A reading of a piece I wrote called ‘How social media divides us.’ I recommend the written piece over the podcast version. Much of the mainstream focus on how social media may be amplifying our divides has been on product features (e.g., content recommendation algorithms, or reaction emoji choices). This piece examines the idea that there may be inherent aspects of internet communication that lead to more polarization, in a medium theory “medium is the message” type of way.
Hod Lipson (hodlipson.com) is a roboticist who works in the areas of artificial intelligence and digital manufacturing. I talk to Hod about the nature of self-awareness. Topics discussed include: how close we are to self-conscious machines; what he views as likely building strategies that will yield self-aware machines; what it takes for something to be considered self-aware; how artificial intelligence research might help us better understand the structure of our own minds and how we behave; and what he sees as the risks of AI.
A talk with crime researcher Eric Piza (site: ericpiza.net) about how the ability to record people’s actions (e.g., video surveillance, personal cameras) has affected people’s willingness to commit crimes. Topics discussed include: what research tells us about video surveillance and crime reduction; what factors make the presence of video surveillance more likely to be effective; the effectiveness of police body cams at preventing bad behaviors; some practical ideas for how one might discourage crime at one’s property; and the role guns may play in U.S. police violence.
In this episode, I give some thoughts on the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict and how some of the anger and emotion around that is caused by political us-vs-them polarization. If you’re someone who has a lot of emotion and anger about the verdict, and you’re someone who wants America to heal, I think you should give this episode a listen.
For a transcript of this episode, see below. If you’d like to check out other politics-related episodes of my show, go here.
Note: I’ve made several edits to this podcast in the first few days after its release.
Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast. This is a podcast about better understanding people and why they behave they way they do. You can learn more about it at www.behavior-podcast.com.
There’s no guest on this episode; it’ll just be me talking about the immense anger I see from some liberals on the Rittenhouse verdict and how I see that relating to the topic of us-vs-them political polarization.
To give you an example of the kinds of emotional and extreme responses I see, I’ll share a couple.
Someone I know shared this take:
White America is sick to its core. I want to believe we can do better, but then a murderous white boy with an assault weapon is set free (and celebrated) (again) and I can’t imagine where we go from here but further down down down. Kyle Rittenhouse is a cold blooded murderer. And our “justice” system let him go free and congratulated him.
This person also shared what I’m pretty sure is fake, distorted news that the judge had hugged Rittenhouse and called him “a good boy.” I think that originated from a The Daily Show bit, from what I can tell from a quick search.
Colin Kaepernick tweeted the following:
We just witnessed a system built on white supremacy validate the terroristic acts of a white supremacist. This only further validates the need to abolish our current system. White supremacy cannot be reformed.
I’ll talk more about that take later in the episode, but those two examples should give you an idea of the kinds of outrage I’m talking about and why I wanted to make this episode.
If you’ve listened to this podcast, you know I focus a good amount on polarization and the psychology behind it. I’ve interviewed a lot of researchers and experts on polarization-related topics; if that interests you, check out my site for a compilation of all the politics-related episodes. If you’re someone who hears about polarization and thinks “why do people always talk about that; clearly one side is horrible, so it makes sense that we’re polarized”; if you think that, there’s an episode with a well known polarization researcher explaining why polarization is a big problem, and how it’s happened in many other countries, and how the U.S. is not unique at all.
Why do I think talking about this is important?
I wanted to do this episode because I thought the high emotions around the Rittenhouse verdict might be useful for examining how us-vs-them polarization plays a role in what people are feeling, how they’re reacting. This episode is focused on what I see as unreasonableemotions and beliefs that liberals had about the verdict. This is not because I am giving conservatives a pass or think that there’s nothing to talk about on that side; clearly there is. It’s simply because my audience is primarily on the liberal side politically, and one of my main goals in talking about polarization is to help more people see how us-vs-them feelings affect their thinking and reactions; That unreasonable us-vs-them filtering is not only something the “other side” does, but something many people are doing, even if you believe the other side is way worse. Put another way: if I had a mainly conservative audience, I’d be talking about bad us-vs-them framing on the conservative side.
Our political anger is not nearly as much about the issues as we seem to think it is; that it is much more about our emotions, our us-vs-them framings. As Anne Applebaum put it in an Atlantic article of hers: “America’s left and right are radicalizing each other.” The rest of us are mainly along for this ride, trying our best to make sense of things. Along the way, we filter out or give a pass to the bad ideas and behavior of people on our side, while we view the bad ideas and bad behavior of people on the other side through the worst possible lens. We view the other side as a monolithic mass, mostly all as bad as the worst people in their group, while we view our side as full of individuals with a spectrum of diverse ideas and opinions, some right and some wrong. We increasingly view all hot button topics as being very simple to understand, with right and wrong stances clearly defined; we ignore the truth that most topics are very complex with a lot of gray area.
So I feel compelled to try to do my best to draw attention to the problem. In the hopes that more people start to understand what the core problems are. In the hopes that more people will decide to work against simplistic, divisive narratives and aim for more nuance. Because that is how we will avoid worst-case outcomes in this country: by more people aiming for nuance. To quote Carey Callahan, who I interviewed on this podcast about trans issues and the polarization around that: “The complexity of the truth is inconvenient for both sides.”
To be clear; examining polarization as our core problem doesn’t mean you have to think both sides are equally bad, or equally at fault. I think this is a common misperception that people have that prevents them from being willing to think about polarization problems. Seeing polarization as the core problem is not a “both-sides” argument. It certainly doesn’t require you to stop fighting for what you believe in or criticizing bad behavior of people on the other side.
Examining polarization as the core problem is simply about noticing how we are all humans reacting to things around us; we are all humans being affected by the us-vs-them narratives around us; it is about realizing how these us-vs-them dynamics get amplified and spread by many people from across the political spectrum. It’s seeing things at an individual human level and not at a tribal, group level. It’s about recognizing the role that we ourselves may be playing in these dynamics and finding things we can do to help reduce our role in adding fuel to the fire and instead looking for opportunities to bring people together. It is about recognizing that people on the so-called “the other side” are responding to the bad, divisive ideas of some people on your side in the same way that you’re responding to the bad, divisive ideas of people on the other side.
It is about recognizing that perhaps instead of traveling in the same path-of-least-resistance us-vs-them ruts we’ve been in, which may lead us to destruction, maybe we need to start criticizing and pushing back on the divisive people around us who promote us-vs-them narratives, whether they’re on our side or not, and maybe we need to start rewarding and honoring the people who speak in more humane, persuasive, and bridge-building ways. Because anyone who’s spent time looking into polarization in a serious way will tell you: we all have much more in common than we think, and our anger is often based on distorted illusions.
Before we start
In this episode, we’ll be examining the outrage that many liberals have about this, and examine how some of that anger may be due not to the case itself, or to Rittenhouse himself, but to the perception that this is the current arena where our us-vs-them battles are being fought. This is not to say that there are no valid reasons to be upset about the Rittenhouse verdict, but I do want to examine exactly why there is so much emotion and anger about it.
I predict if you’re someone who’s outraged about the Rittenhouse verdict, you’ll have an urge to turn off this episode fairly quickly. You may be so upset that you’ll never listen to me again. But if you do want this country to heal, if you do want us to avoid worst case scenarios, I’d ask you to please give it a listen, to see if you find a few tidbits of useful perspective in it. I’ve damaged relationships with liberal friends and family by talking about these topics. I lose some Twitter followers and podcast listeners when I talk about these topics. I may even be hurting my ability to make money in the future, time will tell. All of these outcomes are entirely common and expected results of attempts at bridge building and empathy in very polarized societies like ours. And that’s why so few people do it; the costs are simply too high. I’ve suffered to work on these things not because I enjoy any of this drama or alienation, but because I think these topics are really the most important things we could be talking about right now. So Id’ just ask that even if you do find some of my thoughts stupid or out of touch, please give it a listen. And hopefully you can cut me a little slack along the way because I wrote this in just a few hours, and it’s nearly impossible to talk about such tough, controversial topics accurately and persuasively 100% of the time. I wish I had more hours in the day to devote to this stuff.
If you’re listening to this and you’re politically conservative, hopefully you’re willing to examine similar divisive dynamics on the conservative side. Hopefully you won’t just enjoy this episode as fun liberal-bashing but will try to self-examine how similar things are true of your side. I hope you’ll end up agreeing with me that pushing back against bad, us-vs-them thinking within one’s own political group is one of the most important things we could be doing right now.
The legal aspects
So let’s start with asking: why are so many liberal people so angry about this case?
Is it the verdict itself? Do liberals believe that Rittenhouse should have been found guilty? Do they believe the verdict was unjust? Let’s leave aside Rittenhouse’s character or motivations, let’s leave aside gun laws you may think are bad and idiotic. Let’s just focus on the verdict and if it made sense from a legal perspective.
There are many pieces online you can find talking about how legal experts found the verdict unsurprising and expected. In short: Rittenhouse was able to have those guns, and he had a strong self-defense case. To quote from a recent NPR article:
I think that anyone who saw the evidence could see that the jury might have a difficult time coming to a unanimous decision that Kyle Rittenhouse wasn’t defending himself,” said Julius Kim, a defense attorney and former prosecutor based in the Milwaukee area.
Another quote from that:
Some of the video footage, some of the still frame shots appeared to support the self-defense claim,” said Chris Zachar, a criminal defense attorney based in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Another quote:
The state has to prove that Kyle Rittenhouse provoked the attack by proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And so, the question is: If everyone in that courtroom is still not sure, if the judge wasn’t sure, then how are 12 jurors going to be sure?” said Kim.
That’s just from one article. There are many more. Based on the little I’d read about the case, I would have been surprised if Rittenhouse had been been found guilty.
All this is a way of saying that it can be seen as correct that Rittenhouse was acquitted. Correct in the sense that it made sense legally. You may find it upsetting, or believe that the laws should be different, but that’s not how court cases work. They attempt to apply the existing laws to the existing situation.
Or maybe you believe that the prosecutors should have tried the case differently, and gone for lesser charges. So maybe you have some anger at the prosecution, but I think no matter what: Rittenhouse had a strong self defense case.
Another source of anger seems to be about our gun laws. I’ve seen people express anger that someone could go out to a high conflict area with a gun and kill people and face no legal repercussions. But if the law says what he did was legal, that is a statement on the law. That anger can be seen as directed at the law. But we all know our gun laws are very lax in America. I can understand being angry about our gun laws; our country’s perverse relationship with guns has made me seriously consider moving overseas, not even taking into account our other problems. But obviously that is a frustration that is much broader than the Rittenhouse case; anger at our gun laws doesn’t explain why a lot of anger is aimed at Rittenhouse himself or the verdict itself.
