Well, if that one person happens to be Angelina Jolie, it means that there will suddenly be a whole lot more people who now know about the harmful consequences of having a faulty BRCA1 gene, a genetic mutation that greatly increases a woman’s risk of developing breast and/or ovarian cancer. Thousands of women who have never heard of this gene will now know that if they happen to have this mutation as well, their risks of cancer could be greatly reduced through preventive mastectomies (removal of the breasts) and salpingo-oophorectomies (removal of the Fallopian tubes & ovaries). And it means that all of these women (and men) will now have a very public, very identifiable face tied to that condition and that knowledge.

According to the identifiable victim effect, this is no minor detail. Individual stories have a far greater sway on our attitudes, intentions, and behavior than any long list of numbers, statistics, and facts. For example, if you were to see an ad for Save the Children with a picture of a single, emaciated Malian child named Rokia, you would likely donate significantly more to the charity (about 50% more, on average) than if you see a message listing the statistics about how many people are starving throughout all of Africa. Similarly, just knowing that Angelina Jolie underwent a double mastectomy after learning of her deleterious BRCA1 mutation will likely have a stronger influence on your awareness of this issue and support for genetic testing for BRCA than it would have had if you had simply learned about thousands of unidentified women who deal with these same issues.

So why do individual stories have such a greater pull on us than statistics — especially when, rationally, learning about thousands or millions of people being impacted by something should impact your attitudes and actions much more than hearing about just one?

First of all, these individual stories are vivid. Stories about people are graphic, full of individual details, and typically involve strong visual imagery. Similarly, our experiences with close loved ones are vivid; we know a lot about their lives and individual personalities, and we come into frequent contact with them. Decades of research has informed us that vivid information has a much stronger influence on what people think and believe than dull, boring statistics. Even if the facts themselves are supposed to be “shocking,” numbers on a page will never hit us at the same vivid level as a picture of a wounded puppy or a video of a crying little girl. Pure information will never really impact us in the same way that seeing something happen to our friends, loved ones, or an identifiable public figure will.

Secondly, in addition to being vivid and full of graphic details, individual accounts are emotional, and emotion is an invaluable component of persuasion. For example, men and women asked to donate money to support the charity March of Dimes would consistently donate more money if they were asked outside of a church as they walked in to confession (aka while they felt fairly guilty) than if they were asked when they were walking out of confession (aka when their guilt had already been resolved). We use emotions as a cue for what we should think and do. If you feel guilty? Do something good to resolve it. If you feel happy? Do something good to maintain that positive state. Without even realizing it, our emotions will sway our attitudes and actions — and no facts or numbers will manage to hit our emotions as strongly as an individual story of heartache and woe, or the thoughts, feelings, and lives of the people that we love and care about. In fact, as I’ve written about before, there are entire lines of research devoted to informing us about all of the ways in which our emotions impact our moral and political judgments. (Spoiler Alert: They impact them a lot.)

So what does a bunch of research on Mali, March of Dimes, and starving children have to do with Angelina Jolie’s Op-Ed today on her brave medical decision? Well, the main point of this effect is that it’s harder to work up the empathy and the emotional connection to care about numbers and figures to the point where they will actually sway your opinions and actions. It’s much easier to become emotionally invested in a cause when there’s a name and a face tied to it — especially when that name and that face belong to someone who is famous, well-known, and/or well-liked (hopefully, even if you’re still Team Aniston, you like Jolie enough that you would not wish her any harm!)

The more you can identify a single person being impacted by the issue in vivid, emotional detail, the more likely that person is to sway your attitudes. It happened with Ryan White, whose public struggle with HIV from age 13 to 18 spurred the US Congress to pass the Ryan White Care Act after his death, increasing the services available for people living with HIV/AIDS. It happened with Michael J. Fox, whose public struggle with Parkinson’s Disease is credited with raising public awareness of the disease to all-time highs, and whose foundation raises the most money each year within the United States towards finding a cure. Hopefully, something similar will now happen with Jolie as well. We can only hope that Jolie lending her name and face to awareness of the potential dangers of BRCA1 & BRCA2 mutations will make it more likely that women will get their own genes tested and, possibly, save their own lives as a result.

I truly want to thank Jolie for her bravery in coming forward to write about her double mastectomy, and I hope that others recognize what a great thing she has done for awareness of both breast/ovarian cancer and the potential of genetic testing for deleterious BRCA1/BRCA2 genes. However, now that you’ve read this article on why Jolie’s article was important…I must also warn you to be careful. New research has sadly shown that when people learn about the identifiable victim effect (as you just have by reading this article), it doesn’t always have the consequence that one might hope for. Of course, I would love for people armed with this knowledge to go out into the world and, aware of this bias, work up equal levels of passion for causes without such identifiable victims. But learning about the identifiable victim effect, as it turns out, can have the undesirable effect of actually decreasing support given to identifiable victims, rather than increasing support given to large-scale efforts. Apparently, when people learn about this, the first reaction is to correct for it by giving less to the victims rather than by giving more to the masses. So don’t let this fallacy sway your thinking! Maybe knowing about the effect of knowing about the effect will make a difference…

After all, the identifiable victim effect isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Even Mother Teresa fell victim to it. As she put it, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

Of course, Stalin also noted that “the death of a single Russian soldier is a tragedy, [whereas] a million deaths is a statistic.” But let’s stick with quoting Mother Teresa.

For More On The Identifiable Victim Effect:

Dan Ariely: The Identifiable Victim Effect in Action

Andy Goodman (at Contributions Magazine): Stories or Data: Which Makes the Stronger Case?

Nicholas Kristof: Save the Darfur Puppy

Caveat:

Genetic testing can be incredibly expensive, and it is not necessarily advisable for all women to be tested for BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations. Generally, it is only recommended that women get tested for mutations in these genes if they have a strong family history of breast or ovarian cancer. For more information, you can see the following resources:

http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/BRCA

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/brca-gene-test/MY00322

http://www.ct.gov/dph/cwp/view.asp?a=3134&q=396624

References:

Nisbett, R. E., & Ross, L. (1980). “Human inference: Strategies and shortcomings of social judgment.” Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Jenni, K.E., & Loewenstein, G. (1997). Explaining the identifiable victim effect. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 14, 235-257 DOI: 10.1016/S0167-6687(97)89155-X

Slovic, P. (2007). ‘If I Look at the Mass I Will Never Act’: Psychic Numbing and Genocide. Judgment and Decision Making, 2, 79-95 DOI: 10.1037/e718332007-003

Harris, M.B., Benson, S.M., & Hall, C.L. (1975). The effects of confession on altruism. The Journal of Social Psychology, 96, 187-192 PMID: 1186138

Batson, C. (1990). How social an animal? The human capacity for caring. American Psychologist, 45 (3), 336-346 DOI: 10.1037//0003-066X.45.3.336

Image Credits:

Images of Angelina Jolie by Gage Skidmore via Wikipedia. Available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License and Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.

Image of Michael J. Fox by Thomas Atilla Lewis via Wikipedia. Available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

This is a slightly edited version of a piece that I originally posted in March 2013, relating to Rob Portman’s decision to support marriage equality after learning that his son is gay. You can see the original post by clicking the From The Archives icon on the left.

You can only run to one of the monkeys. Which one will you choose?

Six or seven decades ago, many psychologists would have claimed that any affection that we experience towards our parental figures is a purely behaviorist response. After many instances of conditioning a sense of “positive affect” after receiving life-sustaining food from mothers, children associate that positive emotion with these caregivers, an association that serves as the sole explanation for why people “love” their mothers.

But that’s not what Harry Harlow thought. Harlow, a psychologist working at the University of Wisconsin – Madison during the 1960s, believed that there was something more important underlying our affection for Mom and Dad than our primal need to eat and survive. He believed that there was an additional factor: Comfort.

What Harlow did to test this hypothesis was arguably ingenious, though inarguably cruel.¹ Harlow deprived monkeys of food, making them desperately hungry, and then stuck them into a cage where they had a choice of two “mother figures” to run towards. On the left was a wire mother – cold and uncomfortable, yet equipped with a bottle that would feed the baby with life-sustaining nutrients. On the right was a cloth mother – warm, soft, and comfortable, yet unable to provide the infant with any food. If the only reason why we “love” our mothers (and fathers) is based on a conditioned response to our need for food, then the infant monkeys should run to the wire mothers who can feed them every time.

Yet that’s not what happened. Not even close.

Time after time, even when desperately hungry, the monkeys would run over to the wire mother just long enough to fill up on milk, and then dash to the cloth mother as quickly as possible to spend the next 17-18 hours snuggling into her warm, comforting body. The infants would sometimes come close to starvation before they would voluntarily leave their cloth mothers to refill their bellies.

The monkeys showed us that when push comes to shove, we don’t love our mothers just because they feed us.

We love them because they cuddle us.

Harlow’s thinking on this was largely motivated by one of the most important psychologists in our field’s history: John Bowlby, who developed attachment theory in the 1950s based on his observations of young, orphaned boys. Bowlby determined that our attachment to parental figures (in particular, he argued, to mothers) plays a huge, critical role in our ability to learn, grow, and develop healthy adult relationships. Without a strong attachment, we are destined to be deeply disturbed.²

Whereas Harlow took this research and used it to explore the hypothesis that we have a core motivation for love and affection, a student of Bowlby’s named Mary Ainsworth decided to examine something else: What do the different types of mother-child relationships look like? How can we characterize them, and what types of parenting behaviors produce different kinds of children?

To do this, Ainsworth created a paradigm known as the Strange Situation Procedure.³

The entire thing takes about 20 minutes, and follows a strict sequence of events:

1. The parent and the infant enter a laboratory playroom.
2. The parent and the infant are left alone. The infant is allowed to freely explore the room and all of the toys.
3. A stranger walks in and begins talking to the parent. The stranger then approaches the infant.
4. The parent leaves as inconspicuously as possible, leaving the stranger alone with the infant.
5. The infant is now separated from his/her parent. The stranger tries to interact with the infant.
6. The parent comes back into the room, greeting and comforting the infant.
7. The stranger leaves the room, leaving the parent alone with the infant.
8. The parent leaves the room again. The infant is left alone in the room (supervised through the mirror, of course).
9. The stranger re-enters and again tries to interact with the infant.
10. The parent re-enters, greets the infant, and tries to pick him/her up & provide comfort. The stranger leaves.

