Beyond Populism: The Psychology of Status-Seeking and Extreme Political Discontent

Petersen, M., Osmundsen, M., & Bor, A. 

(2020, July 8).

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/puqzs

Abstract

Modern democracies are currently experiencing destabilizing events including the emergence of demagogic leaders, the onset of street riots, circulation of misinformation and extremely hostile political engagements on social media. Some of the forms of discontent are commonly argued to be related to populism. In this chapter, however, we argue that the evolved psychology of status-seeking lies at the core of this syndrome of extreme political discontent. Thus, social status constitutes one of the key adaptive resources for any human, as it induces deference from others in conflicts of interest. Prior research has identified two routes to status: Privilege acquired through service and dominance acquired through coercion. We argue that extreme political discontent involves behaviors aimed at dominance through engagement in either individual aggression or in mobilization processes that facilitate coalitional aggression. Consistent with this, we empirically demonstrate that measures of status-seeking via dominance correlate with indices of a large number of extreme forms of political discontent and do so more strongly than a measure of populism. Finally, we argue that the reason why dominance strategies become activated in the context of modern democratic politics is that increased inequality activates heightened needs for status and, under such conditions, dominance for some groups constitutes a more attainable route to status than prestige.

Towards depolarized societies 

Understanding the psychological and structural roots of extreme discontent is key if we are to move  towards more peaceful societies.  An exclusive focus on populism might lead to the expectation that the  roots of discontent are value-based. For example, the rise of right-wing populism may suggest that  frustrations are rooted in a decreasing respect for authorities and traditional forms of life. If that was indeed the case, a depolarized society might be reached only if non-populists were willing to compromise on important political values and to a larger extent embrace tradition and authority.

In contrast, the present arguments and results suggest that the true roots of the most extreme forms of discontent are less based on a conflict of abstract political values and more on a lack of social status and recognition. If so, the path towards depolarization lies in more inclusion and more equality, for example, based on an affirmation of the classical liberal doctrine of the importance of  open,  non-dominant  exchange  of  arguments  (Popper,  1945).  Unfortunately,  this  is  not something  that can be fixed quickly, as would be  the case  if discontent was rooted  in transient factors such as the behavior of social media algorithms.  Rather, depolarization requires difficult structural changes that alleviates the onset of dominance motivations.

The research is here.

Humans are complicated—do we need behavioral science to get through this?

Cathleen O'Grady
Ars Technica
Originally published 16 May 20

Here is an excerpt:

Leaning on the evidence

If humans didn’t insist on being quite so messily human, pandemic response would be much simpler. People would stay physically separated whenever possible; leaders would be proactive and responsive to evidence; our fight could be concentrated on the biomedical tools we so urgently need. The problem is that our maddening, imperfect humanity gets in the way at every turn, and getting around those imperfections demands that we understand the human behavior underlying them.

It's also clear that we need to understand the differences between groups of people to get a handle on the pandemic. Speculation has been rampant about how cultural differences might influence what sort of responses are palatable. And some groups are suffering disproportionately: death rates are higher among African-American and Latinx communities in the US, while a large analysis from the UK found that black, minority ethnic, and poorer people are at higher risk of death—our social inequalities, housing, transport, and food systems all play a role in shaping the crisis. We can’t extricate people and our complicated human behavior and society from the pandemic: they are one and the same.

In their paper, Van Bavel, Willer and their group of behavioral research proponents point to studies from fields like public health, sociology and psychology. They cover work on cultural differences, social inequality, mental health, and more, pulling out suggestions for how the research could be useful for policymakers and community leaders.

Those recommendations are pretty intuitive. For effective communications, it could be helpful to lean on sources that carry weight in different communities, like religious leaders, they suggest. And public health messaging that emphasizes protecting others—rather than fixating on just protecting oneself—tends to be persuasive, the proponents argue.