One reaction I’ve seen from outraged people is that this case sets a bad precedent. That it shouldn’t have happened because it will cause more people to go out with guns. That may very well be, but even if you see that as a bad thing, that is unrelated to what the verdict should rightfully have been. Juries and judges don’t make decisions based on the message they’ll send to society; they make decisions based on what the existing laws are and try to reach justice for the person being tried.
Another common reaction I’ve seen is that if he were black, he would have been convicted. This is pure speculation; personally I don’t believe that’s true; let’s imagine it was a young black man who did the exact same thing Rittenhouse did; a young black Trump supporter, with all the other elements the same. I think it’s probable he also would have been acquitted, simply because the legal lines were pretty clear, as they were in this case.
But let’s say the idea of racial injustice in the legal system is one thing that makes you angry. That is unrelated to this court case. That is something you could just as easily be mad about for any number of court cases that have happened in the past or going on right now. Put another way: it’s not very logical to think that Rittenhouse should have been convicted because you believe a black person in his position would have been falsely convicted. (There will be more on ‘white supremacy’ allegations later in this episode.)
Obviously I can’t get into all the legal details here; you may still have reasons you believe the verdict was unfair. But I’d say that, even if you think that: you should find the verdict unsurprising. For the simple reason that our legal system is built upon human fallibility. Our jury system is built on an idea that it’s preferred that many guilty people should go free before a single innocent person is ever convicted. So in that sense, how can we be outraged when people we expect to be convicted are not? Human justice is always fallible, jury systems are fallible; their verdicts are subject to randomness and initial conditions. Expecting court cases to go the way you want them to I’d suggest is immature. This is not to say you can’t be mad about badness and injustice in our criminal system, but I’m simply saying that if you examine any court case, you’ll probably find a lot to object to, because human justice is messy, all the people involved are imperfect and make mistakes. It’s a messy business.
And also: it’s very hard to make comparisons between court cases. I see many liberals hold up two slightly similar court cases and point at different results, as if that comparison proves systemic racism, or proves injustice. But obviously it’s hard to find two cases that are exactly the same, and laws differ in different areas, and what prosecutors choose to prosecute differ, and how juries deliberate is subject to randomness and noise. In short; these things are massively complicated, and holding up two slightly similar court cases and saying “see, this shows how broken the system is” is simplistic and immature. Again, this is not to say that injustices don’t exist; it’s merely to say that you need more than weak comparisons or speculations about what you think would have happened.
Is the anger due to thinking that Rittenhouse is a bad person?
So let’s leave aside the verdict and its correctness or incorrectness for now. A lot of the anger from liberals is about how Rittenhouse is a horrible person, maybe even a monster. A lot of the anger seems to be around an idea that Rittenhouse represents everything bad they see about the right: their love for guns, their hatred for liberal protesters, their violence.
I’d propose that such outrage is simplistic, that it doesn’t match the complexity of the situation, that it is similar to Trump supporters who take a single incident involving the bad behavior of a far left activist and use that as the representative symbol of everything they are fighting against.
Let’s leave aside any objections you might have now, like “clearly their side is worse because of x”. We’re examining how the us-vs-them feelings are similar, at an individual level, and how we tend to bring a lot of our team-based fury with us to incidents, and how that causes us to distort our perceptions.
So let’s try to imagine a political mirror image of the Rittenhouse situation. Let’s imagine a situation where a racial justice protester was in a similar situation to Rittenhouse and ended up killing some people in Kenosha. Let’s imagine it went down like this: a protester had gone out with a gun on the night of the Kenosha protests and riots, because he wanted to quote “protect his fellow protesters from fascists.”
If you weren’t aware, there have been quite a few far-left people open-carrying guns at these events. I mention that just in case you think what I’m proposing would be an unusual event.
While others chanted, a young man stood quietly at the edge of the group of protesters gathered near a river-side park with a semi-automatic rifle strapped across his chest. The man said he had grown up with firearms and in recent weeks decided it was time to carry one to the Portland protests. “In our hometown, we need to take care of our community,” said the man who declined to give his name. The man is one of a small cadre of left-wing protesters who on Tuesday and Wednesday were openly carrying weapons as they pulled security duty on the perimeters of marches through Portland.
In Seattle, during the time left wing people had taken over an area around a police station, some people were open carrying there too. Some people were shot and killed. And you probably remember the militant antifa person who shot and killed a Trump supporter in Portland, Oregon.
So back to our imagined story: let’s say this imagined young protester was traveling around with a group of protesters. And this group had thrown a brick into a shop. Shortly after that, the young man became involved in a physical fight with a shop owner. The shop owner physically attacked the young man, the video showed that pretty clearly, and the young man ended up shooting and killing the shop owner and his friend.
During the trial, a video was submitted for evidence that showed the young man, a couple weeks before the incident, telling his friend “Bro, I’d love an excuse to shoot some fascists.” The young man’s lawyers were successful in getting that stricken as evidence from the trial, with the argument that people say all sorts of angry things they don’t mean when they’re venting or showing off, and that nothing in the young man’s past indicated that he was violent or intended violence on the night of the incident, that it was a case of just things going wrong and escalating, that it was all an unintended tragedy, and that, at the end of the day, the young man had been attacked first and defended himself.
After this young man was acquitted, conservative news pundits made confident speculations about the case, like “If this had been a Trump supporter who’d done this, they would have wrongly convicted him and ruined his life, because the liberal-leaning court system is rigged against conservatives right now, as we’ve seen from other high -profile court cases recently.” Liberals might rightfully scoff at such “we’re being victimized” narratives that are based on purely speculative narratives.
Or let’s say this analogy isn’t direct enough. Because it’s of course hard to make exact analogies. Let’s say it was a far left activist with a gun who traveled to what was expected to be a wild, out of control conservative protest in Virginia because he wanted to protect “vulnerable people” from quote “rightwing nuts.” And let’s say that ended with him getting attacked by conservative protesters and shooting some of them.
If you’re a liberal who’s outraged about the Rittenhouse verdict, I’m curious: what would your feelings be about those other cases? If those people had been acquitted, would you be as angry about that situation as you are about Rittenhouse being acquitted?
I would propose that you wouldn’t be as upset about those other cases, and that’s because you view Rittenhouse as “the bad guy” in this. I would propose that the outrage you feel about Rittenhouse is because you are harnessing all the anger you have about Trump supporters and bringing it to bear on this case, that your feelings from outside the case are impinging on this case. That Rittenhouse is simply the latest representation of what you hate about the right, in a similar way that bad liberal behavior is held up by people on the right and made to seem the representative thing they’re fighting against.
But wait, you may be saying: influential conservatives are holding up Rittenhouse as a hero. This is in no way equivalent because influential liberals don’t hold up far left people who kill people as heroes. And to that I’d say: if those kinds of points are reasons you are angry about this case, you are bringing in aspects that aren’t related to this case. In other words: if part of your anger about the Rittenhouse verdict is how he is being treated as a hero by the right, and about how bad and extreme conservatives as a whole are, you are bringing outside and unrelated anger to the case. Because none of those kinds of points pertain to whether Rittenhouse should be acquitted or not. It is a different topic.
Is Rittenhouse a monster?
Maybe a good place to pivot now would be to explain why I don’t view Rittenhouse as a monster. Or at least why I have no good reason to think he is one. Why I see what happened as entirely to be expected given the highly polarized state of our country, the destabilizing impacts of violent riots, the ubiquity of guns, our gun culture, and other factors.
To start with: it’s entirely expected bad things will happen at violent riots. Did you know that 19 people were killed during the U.S. George Floyd-related protests and riots? Wikipedia has a good summary of those incidents.
In Louisville, the photographer Tyler Gerth was shot and killed at a downtown park where protesters gathered. The alleged shooter, Steven Nelson Lopez, was homeless and had a history of severe mental illness, and had reportedly been asked to leave the park earlier because of his behavior. Many of the protesters in the park were armed and on edge, and returned fire when Lopez started shooting, local news outlets reported.
Another one:
Las Vegas police officer Shay Mikalonis was shot in the head during the protest, and reportedly remains paralyzed from the injury.
From another part of the article:
Other law enforcement officers have been injured in non-fatal shootings this year, including two Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies shot in Compton while sitting in their patrol car in mid-September, and two Louisville police officers shot in late September during a protest over the lack of serious charges against police officers in Breonna Taylor’s killing.
Is the Rittenhouse incident any more or less horrible or tragic than the many violent things that have happened during those protests and riots? Is the Rittenhouse incident more horrible than any of the many violent interactions that happen at any time in this country or across the world?
Because many violent interactions are capable of being seen through an us-vs-them filter. To mention a few examples: the Portland antifa person who shot and killed the Trump supporter, or the George Zimmerman trial, or George Floyd’s death, or some of those 19 deaths from the George Floyd-related protests. There’s no shortage of deadly encounters that could be viewed and used as polarizing lightning rods, as anger-inducing representations of our national divides. And clearly, in many of those situations, people behaved badly, stupidly, or hatefully. But we live in a nation of 330 million people and we have a lot of us-vs-them anger, and we have a lot of poverty and a lot of mental stress and a lot of guns; and we’ve been existentially and financially destabilized by covid; are you surprised that we’ve got some bad things happen? Are you surprised that people are getting riled up in various ways? I’m certainly not. In fact, I’m surprised we haven’t seen more violent encounters. (Personally I think that can be seen as due to the ubiquity of video surveillance and smartphones, something I’ll be interviewing a criminology researcher about for the next episode.)
Let’s talk about Rittenhouse’s motivations: his righteous anger about the destructive riots that were happening at that time in Wisconsin. It’s entirely unsurprising to me that some people would be upset about all the rioting we’ve had in this country and want to stand up to that.
As a liberal-leaning resident of Portland, I’ve been disgusted and angry about the actions of militant antifa people and the destruction and chaos they’ve caused in my city. And it’s easy for me to imagine that anger through a more polarized lens; it’s easy for me to imagine being even more angry than I am now. It’s possible for me to imagine feeling that going out and protecting small businesses from chaos and destruction is a righteous and noble cause.
The inherent danger of militant protest behavior, and how it leads to so many bad outcomes and incidents, is one reason I interviewed a militant Portland antifa/BLM protester last year for my podcast; I was curious about what kinds of philosophies such people were using as justification for their bad behavior, and I wanted to highlight to more people just how illogical and dangerous such ideas and behaviors were, because that behavior largely seems to get a pass in liberal-leaning media; it surely isn’t as critically examined as conservative-side violence is.