The experimenters, watching this whole sequence occur through a two-way mirror, are keeping track of the following four critical things:

1. How much does the infant explore the environment, doing things like playing with new toys or crawling around?
2. How does the infant respond when his/her parent leaves the room?
3. How does the infant behave when he/she is alone with the stranger?
4. How does the infant respond when his/her parent comes back into the room?

After watching dozens and dozens of these interactions, Ainsworth soon discovered that there are three main types of attachment styles: Secure, Avoidant, and Anxious. Infants can be separated into these categories based on how they act during the paradigm described above.

• Secure Attachment: Securely attached infants are happy when Mom is around. They are happy to explore the playroom, using Mom as a “secure base” that they can turn to when they get scared or upset, but they don’t feel the need to cling to her. When she leaves, they become incredibly distressed, often crying or refusing to leave the door in the hopes that she will come back. However, once Mom returns into the room, they are happy to be comforted by her, and are soon back to normal. Within a short period of time, they are happy to explore the playroom again, as if Mom never left.
• Avoidant Attachment: Avoidantly attached infants are generally nonplussed or uninterested when Mom is around. They are happy to explore the playroom, but this is mostly because they have no real interest in interacting with Mom. When she leaves, they don’t show obvious distress. When she returns, they don’t seem particularly happy to see her. Overall, these infants seem largely avoidant or disconnected from their mothers.
• Anxious Attachment: Although anxiously attached infants might seem fine in the playroom at first, once Mom leaves, they become incredibly distressed. However, unlike the securely attached infants, they do not return to normal once Mom returns to the room. Instead, they might seem deeply conflicted, alternating between seeming very angry at Mom for daring to leave or clinging to her and continuing to cry hysterically. They do not quickly return to normal and go back to exploring the playroom; they continue to cling to Mom or express anger about the fact that she abandoned them.

These attachment styles are presumed to arise from different “parenting” behaviors, mostly revolving around emotional availability and responsiveness.

Generally, parents will create secure attachment bonds with their children if they are responsive to their needs and emotionally available. This means that when the child wants attention, the parent will reliably provide that attention and care; however, when the child wants to be left alone, the parent will give them an appropriate amount of space to explore and be independent (in a safe way, of course).

Parents might create avoidant attachment bonds with children if they are consistently unavailable, rejecting, or distant. In this case, children learn that their parents are not going to be there for them, so they adopt a pattern of attachment that revolves around being independent to the point of never needing their parents.

Finally, parents might create anxious attachment bonds with children if they are inconsistently responsive. This means that whereas they might sometimes respond to children’s needs, they might be unresponsive just as frequently. Someone who practices this parenting style can be thought of as practicing a fairly self-centered approach to parenting; attention is given when convenient for the parent, even if the child does not want to be held or played with, but not always given when the child wants (or needs) it. Of course, parents will not always be able to respond to their children’s cries, needs, or wants. No parent is perfect! But these are patterns of behavior that emerge over a long period of time, in which a parent might be unresponsive as often as he/she is responsive, in a completely unpredictable way.

I love you, Mom, but I don't think I ever wanted THIS much proximity!

What else does a secure attachment look like? The three most important features of a secure attachment are that the infant will proximity seek (wanting to be close to the mother), use the mother as a safe haven (cling to her when upset or scared), and use her as a secure base (use the knowledge that she is there as a “safety net” to gain the necessary courage to explore the surrounding environment and try new, interesting things without being too scared).

I was wary of the horse at first, but my Mom was a very good secure base!

What is truly fascinating is that these attachment patterns can end up influencing how we approach relationships for the rest of our lives! The general idea is that our relationships with our parents create “working models” (or mental representations) of what a relationship “should” look like. Our parents’ levels of emotional responsiveness, availability, and dependability lead us to create mental models that form our concepts of what to expect in relationships throughout our lives. In the table below, you can see how people with each of the three attachment styles might approach adult relationships as they grow up, including romantic relationships, friendships, and more.

There are even questionnaires that you can take to assess your attachment style within romantic relationships, or your adult attachment to your parents, which asks questions about how much you feel you can depend on your father or whether or not you worry about being abandoned by your mother (I’ve included some great links to a wide range of these “attachment quizzes” at the bottom of this post). But the nuances of adult attachments are a story for another day…

For now, all we need to know is that our mothers (and fathers) are incredibly important. We need love — in some ways, we crave it as much as (or even more than) we crave basic needs like food. The different ways in which our mothers might respond to our wants and needs shape how we interact with others, respond to strangers, and explore our environments, which ends up playing a big role in how we learn and grow throughout our entire lives. Even into adulthood, our attachments with parents continue to play a huge role, and the models they provide for us about how we should expect other people to respond to us within close relationships can shape what we look for in romantic partners, friends, and colleagues.

So Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. Thank you for always being there with a snuggle, a kiss, and consistent emotional support. I’ve moved across the country two times to pursue my educational dreams, I’ve tried a huge number of things that I needed a very secure base to have the courage to try, and I’ve found an incredibly happy, healthy romantic relationship.

Because of social psychology, I know that I have you (and Dad!⁴) to thank for all of that.

1. It should obviously go without saying that Harlow’s experiments on infant rhesus macaques were incredibly unethical. He raised infant monkeys in isolation, leading to serious mental and emotional disturbances that plagued these poor monkeys for the remainder of their lives. I do not condone this behavior. While I remain glad that there is empirical evidence in support of our core need for love and comfort, and I think the evidence that Harlow established is important for our field and for our understanding of human nature, I am deeply saddened that these theories were developed in this way. Descriptions of Harlow’s experiments on this site should never be taken as an endorsement for the inhumane treatment of animals.

2. I would like to make it very, incredibly, explicitly clear that this statement says NOTHING about any debate on working mothers, working fathers, etc. There are no differences in attachment quality when comparing children of working parents and children with a stay-at-home parent. Bowlby is speaking about children who were, largely, treated like the monkeys in Harlow’s experiments. These were children who were extremely isolated, had no social contact for hours and hours on end, and had absolutely no parental figures present during their formative years. Research has shown that as long as the quality of an attachment is strong when the parent and child interact, it does not matter if that parent happens to be at work for most of the day. Please understand this.

3. All participating mothers provided consent in the original study for these videos to be shared and used for educational purposes in perpetuity.

4. Please don’t worry; PsySociety loves fathers, too! Even though most early attachment research was conducted with mothers as the primary caregiver being observed, attachment relationships with fathers are absolutely crucial. Just wait a month or so; soon enough, it will be Dad’s turn for a spin on the blog!

For More Information:

SciAm Blogger Jason Goldman on Harry Harlow’s experiments

Several attachment-related personality quizzes (Disclaimer: This site is hosted by my colleague Nate Hudson)

A very comprehensive rundown of adult attachment theory (Disclaimer: This site is hosted by my colleague Chris Fraley)

Adult Attachment Questionnaire: Discover your attachment style! (Disclaimer: This site is hosted by my colleague Chris Fraley)

Take dozens of fascinating attachment-related quizzes and personality tests! (Disclaimer: This site is hosted by my colleague Chris Fraley)

References:

Ainsworth, M., Blehar, M., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Ainsworth, M. and Bowlby, J. (1965). Child Care and the Growth of Love. London: Penguin Books.

Blum, Deborah. (1994). The Monkey Wars. Oxford University Press.

Bowlby J (1973). Separation: Anxiety & Anger. Attachment and Loss (vol. 2); (International psycho-analytical library no.95). London: Hogarth Press.

Bowlby J (1988). A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. Tavistock professional book. London: Routledge.

Fraley, R. C., Heffernan, M. E., Vicary, A. M., & Brumbaugh, C. C. (2011). The Experiences in Close Relationships-Relationship Structures questionnaire: A method for assessing attachment orientations across relationships. Psychological Assessment, 23, 615-625.

Harlow, H. F. (1958). The nature of love.

Harlow, H.F. (1962). Development of affection in primates. Pp. 157-166 in: Roots of Behavior (E.L. Bliss, ed.). New York: Harper.

Heffernan, M. E., & Fraley, R. C. (2013). Do early caregiving experiences shape what people find attractive in adulthood? Evidence from a study on parental age. Journal of Research in Personality, 47, 364-368.

Heffernan, M. E., Fraley, R. C., Vicary, A. M., & Brumbaugh, C. C. (2012). Attachment features and functions in adult romantic relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 29, 671-693.

Image Credits:

Harlow Monkeys photograph from the original experiment courtesy of the UW-Madison Archives.

Strange Situation photograph from the original experiment courtesy of Social-Psych.

All other images are the author’s personal family photographs.

As of today, PsySociety officially has its own Facebook Page! If you use Facebook and would like your News Feed to include updates from PsySociety, links to new pieces, and interesting posts about psychology, pop culture, and current events, please head over to the page and click that “Like” button!

You can find the new page and become a fan of PsySociety at https://www.facebook.com/psysocietyblog.

Why do couples get divorced?

Gottman decided to answer this question by trying something very simple: Recording married couples talking for 15 minutes about a recent conflict that they were having in their relationship, and then carefully scrutinizing these recordings to see how happy and unhappy couples behaved differently. After all, every couple has problems; the simple act of fighting can’t possibly be the only thing that drives a couple to divorce. There must be something in particular about the nature of the fights themselves that distinguishes happy from unhappy couples. After gathering these recordings from about 80 married couples throughout the Midwest, Gottman and his colleague Robert Levenson underwent the grueling task of coding these videos. This means that they made a note of every single time that certain things happened in the interaction. Was one partner angry? Was the other one getting defensive? How much did they use humor in their interaction? Did they show any affection? How about the nasty silent treatment – did that ever rear its cold, ugly head?