But not everyone is convinced that it would necessarily be a good idea to act on the recommendations. “Many of the topics surveyed are relevant,” write psychologist Hans IJzerman and a team of critics in their draft. The team's concern isn’t the relevance of the research; it’s how robust that research is. If there are critical flaws in the supporting data, then applying these lessons on a broad scale could be worse than useless—it could be actively harmful.

The info is here.

We Need a Word for Destructive Group Outrage

Cass Sunstein
www.Bloomberg.com
Originally posted May 23, 2019

Here are two excerpts:

In the most extreme and horrible situations, lapidation is based on a lie, a mistake or a misunderstanding. People are lapidated even though they did nothing wrong.

In less extreme cases, the transgression is real, and lapidators have a legitimate concern. Their cause is just. They are right to complain and to emphasize that people have been hurt or wronged.

Even so, they might lose a sense of proportion. Groups of people often react excessively to a mistake, an error in judgment, or an admittedly objectionable statement or action. Even if you have sympathy for Harvard’s decision with respect to Sullivan, or Cambridge’s decision with respect to Carl, it is hard to defend the sheer level of rage and vitriol directed at both men.

Lapidation entrepreneurs often have their own agendas. Intentionally or not, they may unleash something horrific – something like the Two Minutes Hate, memorably depicted in George Orwell’s “1984.”

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What makes lapidation possible? A lot of the answer is provided by the process of “group polarization,” which means that when like-minded people speak with one another, they tend to go to extremes.

Suppose that people begin with the thought that Ronald Sullivan probably should not have agreed to represent Harvey Weinstein, or that Al Franken did something pretty bad. If so, their discussions will probably make them more unified and more confident about those beliefs, and ultimately more extreme.

A key reason involves the dynamics of outrage. Whenever some transgression has occurred, people want to appear at least as appalled as others in their social group. That can transform mere disapproval into lapidation.

The info is here.

Leader's group-norm violations elicit intentions to leave the group – If the group-norm is not affirmed

Lara Ditrich, AdrianLüders, Eva Jonas, & Kai Sassenberg
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Available online 2 April 2019

Abstract

Group members, even central ones like group leaders, do not always adhere to their group's norms and show norm-violating behavior instead. Observers of this kind of behavior have been shown to react negatively in such situations, and in extreme cases, may even leave their group. The current work set out to test how this reaction might be prevented. We assumed that group-norm affirmations can buffer leaving intentions in response to group-norm violations and tested three potential mechanisms underlying the buffering effect of group-norm affirmations. To this end, we conducted three experiments in which we manipulated group-norm violations and group-norm affirmations. In Study 1, we found group-norm affirmations to buffer leaving intentions after group-norm violations. However, we did not find support for the assumption that group-norm affirmations change how a behavior is evaluated or preserve group members' identification with their group. Thus, neither of these variables can explain the buffering effect of group-norm affirmations. Studies 2 & 3 revealed that group-norm affirmations instead reduce perceived effectiveness of the norm-violator, which in turn predicted lower leaving intentions. The present findings will be discussed based on previous research investigating the consequences of norm violations.

The research is here.

How the Science of “Blue Lies” May Explain Trump’s Support

Jeremy Adam Smith
Scientific American
Originally posted on March 24, 2017

Here are two excerpts:

This has led many people to ask themselves: How does the former reality-TV star get away with it? How can he tell so many lies and still win support from many Americans?

Journalists and researchers have suggested many answers, from a hyperbiased, segmented media to simple ignorance on the part of GOP voters. But there is another explanation that no one seems to have entertained. It is that Trump is telling “blue lies”—a psychologist’s term for falsehoods, told on behalf of a group, that can actually strengthen bonds among the members of that group.

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This research—and these stories—highlights a difficult truth about our species: we are intensely social creatures, but we are prone to divide ourselves into competitive groups, largely for the purpose of allocating resources. People can be prosocial—compassionate, empathetic, generous, honest—in their group and aggressively antisocial toward out-groups. When we divide people into groups, we open the door to competition, dehumanization, violence—and socially sanctioned deceit.