During my interview with the militant antifa person, they defended physically fighting with cops and setting fires to buildings, said that he imagined a society without police, where citizens themselves police the streets with guns and enforce justice themselves. It was all pretty incomprehensible and idiotic to me. And as regards to their militant protesting actions: the lawless conditions that they create in the streets, however well meaning and noble they think it is, very predictably leads to bad things, including bad things that nobody sees coming. Bad things like Rittenhouse situations. Violent actions result in violent reactions. People will get in fights, people will die. Street violence leads to more political polarization, with each side becoming increasingly riled up about the violence; escalating street violence is a common pathway by which some countries have fallen apart. These people are playing with a dangerous fire they don’t realize the power of, in a similar way that Rittenhouse was playing with fire and likely didn’t realize how often his course of action would lead to unintended tragedy.
It ispossible to see Rittenhouse’s motivations as noble; a motivation to protect against chaos and destruction. You may find such a view wrong and misguided, but all I’m saying is that it’spossible to see it through that lens. Just as it’s possible to see the motivations of racial justice protesters who go out with guns as noble when looked at through a certain lens. It doesn’t mean you have to agree with any of these people’s beliefs; I certainly don’t; it simply means being willing to try to see the things that are making them angry and not assigning the worst possible motivations to them. And that also means taking into account the very polarized dynamics of our country and the us-vs-them narratives that very influential people spread.
One popular meme making the rounds on this topic is a quote from the Daily Show host Trevor Noah. that quote goes:
Nobody drives into a city with guns because they love someone else’s business that much. That’s some bullshit. No one has ever thought ‘oh it’s my solemn duty to pick up a rifle and protect that TJ Maxx’. They do it because they’re hoping to shoot someone.
I see that as a very simplistic way to frame things. A conservative could just as easily say the same thing about a liberal activist who is carrying a gun. There are always ways to view anyone who brings a gun to an event as wanting to kill someone, to view it through a lens of “they wanted to hurt people” and not “they wanted to protect.”
Personally, I am willing to give people the benefit of the doubt until I know more; we live in confusing and high-emotion times. We have also been destabilized by covid and the associated stresses of the lockdowns.
To be clear here: my goal here is not to defend Rittenhouse’s decisions, no more than my goal is to defend leftist people who go out to such events with guns. All people who go out with guns should realize that things could end in tragedy, that the night could end with them having killed people they didn’t want to kill, or end with them being killed. As Johnny Cash knew: when you take your guns to town, bad shit can happen.
And it’s probably not a coincidence that this case involved a teenager; it’s perhaps no coincidence that older people who felt the same anger and frustration as Rittenhouse didn’t put themselves in the position Rittenhouse did; because they were more mature and realized things can easily go badly.
But let’s assume Rittenhouse is a bad person
But let’s say that you still think Rittenhouse is a bad person who deserves to be punished. And his badness is what angers you.
I’d ask: are you equally as mad about every violent behavior where a political us-vs-them motive might be seen to play a role. Have you been as equally angry about cases where far left people did violent things?
To take one example: are you aware of the case of William Van Spronson? He was a self-described antifa person who in the summer of 2019, in Tacoma Washington, attacked an ICE facility with a semi-automatic rifle and a propane tank bomb and who died by being shot by police. He was a far left terrorist.
He was a self-described antifa person who, in the summer of 2019, in Tacoma Washington, attacked an ICE facility carrying a semi-automatic rifle and attempting to explode a commercial-sized propane tank. He died by being shot by police.
“This could have resulted in the mass murder of staff and detainees housed at the facility, had he been successful at setting the tank ablaze,” Shawn Fallah, who heads U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of Professional Responsibility, said in a statement.
I’d bet that if you’re outraged about Rittenhouse’s actions, there’s a good chance you’re not as outraged about Van Spronson. You may even intellectually recognize that Van Spronson’s motivations and decisions were much worse than Rittenhouse’s, even if he didn’t succeed in killing anyone, but maybe you’re still emotionally more disgusted by Rittenhouse. Maybe you’re searching for a reason for why your disgust at Rittenhouse makes sense. I’d humbly suggest the reason you’re so much more viscerally disgusted by Rittenhouse, despite Rittenhouse being a much more sympathetic person than many far left extremists I could name, is because of political polarization.
There’s a very good chance you’ve never even heard about that Van Spronson person and what he did. I myself hadn’t heard of him at all until a few minutes ago, when I was researching far left extremism. And I think that says a lot about what gets attention in the liberal-leaning mainstream media and a lot about what drives the perceptions of many people on the left. Because I have no doubt if a far right person had attacked an organization with guns and a bomb as Van Spronson did, I would have known a good amount about it. Often, liberal-leaning mainstream media will even present excuses for far left extremism. In an NPR article about Van Spronson, a person named Mark Bray, who’s a professor and who writes about the antifa movement, argued that quote “it’s unfair to lump militants like van Spronsen into the terrorism category without a discussion of the violent ideologies they were targeting. Antifascists, Bray said, aren’t the ones going on hate-fueled rampages.” end quote.
Here are some other examples of far left extremist violence: there was James Hodgkinson, who in 2017 shot five GOP Congressman in DC because he was so angry politically.
Then there are what the FBI calls Black Identity Extremists. A 2018 report about extremisms lists six attacks by black identity extremists since 2014, including Micah Johnson, the Dallas shooter who killed five police officers in July 2016, and Gavin Eugene Long, the Baton Rouge shooter who killed three officers 10 days later.
My point is: If Rittenhouse’s actions disgust you and outrage you, I hope you are also disgusted by the kinds of far left incidents I’ve named. Hopefully much more outraged by those incidents because those few I’ve named are much more disturbing and vile.
I’m mentioning all this not to try to compare far left or far right extremism body counts. It’s known that far right extremism has resulted in a lot more people killed than far left extremism.
But personally I think such numbers don’t tell the whole story. It’s possible to see left-associated protests and riots as part of this equation of chaos.
I don’t watch much TV at all, but one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen in this regard was John Oliver’s episode about George Floyd protests, where he essentially promoted a ‘burn it all down’ perspective. When you look into police violence and the research about it, you’ll find that it’s a tremendously complex topic; there is simply no strong evidence that racism plays a big role in killings by police, that it is much more about socioeconomic status and the high crime areas that police end up policing more. As someone who has looked at the research a good deal, partly in preparation for interviews I’ve done with a retired police captain, I personally think that our country’s huge number of guns is the main culprit here, in how the lurking threat of guns escalates every encounter cops have.
But the role of guns wasn’t mentioned in John Oliver’s episode, at least I don’t remember it being highlighted. He didn’t talk about the complexity and ambiguity of the causes behind police violence, as shown in the numerous academic studies done on the subject. He didn’t talk about the fact that yes of course, the racist history of America has meant that many black people are poor and live in high crime areas that are policed more and have more interactions with police than white people do, but that doesn’t equate to malicious racism, and it doesn’t detract from the fact that high crime areas need to be policed more than low crime areas. He didn’t talk about the fact that many people in high crime areas very much want a police presence, and that “defund the police” slogans and riots might be deeply unsettling to many poor people, including many minority people.
Police presence is the cornerstone of every modern civilized society, but John Oliver focused on tying the concept of American police to the enforcement of slavery; an association that perplexed one of my most liberal relatives, who later asked me what the hell John Oliver was talking about. At the end of his episode, he played a clip of an emotional racial justice activist, Kimberly Jones, who said that she agreed with something Trevor Noah had said: that the social contract was broken, who said, and I’ll transcribe this approximately:
Why the fuck do I give a shit about burning their football hall of fame, about burning a fucking Target. You broke the contract when you killed us in the street and didn’t give a fuck. For over 400 years we played your game and built your wealth.
Later she said:
As far as I’m concerned we could burn this bitch to the ground and it still wouldn’t be enough and they are lucky that what black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.
John Oliver, after presenting a very simplistic, un-nuanced, and racially divisive view of what police violence was all about, ended his show on a note of essentially endorsing violence and destruction. I found all this disturbing and irresponsible. Where were the adults in the room? Where were the balanced, nuanced, objective views that sought to examine what I see as much more the truth: that we’re mostly a bunch of people just trying our best to solve problems? How much violence in the George Floyd-related protests might John Oliver’s show have been responsible for? How much responsibility for that might be seen to lie with other influential people promoting similar views? Is it wrong to examine all these complex sides of the equation if our goal is truly to understand why people do the things they do? If our goal is to understand the violence around us? If a conservative host had promoted such a divisive narrative and endorsed violence in that way, would you find their behavior irresponsible? Do liberals get a pass from all criticism and blame because they’re on our side?
My point again isn’t to blame liberals or say that they’re as bad as conservatives; I find the attempt at score keeping unproductive and impossible anyway; these dynamics are complex and overlapping. I’m a lot more interested in why individuals behave the way they do; what the narratives are that are driving their behavior.
My point is that there are many divisive us-vs-them narratives floating around, from across the political spectrum, capable of producing very bad behavior when people fully embrace them. Both the left and the right are capable of some apocalyptic, good-versus-evil rhetoric about the other side, or about the evil nature of society and government systems. And many people on both sides seem capable of excusing the bad behavior of people on their side while being driven into a frenzy by the bad behavior of people on the other side; that is after all what tribalism and polarization is all about.
When I hear about people who’ve been radicalized by these kinds of narratives and do violent things, my primary thoughts are sadness that people have let such divisive narratives drive them mad. It is understandable to me how people are seduced by all sorts of simplistic us-vs-them narratives; we become emotionally isolated, we become obsessed, we want to find a purpose for our lives, we want to be heroes, we want to be martyrs. We all have factors for why we believe what we believe. We are all human.
I think what we need are more people combating the divisive ideologies around us; what we need are more people building more nuanced and empathetic narratives about how the world works and where we should be going.
Claims of white supremacy
One of the more disturbing things about liberal reactions to Rittenhouse and the case has been the confident ways that people claim Rittenhouse is a white supremacist or that the verdict represents a white supremacist system.
The tweet from Colin Kaepernick represents a good summary of all of this kind of thinking:
We just witnessed a system built on white supremacy validate the terroristic acts of a white supremacist. This only further validates the need to abolish our current system. White supremacy cannot be reformed.
These kinds of takes are everywhere on social media and in the news. One Washington Post op-ed reads “Kyle Rittenhouse, whiteness and a divinely ordained license to kill.”
Congressperson Cori Bush had a tweet that read:
The judge. The jury. The defendant. It’s white supremacy in action. This system isn’t built to hold white supremacists accountable. It’s why Black and brown folks are brutalized and put in cages while white supremacist murderers walk free.
These takes are disturbing for the extremity of the claims and for the casualness with which people make them.
One thing that probably helped promote the idea that Rittenhouse is a white supremacist was that President Biden communicated this to the public. Biden made a tweet after one of the presidential debates about Trump that read:
There’s no other way to put it: the President of the United States refused to disavow white supremacists on the debate stage last night.
That tweet included a video that used a voice-over of a moderator’s question from the presidential debate. The moderator asked Trump about white supremacist violence. As the moderator’s voice said “as we saw in Kenosha”, the video showed an image of Rittenhouse.