After keeping track of these couples and noting which ones ended up getting divorced over the course of the next 14 years, Gottman and Levenson eventually realized something incredibly important: They didn’t actually need to note down all that much. In fact, there were just four behaviors that could be used to predict which couples would still be married 14 years later — with 93% accuracy.

Yes; in case the enormity of what I just said didn’t sink in quite yet, solely based on how often you notice four behaviors occurring in a single, 15-minute conversation, you can predict with 93% accuracy whether or not a couple will still be married 14 years from now.¹

Now I’m guessing you probably want to know what these four behaviors — or, as Gottman and Levenson call them, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — actually are. These four toxic behaviors are called contempt, criticism, stonewalling, and defensiveness.

And, funny enough, to understand what each of these behaviors looks like in action, one needs to look no further than America’s favorite briefly-unhappily-married couple: Socialite Kim Kardashian and “basketball player” Kris Humphries.

Contempt

Couples who eventually divorce express over twice as much contempt during disagreements as those who stay together for the long haul. In fact, Gottman himself believes that of the four “horsemen,” contempt is the most significant one.

What does contempt look like? It’s more than mere anger; all couples become upset or angry with each other at times, and this certainly does not mean that they will all divorce. Contempt in particular is a potent mix of anger and disgust. Expressing contempt involves speaking to your husband like he is “beneath” you, or mocking your wife in a cold, sarcastic way.

The clip below, from Keeping Up With The Kardashians, certainly elicited a lot of laughs when it aired. And many (including myself) thought it was kind of funny that Kris was clearly giving Kim a “reality check” about her likely-fleeting fame. Yet when considering their relationship quality, his response is completely toxic. It’s clear in what Kris says to Kim that he didn’t respect her or her priorities. It would be possible for these two to fight about where they should live without expressing contempt. Yet by telling her to her face that her career is essentially worthless – whether or not that is actually the case – he’s expressing contempt towards her. No good for their ill-fated marriage.

Criticism

The second horseman is criticism, which might immediately worry anyone who’s ever complained about a partner forgetting to empty the dishwasher. However, the toxicity of criticism does not emerge in a disagreement where the partners are simply voicing any minor (or major) concerns that they might have. Criticism specifically involves turning your complaints into some sort of “defect” about your partner’s personality. Rather than voicing constructive complaints about a behavior, situation, or incident, criticism specifically involves negative trait (not state) attributions.

In other words: A complaint focuses on the behavior. A criticism attacks the person.

We can see this in the following TV clip where Kim rants about her pet peeves. The very first one that she mentions is Kris’s habit of brushing his teeth so vigorously that he gets toothpaste on the mirror (seriously, people — you can’t make up these scintillating conversations). But note how she says it. She doesn’t say that it bothers her when he does this. She specifically notes that she hates the kind of people who brush their teeth so vigorously they get toothpaste all over the mirror. She has managed to take something fairly minor and, rather than phrasing it as a complaint (“It really bothers me when you do this. Could you try to brush over the sink, or at least wipe off the mirror when you’re done?”), she has turned it into a weird, dental-centric criticism of his character (“You’re the kind of person who messes up the mirrors when you brush your teeth!”) Over time, these trait- (or personality-)based attributions can build up and lead to resentment or a lack of respect for one’s partner, which will quickly breed that earlier sense of contempt.

Defensiveness

This strategy can best be summed up by one, simple line: “It’s not me. It’s you.”

Do you often “play the victim” in your fights, maybe by making it seem like everything that happens is your partner’s fault? Do you regularly deny responsibility for any role that you might play in a conflict? Do you find yourself trying to “prove” during a fight that your partner is “more wrong” than you are?

If so, you might be guilty of defensiveness.

It’s only natural to believe in a disagreement that we are right and our partners are wrong. After all – if we didn’t think that we were right, we probably wouldn’t be fighting! But the important thing about defensiveness is that it involves a tendency to consistently blame things on one’s partner, paint oneself as the “martyr” or “victim” who does nothing wrong, and make it seem like the partner is responsible for anything that goes wrong in the relationship.

Below, we can see Kim flip her switch to Defensiveness Mode the very second that something goes wrong in an interaction with Kris. She is perfectly happy to be playing around with Kris by the water, but as soon as something goes wrong (she loses an incredibly expensive earring in the ocean), the entire incident immediately becomes his fault. She accepts no blame for any part she might have played in the disagreement, like also horsing around…or even simply wearing earrings that expensive around the ocean. Instead, she becomes the “victim,” and Kris becomes the villain. Unfortunately, no one likes being the villain all of the time — which is why defensiveness can suck the life out of your relationship.

Stonewalling

Stonewalling is when, during a conflict, one (or both) partners will completely tune out from the discussion — maybe by texting, turning on the TV, or simply not responding to a partner’s attempts at conversation. Stonewalling is usually accompanied by increased physiological responses like an accelerated heart rate, higher blood pressure, and sweating. This indicates that it might be a response to physiological overarousal; after dealing with too much physiological stress, someone’s response to a conflict may simply be to “shut down” and block out the argument.

Stonewalling is toxic because it shuts down productive conversation. Rather than hashing out any differences in a mature way, someone who stonewalls just succeeds in raking over the underlying issues, not really resolving anything, and also making one’s partner feel like he/she is not being taken seriously or heard.

Below, we can see Kris engaging in some very clear stonewalling. Kim has told him that she does not plan on changing her last name, and this clearly bothers him. However, rather than talking this out and coming to some sort of compromise or reasoned conclusion, Kris completely shuts her out. He turns to his phone while she’s trying to speak to him, doesn’t really listen to (or process) what she is saying, and disengages from the conversation. As mentioned above, this creates a twofold problem — not only does it not solve the true, underlying problem, but it makes Kim feel devalued.

What To Do?

Now that Kim and Kris have conveniently demonstrated the four worst things that you can possibly do in a relationship, how are you supposed to combat them?

Gottman and Levenson suggest that each of the four horsemen actually has a healthy counterpart.

• Rather than phrasing a complaints as a criticism of your partner’s personality or traits, try to emphasize state attributions. Instead of complaining about your partner’s personality, raise complaints or problems about the situation or the behavior.
• Instead of “playing the victim” and getting defensive, accept responsibility for your role in a conflict. This doesn’t mean shouldering all of the blame; rather, it means recognizing and acknowledging anything that you might have done, or any way in which you are not blameless.
• Build a “culture of appreciation,” so both partners see each other with respect and appreciation instead of contempt, resentment, and disgust. Emphasize the importance of respecting each other and seeing each others’ interests, hobbies, and passions as worthwhile.
• If you are someone who frequently ends up stonewalling, or disengaging from potential conflict, figure out if this is because the fight is too overstimulating. If so, you can engage in something called “physiological self-soothing,” which basically just means taking deep breaths and trying to mindfully relax. By focusing on the breath and calming down, it can become easier to have a difficult conversation without becoming so emotionally overaroused that disengagement seems like the only way to cope.

It’s also important to note that if you’ve noticed any of the Four Horsemen in how you or your romantic partner tend to behave, this should not be interpreted as a “death knell” for your relationship. Although these studies do not establish the direction of any presumed causality, researchers in the field believe that the truly important contribution of this work is not the ability to identify doomed relationships and “predict divorce” as a cute party trick. The important note is that these behaviors themselves are presumed to be the cause of marital dissatisfaction, not the other way around. Just as we learned that it’s important to attribute your partner’s mistakes to situational (rather than dispositional) factors to avoid engaging in too much criticism, we can think about applying this state vs. trait idea to our attributions about the overall relationship as well. If you tend to be defensive and your partner tends to stonewall, it is much more productive (and optimistic!) to focus instead on addressing the individual behaviors themselves that are causing problems, rather than assuming that this indicates that your relationship is destined to fail. Based on what Gottman and his colleagues have argued, being aware of these four behaviors and trying to actively combat them is not a futile task — it should actually greatly increase your odds of staying happily committed.

It looks like things are turning around for Kim K. She’s now in a relationship with rapper Kanye West, and their first child together is due over the summer. The two are not officially engaged, but have hinted that they plan to wed in the future.

Regardless of whether or not Kim ties the knot for the third time, taking a good look at her past relationship behavior might help her figure out what went so terribly wrong in the past. Hopefully, she will bring less criticism and defensiveness into her relationship with Kanye, and maybe Kanye won’t be as likely to stonewall during arguments or treat Kim with contempt.

And if nothing else, at least Kim’s 72-day marriage to Kris Humphries did provide the world with one valuable thing:

A play-by-play demonstration of exactly what not to do in your own romantic relationships.

Gottman, J., & Levenson, R. (2002). A Two-Factor Model for Predicting When a Couple Will Divorce: Exploratory Analyses Using 14-Year Longitudinal Data. Family Process, 41, 83-96.

Carrere, S., & Gottman, J.M. (1999). Predicting Divorce among Newlyweds from the First Three Minutes of a Marital Conflict Discussion. Family Process, 38, 293-301.

Gottman, J.M., Coan, J., Carrere, S., & Swanson, C., (1998). Predicting Marital Happiness and Stability from Newlywed Interactions. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 60, 5-22.

For more information on Gottman’s research:

Psych Your Mind on the Four Horsemen
Further Citations for Gottman’s work
The Gottman Institute

Image Credits:

Kim Kardashian: Photograph by David Shankbone via Wikimedia Commons. Available under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Kris Humphries: Photograph by Keith Allison via Flickr. Available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.