“People condone lying against enemy nations, and since many people now see those on the other side of American politics as enemies, they may feel that lies, when they recognize them, are appropriate means of warfare,” says George Edwards, a political scientist at Texas A&M University and one of the country’s leading scholars of the presidency.

The article is here.

Are Moral Judgments Good or Bad Things?

Robb Willer & Brent Simpson
Scientific American
Originally published April 10, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Beyond the harms, there is also hypocrisy. It is not uncommon to discover that those who make moral judgments—public evaluations of the rightness or wrongness of others’ behavior—do not themselves conform to the moral norms they eagerly enforce. Think, for instance, of politicians or religious leaders who oppose gay rights but are later discovered soliciting sex from other men. These examples and others seem to make it clear: moral judgments are antisocial, a bug in the code of society.

But recent research challenges this view, suggesting that moral judgments are a critical part of the social fabric, a force that encourages people to consider the welfare of others. Our work, and that of others, implies that—while sometimes disadvantageous—moral judgments have important, positive effects for individuals and the groups they inhabit.

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To summarize, we find that moral judgments of unethical behavior are generally viewed as a legitimate means for maintaining group-beneficial norms of conduct. Those who use them are generally seen as moral and trustworthy, and individuals typically act more morally after communicating judgments of others.

The article is here.

A Tale of Two Moralities, Part 1

Will Wilkinson
Niskanen Center
Originally posted January 19, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Because “the establishment” (including the Republican political establishment) is relatively cosmopolitan and liberal (in the broad sense), an outpouring of populist anti-establishment sentiment is going to assume a nationalistic, illiberal form more or less by default. The good news is that anti-elite anybody-but-Hillary-ism doesn’t really imply serious public appetite for anything like alt-right authoritarianism. The bad news is that the liberal-democratic capitalist welfare state and the so-called “neoliberal” global order is far and away the best humanity has ever done, and we’ve taken it for granted. We could very well trash it in a fit of pique, and wind up a middle-income kleptocracy boiling with civil strife and/or destabilize the global order in a way that ends in utter horror.

It is very important to keep this from happening! And that means it’s important to understand the mechanisms underlying our cultural and moral polarization. That’s what I’m going to begin to do in this (long!) post, in a preliminary, speculative, exploratory spirit. I want to push a little deeper than the prevailing journalistic narratives have gone, and churn up some credible empirical hypotheses that I hope will help us eventually home in on the correct diagnosis. Then we can hazard some recommendations that may help reduce polarization and mitigate its bad effects. I’ll do that in a future post.  

This important blog post is here.

Understanding America’s Moral Divides

Julie Beck
The Atlantic
Originally published December 14, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Part of why it’s easy for anyone to see themselves, or the groups they belong to, as super moral is because morality itself is a vague concept. “You can have one person, for instance, who cares very deeply for their friends and family and would go to the ends of the earth for these people,” Tappin says. “And yet they don’t, say, give a dime to foreign charity. And then you’ve got another person who spends their entire life donating money overseas, yet in their interpersonal life, perhaps they don’t treat their family members very well. In those cases, how do you compare who’s more moral? It seems quite impossible to judge and it’s just at the mercy of people’s preferences.”


Haidt’s work identifies six different moral metrics—liberty, fairness, loyalty, authority, care, and purity. Different groups and cultures prefer to emphasize these domains to different degrees. For example, people in Eastern countries tend to emphasize purity and loyalty more than people in Western countries. People who live in countries where there has historically been higher prevalence of disease also place a higher value on purity, as well as loyalty and authority. In the United States, liberals tend to focus mostly on care, fairness, and liberty, while conservatives generally emphasize all six domains. Other research shows that people rate the moral values a group holds as the most important characteristic affecting whether they’re proud to be a member of the group, or more likely to distance themselves from it.

The article is here.