First, with regards to Rittenhouse himself: There is no evidence I’ve seen that Rittenhouse is a white supremacist. Rittenhouse’s decision to go out to protect businesses and act as a law-and-order enforcer, while you may see it as misguided and stupid and reckless, or even as hateful or murderous, has nothing to do with white supremacy that I can see. It’s maybe worth pointing out that many people at these events, including many people doing destructive and violent things, were white. I don’t know about Kenosha specifically but in Portland and Seattle, most of the fighting with cops and damage to property was done white people. All three of the people shot by Rittenhouse were white, as far as I know.
The one slim piece of evidence I’ve seen presented that he’s a white supremacist is that, when Rittenhouse was out on bail not long after his arrest, he was hanging out at a bar with some far right types, including people from the Proud Boys group. There’s no evidence I’ve seen that Rittenhouse knew these people beforehand. Rittenhouse was wearing a shirt with the words ‘Free as fuck’ on it. At that bar, there was a picture taken of him putting up the OK symbol, which has gotten press for being used by white supremacists.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but first: while that symbol does seem to be used by some bad people, including white supremacists, it also seems to be something done by far right people to trigger and upset liberals.
“The “OK” hand gesture originated as one of these hoaxes in February 2017 when an anonymous 4channer announced “Operation O-KKK,” telling other members that “we must flood Twitter and other social media websites…claiming that the OK hand sign is a symbol of white supremacy.” The user even provided a helpful graphic showing how the letters WP (for “white power”) could be traced within an “OK” gesture. The originator and others also suggested useful hashtags to help spread the hoax, such as #PowerHandPrivilege and #NotOkay. “Leftists have dug so deep down into their lunacy,” wrote the poster, “We must force [them] to dig more, until the rest of society ain’t going anywhere near that s***.”
There is a definite culture of malicious trolling by many far right people. And clearly some of the people who use these symbols are white supremacists. But even the group that gets a lot of press as being clearly white supremacist, the Proud Boys, have members who are racial minorities; to me, that group could be more accurately described as culturist than racist; and that’s not to give them a pass at all as in some sense those two things can be very related and overlapped. But in short, all these things are not as simple as they appear.
But let’s assume for now that that OK symbol is a symbol of white supremacy, or even let’s assume it’s one of significant us-vs-them hate. In an interview later, Rittenhouse claimed that he did not know what the symbol meant. He also says that he blamed that outing to the bar on his lawyers, John Pierce and Lin Wood, who Rittenhouse’s family later fired. To quote from a NY Post article:
Kyle Rittenhouse claimed his ex-attorney quote “set him up” for a photo of him posing with purported members of the Proud Boys and making a hand gesture used by white supremacists.
Rittenhouse blasted his former legal team, John Pierce and Lin Wood, saying he didn’t know the “OK” hand signal is now associated with white supremacy and claiming he “didn’t know what a militia was” until after he was arrested.
Some people have scoffed at this idea, that Rittenhouse wouldn’t know the meaning or common interpretation of that symbol. But many people simply don’t know how few people are actually keyed into internet memes and meanings. The people who use a lot of social media and who stay abreast of the latest internet outrage tend to think that everyone else has the same obscure knowledge they do, or must have the same interpretations of things as they do. It would not be surprising to me at all that Rittenhouse wouldn’t know what that symbol was, and it wouldn’t be surprising to me that the people around him had pressured him in some way to put up that symbol.
The reason that scenario is easy to imagine is because it’s clear that the people around Rittenhouse at that time were people who did not have his best interest in mind. One of his lawyers at that time was Lin Wood. Lin Wood later gained prominence as being a prominent spreader of claims that the 2020 election was stolen; he’s a creepy dude into QAnon claims and such. Think about how destitute of judgment these people were to bring Rittenhouse to a hangout with far right people, to have Rittenhouse out in public wearing an offensive ‘free as fuck’ shirt, to have him posing for pictures with far right people, all this before his trial. It seems clear to me that these were morally bankrupt people who had no concern that Rittenhouse, a teenager, might have his reputation destroyed in the public eye, right before a trial that might destroy his life. These were this young man’s protectors.
In that kind of atmosphere and with the people surrounding Rittenhouse, and with the ambiguity of the OK symbol in the first place, and with Rittenhouse saying he blames his lawyer and disavows what happened that night, there’s a lot of reasonable doubt. If this is the only evidence you have that Rittenhouse is a white supremacist, it’s very bad evidence. Consider how easily conservatives might use equally slim evidence to paint a far left person charged with something similar as a white-hating racist who wanted to kill white people. Personally, I think it’s reprehensible to accuse Rittenhouse of white supremacy from the evidence I’ve seen presented. It’s easy to forgive random citizens for making these claims, but it’s harder to forgive people with large platforms, people who claim to be objective, who want to be seen as responsible thinkers and leaders.
Let’s consider Biden’s tweet that communicated to the public that Rittenhouse was a white supremacist. Now it’s easy for me to give their team the benefit of the doubt because i’ve worked in TV news and digital media and I know how easy it is to put out wrong stuff. It’s easy for me to imagine them lazily and accidentally editing that video and just looking for things to match the moderator’s voice-over and not really thinking things through. It’s also easy for me to imagine based on the ok symbol press that the people making the video fully believed Rittenhouse was a white supremacist. I tend to think we’re all being driven mad in general by things that can be easily explained by errors and not maliciousness; we’re filtering everything through a lens of ‘they intended that’ instead of ‘might that just be a mistake or a misunderstanding?
But all motivations aside: surely you should be able to see what is so wrong and divisive about the President of the United States putting such a damaging and incendiary claim out there in the public before someone’s trial. Surely you can see what it is that makes conservatives angry about that. In the same way that liberals are made very angry by confident, worst-possible lens takes that conservatives make. In the same way that liberals were made very angry by Trump making tweets that seemed to attempt to influence court cases that were still in progress.
And these confident pronouncements about so many things being related to white supremacy are everywhere these days; you can find influential journalists and pundits who confidently state that the January 6th Capital riot was a “white supremacist coup attempt” and similarly worded statements. But the fact is that there were black Trump supporters and other minority Trump supporters at that event. Simply put: believing the 2020 election was rigged doesn’t require you to be a white supremacist, any more than support for Trump requires that; it simply requires you to have believed that narrative about the election, which was promoted by many influential people, including the President himself and a lot of influential rightwing media. It is easy to see how people believe such things when so many powerful people are dedicated to spreading them.
And these confident pronouncements of things being about white supremacy are everywhere these days; I have seen influential journalists and pundits confidently state that the January 6th Capital riot was a “white supremacist coup attempt” or similarly worded phrases. But there were black Trump supporters and other minority Trump supporters at that event; you don’t have to be a racist to believe the election was rigged; you just need to have swallowed the lies and deception about the election, which was promoted by many influential people, including the President himself. You may believe that Trump is a white supremacist, or that he’d set up a white supremacist government, but clearly that is not everyone’s view, as shown by his significant support from minority demographics. I’m someone who believes Trump is a truly horrible pathological narcissist and I believe he may end up being the cause of, or at least a core contributing factor in, the downfall of our democracy. I have a very negative of view of Trump, and still it’s not clear to me how racist he is or what he’d do with more power. Even if was pretty certain he was a hardcore racist, I’m not sure what he’d do policy-wise about that considering keeping his racial minority supporters and non-racist supporters from turning on him would probably be an important part of him retaining power. If you’re someone who’s 100% certain that Trump is a white supremacist or you’re certain of how him taking illegitimate power would result in a white supremacist government, I’d suggest that your certainty about something that many people are far from certain about, even people on your own side, is an indicator that maybe you’re looking at things in a very polarized, worst-frame light.
Returning to the Rittenhouse verdict and people claiming the results were ‘white supremacist’: considering that it’s not surprising to many law-knowledgeable people what the verdict would be — to claim that the jury’s finding was racist doesn’t make much logical sense. Personally I think if Rittenhouse had been black, he would have likely been acquitted, just as Rittenhouse was. It seems like the legal lines around this specific incident were fairly clear, or at least we can say it’s not certain he should have been convicted. Put another way: if a black person who’d done the same things Rittenhouse had done had been found guilty, it seems clear that many law experts would have been surprised. And there are clearly cases of black people being acquitted of murder or manslaughter with a self-defense argument. There was a high profile one about a black man named Coffee being acquitted a few days ago. But of course comparisons of cases are hard to make, because every court case is unique, and it is hard to compare court cases that happen in different areas, and which have different judges and juries. So I’d say: considering all these facts and all this ambiguity, does it make sense to call the results of this verdict “white supremacist”? Or to claim that such a single case points to our system being white supremacist?
So what’s the problem with all of these confident and common pronouncements that “white supremacy ‘is to blame for all the things we don’t like around us? I’d argue that it has big negative effects, and that liberals need to grapple more with what those effects are. Imagine that you’re an average Trump supporter who does not see themselves as racist (let’s make it a black Trump supporter just in case, to drive the point home better). And imagine that you see liberal media and liberal citizens constantly painting everything with the “white supremacy” brush. Imagine how little respect you’d have for such incendiary accusations when you see little to no basis for those accusations.
Imagine how these constant hysterical accusations might make you feel that the left has lost its mind, that their hysteria about those things must point to their unreasonable hysteria about other issues.
All of this exaggerated emotion from the left makes it easy to not take them seriously.
Worse, it results in some people reaching the conclusion, “Hey, it really does seem like the media and influential liberal leaders are exaggerating what’s going on and exaggerating our divides; maybe the system really is corrupt in some major way; maybe we need to support people like Trump who see these problems”. Maybe once they start seeing some of the problems with bad liberal thinking, they may start to find other question-the-status-quo beliefs more palatable, (like that the election was rigged, or global warming is a hoax.)
We need to face the fact that people are capable of recognizing the bad thinking on the left; they are capable of recognizing how deeply some of that bad thinking is entrenched in liberal-leaning media and in political leadership, and how little that bad thinking and behavior is critically examined or criticized by other liberals — and that recognition is how some people take what they call “the red pill,” how they start to question all the liberal ideas. It’s a rabbit hole that people do go down.
Trump saw a big increase in minority voters in 2020 and it seems quite likely that that increase was at least partly a response to unreasonable rhetoric from the left. For example, the anti-police, anti-prison rhetoric: that kind of rhetoric is understandably scary to people who live in high-crime areas, or if not scary, just downright weird and a bit maddening.