Kim & Kanye: Photograph by Noel Vasquez via Flickr. Available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

1. This figure of “93% accuracy” in predicting divorce can be a little bit confusing, so I want to clarify what it means. In the first study that Gottman and his colleagues ran, they conducted analyses after collecting data on many couples over the course of about a decade, and they identified the most important factors that distinguished the couples who happily stayed together, the couples who unhappily stayed together, and the couples who got divorced. In six future studies, the researchers then took those factors (identified from the first study) and, using entirely new sets of couples, tested different “models” of relationship satisfaction and divorce. What this means is that they designed a bunch of different ways that the important factors might combine together in order to influence divorce rates, and then used that information to create what is basically like an “algorithm” (or calculator) for analyzing a large number of couples. The models can use these factors and the information entered abotu the couples to perform a “prediction analysis,” where the models automatically sort the couples into categories based on its predictions about their future marital status. In these studies, the models that sorted these couples into “Divorced” or “Still Married” groups were able to correctly identify the “divorced” couples 85-95% of the time. This is a rough description of the process, of course, but should generally convey what actually goes on in this research. Gottman and his colleagues never actually take individual couples and say “Will Divorce” or “Will Not Divorce.” However, as Gottman and his colleagues argue (and rightfully so), you can predict divorce in the sense that you can look at an individual couple and assess the degree to which they resemble the couples that were deemed “Will Probably Divorce” by the model, knowing that the model exhibited ~90% accuracy for the couples that were assessed.

As an example, in the 1992 paper, there were 47 couples, 7 of whom had gotten divorced. The model’s prediction analysis predicted that 37 of the couples would still be married (all of whom were), and that 10 of the couples would be divorced (7 of whom were). Therefore, the only mistake that the calculator made was classifying 3 still-married couples as “probably divorced.” This means that the calculator was correct about 44 of the 47 couples, making it 93.6% accurate.

For more information, you can read the FAQs on Dr. Gottman’s site.

The exact details of what happened today on Boylston Street are still being sorted out, but multiple reports are confirming that two bombs were detonated close to the finish line of today’s Boston Marathon, killing at least two people and wounding dozens of others.

As a social psychologist, there are so many reasons to expect that this should end up revealing an absolute low point for humanity. First of all, the bombing itself is just horrendous. I can’t say any more about it, because there is nothing else to say. There is no perspective, opinion, logic, or reason that I could ever find to explain or even hope to understand any of it.

But based on what we know about altruism and helping behavior, there’s another reason why a social psychologist might have expected that today would be even more dismal. After all, everything that our research says about altruism — using phrases like “bystander effect” or “diffusion of responsibility” and throwing around names like “Kitty Genovese” — points to the idea that in the wake of such a terrible tragedy, we should have been faced with a general public that shied away from cooperating, lending a hand, and providing crucial support and assistance to those in need. Yet after the explosion, spectators lent runners blankets, sweaters, and phones. People helped each other up, provided crucial assistance and care, and put their own needs on hold to attend to those of perfect strangers. Across the city of Boston, the past few hours has revealed an outpouring of support, cooperation, and altruism.

So why might we not have expected this outpouring of support today?

1. The Marathon was in Boston.

A cross-cultural analysis of helping behavior in rural and urban settings all around the world reveals that strangers are significantly less likely to help each other when they are in urban areas (like New York or Boston) as opposed to rural areas. An injured pedestrian or lost child, for example, would be far more likely to receive crucial help from an onlooker in a town of 1,000 people than in a town of 5,000 people, and more likely to receive help in the town of 5,000 than in the town of 10,000.

This is not because “city dwellers” are fundamentally jerks, nor is it because the rural folk are inherently more kind. We know this because it’s the size of the town where the person lives now that matters when it comes to helping behavior, not the size of the town in which someone grew up. Rather, there are a couple of potential reasons why strangers tend to help each other so much more in small towns than in cities. First of all, Stanley Milgram argued that in large cities, people often fall victim to stimulus overload; if your senses are constantly being bombarded with lights, smells, sounds, and crowds, you quickly get used to narrowing your focus and shutting out most of that sensory input swarm when you go about your everyday life. If you’re in this mode, it’s easy to accidentally overlook someone who needs your help, simply because less of the environment will grab your attention at any given time. Secondly, there are effects of diversity. People are more likely to help others that are similar to them, like in age, race, or gender. Urban areas have more diverse populations than rural ones; this increases the odds that any given person who needs help will be somehow different from the potential helper. A somewhat dismaying finding, but potentially important nonetheless.

There were over 20,000 runners at the Boston Marathon this year, not to mention family members, friends, and Boston residents who came out to join the race day fun. Not only is Boston a major city, but the event itself contains its own unique brand of “stimulus overload.” And diversity? People came to run Boston from all over the world! Any of the reasons why you would expect to see less helping behavior in large cities were certainly also present today at the Boston Marathon. And lest we forget another major factor…

2. More onlookers, less help.

Research on the bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility suggests that the more onlookers there are in a tragic or troubling situation, the less likely it is that any one of those onlookers will provide crucial assistance. This is why one of the best pieces of safety advice that any self-defense class can ever teach you is that if you find yourself in trouble, you should not just vaguely scream for “Help” — you should single out specific people to target with your pleas. If you do not, people in large crowds will often assume that there are enough people around that “someone else will probably help,” thereby diffusing the responsibility for helping and making it less likely that any help will actually be provided. In short — more bystanders, less personal sense of responsibility, less help.

With this in mind, the fact that there was a humongous crowd at the Boston Marathon certainly should have made it very unlikely that anyone would step up and help the injured/panicking runners & spectators. The tens of thousands of people around should have made it much more likely that everyone would freeze, assuming that “someone else” would jump in and take responsibility for helping out.

3. It’s difficult to help when the situation is ambiguous.

Many times, in an emergency, it’s not exactly clear what’s going on. What happened? What help is needed? Is this even an emergency at all?

Imagine being near the finish line of the Boston Marathon today when the bombs exploded. You hear two loud noises that sounded somewhat like thunder, according to eyewitness reports. You see smoke. Many people were not sure exactly what was going on — was this planned? Is this an attack? Is this a mistake? What is even happening?

People are significantly more likely to provide help in a dangerous situation if they are clearly aware of what is going on. For example, in one study, participants who watched someone faint and slowly regain consciousness were much more likely to help out than those who simply walked in on someone who had already fainted. If you don’t know what’s going on, there’s a lot more confusion — a reaction that tends to lead people to freeze rather than actively help.

These were some of the big reasons why we might not have expected to see people helping today. This is social psychological research, replicated and confirmed dozens of times. This is what I teach my students in class each semester when we learn about “altruism.” Everything in the Social Psychology textbook suggests that people should not have stepped up to help their community members, fellow runners/spectators, and complete strangers today. There was a large crowd, in a large city, thrown into a frightening, ambiguous situation. Research tells us that this is exactly the kind of situation that should lead people to freeze up, diffuse responsibility, and assume that “others” will help if it is needed.

But here’s what I want to point out. Here’s what I wrote this entire post to point out. That’s not what happened.

When faced with unimaginable tragedy, in a terrifying situation where people did not know how to respond or behave, when no one could know if there would be any more bombs being detonated or any more people being harmed, in a set of circumstances that, by all logic and reason, should have discouraged most people from lending a hand, people still jumped into the crowd and helped. In droves. They stepped up, pitched in, helped strangers. They put themselves in potential danger to make sure that strangers were okay.

It’s so easy to get dismayed about humanity on days like today. To wonder how people can do such horrible things. But this is why I like Mr. Rogers’ words of wisdom. This is why I have decided, today, to look at the helpers. Because the helpers show us that even when faced with unimaginable tragedy, terror, and tumult, there is a monumentally strong force within each of us that truly wants to help our fellow man. We all have that seed of good. It can defy logic, reason, and empirical scientific data. And even when everything around us — those “powerful situations” that us social psychologists love to say determine everything about what we do and who we are — combines in perfect synchrony to create the exact blend of factors that should push anyone away from helping, we can’t underestimate the power of that drive within us all that doesn’t care about what the textbook says and pushes us towards doing good anyway.

What a beautiful thing.

Steblay, N. (1987). Helping behavior in rural and urban environments: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 102 (3), 346-356 DOI: 10.1037//0033-2909.102.3.346

Milgram, S. (1970). The Experience of Living in Cities Science, 167 (3924), 1461-1468 DOI: 10.1126/science.167.3924.1461

Latane, B., & Nida, S. (1981). Ten years of research on group size and helping. Psychological Bulletin, 89 (2), 308-324 DOI: 10.1037//0033-2909.89.2.308

Darley, J., & Latane, B. (1968). Bystander Intervention in Emergencies: Diffusion of Responsibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8 (4, Pt.1), 377-383 DOI: 10.1037/h0025589

Piliavin, J., Piliavin, I., & Broll, L. (1976). Time of Arrival at an Emergency and Likelihood of Helping Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2 (3), 273-276 DOI: 10.1177/014616727600200314

Image from the aftermath of the Boston Marathon by Aaron Tang via Flickr; available under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

Image of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings map by Anna Frodesiak via Wikipedia, created using OpenStreetMap; available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.

Image of Mr. Rogers with his quote on helping via Liberty for Kids.

ANYWAY, if you would like to watch the panel, see me speak about all of this stuff, learn more about my thoughts on the matter, or generally be part of what will surely be a very interesting discussion, please tune in this afternoon/evening at 5:30 EST (4:30 CST)! The discussion will last about 30 minutes, and here is the link for the livestream: http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/how-to-talk-about-a/515eeebe78c90a2f2e0001d2

The discussion should also be archived after the event, so if you cannot catch it, no worries! You can always watch it later on.

I’ve naturally received a lot of comments on this piece, as I absolutely knew going into this that I would. The comments have been both critical of and thankful for the article, and I’m truly grateful that I’ve received far more of the latter — anything involving prejudice is going to be a sensitive issue for a large amount of people, and I’m always happy to know that I’ve managed to make more people feel validated or affirmed than marginalized or offended. Of the critical feedback that I have received, I have been pleased to find that a good amount of it has contained thoughtful questions and valid concerns. I have been especially pleased by comments from those who have not thought about these issues before, who are now engaging with the subject matter and asking genuine questions about how to construe their own actions. As a writer and a science communicator, that is incredibly affirming. It is always good to know that one is not simply “preaching to the choir.”

I initially wanted to respond to every single comment. However, as there are over 40 and counting, this seems like it will be quite a difficult undertaking. Therefore, I’ve decided to write this follow-up post as a handy FAQ-style explainer addressing some of the common critiques, complaints, or comments that I have encountered.

