After 50 Years of Explaining Conservatism as Flaw, New Study Suggests It's Cultural

Social psychologists are overwhelmingly liberal. Most people would probably say that if 90% of a field are liberal, that would be pretty skewed, but a recent survey suggests the real number is 12 liberals to 1 conservative.

Given that backdrop, maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise that most of the explanations social psychologists have come up with for liberal-conservative differences have framed conservatism as a cognitive flaw. According to psychology journals, conservatives are conservative because they’re “dogmatic,” “inflexible,” “low on integrative complexity,” or just plain stupid (low IQ).

But having lived in China, I saw things differently. Cultural psychologists tend to think thought style is grounded in our social style. In China, most people’s social world is full of tight, binding ties. In the US, social conservatism is more common in places with tight social ties, like strict churches, small towns, fraternities, and the military. If that’s the case, maybe conservatives think about the world a bit more like people in interdependent cultures like China.

In a recent study, I tested thousands of Americans’ cultural thought style and found that social conservatives tended to think more like people from China (PDF). In a second study, I found the same pattern on the other side of the world: social conservatives in Hong Kong think more like the traditional Chinese style than liberals (PDF). Or put another way, social liberals in Hong Kong think a bit more like the typical American.

One method cultural psychologists have used to measure cultural thought style is to show people three items and ask them to choose two to categorize together. People in China and India tend to choose items that share a functional relationship, like hand and mitten. Americans and Western Europeans are a bit more likely to choose items that belong to the same abstract category, like mitten and scarf.

 

Illustration of Triad Categorization Task

Yet America is not a single culture. Among a large sample of Americans, social conservatives chose more of these relational pairings. Liberals chose fewer relational pairings. The same pattern held among 438 college students in Hong Kong.

 

Graph of Social Politics and Thought Style

Are these just cultural markers, or do these thought styles really matter for people’s politics? In a follow-up study, participants were briefly trained to choose relational or abstract pairings. Then they read an article about a policy that would send low-level drug offenders to school rather than jail. This brief perspective change nudged people’s attitudes toward a liberal policy on drug offenders (but it did not change whether they identified as liberal or conservative). 

 

Graph of Support for Drug Offender College Program

To be sure, there are lots of reasons why people think or vote the way they do. For example, professor parents are more likely to give their children liberal attitudes and an abstract thought style. Yet this experiment suggests that nudging the way people process information can change the conclusion they come to.

Some psychologists have called the liberal style of thinking WEIRD. They call it WEIRD because most cultures that researchers have tested tend to score on the relational side of the spectrum.

 

Support for drug offender college program graph

So far, the data shows that analytic thought is mostly concentrated in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies. So globally speaking, it’s not conservatives that need to be explained. It’s WEIRD liberals. Rather than looking out at conservatives, explaining their flaws, this research suggests at least some of the differences are cultural.


Thomas Talhelm is an Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He researches cross-cultural differences and north-south cultural differences in China. He has lived in China (both north and south) for four years doing research, as a Fulbright Scholar, Princeton in Asia fellow, and as a freelance journalist. While living in Beijing, he also founded Smart Air, a social enterprise that researches and ships low-cost DIY air filters to help people protect themselves against air pollution.

What Children’s Explanations of Inequality Reveal about the Belief that Society is Fair

The wealth gap between the richest Americans and middle-income earners is the largest on record, and is projected to increase for the next 20 years. According to the AFL-CIO, the average American CEO earns a salary 331 times the size of the average worker’s salary. Inequality, it would appear, is everywhere.

And yet, as of 2011,[i] a majority of Americans believe that corporations are generally fair in balancing personal profit with public interest and that the federal government should not act to reduce the income and wealth gap.

The contrast between economic reality (namely, that most people are being shortchanged by the system) and the relatively positive attitudes toward the status quo raises an obvious question: Why do people seem to reject the idea that society is unjust? Why do they support a sociopolitical system that allows widespread, ever-growing inequality?

In a paper that will appear in JPSP, Andrei Cimpian and I answer this question by examining the thought processes that contribute to the counterintuitive tendency to uphold the status quo. Our claim was that this tendency has roots in explanation.

From a young age, people explain patterns and events in the world in a remarkably consistent manner. Instead of exhaustively considering every possible explanation, people often rely on the first thing that comes to mind (in other words, they explain heuristically). Previous work suggests that the information that comes to mind most quickly tends to be inherent information—facts or features that describe an entity itself rather than its context or its history.[ii],[iii] Thus, when people generate quick heuristic explanations of social patterns such as group-based inequalities, they might, more often than not, attribute the inequality to (presumed) inherent features of the people involved (e.g., men occupy more high-power jobs than women because men are more driven).

We hypothesized that this overreliance on inherent explanations is an important source of the widespread tendency to support unequal societies. After all, if people understand inequality as being directly caused by certain features of the groups involved (e.g., work ethic, intelligence), then it seems natural and legitimate that inequality should exist.

We contrasted our proposal with the currently dominant view on this phenomenon. This view suggests that people are motivated to support their sociopolitical systems.[iv] People often experience discomfort or anxiety when thinking about how unfair society is and how potentially undeserved their own position is (whether it is high or low). As a means of reducing these negative emotions, people may instead adopt the belief that the system is fair, and that they are where they belong.[v]

While there is a great deal of support for this motivated account, we argued that a motivation to reduce negative emotions is not necessary for system-supporting attitudes to emerge. Our own view suggests that such attitudes can occur simply as an unintended consequence of the explanation process. In order to differentiate between these two proposals, we focused our investigation on a participant population that, while particularly susceptible to inherent thinking, may not be so deeply anxious about their position in society: young children.