And if you’re by chance a conservative listening to this, hopefully you can see that all the things I’ve said apply to conservatives, too. For example: Trump’s reckless and divisive way of speaking have driven many conservatives away from the GOP. Pushing back against your side’s divisive behavior and trying to bring more nuance to the discussion is how you make your side more persuasive and reach more people. In a nation where the political races are so close, one side being slightly more persuasive and getting just a few % points more support can make a big difference. We should all be attempting to speak more to the people who aren’t that extreme; the people who recognize like we do that the extreme narratives on both sides are what is driving our country crazy. Maybe that could be a narrative that could bring us all together more, if more of us had the bravery to call out bad thinking and bad behavior on our side when we see it.
If you’re politically liberal, you may be thinking at this point: but clearly conservatives are the worse group, so why are you focusing on liberals? Any bad stuff on our side is dwarfed by what’s going on over there.
Again: I am not implying that liberals are at fault for our divides, or equally at fault. I have much criticism for the right, especially for the leadership of the right and how they’ve embraced overt us-vs-them narratives in a way that Democrat leaders haven’t. But for the reasons I’ve talked about in this episode, and for other reasons we could talk about, the left has to be seen as contributing to these dynamics. The very definition of polarization implies that both sides must be driven a bit mad; it’s impossible to imagine a scenario where there’s only one side being deranged. But mainly, the reason I’m focusing on liberal stuff is because I have no influence over people on the right; all I can do is talk to the people most likely to listen to me, who are mostly liberals.
I think if you’re striving to understand how our hatred and anger is continually rising, if you’re actually interested in understanding how these dynamics work and what the drivers are, you have to be willing to examine how people on your side are adding to those divides. As Anne Applebaum put it “America’s left and right are radicalizing each other.” You have to come to terms with the fact that none of this stuff is unique to America; we are going through the same polarizing dynamics that have befallen many other nations, like Venezuela, Hungry, Poland, and many others) We are not unique. We are just human. We are prone to the very human tendency to form into groups and go at each others’ throats. And we may be aided in this tendency by our digital media, and by how philosophically and emotionally isolated we are from each other in modern societies. We tend to think our anger is all about the issues but it’s not so much about that; it’s much more about our growing perception that the other side represents all the bad things, all the bad thoughts.
And you can examine these underlying psychological causes for our divides while still continuing to think “the other side is worse.” Even if it was my goal to get you to think both sides are equally at fault, which it’s not, I would not be capable of convincing you of that. There is much to be angry at. I wouldn’t deny you your anger or passion, or pretend there are not valid reasons to be angry.
But I think the value of examining these ideas is that you’ll be making your side more balanced, more persuasive. By working to reduce the polarized, emotional takes of your side, you’ll be making your side speak more to normal, middle-of-road Americans who, believe it or not, may be seeing things in a less polarized way, in less us-vs-them ways, than you yourself are. Many people on both the left and the right are disheartened and disgusted by the constant framing of every hot button issue as the latest high stakes event that represents good versus evil.
The more we strive for nuance, the more coherently we speak, the more we are able to speak persuasively to people who don’t think the same as us. When I interviewed Jaime Settle, who researched the mechanisms behind how Facebook and other social media increase us-vs-them animosity, one of the things she said was most useful in combating extreme polarization was demonstrating to others how we don’t fit into the stereotypes of our group. The more people do that, the more people understand that we don’t easily fit into such extreme and simple categories. The more it’s hard to get mad at “the other side” and all their ideas as a symbol of all that’s wrong with the world. And that idea is partly what motivates me to do this podcast; to demonstrate that complexity with my own ideas.
If you think that Rittenhouse is a monster: where is the compassion and the understanding of complexity that I think you likely bring to other situations, to other people? For example: I’d guess that, when it comes to some violent and criminal behavior in the world, you’re able to examine things like: that person’s environment, their upbringing, the world of ideas they lived inside of, the influence of media, the ease of acquiring guns, our country’s culture of normalizing guns, etc. Where is that curiousness about Rittenhouse’s behavior in this case? Where is that compassion and striving for understanding all the historical and environmental factors that lead to almost all events. Where is that intellectual curiosity about why people act the way they do that I used to appreciate about many politically liberal people I knew?
Because it seems that those things are largely disappearing; our understanding of and tolerance for others seems to be increasingly overshadowed by a desire to see everything through a team-based lens, to score whatever cheap political points we can in the moment.
Mark Lilla wrote a book criticizing Democrat party politics called ‘The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics’. I’ll paraphrase something he said in there: liberals generally have so much empathy for people in developing countries, even those people who behave badly; they’re able to see that there are factors at work that affect people’s behavior, that there are many cultural factors at work. But many liberals aren’t willing to apply that same empathy and understanding for the people who are right down the street from them.
I do think that we all need to get a lot more curious about the people around us and a lot more understanding about their motives if we’re going to avoid worst case scenarios in the near future.
This has been the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. You can learn about this podcast at www.behavior-podcast.com. If you liked this episode and think other people should hear it, please share it on social media.
Personally I think more understanding of our us-vs-them dynamics and how they work is one of the most important things we could be talking about. If you liked this topic, please check out some of the past episodes where I discuss political issues.
I make no money on this podcast and spend a good deal of time on it. I also get a good amount of hate for it; my work talking about political polarization topics has strained and ruined some friendships. If you’d like to show some appreciation, you can leave me a rating on iTunes or on whatever platform you listen on, and you can share this podcast with other people. I have a Patreon at www.patreon.com/zachelwood if you’d like to show me some financial support and encourage me to do more work like this.
In this episode of the People Who Read People podcast, I talk to sociology researcher Saul Albert (twitter @saul, website: saulalbert.net) about conversation analysis: the scientific analysis of how humans talk to each other. Topics discussed include: what conversation analysis (CA) is and how it’s done; some interesting CA findings described in Elizabeth Stokoe’s book Talk; Saul’s own research; the complexity and difficulty of human communication; the role of silence in conversation; transcription/notation methods used in CA; how conversation analysis relates to the broader field of ethnomethodology; and more.
In this episode of the People Who Read People podcast, I talk to Rob Speiden (trackingschool.com), who’s an expert in “sign cutting,” which is the tracking of humans or animals over land using clues of physical disturbance. Rob teaches tracking and his site is at www.trackingschool.com. He wrote, along with Greg Fuller, a respected textbook on tracking called Foundations for Awareness, Signcutting, and Tracking (F.A.S.T.).
Topics discussed include: common methods of tracking; the different types of tracking jobs that come up; how tracking is used in search and rescue scenarios; addressing some common misconceptions about what’s possible with tracking; the importance of being fully aware and open to all sensory input; the role of the unconscious in giving us clues, and more. Rob also tells some interesting stories from his career.
A talk with researcher Emily Kubin (twitter: @emily_kubin) about her work reviewing more than 100 studies on how social media may be affecting political polarization. Transcript is below.
Their paper is called “The role of (social) media in political polarization: a systematic review.” We discuss her research, why polarization is a problem in the first place, why people can be resistant to thinking that polarization is a problem, the two different types of polarization (affective and ideological), our psychology tendency to become us-versus-them in our thinking, her own opinions on what social media is doing to us, and the mechanisms by which social media may be amplifying polarization.
If you liked this episode, please check out the other People Who Read People episodes on related topics (like this one on how Facebook increases polarization).
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast about understanding the people around us and understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com.
On today’s episode, recorded October 12th 2021, I talk to Emily Kubin about her research into the effects of social media on political polarization.
When some people hear about the problem of polarization, think something like: “one political group is way worse than the other so it makes sense that we’re polarized and therefore polarization is not a problem”. If you’re someone who thinks something like that, I recommend you listen to this episode. Because, in my opinion, and in the opinion of many people who study these things, our us-versus-them polarization is the root cause of the problems we’re facing in the United States and in many other divided and dysfunctional countries, and many people in both political groups, including people like you and me, play a role in amplifying those divides. Many people have a defensive reaction to thinking about polarization and their potential role in it, which goes something like “the other side is much worse so why should I have to think about my behavior or my group’s behavior”But it’s possible to recognize how we can be contributing to our problems while still believing one group is worse than the other. In other words, we can attempt to change our behavior and the people on our side’s behavior to help solve our problems and that doesn’t require us to take the blame for the problem; it just requires us to recognize how these dynamics are happening.
I really can’t overstate how important I think the issues we’ll be discussing are. I don’t view these issues as distant, abstract academic topics; they are vitally important topics, in my opinion quite literally the most important topics, because extreme polarization can be deadly and destructive on its own, can and has destroyed many countries, but also because us being very polarized prevents us from solving other very serious and scary problems.
Emily Kubin and Christian Von Sikorski’s paper is titled “The Role of (Social) Media in Political Polarization: A Systematic Review.”For that research they examined 121 studies on the role of social media in shaping political polarization.
I’ll read the abstract of that paper:
“Rising political polarization is, in part, attributed to the fragmentation of news media and the spread of misinformation on social media. Previous reviews have yet to assess the full breadth of research on media and polarization. We systematically examine 94 articles (121 studies) that assess the role of (social) media in shaping political polarization. Using quantitative and qualitative approaches, we find an increase in research over the past 10 years and consistently find that pro-attitudinal media exacerbates polarization. We find a hyperfocus on analyses of Twitter and American samples and a lack of research exploring ways (social) media can depolarize. Additionally, we find ideological and affective polarization are not clearly defined, nor consistently measured. Recommendations for future research are provided.” end quote
You can follow Emily on Twitter at @emily_kubin, and you can find her research by searching online for ‘emily kubin research’.
I’ve spent a good amount of time on this podcast interviewing people about political polarization psychology and about how social media may be impacting that. If this topic interests you, I recommend skimming back through past episodes to see topics related to this.
I’ve also done my own work on this topic. Last year I researched and wrote a piece about the inherent ways in which social media may be amplifying our divides. My focus on inherent aspects was a purposeful contrast to a focus on product features, which gets most of the attention; a good example of the focus on product features was in the documentary The Social Dilemma. I think the focus on product features is attractive in many ways, because it gives us clear villains, and it’s also fairly optimistic in that it assumes the problem is simply badly made products and not something more intrinsic and harder to combat. But I think this focus is a mistake and a blind spot and I think it detracts us from understanding the root causes of the problem. That piece I wrote contains some ideas that, as far as I know, I’m the first person to write about. For example, I reference a 1950s study that showed how writing things down publicly makes us more stubborn and less likely to change our minds, and I think this is one of the fundamental ways in which internet communication may be making us less flexible and more defensive and argumentative. You can find that piece of mine on my Medium blog; search for ‘zachary elwood medium social media.
A few months ago, I talked to a high school class about these topics, and I think we need more schools working these ideas into their curriculum; we need more awareness from a young age of how these tools that now play such a huge role in our lives may be screwing us up in various ways.
Okay, sorry about all the self-promotion, let’s get back to my guest Emily Kubin: Emily is currently a PhD student in the Political Psychology & Communication Lab at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Landau, Germany. She is also a research affiliate at the Center for Moral Understanding at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Emily’s studies focus on political communication. Specifically, she focuses on how political opponents view and interact with one another, and the role media plays in opponents’ perceptions of one another. She places a special focus on studying strategies that political opponents (and the media) can use to reduce affective polarization.