Men can be the victims of this too/Women can be sexist towards men:

Yes. I agree. You are absolutely right.

Is there a lot of research on benevolent stereotypes impacting men? No, there’s not. That’s why I can’t really talk about it proficiently — the research is not really there, at least not to my knowledge. Is this a flaw in the literature, and an interesting empirical research question worth addressing? ABSOLUTELY! I completely agree with commenters here and on Twitter who pointed out that “benevolent sexism” can also come in the form of stereotypes about traditional masculinity. Seemingly benevolent stereotypes portraying men as strong or stoic make it incredibly difficult for men to openly express emotions, cry in public, or pursue gender-atypical careers (e.g., nursing, nannying, dancing, being a stay-at-home father). There is an additional wrinkle on this side of things, which is the fact that often times, men who defy traditional gender roles are not only derogated, they are often referred to as “gay.” This is not only problematic for men, but it’s INCREDIBLY problematic for the entire LGBT community, which suffers any time terms associated with homosexuality are intended to be insulting or demeaning. Very bad all around.

There’s a lot here. Very ripe for interesting research questions. Unfortunately, not much has been done on it. A problem? Definitely. A valid point that you have raised? Yes. But I must now defend myself by saying that it’s not entirely my fault. I’m in the business of communicating peer-reviewed academic research. If the research doesn’t exist, I can’t just decide to provide my own data in the form of anecdotes and speculation. But I do agree with several of you wholeheartedly that there is something there.

In fact, I did consciously try very hard to specifically note several points within the article where benevolent sexism, even directed at women, could still have a negative impact on men. I encourage you to read back over the piece and note where I point out that it’s incredibly hurtful for men who are truly good husbands and fathers to have those roles underplayed in descriptions of their lives, and it’s a sign of a truly unequal society if a man faces criticism for wanting to devote time to his family life and/or stay at home with a child, either temporarily or permanently. Note that I explicitly say in the article that the problem is not in calling attention to Brill’s personal life. The problem is that it was done for her, while it likely would not have been done if she were male. The implication, given the nature of this piece, is that this is something anti-woman, but it should be noted that this is also quite negative for men. Several have noted that Einstein in particular is not a good comparison point, but I would encourage you to think of how likely it is for you to see something like that written about any man.

Finally, to address a couple of specific comments (on something that I think is very interesting, and something I might have to write about in more detail in the future!), I have alluded in prior posts (albeit not in very much detail) to the fact that the one TV/movie/sitcom trope that drives me absolutely up-the-wall BONKERS is the “bumbling, idiot husband who can’t do anything right” stereotype. See Everybody Loves Raymond, King of Queens, etc. I hate it. I think it’s a terrible, one-dimensional, lazy writing gimmick. It’s stupid, it’s offensive, and it doesn’t look like any of the men I know and respect tremendously. So don’t worry. Those of you who mentioned that as offensive, I’m fully with you on that one.

Alright, next?

Biology!/Reproductive Fitness!/Men like looks, women like money!/EVOLUTION!

Oh boy. You likely don’t want to get me going down the rabbit hole on this one.

Chances are, if you’re arguing biological essentialism, we are probably never going to see eye to eye. But I will try and give a brief overview of why this is problematic — in case there are any bystanders reading this who might simply be curious as to whether or not this argument holds any water.

To understand why it doesn’t, I recommend reading this article from the New York Times for an elegant rundown of some issues with evolutionary perspectives on mating, written by Dan Slater and citing the incredible work of several prominent social psychologists, including Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick. No one is arguing that evolution isn’t important, or that the biological side of things doesn’t matter. But because of a combination of several factors — including the important fact that people are sometimes unfairly biased towards preferring biological explanations for phenomena even when other, better explanations might exist — the role of these factors gets severely overstated.

Basically, it comes down to two things:

• Biology is often confounded by strong cultural differences. Yes, women and men often differ when it comes to sexual behavior and mating patterns, but they also differ in a lot of other ways — including their level of access to important resources. Research that attempts to disentangle biology from culture (as best it can be disentangled) reveals that a lot of the gender differences that have been so widely noted in mating and attraction behavior can actually be explained by cultural differences. Once you control for things like power, money, and resources, sex differences go away. Which shouldn’t happen if it’s really attributable to “just biology.”
• When you run better studies that are more methodologically sound and control for problems found in earlier research, sex differences go away. For example, as cited in the Times article above, some studies claim that men have more sexual partners than women, and that they also report a desire for more partners, as justification for the idea that men are more biologically driven to “spread their seed.” Yet when you hook participants up to a fake “lie detector” so they think they have to tell the truth, those differences suddenly go away. It’s not that women actually have or want fewer partners, it’s that they know they shouldn’t admit it. If they think they can’t lie, they suddenly don’t look so different from the men.

Alright. Next.

Something about my bio/picture/credentials!

Just stop. You’re embarrassing yourself. If the only argument you can make against my article has to do with me personally, then you’ve already lost. It’s a sign that you don’t actually have something substantial to contribute.

Is this unique to sexism?

No. This is commonly studied within sexism, but the hostile vs. benevolent distinction can be (and has been) applied to all types of prejudice.

I think that sometimes, people have unique responses to sexism that make it difficult to see a larger point, but put in a different context it becomes more apparent why certain things are problematic.

For example, imagine if Elise were of a different race, and the comments under her picture looked something like… “Whoa! Not only are you interested in science, but you’re surprisingly articulate! I just got more interested in science today!”

WOW. SUPER NOT OKAY, RIGHT? We can see how that is INCREDIBLY offensive? And how many of the commenters who wrote the original remarks on Elise’s status would NEVER write something like what I just did above?

So, that’s an example of how something that “sounds positive” can actually be incredibly offensive. There are also examples of concrete benevolent stereotypes that cause problems within racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia.

To name a few — African-Americans are not all naturally athletic. Not all Asians are good at math and science. All Jewish people are not rich and powerful. All gay men are not all fashion-savvy and awesome shopping buddies. All lesbians will not be able to deftly remodel your home.

I note those stereotypes not to endorse them (obviously), but to point out that we are all largely familiar with them. Technically, stereotypes are simply schemas (or knowledge structures) about large groups of people. When stereotypes become dangerous is when they are rigidly over-applied, or when they are assumed to be “harmless” because they seem objectively positive. When you rely on stereotypes and automatic judgments to dictate how you respond in any one particular situation (or to any one particular person), that’s when it’s a big problem.

As an example, it is not offensive to acknowledge that men, on average, are stronger than women. It is offensive, when faced with a woman who has really toned arms, to say, “Whoa! How did you get arms like that?” and then, if she says by lifting weights, to make a comment about how women don’t do that. You’re rigidly over-applying your stereotype there. You are faced with a woman who is quite possibly stronger than most men she knows. It’s OK that on average men are stronger than women, but in this case, for this one particular woman, that might not be true. So this is when it’s time to ditch the stereotype. Don’t cling to it. It won’t help you anymore.

Research supports the fact that positive stereotypes can be harmful across all types of prejudice. Positive stereotypes about performance ability might make people more likely to “choke under pressure,” there are psychological threats involved in being a “model minority,” and seemingly positive stereotypes about one group can have negative consequences for another. “Positive” stereotypes about Caucasian and African-American groups involving academics and athletic ability can each impact the other group negatively; when a test is framed as an intellectual diagnostic task, Black participants underperform, but when the same test is framed as a test of athletic ability, White participants underperform. Finally, as a commenter pointed out, African-American athletes might be more likely to be praised as “physically gifted,” whereas White athletes might be more likely to be praised as “hard workers,” due to different racialized perceptions of “natural ability.” This might not seem like a huge deal, until you consider research showing that praising the effort someone puts in is tremendously more beneficial and intrinsically motivating than praising someone for being innately good at something.

As a thought experiment, I invite you to try identifying any identity that you might be sensitive about or derive a lot of your personal identity from – it can be a racial, gender, or religious identity, or it can be something not typically addressed in a lot of this literature, like a medical or mental health diagnosis, a hobby, a school affiliation, a state that you are from, etc. Try identifying one potential “benevolent” stereotype associated with that identity, and one potential negative one. Then try imagining what some of these examples I have brought up today and yesterday might look like if they referred to that identity. You might still feel the same way, but I am willing to bet that you might reconsider some of the comments that initially seem innocuous once you realize what they sound like if applied to you.

For myself, I tend to try substituting in “Jewish.” For situations like what happened with Elise, I imagine how I would feel if someone commented, “You’re a Jew and you’re not a banker or running Hollywood?! So cool!”

It doesn’t feel great.

I would love it if my obit looked like that/I’d love for people to call me bangable all the time!

Great. That’s your call. You’re certainly allowed to feel that way. But although I have no idea how Brill would feel about her obit, I can tell you that from what we’ve seen, Elise was very much not pleased with the response that she got. Which means it’s not OK for people to tell her that she should just change how she feels because she’s being too sensitive or reading too much into things. Guess what? If you say something and you make someone feel seriously uncomfortable, it’s now on you to give serious consideration to why that person might feel that way. That’s how empathy and being a nice human being works.

And here’s the thing, which transitions very well into my next point…

So is EVERY compliment sexist?!/Can I say ANYTHING nice without being sexist now?!/You ruin stuff for everyone by saying that anything nice I do is sexist!

No. Compliments are not sexist. Guess what? I like being told that I’m attractive. I think it’s polite when people hold the door open for me. Sometimes my boyfriend pays for dinner. (And yes, there is a man who has chosen to live with me for the past 2 years — sorry, those of you who are convinced I’m sad, bitter, and alone).

