though they were sort of just robots or something, right, responding to real information rather than having all kinds of biases, which we know they do. So
00:59:39
Speaker
To me, I feel like having psychology enter into these fields that used to be ignored or that used to ignore psychology rather is really hopeful. Because I think just as human beings, we know, right, that we have all kinds of biases and faults, et cetera. And the idea that our science just ignores those things and treats people as though they're kind of robotic, it seems ridiculous and not very productive.
01:00:04
Speaker
Well, Gail, it was really a pleasure having you on the show with us. Happy you could join us. And again, the book is Blame and Political Attitudes, The Psychology of America's Culture War, out by Pelgrave. Just in, when did it come out? January, 2023. Yes. Well, thank you both. This was a fun conversation. Yeah, thank you so much.