Here’s my interview with Emily Kubin:
Zach: Hi, Emily. Thanks for coming on.
Emily: Thank you for having me.
Zach: So you’ve clearly reviewed a lot of work about social media effects on political polarisation and you’ve clearly had to think deeply about all the work out there on the subject. And I realise that your research was not about reaching some sort of definitive conclusion all these topics, but I think a lot of people would be very curious if we’re talking about effective polarisation, emotional us-versus-them polarisation. Are you willing to say what your personal take is on how much of an effect social media is having on effective polarisation?
Emily: So of course as a scientist, it’s very difficult to say X causes Y. Right? We tend to talk about correlations rather than causations. I’ve looked through a great depth of literature on this specific subject and what we are consistently seeing is this kind of relationship between the use of social media and the contents of social media, and increasing levels of effective polarisation. Especially in terms of the connection between Facebook as a social media platform and Twitter. These two major social media networks seem to be frequently cited as places where people are becoming increasingly more effectively polarised.
Zach: Are there certain studies that stand out to you as you were reviewing the literature and studies? Are there certain things that stand out as being the most important ones in the field?
Emily: Well, what I would say is the most interesting research out there is focusing on the extent to which we’re actually incentivized to be polarising on social media platforms. So there’s a variety of studies that actually highlight that politicians when they are saying polarising things or being very polarising on social media platforms, they get more reach, more spread, and therefore they might actually be more incentivized to be saying polarising things. If I am a politician and I want people to hear from me, I want them to know my name, I want them to have my name pop up on their newsfeed, then social media is a great place to be spreading my polarising content to get access to the public.
Zach: Yeah, I think that kind of gets into something I’m interested in, and it’s the inherent ways that social media and internet communication act on us; which I think often the product choices get so much attention like what buttons are used and what are the specific algorithms and rules. But I think to me, if the internet was just a series of very simple forums like Reddit or something, I think we’d still be dealing with a lot of the same effects because there is this inherent aspect to the internet and our communication in general of like, we want to be noticed, we want to get attention– negative messages get more attention than positive messages, that kind of thing. And I’m curious did some of the work that you review talk about some of these inherent aspects of internet communication?
Emily: Yeah, exactly. A lot of the content that we see that gets spread the most are things that are the most outrageous, the most upsetting and cause the most strong emotional reactions. And these things tend to also be very polarising things. So when we see an outrageous post, these things are liked more, reacted to more. And it could be in terms of people reacting in a good way of saying, “This is right, I agree with this. This is great,” and also people reacting like, “This is disgusting. This is horrible. How could you share this or think this way?” So on the internet, the things that are are going to cause those strongest emotional reactions are also the things that are going to spread the furthest and fastest. And yeah, those are the things that are the most polarising often.
Zach: A small edit here. I’m going to skip to a part of the interview where Emily talks about some of the methods they used to review the many studies that accumulated.
Emily: And then now let’s say we have our collection and in the case of this review, we had 94 articles in total that we analysed. Now the next step is to say, “Well, how do we collect this massive amount of knowledge and data and find something that we can actually present to the public of what we know in the literature.” And so what we decided to do was start to categorise the study. So for example some studies will focus on media content like what kind of content is on social media platforms or news media, etc? And so they’re just focusing on what is the actual text that people will read. Another area of categorization could be like your selective exposure. So if I’m selectively exposing myself to to like-minded media, how does that impact the extent to which I’m polarised? Then the third is focusing in on media effects. So these are often much more like experiments, and they are manipulating different types of media and seeing if there’s differences in outcomes for polarisation. We can start breaking these down into different types of research, and then once you do that you can then look and see if there’s systematic patterns.
Zach: A small note here due to an audio glitch, Emily says that one thing they’re looking for in the studies is what they measure whether it is polarisation on actual issues and policies, or whether it’s polarisation on how the subjects perceive people who were politically different from them. And those are two very different measurements.
Emily: What’s really interesting is that even researchers that study this stuff don’t seem to be very good at making those distinctions either. Of course the researchers usually or should know the distinction between the two, but when they talk about it in their work, they don’t always make this clear distinction of like, “We’re going to be focusing on effective polarisation,” or “We’re going to be focusing on ideological polarisation.” And the reason that that can be a problem is that it makes it– for people that aren’t as familiar with this topic– it makes this information a lot less clear. Even if you’re as a psychologist that’s studying social psychology but maybe you don’t study politics and policy, you might not know that there’s these two different forms of political polarisation and what they’re called and the antecedents and consequences of these things. And so when you read a paper that’s just talking about political polarisation overall and not making a clear distinction, the nuance gets a little lost. And this is kind of a critique that we’re making a literature on that.
Zach: Yeah, I think a big part of what came across to me in reading your paper was encouraging other scientists to think about these factors and the different categories helps make the research more consistent so you can get a better sense over time. Because as you say, this is a super hard area to study because it’s such a dynamic and changing world and there’s so many factors involved. And I think people don’t understand how complex these things are to study too is another issue. Yeah.
Emily: Yeah, absolutely.
Zach: The point about some studies not making the distinction between the effect of an ideological polarisation, I’m curious, sometimes when I read some psychological studies, I’m just thinking this seems really dumb. And I’m wondering were there moments you had when you were reviewing studies and thinking like, “This just seems really bad for a number of reasons and maybe we shouldn’t include it” or do you make that decision ahead of time like, “This is included because it’s peer reviewed or whatever and it’s going to be included no matter what dots you have on it later on,” if that makes sense.
Emily: So we at the very beginning had a very strict criteria of what would be included and what wouldn’t be. We had very clear rules set out that it had to focus specifically on social media or traditional media and the effect of that media on polarisation, or the relationship between these two things. And that’s a very specific criteria to have and so for us, it wasn’t difficult later on to then be like, “Should this actually be included or not because for us, the rules have been very clear from the beginning.” And so what that allowed us to do is then see places where maybe researchers kind of went a little wrong with their research, I would argue, or maybe didn’t do things in the most ideal way. But it didn’t make us question should this be included or not. Of course it should be included, it was very relevant. But what they did wasn’t ideal. I think the place where we saw this the most was in terms of measurement of polarisation specifically. This was really a place where I was kind of shocked. And we originally actually hadn’t been planning on looking at measurement and then decided maybe this would be interesting to see if there’s differences in how researchers are measuring polarisation. And what we found was that relatively consistently, people or researchers I should say are measuring ideological polarisation, which again is this polarisation on policy stances so like the extent to which I’m pro or anti-gun, for example. They measure that… It’s comparative across studies. Most studies are doing something relatively similar to other studies, the only distinction is that some will measure on a specific policy stance. So for example, like to what extent are you pro or anti-gun or based on where participants place themselves on the ideological spectrum and how liberal or conservative you are.
So those are slightly different things, I would argue. However, these are fair and reasonable ways to measure ideological polarisation. What was really interesting was how effective polarisation was being measured. Of course there’s plenty of people that consistently were measuring it in similar ways in terms of like how warm people feel towards their political opponents was a very standard measure. However, there were some that were a little strange. For example, one paper measured effective polarisation by assessing how strong you feel the leader is of the opposing political party. I would argue that that is not measuring how much animosity I have towards the out group or how much love I have for my in group. I was pretty shocked by this, but I think that highlighting this and finding this distinction is something that’s interesting and important to note that of course it’s a match or a criteria, but it was a surprising finding and it suggests that maybe in the future researchers should be more cognizant of this, and especially with effective polarisation be more consistent in their measurement.
Zach: Yeah, there just seems to be so many factors here. If anyone has looked into it even a little bit, for example trying to measure ideological polarisation by rating, you know, how liberal or conservative you perceive yourself as, that very easily overlaps with feelings and affective polarisation in terms of like, one might perceive oneself as conservative or even have more conservative views because of the feelings. You know, there can be an overlap between these two things and very much in the way that feelings can affect the issues and ramp up the issues. The reason that we can be so irate about the issues can be in an underlying way about the feelings. Because in a less polarised environment, for example, something that could just be a normal political discussion or disagreement suddenly turns and feels like a life and death high stakes thing on the issues. There’s very much this overlap which I think gets at the reason why these things can be hard to separate in people’s minds and also hard to separate for studies.
Emily: Absolutely. Also, something that I would like to note that I think is very interesting is that there’s some new research coming out not necessarily related to my review that suggests that people actually aren’t that ideologically polarised in the US, they don’t disagree that much on policy preferences, but they think that they do. And they have this meta perception that they do, and that this meta perception is related to how much they dislike the outgroup or dislike their political opponents. So it’s like we might even actually have a forecasting error in terms of predicting how different we are from our opponents, and this forecasting error is actually related to how much we’re disliking political opponents. I find that quite interesting and it suggests that there is a distinction between ideological and effective polarisation. And of course they can be related, but now there’s starting to be some evidence that perhaps how effectively polarised you are doesn’t necessarily predict how ideologically polarised you are.
Zach: Yeah, I think the problem I’ve encountered in trying to talk about these things is there’s the feeling that just by saying that there’s a way that both sides are ramping up emotions, for some people it seems to be saying, “Oh, you’re making a both sides argument.” And clearly one side is worse but I think the key to me is acknowledging you can keep thinking one side is worse while also seeing how the emotion makes things worse, like has an amplifying effect on everything. And I think that’s a distinction that can be hard to make because some people hear, “Oh, you’re talking about polarisation. You’re trying to blame both sides.” Yeah, that’s what keeps coming up to me when I have these conversations.
Emily: Yeah, that’s a very interesting insight that is something I hadn’t really thought about that much. But I think that often people are very tied to their convictions about politics and so as soon as they feel in any way blamed or attacked– which both sides probably are feeling when we talk about polarisation– it becomes a very visceral reaction where they feel like it’s unacceptable to be questioning the status quo in terms of levels of polarisation in the society.
Zach: Right. And I think that gets at the hardship, I mean, that’s a project I’m working on now as actually trying to put these things in ways that talk about the problem and get around that instinctual pushback that people have. Because on both sides, clearly if you’re emotional, you have those feelings of, “Why would I ever need to examine my behaviour or my sides behaviour when the other side is clearly much worse?” Right. And so-
Emily: Also, I’m sorry to interrupt but not just that they’re worse, but also ‘I’m right. So of course I have a right to be this angry and this upset and this emotional and not even listen to the other side because I know I’m right. So there’s no point.” [laughs]
Zach: Right. And yeah, some of the illusory aspects of polarisation and the way that we tend to think of the other side as bad for all of these different consistent across-the-board stances, when actually the other side is much more varied in their opinions that we think and we have people that believe some of those things on “our side” you know? Things like that. There’s these illusory natures of nature of polarisation that can exist.