I would like for everyone reading this to understand two really big, important things:

1. CONTEXT IS INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT.

Someone brought up the example of positively noting that someone’s weight loss efforts are paying off. If you have a relationship where commenting on that would be appropriate – like this is someone you talk to regularly, and he/she has noted to you several times that he/she is trying to lose weight – that’s fine! I’m sure it would make his/her day, and that’s good! Another important thing to note there is that there’s no clear gender implied here. I assume that if you have a relationship with anyone, male OR female, you know how they respond to things that you say about them. That means you can say them. Because that is your relationship. But if you’re just a random coworker who, out of nowhere, comments about someone’s body when you don’t normally talk to each other, and you also don’t normally verbally comment on everyone’s body around the office — maybe you shouldn’t. Especially since those types of comments tend to be disproportionately aimed at women. Do you see how those situations are different? How in the latter situation it would be inappropriate and might make someone feel incredibly uncomfortable, especially since that person now seems to be singled out in a kind of creepy way?

Or, take the example of Elise. I’m pretty sure that there are people in her life who call her attractive, and I’m pretty sure she is probably thrilled about that (though I don’t know, as I don’t really know her). The issue is when, on her professional page, people turn the conversation into one that is almost entirely about her appearance the very second they see an image of her face, and a space that is normally dedicated to science becomes dedicated to her looks. Again, do we see how that is different? Can we understand how that might evoke different feelings for Elise?

Now, going back to the examples I provided earlier. I hold the door open whenever someone is behind me — male or female. That’s called being a polite human being. I don’t discriminate based on gender. If you’re behind me, you get the door held open. So if a man holds the door open for me, I honestly do not think twice about it. However, if a man holds the door open for me, and then I see him deliberately not hold the door open for another man, it might cause me to feel a little peeved, or at least confused about what his thought process was there.

Sure, some people are going to have different assumptions. Maybe you’ve had personal experiences with a woman who does always assume negative or sexist intentions, even when those intentions are not there. But guess what? Some people – male or female – are just jerks. One jerk does not give you permission to discredit an entire line of thinking. Just because one person is going to overreact to every single thing that you do and assume negative intentions for everything doesn’t mean that every woman who self-identifies as feminist and agrees that benevolent sexism is a problem is going to FREAK OUT ON YOU IF YOU HOLD THE DOOR OPEN. Sure, some women might. But also, some women are jerks! You can’t say that one woman reacting like that discredits the 99% of us who really would just smile and say thank you while holding the door open for the next person behind us, just like you don’t want us to say that any single negative thing a man ever does says something horrible about all of mankind.

2. This is not about the person, it’s about the culture.

The main takeaway point of benevolent sexism is not that every person who compliments a woman is a “benevolent sexist.” It’s meant to describe a larger, problematic culture in which certain attitudes held by a society at large can perpetuate problematic structural inequalities.

The sexist thing about the response to Elise’s picture was not each individual response to her appearance. It was the aggregate fact that the overwhelming response on the part of thousands of people was a broad focus on her appearance and gender. If just one person commented that she was attractive, this would likely not be a “sexism” issue. The larger issue here is that her picture evokes a mass commentary on her appearance and femininity, whereas a male posting his picture would not evoke the same kind of mass response from readers. This indicates a larger societal difference here in terms of how men and women are viewed, which, by definition, constitutes sexism. The aggregate idea of what’s worth focusing on about Elise is what makes it an indicator of “sexism,” not every single person’s individual comment. This is why each person’s individual motivation for posting the comment or tendency to say that sort of thing “to both men and women” does not really matter. It’s not about each person individually. It’s about the collective culture and overall response. Does that make sense?

Similarly, with Brill, this is why it’s not particularly important who Brill was, or that Einstein is not the best comparison (as many have argued). Brill and Einstein are not the point. The point is that across all discussions of famous female and famous male scientists, all discussions of female scientists are going to be disproportionately more likely to focus on their roles as wives and mothers, and all discussions of male scientists are going to be disproportionately more likely to ignore that aspect of their lives. The individual obituary is not “sexist” in itself as much as it’s an indicator of a larger cultural issue in which this sort of biased viewpoint is normative.

This brings me (finally!) to my closing point. Hopefully, this distinction between individual and cultural responses will help people feel a little less like they are being attacked.

To note what one commenter said — is it sexist to compliment your own granddaughters on how pretty they are?

No! By all means, please be a loving grandfather.

However, what is sexist are the results of studies showing that when adults talk to children, they are disproportionately more likely to mention how pretty/cute they are if they are girls, and how smart they are if they are boys. That is sexism, and that is not good. It perpetuates a culture. It molds children’s ideas of what is “worthwhile” or important about themselves. It creates a problem.

This doesn’t mean that you need to fundamentally change the way that you interact with people. What it does mean is that it might be worth taking some time to think critically about how you respond to different situations, and to honestly question whether you respond to things the same way when faced with males and females. Are you more likely to tell your female children that they’re pretty, and your male children that they’re smart? Both are nice, but they are nice in critically different ways. No one is calling you cruel or unloving. No one is calling YOU sexist. All I am saying is that it might be worth giving some thought to the implications underlying the everyday things that we say.

Something can’t actually be sexist if it’s really, really nice, right?

I mean, if someone compliments me on my looks or my cooking, that’s not sexist. That’s awesome! I should be thrilled that I’m being noticed for something positive!

Yet there are many comments that, while seemingly complimentary, somehow still feel wrong. These comments may focus on an author’s appearance rather than the content of her writing, or mention how surprising it is that she’s a woman, being that her field is mostly filled with men. Even though these remarks can sometimes feel good to hear – and no one is denying that this type of comment can feel good, especially in the right context – they can also cause a feeling of unease, particularly when one is in the position of trying to draw attention towards her work rather than personal qualities like her gender or appearance.

In social psychology, these seemingly-positive-yet-still-somewhat-unsettling comments and behaviors have a name: Benevolent Sexism. Although it is tempting to brush this experience off as an overreaction to compliments or a misunderstanding of benign intent, benevolent sexism is both real and insidiously dangerous.

What Is Benevolent Sexism?

In 1996, Peter Glick and Susan Fiske wrote a paper on the concept of ambivalent sexism, noting that despite common beliefs, there are actually two different kinds of sexist attitudes and behavior. Hostile sexism is what most people think of when they picture “sexism” – angry, explicitly negative attitudes towards women. However, the authors note, there is also something called benevolent sexism:

We define benevolent sexism as a set of interrelated attitudes toward women that are sexist in terms of viewing women stereotypically and in restricted roles but that are subjectively positive in feeling tone (for the perceiver) and also tend to elicit behaviors typically categorized as prosocial (e.g., helping) or intimacy-seeking (e.g., self-disclosure) (Glick & Fiske, 1996, p. 491).

[Benevolent sexism is] a subjectively positive orientation of protection, idealization, and affection directed toward women that, like hostile sexism, serves to justify women’s subordinate status to men (Glick et al., 2000, p. 763).

Yes, there’s actually an official name for all of those comments and stereotypes that can somehow feel both nice and wrong at the same time, like the belief that women are “delicate flowers” who need to be protected by men, or the notion that women have the special gift of being “more kind and caring” than their male counterparts. It might sound like a compliment, but it still counts as sexism.

For a very recent example of how benevolent sexism might play out in our everyday lives, take a look at this satirical piece, which jokingly re-writes Albert Einstein’s obituary.

To quote:

He made sure he shopped for groceries every night on the way home from work, took the garbage out, and hand washed the antimacassars. But to his step daughters he was just Dad. ”He was always there for us,” said his step daughter and first cousin once removed Margo.

Albert Einstein, who died on Tuesday, had another life at work, where he sometimes slipped away to peck at projects like showing that atoms really exist. His discovery of  something called the photoelectric effect won him a coveted Nobel Prize.

Looks weird, right? Kind of like something you would never actually see in print?

Yet the author of rocket scientist Yvonne Brill’s obituary didn’t hesitate before writing the following about her last week:

She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job, and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said.

But Yvonne Brill, who died on Wednesday at 88 in Princeton, N.J., was also a brilliant rocket scientist, who in the early 1970s invented a propulsion system to help keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits.

In fact, Obituaries editor William McDonald still sees nothing wrong with it. In his words, he’s “surprised…[because] it never occurred to [him] that this would be read as sexist,” and if he had to re-write it again, he still “wouldn’t do anything differently.”

I want to make one thing perfectly clear. There’s not a problem with mentioning Brill’s family, friends, and loved ones. It’s not a problem to note how wonderfully Brill balanced her domestic and professional lives. Brill was a female scientist during a time when very few women could occupy that role in society, and that means something truly important.

But the problem here is really that if “Yvonne” were “Yvan,” the obit would have looked fundamentally different. If we’re talking up the importance of work-life balance and familial roles for women but we’re not also mentioning those things about men, that’s a problem. If a woman’s accomplishments must be accompanied by a reassurance that she really was “a good Mom,” but a man’s accomplishments are allowed to stand on their own, that’s a problem. And lest you think that I only care about women, let’s not act like this doesn’t have a real and dangerous impact on men, too. If a man spends years of his life as a doting father and caring husband, yet his strong devotion to his family is not considered an important fact for his obituary because he’s male…then yes, that’s also a big problem.

The fact that so many people don’t understand why it might be unnerving that the writer’s idea for a good story arc in Brill’s obituary was to lead with her role as a wife and mother, and then let the surprise that she was actually a really smart rocket scientist come in later as a shocking twist? That’s benevolent sexism.

Why is Benevolent Sexism a Problem?

Admittedly, this research begs an obvious question. If benevolently sexist comments seem like nothing more than compliments, why are they problematic? Is it really “sexism” if the content of the statements seems positive towards women?

After all, the obituary noted nothing more than how beloved Brill was as a wife and a mother. Why should anyone be upset by that? Sure, men wouldn’t be written about in the same way, but who cares? It’s so nice!

Well, for one thing, benevolently sexist statements aren’t all sunshine and butterflies. They often end up implying that women are weak, sensitive creatures that need to be “protected.” While this may seem positive to some, for others – especially women in male-dominated fields – it creates a damaging stereotype.