We tested whether 4- to 8-year-olds’ spontaneous ways of explaining lend support to the status quo in several studies using stimuli that described unfamiliar social disparities (e.g., on Planet Teeku, the Blarks have a lot more money than the Orps). We used unfamiliar groups and settings to reduce the likelihood that children would make connections to their own society, which might then trigger anxiety and a motivation to reduce it. For each unfamiliar disparity, children rated whether the disparity was due to inherent features of the groups (e.g., the Blarks are smarter) or to environmental or historical factors (e.g., a war long ago). This was a measure of how children explained the disparity. We also asked children to indicate how fair they perceived the disparity to be, and how much they liked each group. This was a measure of children’s tendency to defend the status quo.

In support of our prediction, children reliably preferred the inherent explanations. They thought that the Blarks were wealthier than the Orps, for example, because of something special about Blarks as group, and not because of their circumstances or history. Moreover, this preference for inherent explanations strongly predicted whether children saw the status quo as legitimate. The more strongly children agreed with the inherent explanations, the more likely they were to believe that all was fair on Planet Teeku.

Notably, when we asked children to generate their own explanations for these disparities (rather than having them evaluate explanations we generated), we found a similar preference for inherent explanations. Children as young as 4 explained inequities such as the one between the Blarks and the Orps in terms of inherent facts about the groups involved (e.g., “They work harder,” “Because the Blarks do their jobs a lot better, so they get a lot more money”). This suggests that the tendency to view inequality as fair has early roots in the basic processes by which people explain the world.

These explanatory processes influence sociopolitical reasoning throughout life. When adults reasoned about the same disparities we had presented to children, they displayed very similar biases. Just like children, adults believed that novel disparities were likely due to inherent features of the groups involved (as opposed to environmental or historical factors). In turn, this belief strongly predicted their intuitions that the disparities were fair and their preference for the high-status group. Importantly, these inequality-supporting attitudes came about in a context in which participants should have experienced little or no motivation to alleviate anxiety about their own place in society.

Although the take-home message may seem initially bleak—a pervasive explanatory bias leads us to inadvertently defend the status quo—there is, in fact, a silver lining. When we provided children with contextual explanations for status disparities, they were much less likely to see those disparities as fair. For example, simply telling children that the Blarks had more money than the Orps because they “live in a town with a lot better jobs” drastically reduced children’s tendency to believe that wealth gap was fair. This suggests that acknowledging the degree to which various extrinsic factors influence one’s position in society is important in reducing the near-automatic tendency to attribute status to inherent features.  Finding ways, then, to overcome the bias to explain via inherent information may prove useful if we are to readjust our inequality-justifying attitudes in the face of ever-increasing wealth disparities.

 

***

Larisa Hussak is a PhD student in Developmental Psychology at the University of Illinois. Her research seeks to uncover the various cognitive mechanisms which underlie social and political behavior, and how they manifest across development. You can read more about her research here and reach her at [email protected].

 

[i] Kohut, A., & Dimock, M. (2013, May 1). Resilient American Values. Retrieved June 18, 2015.

[ii] Hussak, L. J., & Cimpian, A. (2014, November). Facts about inherent features are highly accessible in memory: Evidence for an inherence heuristic in explanation. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Long Beach, CA

[iii] McRae, K., de Sa, V. R., & Seidenberg, M. S. (1997). On the nature and scope of featural representations of word meaning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 126(2), 99-130.

[iv] Jost, J. T., & Banaji, M. R. (1994). The role of stereotyping in system-justification and the production of false consciousness. British Journal of Social Psychology33(1), 1-28.

[v] Jost, J. T., & Hunyady, O. (2002). The psychology of system justification and the palliative function of ideology. European Review of Social Psychology, 13, 111-153.

 

 

 

Special Issue of Psychology and Society

Psychology & Society is an online peer-reviewed and open access journal that focuses on how the social world shapes psychological functioning and vice-versa. The journal publishes theoretical, methodological and empirical work that contributes to the knowledge of how the social and cultural world and the psyche are intertwined, interrelated and interdependent.

This month’s special issue of Psychology & Society was edited by guest editor Maria Cecilia Dedios-Sanguineti from the London School of Economics and Political Science. The focus of the issue is around the question of ‘context’ in a cultural psychology of human cognition, development and behaviour. In particular, the issue addresses the question of whether it is possible to put context alongside culture when doing cultural psychology? Why is this necessary? Each of the contributors to this special issue propose different answers to these questions. Joshua Bruce examines how cultural psychology incorporates power into its theorizing and explanatory capabilities; Kurtis and Adams investigate culture and gender influences on interdependence; Goyal, Wice, Adams, Chauhan and Miller explore attributions of spousal transgressions in India and the US, challenging simple links between power, rights and responsibilities; Soerens views intimate partner violence among migrant women through the lens of the dialogical self; finally, Mandviwala provides a window into the experiences of adolescent Muslim girls growing up in America. Each of these efforts represents a nuanced and subtle approach to the study of the entanglements between culture, context, and mind.

The primary focus of Psychology & Society is to understand the complexities of the individual embedded in social, cultural, historical and economic contexts. Towards this end, we welcome submissions using an array of methodologies employed at different levels of analysis. Moreover, we also welcome pitches from individuals or groups who wish to assemble a special issue on an area of psychology or a specific psychological event. The best way to get in touch is to email us here.