Emily: Yeah, we tend to view the outgroup as very homogenous and like-minded and they all have these very similar and extreme attitudes. And in the reality, that’s not the case. Many more people are actually more moderate but people don’t recognise this or don’t see this. And I think that that can drive affective polarisation further.
Zach: Right, that gets back to the ideological where we have more in common. Multiple studies and surveys have shown that we have much more in common ideologically than we believe. Also, another factor that I think is a big thing here is a lot of people don’t distinguish between the leaders and the citizens in the sense that I can believe… They kind of lump them all on the same homogenous group, like you were saying, the homogeneity. But in reality, we should be able to say, “I can believe this leader is doing bad things and speaking in bad ways and acting divisively and acting ignorantly. And I can also believe that citizens can be fooled or misled in various ways or disagree on various things without them being as bad as that leader.” I think that’s a big distinction, too, that the lack of perceiving that is a key factor in driving polarisation. And perceiving the other side as a monolithic, homogeneous group.
Emily: Yeah. There’s also a lot of evidence of political elites being much more ideologically polarised than average citizens. And so when people are lumping the political elites like politicians, for example, into the same exact category as average citizens, of course people are going to think that the other side is very extreme and polarising. And potentially when they think this then they also could arguably believe that they’re bad for the country, bad for the future of the US. And this is where you see all this intense political strife because there is argument and fighting over the future of America.
Zach: Can you talk a little bit about how you see the distinction between social media effects and, you know, clearly we have polarisation dynamics that can occur just based on our human nature that clearly have been taking place in our country, for example, for decades. I’m curious how you see social media playing into all these other factors like our inherent tendency to do this or TV news, media, things like that.
Emily: Polarization has been increasing even before the rise of social media. So we have become increasingly polarised, but I would argue that social media has exacerbated this effect. So of course we shouldn’t be saying that everything that’s wrong with the US and politics is caused by Facebook. However, I don’t think that they’ve helped and I think that they’ve exacerbated the problem. My understanding of the role of media in polarisation has become one of which it’s very cyclical. So it could be, for example, that the Americans are becoming politically polarised for some unknown reason but this trend is starting to happen. And then they choose to access media markets and social media platforms that follow their own worldviews. This is something in psychology that would make sense. Like, psychologically we want to find information that agrees with our world views. So we do this, and then therefore the media markets are trying to cater towards us because in the end, all they want is to be successful and get more viewership and more money, etc. And so they start gearing their content towards the information that their user base is wanting to hear. Or they’re designing their social media platforms in a way that allows these echo chambers to occur. So now these echo chambers or these media platforms are becoming… Partisan media platforms are rising and now this media is making the population even more polarised, which then reinforces them wanting to find more like-minded information. And then the cycle continues and continues and continues. I think that this is kind of where we are at now where these complex dynamics are occurring, where we’re kind of being reinforced with our belief systems by media, but we’re also reinforcing media to do things to make us even more polarised.
Zach: A lot of articles or texts that you read about these subjects try to act as if, you know, try to find some magic bullet for the cause of these things. And clearly, to me, it’s about our human nature. It’s that we are prone to these ingroup versus outgroup tendencies, and clearly there’s all these different ways because we’re social creatures, we are affected by all these different ways we communicate. So all these ways we communicate, whether it’s TV news, whether it’s social media, whether it’s the fact that we sort ourselves into more and more groups and have those in-person conversations, they’re all just various ways to amplify or in some cases defuse our natural tendencies to get at each other’s throats in various ways. And I think Peter Coleman, the well-known mediator and conflict resolution guy who wrote a book about polarisation recently called The Way Out, I think he put it pretty well where he was talking about how people try to find what’s causing this exactly. And it’s like, “No, it’s a bunch of things causing it in various ways. And human interaction is complex, and clearly in different countries it will behave in different ways for cultural or random environmental reasons or whatever.” And I’m curious, do you agree with that that… It sounds like that’s what you were saying as we’re just dealing with all these different ways that affect us.
Emily: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s very easy to say, “Oh, this is all Facebook’s fault.” [laughs] But I don’t think that that is actually the full answer. Of course, there’s plenty of concerns about how Facebook has handled these kinds of things and whether or not they should have foreseen certain things happening on their platform that have clearly made polarisation worse. However, a lot of the factors are driven by things outside of Facebook’s control. First of all, we can think one thing is government regulation on the internet. We haven’t had updated regulation since 1996 and this clearly has caused a lot of problems. But there’s also a lot of psychological reasons, as you were saying, in terms of our own need to find people that are a part of our ingroup in this tribalism that we now are involved with in politics. And we’re motivated and driven to access information that is going to be agreeing with our worldviews and not be exposed to things that disagree or question what we think. And in the current media environment, this is the perfect grounds for which we can find this information, find whatever information we want that would agree with our view. It’s like we kind of select the facts that we want to choose and build our own realities around this. So of course the psychological processes are playing a huge role as well in this era of political polarisation.
Zach: Yeah, we tend to think of… This is a point that Elizaveta Friesem who I interviewed for the podcast made in her book which is called Media Is Us, we tend to think of media as something out there, something that’s affecting us like something that is something external. But her point is we need to start thinking of media. It’s just us, it’s manifestations of our human nature, right? It’s like the same dynamics that we can get into with no technology or no advanced technology are the same dynamics that can occur in various ways with these various technologies, whether the technology is books or TV news or social media. It’s like the media is us. And I think that’s a really important way to view the world. It’s like, these things that are happening are fundamentally about us as humans.
Emily: Yeah, we’re actually very entangled with media. I definitely agree with the sentiment.
Zach: Another person I interviewed for the podcast was political scientist David Karp and he made the same point you are making. Clearly there are reasons to be angry at Facebook and other social media platforms and don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of anger about Facebook in particular about their arrogance and things that they’ve done. But I think the point you were making and the point he made too is fundamentally there’s a failure of legislation there because we’ve been so gridlocked and not able to pass legislation around these super powerful platforms, you know? And ironically, that’s the gridlock in Congress. It’s due to polarisation so there’s maybe some circular effects there. It’s like we can’t manage or legislate these platforms that are causing and amplifying polarisation because we’re so polarised.
Emily: Yeah, that’s a really interesting point. [laughs] I never thought of it that way.
Zach: It’s all related. Anything you feel that we haven’t touched on that you’d like to talk about your work– interesting things about your work?
Emily: Yeah. One of the biggest takeaways that we found in our review is that there’s actually very little research on how media can depolarize people. I think we’re kind of in a moment where we’re all like, “Okay, we’re in this horrible political situation, how can we make this better?” And that’s where I am turning my focus to in my research in the coming years; finding ways that instead of having media be the place where hostility intensifies and polarisation gets worse, we use it as an avenue or a strategy or a tool to actually bridge divides between political opponents. Yeah, a lot of research is not focusing on this yet, however, in the coming years I hope to start to integrate psychological research that we already have started to establish on interventions between political opponents into actual effective interventions in media. I think this is important because we already know that people are not motivated to hear from their policy opponents, they have animosity towards them, they are unmotivated to engage with those they disagree with. And this means that they’re not going to be having these day-to-day interactions with policy opponents or political opponents to help shape their perceptions of their opponents. Rather, I would argue a lot of people are building their perceptions of political opponents through what they see online, through social media, through the news, etc. And this is suggesting that media can be a powerful place for perception building of our opponents. And so I think that we should meet people where they are, which is online and media, and try to find effective solutions to maybe make them like their opponents a little bit more.
Zach: Yeah. And your paper, that was a really good sense that stood out to me and I’ll read it in a second but I think it gets at one of the fundamental mechanisms for thinking about how social media is affecting us and the way it is amplifying polarisation. I’ll read this sentence from your paper, “Given that people are unwilling to engage in day-to-day interactions with their political adversaries, many build their impressions of opponents via the media, meaning social media is increasingly shaping how we perceive the political environment.” And I think that’s a key point. Would you agree that if we had to pinpoint one of the fundamental mechanisms, do you feel like that’s the way it’s acting?
Emily: Yeah, exactly. Because first of all we know as we already said earlier, that social media is the place where outrageous content gets spread. So this is the place where if I’m a Democrat, let’s say, and you’re gonna see a Republican, you’re going to see a Republican doing something extreme, outrageous, maybe violent, or very stereotypical but with a negative light to this. Something that’s very out there. And you’re gonna see this online and you’re also not going to have many interactions in your day-to-day life to compare it to to say, “Okay, well, maybe what I saw online was kind of extreme and out there, but not every Republican is like this.” Right now in the current political climate that we see, people are not really building these perceptions in their day-to-day interactions, and therefore they’re not having this moderating effect where they realise that their policy opponents or their political opponents are not that different from them in actuality. And instead, they’re just seeing this extreme content online which makes them feel like, “Wow, the Republicans or the Democrats, they’re very extreme. They’re really out there.” And that’s further reinforcing this polarisation. But I argue that maybe because this mechanism occurs, that perhaps we can flip the switch and actually depolarize people as well.
Zach: Yeah, I think it’s getting at the root cause because, you know, it’s that our psychological tendency to perceive the other group as homogenous. And so when we see these extreme statements by the other side by the more extreme and unreasonable, people on the other side drives our perception of that group as a whole, which in turn informs the statements we make about the other group, which in turn drives how they perceive us, etc, etc. And in part, a big part of that I think too is the way that insults drive group identity. And that was another person I interviewed for the podcast who was Karina Korostelina, I interviewed her about her book about how insults and perceptions of insults and threats drive group identity, drive group anger, and I think that’s a big part of it, too. We perceive the other group as increasingly threatening to us as these dynamics ramp up. And I think that’s… Yeah, so I think that statement in your paper really gets to the core of how these things are affecting our worldview.
Emily: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that probably is kind of explaining why people believe that they’re more ideologically polarised than they actually are. Because they’re just seeing all of this extreme content from the other side.
Zach: And from our own side, too. It’s like that kind of drives us to think the more extreme views are more prevalent than they are.
Zach: Yes, I’m curious. There’s work by Levi Boxell and his team showing how older Americans are more polarised than younger Americans. And one of the conclusions that people make around that study is that that shows that older Americans, because they presumably consume less social media, this shows that social media can be playing that bigger role. I’m curious what you think of that study and how you see it as fitting in.