As Glick and Fiske themselves note in their seminal paper:

We do not consider benevolent sexism a good thing, for despite the positive feelings it may indicate for the perceiver, its underpinnings lie in traditional stereotyping and masculine dominance (e.g., the man as the provider and woman as his dependent), and its consequences are often damaging. Benevolent sexism is not necessarily experienced as benevolent by the recipient. For example, a man’s comment to a female coworker on how ‘cute’ she looks, however well-intentioned, may undermine her feelings of being taken seriously as a professional (Glick & Fiske, 1996, p. 491-492).

In a later paper, Glick and Fiske went on to determine the extent to which 15,000 men and women across 19 different countries endorse both hostile and benevolently sexist statements. First of all, they found that hostile and benevolent sexism tend to correlate highly across nations. So, it is not the case that people who endorse hostile sexism don’t tend to endorse benevolent sexism, whereas those who endorse benevolent sexism look nothing like the ”real” sexists. On the contrary, those who endorsed benevolent sexism were likely to admit that they also held explicit, hostile attitudes towards women (although one does not necessarily have to endorse these hostile attitudes in order to engage in benevolent sexism).

Secondly, they discovered that benevolent sexism was a significant predictor of nationwide gender inequality, independent of the effects of hostile sexism. In countries where the men were more likely to endorse benevolent sexism, even when controlling for hostile sexism, men also lived longer, were more educated, had higher literacy rates, made significantly more money, and actively participated in the political and economic spheres more than their female counterparts. The warm, fuzzy feelings surrounding benevolent sexism come at a cost, and that cost is often actual, objective gender equality.

The Insidious Nature of Benevolent Sexism

A recent paper by Julia Becker and Stephen Wright details even more of the insidious ways that benevolent sexism might be harmful for both women and social activism. In a series of experiments, women were exposed to statements that either illustrated hostile sexism (e.g. “Women are too easily offended”) or benevolent sexism (e.g. “Women have a way of caring that men are not capable of in the same way.”) The results are quite discouraging; when the women read statements illustrating benevolent sexism, they were less willing to engage in anti-sexist collective action, such as signing a petition, participating in a rally, or generally “acting against sexism.” Not only that, but this effect was partially mediated by the fact that women who were exposed to benevolent sexism were more likely to think that there are many advantages to being a woman and were also more likely to engage in system justification, a process by which people justify the status quo and believe that there are no longer problems facing disadvantaged groups (such as women) in modern day society. Furthermore, women who were exposed to hostile sexism actually displayed the opposite effect – they were more likely to intend to engage in collective action, and more willing to fight against sexism in their everyday lives.

How might this play out in a day-to-day context? Imagine that there’s an anti-female policy being brought to a vote, like a regulation that would make it easier for local businesses to fire pregnant women once they find out that they are expecting. If you are collecting signatures for a petition or trying to gather women to protest this policy and those women were recently exposed to a group of men making comments about the policy in question, it would be significantly easier to gain their support and vote down the policy if the men were commenting that pregnant women should be fired because they were dumb for getting pregnant in the first place. However, if they instead happened to mention that women are much more compassionate than men and make better stay-at-home parents as a result, these remarks might actually lead these women to be less likely to fight an objectively sexist policy.

“I Mean, Is Sexism Really Still A Problem In 2013?”

We often hear people claiming that sexism, racism, or other forms of discrimination that seem to be outdated are “no longer really a problem.” Some people legitimately believe this to be true, while others (particularly women and racial minorities) find it ridiculous that others could be so blind to the problems that still exist. So why does this disparity exist? Why is it so difficult for so many people to see that sexism and racism are still alive and thriving?

Maybe the answer lies right here, on the benevolent side of prejudice. While “old fashioned” forms of discrimination may have died down quite a bit (after all, it really isn’t quite as socially acceptable in most areas of the world to be as explicitly sexist and/or racist as people have been in the past), more “benevolent” forms of discrimination still very much exist, and they have their own sneaky ways of suppressing equality. Unaffected bystanders (or perpetrators) may construe benevolently sexist sentiments as harmless or even beneficial; in fact, as demonstrated by Becker and Wright, targets may even feel better about themselves after exposure to benevolently sexist statements. This could be, in some ways, even worse than explicit, hostile discrimination; because it hides under the guise of compliments, it’s easy to use benevolent sexism to demotivate people against collective action or convince people that there is no longer a need to fight for equality.

However, to those people who still may be tempted to argue that benevolent sexism is nothing more than an overreaction to well-intentioned compliments, let me pose this question: What happens when there is a predominant stereotype saying that women are better stay-at-home parents than men because they are inherently more caring, maternal, and compassionate? It seems nice enough, but how does this ideology affect the woman who wants to continue to work full time after having her first child and faces judgment from her colleagues who accuse her of neglecting her child? How does it affect the man who wants to stay at home with his newborn baby, only to discover that his company doesn’t offer paternity leave because they assume that women are the better candidates to be staying at home?

At the end of the day, “good intent” is not a panacea. Benevolent sexism may very well seem like harmless flattery to many people, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t insidiously dangerous.

To conclude, I’ll now ask you to think about recent events surrounding Elise Andrew, creator of the wildly popular I F–king Love Science Facebook page. When she shared her personal Twitter account with the page’s 4.4 million fans, many commented on the link because they were absolutely SHOCKED…about what? Why, of course, about the fact that she is female.

“I had no idea that IFLS had such a beautiful face!”

“holy hell, youre a HOTTIE!”

“you mean you’re a girl, AND you’re beautiful? wow, i just liked science a lil bit more today ^^”

“I thought that because of all the ways you were so proud to spout off “I f–king love science” in a difient swary manner against people who hated sware words being used that you was a dude.”

“you’re a girl!? I always imagined you as a guy; don’t know why; well, nice to see to how you look like i guess”

“What?!!? Gurlz don’t like science! LOL Totally thought you were a dude.”

“It’s not just being a girl that’s the surprise, but being a fit girl! (For any non-Brits, fit, in this context, means hot/bangable/shagtastic/attractive).”

Right. See, that’s the thing. Elise felt uncomfortable with this, as did many others out there who saw it — and rightfully so. Yet many people would call her (and others like her) oversensitive for feeling negatively about statements that appear to be compliments. Many thought that Elise should have been happy that others were calling her attractive, or pointing out that it’s idiosyncratic for her to be a female who loves science. What Elise (and many others) felt was the benevolently sexist side of things — the side that perpetuates a stereotype that women (especially attractive women) don’t “do” science, and that the most noteworthy thing to comment on about a female scientist is what she looks like.

Unfortunately, it’s very likely that no one walked away from this experience having learned anything. People who could tell that this was offensive were obviously willing to recognize it as such, but people who endorsed those statements just thought they were being nice. Because they weren’t calling her incompetent or unworthy, none of them were willing to recognize it as sexism, even when explicitly told that that’s what it was — even though, based on research, we know that this sort of behavior has actual, meaningful consequences for society and for gender equality.

That right there?

That’s the real problem with benevolent sexism.

This is a revamped version of a piece that I originally posted at the Scientific American Guest Blog in January 2012. I am re-posting it now because, unfortunately, current events indicate that there seems to be some need for people to get a quick refresher. You can read the original post by clicking the “From The Archives” icon at the top of the page.

Citations:

Becker, J., & Wright, S. (2011). Yet another dark side of chivalry: Benevolent sexism undermines and hostile sexism motivates collective action for social change. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101 (1), 62-77 DOI: 10.1037/a0022615

Glick, P., & Fiske, S. (1996). The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory: Differentiating hostile and benevolent sexism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70 (3), 491-512 DOI: 10.1037//0022-3514.70.3.491

Glick, P., Fiske, S., Mladinic, A., Saiz, J., Abrams, D., Masser, B., Adetoun, B., Osagie, J., Akande, A., Alao, A., Annetje, B., Willemsen, T., Chipeta, K., Dardenne, B., Dijksterhuis, A., Wigboldus, D., Eckes, T., Six-Materna, I., Expósito, F., Moya, M., Foddy, M., Kim, H., Lameiras, M., Sotelo, M., Mucchi-Faina, A., Romani, M., Sakalli, N., Udegbe, B., Yamamoto, M., Ui, M., Ferreira, M., & López, W. (2000). Beyond prejudice as simple antipathy: Hostile and benevolent sexism across cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79 (5), 763-775 DOI: 10.1037//0022-3514.79.5.763

Image Credits:

Female Scientist Drawing Chemical Compound courtesy of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

Yvonne Brill with President Barack Obama courtesy of Ryan K Morris/National Science & Technology Medals Foundation.

Although many people have said that it’s been personally meaningful to sign onto Facebook and see a screen full of red avatars, many have criticized the trend for being a silly way of “showing support” without actually accomplishing anything significant. However, although the SCOTUS justices might not be checking Facebook to tally up the red avatars before rendering a decision, a demonstration of solidarity like this one really could end up making an impact.

The reason why those avatars might actually make a difference has to do with the fact that at the end of the day, there’s a part of our brains that never quite made it out of high school. Namely, we’re all too susceptible to the powers of peer pressure, or social proof. Our friends, family, and the people around us exert strong influences on our attitudes and behavior, whether intentional or not.

One of the big ways that the people around us exert these influences is through the use of norms, those messages that we send out about what’s acceptable, appropriate, and…well, normal. Descriptive norms simply describe the way that things are, whereas prescriptive norms offer a mandate about how things should be. For example, if I said that most college students go to class wearing jeans and sweatshirts, that would be a descriptive norm. If I said that you should wear jeans and a sweatshirt in order to fit in, that would be prescriptive. Quite possibly the most important takeaway point from all of the research that’s been done on norms is just how powerful descriptive norms can be. When people try to change behavior, they often focus on prescriptive norms, telling people what they should do. We often underestimate just how strongly we respond to what other people actually do.

