Two Lessons For Democrats From Social Psychology

This is the text of an op-ed piece published by the Wisconsin State Journal on May 16 (and can be found at this link: https://bit.ly/2Th4Mfb).

The opinions expressed are those of the author and not of any professional institution with which she is affiliated.

Winning elections in Wisconsin these days takes far more than persuading people to vote for a platform that polls indicate a majority already endorses anyway. In an era of extreme partisanship, winning elections also relies on learning two lessons from social psychology. One lesson is to enhance voters’ feelings of intelligence and relevance by allowing them to define the conversation. About anything. The second lesson is to take control of the communication of social norms.

President Trump has learned the first lesson and brought it to Wisconsin. He has been successful at establishing a base among previously neglected voters because he appears to take an interest in their expertise and in engaging in conversation on their terms. That makes them feel good, and it is a nonpartisan fact that people like to feel good about themselves. In contrast, when speaking to these same voters, Democrats often appear to conspire to make them feel stupid. Democrats do this by controlling the conversation so that it remains solidly on their own turf.

In a classic study, Lee Ross, a social psychologist at Stanford University, and his colleagues brought experimental participants into the laboratory in pairs. One participant was randomly assigned to generate general knowledge questions and pose them to the second participant. The questioners were free to write esoteric questions based on their own knowledge.

Unsurprisingly, the answerers struggled to respond correctly. Does that mean the questioners were smarter than the answerers? Of course not. However, the researchers found that both the questioners and answerers rated the questioners as more intelligent.

The first lesson from social psychology is that by controlling the conversation topic, you can make people feel intelligent and relevant because you provide them the opportunity to shine in their own area of expertise. Or you can make them feel stupid and irrelevant because you keep the conversation in your area of expertise. Telling people that they are voting against their own best interests, for example, denies them expertise even in their own lives. Use of the former strategy wins votes.

The second lesson is about social norms. Descriptive social norms are defined as what most people in a society are doing, believing and valuing. Perceptions of social norms strongly influence people’s behavior; people like to think and do what most other people around them are thinking and doing.

Over the past decade, the Republican party has controlled perceptions of political norms in Wisconsin. Their use of billboards and advertising deftly manipulates the perception of “most people’s” political leanings in the state. Strategic use of generalizations such as Northern Wisconsin being a “Republican stronghold” denies Bayfield, Douglas and Ashland counties their recent voting records entirely. And to great effect.

Gerrymandering influences perceived norms because people use simple logic to draw conclusions. The legislature has a Republican majority, so most Wisconsinites must vote Republican, right? Wrong. In 2018, Democratic candidates received more votes than Republicans in Wisconsin’s U.S. House and state Assembly races. But Republicans won five of the eight U.S. House seats and 64 of the 99 state Assembly seats.

Democrats have been less energetic at taking control of the narrative about political norms in the state. Wisconsin has progressive roots, a strong relationship to public education and a concern for small business and agriculture. Documenting and communicating Wisconsinites’ beliefs about education, guns, natural resources, immigration and health care would go some way in correcting perceptions that have been constructed on the basis of ideology (often by the national GOP) rather than democracy.

But scolding won’t work. The average Wisconsinite is intelligent and an expert in some domain. Empiricists by nature, the people of this state are able to understand honest information about social norms. When they learn that most people think as they do, democracy will prevail.

Who Am I to Write this Blog?

In 1997 I moved to France, to Aix-en-Provence, for a year on sabbatical from Indiana University. I wanted to write and to learn French. I stayed and got a job as a researcher with the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), working at Université Blaise Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand. I lived in France for 13 more years (with a year sabbatical in the US after 10 years), married a German, raised two step-sons (whose mother is French), and had two little German-American sons (not French, confusingly for them, because in France there is the law of paternity, meaning that at least one of your parents has to be French for you to have that nationality; or you can wait and apply for this as an adult). I already spoke pretty fluent German, but I had to learn fluent French, which took more than four years of hard work and a lot of tears. When, in 2006, I moved with the whole family to Madison, WI for a year-long sabbatical at the University of Wisconsin, I was stunned. I realized that for 10 years, I had listened to what people outside of the US said about Americans and about themselves, and just accepted everything as truth. Most of what they said about themselves was positive, and most of what they said about Americans was negative. Or if not negative, a combination of admiration and disdain. Especially when they employed the concept of being “Anglo-Saxon.” Somehow the occasional visit to my family was not a corrective to these clichés. It took living and working back in the US to confront them.,

I learned in my first year in France, in the context of a French immersion class in which I was the only American, that accepted stereotypes among many Europeans is that Americans are fat (eat poor, restricted diets), superficial, imperialistic, arrogant, and naive, if not stupid. Less well-raised and less well-educated. I didn’t do a good job of sticking up for Americans in part because out of context it was hard to judge or even remember. And it was so easy and even helpful for the goal of assimilation to just to agree with the stereotypes. When I moved back to the US after ten years, though, I was both embarrassed at myself and enraged about clichés. Sure, some behavioral facts are true (Americans children make noise while playing in the park), but the interpretations of what that behavior (e.g., poorly raised) means were often so far off the mark, that I felt discouraged and helpless.

The asymmetry I referred to (US is bad and other places are somehow better) describes not only informal beliefs (clichés) but also, perhaps more dangerously, some of the science of culture. Cross-cultural psychologists quite often “find” things wrong with the US and “find” things right with other (their!) cultures. This seems inevitable for the following reason: Most cultural psychologists come to the US and tell Americans what the US is like. They learn English pretty well, and comment on the differences between their culture and American culture. However, American cross-cultural psychologists do not go abroad and live and work for years (and fully master the language) in other countries. Partly this is unsurprising because North American academic and scientific institutions have some very nice features that are hard to give up. But if American scientists do not go abroad and actually be part (live, work, speak) of other cultures, they can not serve as the natural interpretive correction for inaccuracies in the conclusions and interpretations that cultural psychologists who immigrate to the US quite naturally make.  

The problem is even bigger than it seems because since Americans tend to have inaccurately positive clichés about other countries (e.g., thinking kids abroad to be better raised or better educated; thinking that other cultures are more worried about others than the self), then anything that the transplanted scientist says is accepted without question.  They already believed that their country was inferior, so when a visitor tells them this, they simply agree.  This is like a European saying to me (before I learn German or French) that their interpersonal relationships are deeper and more meaningful than those in in the US.  I say, “Yes,” because I can’t tell yet (and because I had already accepted that cliché as fact). It is only when I do learn the language and the culture that I can say, “no, in the US our relationships are not less good. It is just that good and deep involve different behaviors. Ones that you don’t recognize as important.”

I think that people and scientists should not judge one another, but rather try to understand differences. Testing whether relationships in one culture are “better” than in another. Testing whether people are “happier” in one culture than another. These are not scientific questions; these are competitive and hostile gestures.

I moved back to France in 2007 and then lived there until late 2011, when I moved permanently with my family to Madison, WI. So here is my blog. I love the US, and France and Germany (countries I have a personal connection to, and whose language I can speak). If I take on clichés in a way that seems to favor the US, this is only because my best ability is to inform the misunderstandings of this country. However, wherever I can, I unpack the negative and positive clichés about other countries and their artifacts. The goal is to show how many ways we misunderstand each other, not to find one culture or country better than another. And if I ever fail in this, I sure hope that the reader comments to correct me. I don’t need to be right; we all need to be fair.