In a classic study, Cialdini and colleagues manipulated the signs that were displayed in Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, a site often plagued by tourists who end up grabbing some of the petrified wood to take home as a souvenir. In situations like this, the first inclination of well-meaning environmentalists might be to set a strong prescriptive norm — perhaps by saying something like, “Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the state of the Petrified Forest. This is bad, don’t do this.” The idea here would be to invoke a sense of shame and severity before asking visitors to refrain from taking the wood. But read that prescriptive message once again. Is there anything descriptive in there? Yes, of course there is. That message is not just telling you that you shouldn’t take the wood — it’s also telling you that most other people do. In fact, people were actually more likely to steal wood from the forest when they saw the sign telling them how many people tend to do it themselves, even though the very next sentence was asking them to refrain. But when the researchers simply tweaked the message to read that “the vast majority of past visitors have left the petrified wood in the park, helping to preserve the natural state of the Petrified Forest,” the thievery plummeted.

We don’t really care so much about what we should do. We care about what other people do. And then we really, really care about not being different.

We see this happen all of the time in the world around us. Have you stayed in a hotel lately? If you have, then you’ve probably seen the little cards requesting that you re-use your towels to help conserve water. Well, as you can probably guess by now, the wording on those cards actually matters. Simply telling travelers that the majority of guests reuse their towels is more effective at getting them to re-use their own than a prescriptive plea asking guests to help protect the environment.

If you go door-to-door soliciting donations for your charity, simply presenting a longer list of existing donors will increase the odds that the next person you approach will actually donate. After all, if most people tend to donate, you certainly don’t want to be the only one who doesn’t. This is why bartenders and baristas will “salt the tip jar” by putting in a few dollars of their own before their shifts begin. People will give more if they think that it’s “normal” to do so.

If you are given five positive reviews about a book, you will rate the book more favorably if you hear the five reviews coming from five separate voices than if you hear all five of the same reviews coming from the same voice, even if the information that you’re getting is exactly the same. Why? Because the more you see a wide variety of people doing, endorsing, or believing something, the stronger that descriptive norm becomes — and the more likely you are to make sure your attitudes or behavior match up.

And even though most people report that they find TV shows with laugh tracks to be incredibly annoying, they will end up laughing more when they watch shows that have them, and will go on to rate those shows as having been funnier. Why? Because without even realizing it, the sheer act of hearing other people laugh throughout the half-hour program — even if you consciously know that the laughter was fake — sends a message to your brain that it is “normative” for people to find that content funny.

Which brings us back to Facebook. When looking at the literature on descriptive norms and social proof, there’s one finding that consistently pops out – the more targeted the norm, the more effective it is. For the towels, referring to the majority of past guests who stayed in that room has a stronger effect than referring to the majority of past guests who stayed at that hotel. For the door-to-door charity, the effect on donations was even stronger when the names on the list of prior donors were people that the potential new donor actually knew, like close friends or neighbors. We don’t just respond to descriptive norms — we respond particularly strongly to descriptive norms set by the people that we care about. Which, presumably, includes the people (or at least, some of the people) that we are linked to on Facebook.

People look at an issue like marriage equality, and the first inclination is to set prescriptive norms. We should do something, the justices should rule a certain way, you should support a given cause. But based on everything that we know about our brains and their bafflingly strong desires to fit in with the crowd, the best way to convince people that they should care about an issue and get involved in its advocacy isn’t to tell people what they should do — it’s to tell them what other people actually do.

And you know what will accomplish that? That’s right. Everyone on Facebook making their opinions on the issue immediately, graphically, demonstrably obvious. That is literally all that it takes to create a descriptive norm: Publicly acknowledging your belief along with the thousands of other people who are also publicly acknowledging theirs.

So, no. The fact that you’ve replaced that picture of yourself mugging for the camera with a red square and an equal sign will not cause Justice Kennedy to bang his gavel or stomp his foot and say that he’s come to a final decision on the matter, and that it’s all because of your new profile picture. Changing your Facebook image will not have a direct impact on our legislation.

But a widespread descriptive norm implying that it is socially acceptable to advocate for same-sex marriage and that most people in contemporary American society seem to be pro-marriage-equality?

Now that just might.

Platow, M., Haslam, S., Both, A., Chew, I., Cuddon, M., Goharpey, N., Maurer, J., Rosini, S., Tsekouras, A., & Grace, D. (2005). “It’s not funny if they’re laughing”: Self-categorization, social influence, and responses to canned laughter Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 41 (5), 542-550 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2004.09.005

Lee, K. (2004). The Multiple Source Effect and Synthesized Speech. Human Communication Research, 30 (2), 182-207 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2958.2004.tb00730.x

Cialdini, R.B. (2001). Harnessing the science of persuasion. Harvard Business Review, 79, 72–79.

Cialdini, R.B. (1993). Influence (3rd ed.). New York: HarperCollins.

Image of the HRC equality logo via Wikimedia Commons, designated as a public domain image.

claimtoken-515519c288b5c

- William Shakespeare, Hamlet

According to a poll from the Pew Research Center that has come out just in time for this week’s historic decisions on marriage equality, we should all be concerned. As it turns out, there’s a tremendous amount of bias in our Supreme Court.

Unfortunately, there’s just one thing that people can’t quite agree on: The direction in which this bias swings.

This disagreement, which I will get into shortly, harkens back to a study conducted all the way back in 1954. Two researchers were curious if people might actually construe the same objective stimulus differently based on their pre-existing beliefs and motivations, so they asked Princeton and Dartmouth students to watch the telecast of a football game that occurred between the two teams. Although they both saw the same exact game, you would never know it by reading how the different fans described the events that they had watched. Princeton students thought that the Dartmouth players made twice as many infractions as their own team did — which also happened to be twice as many infractions as the Dartmouth fans themselves thought their own team had made. Essentially, they might have seen the same video, but they certainly did not see the same game. Each team’s fans went into the viewing with their own set of biases and their own pair of eyes, and they ended up seeing what they wanted to see. Bias against your side might seem like something odd for someone to “want to see,” but think about it — even if you never necessarily want the media to be against you, it can sometimes be self-serving to believe (or maintain) that it is. After all, everyone loves an underdog. It’s better to be the side that is unfairly persecuted and still manages to triumph than the side that gets the systemic privileges and benefits. This is why everyone hates referees; no matter how objective they are (or try to be), their calls are always going to seem like they’re against you. This overperception of bias against our own side (and underperception of bias against our rivals) is referred to as selective perception, sometimes referred to specifically as the hostile media phenomenon if it refers to an oversensitive perception of bias in the media.

Two decades after the Princeton-Dartmouth study, a preliminary examination of registered voters leading up to the 1980 Carter-Reagan election began to lend some formalized support to this idea that we might see media forces as being particularly hostile towards our own side. Even though only 55 of the 160 voters that were polled reported thinking that there was an unfair bias in media coverage of the election, there was a clear pattern in the jilted voters’ responses: Almost all of them thought that the media bias was running against their own side. Of the voters who planned on supporting Carter, 83% of them felt that the media was unfairly biased in favor of Reagan, whereas 96% of intended Reagan voters felt the opposite way about there being a slant towards Carter.

A second study conducted by this team of authors specifically tests how people with different ideological slants might respond to the same objective telecast of a controversial political issue. With this goal in mind, the research team showed media coverage of the 1982 Beirut Massacre to a wide variety of participants, some of whom were pro-Israeli, some of whom were pro-Arab, and some of whom were neutral or had no strong opinions (to serve as a control/comparison group). The researchers ultimately discovered that when pro-Israeli and pro-Arab participants viewed the exact same media coverage of the massacre, they once again appeared to have watched entirely different reports. Pro-Arab participants were significantly likely to think that the coverage was unfairly biased in favor of Israel, and they counted, on average, about 42 pro-Israel statements and 26 anti-Israel statements. Pro-Israel participants, on the other hand, only counted 16 pro-Israel statements — 22% of the total number of statements that they noted down in their records. So, even after watching the same exact telecast, the pro-Arab participants still managed to count 26 more pro-Israel statements than the pro-Israel participants did.¹

We can see the hostile media phenomenon at work in this most recent Pew Research Center’s study, which asked Americans to report how they construe the current Supreme Court. As you can see in the table on the left (reproduced from the Pew Center’s report), only 9% of conservative Republicans see the Supreme Court as being “conservative” like they are, whereas a full 48% of liberal Democrats think that SCOTUS has a clear right-leaning bias. On the other hand, 45% of the conservative Republicans are quick to call the Supreme Court “liberal,” as opposed to the mere 15% of liberal Democrats who are willing to say the same.

Long story short, if you’re a conservative, it’s painfully apparent that the Supreme Court has a strong liberal bias. If you’re a liberal, on the other hand, the Roberts court is obviously unfairly conservative.

No matter which way you lean, there’s no denying it: The Supreme Court is clearly biased.

We’re just not sure how.

1. Comparing these results with the neutral control group reveals that there were “objectively” (or as objectively as possible) about 19 pro-Israel statements, or 26%. This is not significantly different than the number of statements counted by the pro-Israel participants, so they were fairly accurate (the pro-Arab participants overperceived the frequency of pro-Israel comments). However, the pro-Israel participants were certainly not immune from the hostile media phenomenon just because their frequency counts did not happen to differ from the control group. Even though their counts did not differ on that one particular item, the pro-Israel groups were significantly more likely to think that Israel was treated more poorly overall in reports on the massacre, that unfair standards were being applied to Israel, and that the media was spending a disproportionate amount of time time focusing on Israel’s role in the massacre.

Vallone, R., Ross, L., & Lepper, M. (1985). The hostile media phenomenon: Biased perception and perceptions of media bias in coverage of the Beirut massacre. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49 (3), 577-585 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.49.3.577

Hastorf, A., & Cantril, H. (1954). They saw a game: A case study. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 49 (1), 129-134 DOI: 10.1037/h0057880

Coe, K., Tewksbury, D., Bond, B., Drogos, K., Porter, R., Yahn, A., & Zhang, Y. (2008). Hostile News: Partisan Use and Perceptions of Cable News Programming. Journal of Communication, 58 (2), 201-219 DOI: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.2008.00381.x

Image of Shakespeare via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image due to age; thought to be the work of a 17th-century painter named John Taylor.

Image of Sabra and Shantila (aka the site of the Beirut Massacre) courtesy of user deutsch_laender via Wikimedia Commons. Originally posted on Flickr. Available through a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.