Emily: Yeah, so this is definitely a place where we can implement that correlation does not mean causation. Of course, I think that it’s very persuasive evidence to suggest, “Oh, social media must not have a big influence. It’s the people that use social media the least are the ones that are the most polarised.” However, I would counter that this is actually much more complex than that. There’s a lot of other factors that can be complicating and shaping this relationship. So it could be that when people are young and they’re exposed to social media, it has a polarising effect. And it’s still as important to think about how the social media is polarising people. It could also be that for older people, the reason that they’re more polarised could be something completely different and has nothing to do with the effect of social media potentially. It could be because they choose to watch traditional news media to a greater degree than younger people, and perhaps that’s what’s polarising them to a greater degree. It could also be their own dispositions. For example, as people get older, they tend to become more concerned with threat. And this could have psychologically differential effects on how people are reacting and responding to political information. So I don’t have a direct answer of what that could be but I think we have to think about this as a very complicated situation and not make very simple conclusions based on an association.
Zach: Right, and I interviewed Levi Boxell and that was an interesting conversation because his work kind of pushed back on or questioned the idea that social media played an effect. But as you say and as I talked about in that podcast with him, I was pushing back and saying well, that doesn’t mean that social media is not a significant amplifier of things for various reasons. I mean, there’s all sorts of ways– some of the ways you mentioned. And one other way is that social media can play an indirect role in society by making young people more extreme in their behaviours, and then older people perceiving that that behaviour and social media takes get picked up as news. So you could be watching Fox News and see they often highlight things that are related to social media or even theoretically caused by social media. And that can have an indirect way of affecting older people. But that’s just one example. But as you say, they can be two different dimensions acting simultaneously, and one doesn’t necessarily impact the other.
Emily: Yeah.
Zach: Yeah. I’m really surprised that more… When I look at the papers and research on this, I’m surprised there isn’t more work about the methods by which these tools can be used to reduce polarisation and depolarize people. So I think it’s great that you’re working on that. Are there certain things that stand out to you as, you know… Like, say you suddenly took charge of Facebook, are there certain things that you would change immediately that you think would have a big effect?
Emily: Well, I think if I was hired by Facebook, they wouldn’t be very happy with me because I think that the focus I would have is less about finances, only in what’s best for the bottom line. But I think that one of the biggest things is the spread of outrageous content, and also as the spread of misinformation. These things spread as well, if not better than true information and not less outrageous content. So I guess what I would suggest for social media is to kind of use our psychology to find solutions for these things. If we know that people are going to be most likely to react to outrageous content or most likely to share something that’s misinformation about COVID vaccines or something, we should not be incentivizing the platform to further promote these posts. I actually was watching a documentary recently and they were discussing what WhatsApp is doing to– which is owned by Facebook– to reduce the spread of misinformation. And now they’ve changed the rules so that in WhatsApp groups of 20 people or so, you can only forward messages to up to five groups; I think it is. But then if you do the math on this, if everyone from every group is continuing to share to a bunch of other groups, even if it’s only five groups at a time instead of the unlimited amount that had been previously, you can get to 3 million people in a matter of a few terms. So I think that this situation is very complex and difficult. Even when we put barriers and walls up to try to minimise these effects or disincentivize Facebook from allowing outrageous content to be promoted more, I don’t really have a clear answer, actually. I think it’s something that’s complicated. [laughs]
Zach: Well, sure. I think the problem is even tougher than a lot of people think, because in terms of trying to categorise what counts as outrageous content or bad content is clearly a line that no one can agree on. And I think that’s the fundamental problem we’re dealing with. Also, the problem is that even if you had rules that you thought were quite reasonable, it’s very hard to apply that across a huge platform where people are making millions of posts a day. How do you programmatically enforce that? I think there’s several things that even just at a conceptual definition of the problem part and then in implementation, it’s vastly confusing. And that’s part of what bugs me about Facebook and these other groups. It’s the arrogance and just rolling these things out in. You know, we apparently are partially deranged by these technologies but then they roll them out in places where you can completely foresee that there would be very bad effects in a population that was already prone to group versus group violence. You know, these kinds of things. And that’s what really gets me about the arrogance of these platforms just thinking like, “Hey, it’ll all be fine. We don’t have any real responsibility for thinking about the implications of this stuff.”
Emily: Pulling back a moment a little bit to determining which content should and should not be shared or promoted or whatever, there’s a lot of ethical questions about that, too, of who decides? And this is another layer of complexity to this situation that makes very difficult situation. The work that I’ve been more focused on rather than actually shifting platform dynamics is focusing in on the content that reduces political polarisation. So it’s like, “What does somebody have to say in a social media post to reduce your animosity towards them, for example?” And with that, it’s a little bit more straightforward because you’re not dealing with all of the complexities of the social media platforms and the moving dynamics of all of them and how to handle the infrastructure of this. And basically, one pathway that we found that seems to be effective– this isn’t published yet, I want to be clear about that. We’re still in preparation and data collection- But it seems that when people highlight their own personal experiences that drive their opposing political views– so for example, if I say I disagree with you on gun policy because I’ve had a harmful personal experience with guns, I was hurt by a gun or I could have been hurt if I hadn’t had a gun to protect myself, for example, and that experience has driven my my attitudes towards gun policy, it makes you much more willing to respect me and to be tolerant of me. This reduces dehumanisation. It has a lot of benefits for the ways that the left and right engage with one another. And what’s interesting is that this strategy is much more effective than if political opponents share facts with each other. So if I tell you that I base my views on gun policies based on data and statistics, you respect me less than if I share because of my own harmful firsthand experiences.
Zach: Yes, getting back to the hidden role of how powerful emotions are in all of this, we tend to think of these things as being about issues or facts. It’s like the emotional part of this, the narrative part of this is a much bigger thing than people tend to realise.
Emily: Also, I think given the rise of misinformation on social media and now throughout society, it’s made it much easier for us to doubt and question data and statistics. We actually show in some of our published work that personal experiences are seen as more true than facts. Even if those facts are from real statistics from real reports, that is still seen as less true than a personal experience. And we’re living in a reality where facts actually don’t matter and people take them with a grain of salt. And I think that that’s troubling, but also very interesting.
Zach: Yeah, this kind of gets into cutting ourselves a break more. I mean, because we’re talking about how animosity and emotion drive these things. And I think if we’re going to get over these things, I don’t see us solving these things with technology. I see us, whether we fail or not, whether we fail or succeed, we’re going to succeed by maturing as a people. One way or another, we have to get used to what these efficient forms of communication do to us, and we have to be able to cut people slack more and realise that for example, we do live in a confusing world where you go online and you can see all sorts of things at the touch of a button. We have to start realising that other people are just responding to various things in their environment. They’re the people they’re with and the media they consume. And I see that as it kind of has to start or be implemented at a personal growth level or at some level. And maybe that’ll happen naturally where we just start getting used to these things and realise that we’re deranging ourselves in some way. But I don’t know, I’m not very optimistic about that. I just see it as something has to change as a people. Sort of like some people criticised books back in the day for deranging people with all these new ideas and such, and it’s like part of that is a true observation but we also need to get used to these technologies and realise how they’re affecting us. I guess that’s what I’m saying. Yeah.
Emily: Yeah, we have to learn how to work alongside them rather than work against them. [laughs]
Zach: Yeah, and I think that’s why your research and other people’s similar work is so important. We need to get those ideas out to people in the mainstream. I feel like so much mainstream coverage of these things is not focusing on these issues. It’s like they’ll make a point about people’s anger about the issues and about specific issues, but they never tie it back to these things that many people know are the root cause and going on under the surface. And I think getting people in news organisations and such and politicians more aware of how we can bring people together by addressing how all this stuff is happening and not looking at it so much as an us-versus-them problem but as just a people problem, I think that’s kind of key to where we need to go and that’s why I’m interested in these areas. I’m just so disappointed by politicians, by journalists who don’t make these connections who don’t make an effort to look under the surface of what’s happening.
Emily: Yeah, absolutely. I feel like when we recognise that the polarisation issue isn’t because they’re wrong and I’m right, but rather that this is how our psyches work and the system that is set up is making it the perfect breeding ground for polarisation, I think that it could make us feel more like we’re united together trying to confront an issue as a team rather than this tribalism.
Zach: Totally. No, that’s great. Yeah. And so I want to thank you for your work on this and I wish more people were doing similar work and getting out there. So yeah, thanks again and thanks for the talk.
Emily: Yeah, thank you so much.
Zach: That was Emily Kubin. You can follow her on Twitter @emily_kubin. My name is Zachary Elwood, you can follow me on Twitter at @apokerplayer.
If you found the ideas in this podcast important, please consider sharing it with your friends and family. I think these ideas are important; that’s why I focus on them. I think these are super important ideas that are at the core of our dysfunction and what seems to be our escalating path of destruction. And I focus on these things because I am disappointed that more leaders and journalists don’t focus on helping spread the word about these problems. These are not complex ideas; they are ideas anyone can understand, and getting more people to think about them may hold the key to us solving our problems.
And just a reminder that I have quite a few other episodes about political polarization psychology and about social media effects. And just a reminder about the piece I wrote about social media, which you can find by searching online for “zachary elwood social media medium”
If you want to show some appreciation for my work, there are a couple things you can do:
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A conversation with Ben Tyler, professional musician, about how understanding behavior and psychology have played a role in his musical career. Ben’s own music project is called Small Skies (Twitter: @smallskies), and he has worked and toured with many other bands. Specific topics include: what cues and signals from other musicians is he making use of when playing jazz and other music?, Does being skilled at musical improvization result in being more flexible in life in general?
If you pay a lot of attention to politics, but doing so makes you miserable, this might be one you want to listen to. I talk with Christopher Freiman (Twitter @cafreiman), political philosopher and author of the book Why It’s OK to Ignore Politics. For many people, voting and paying attention to politics is a moral duty, a responsibility you have as a citizen of a democracy. But Freiman makes a strong case for why paying attention to politics is not a good use of our time, if our goal is to maximize the good we do in the world. And we talk about how our collective anger about politics makes us miserable and also drives us-versus-them polarization, which may be the root cause of our societal and governmental dysfunction.
Addressing common objects to political abstention, such as: it’s a privileged, entitled stance to ignore politics; that it’s dangerous to encourage people to not vote, and more.
How the act of voting, due to how unlikely your vote is to matter, may be perceived as a lost opportunity compared to doing other charitable acts.
How us-versus-them in-group-versus-out-group dynamics tend to give us distorted views of political issues and of our political opponents.
How effective altruism concepts encourage people to think more about maximizing their effect for the time or money they donate.
A talk with Jennifer Cohn (Twitter @jennycohn1), election integrity advocate, about American election security. Since 2016, Jennifer has been warning that our elections are insecure in many ways; you can read some of her writings on this topic on Medium. Her stance hasn’t changed but, after Biden won and Trump claimed that the election was rigged, it’s been understandably harder for her to get Democrats and liberal-leaning people and media interested in talking much about this problem.
I wanted to talk to Jennifer about how our politically polarized environment has changed things, how it’s affected her attempts to get attention for this problem, and how it’s changed her messaging. So there were some psychological aspects I was curious about, but I also just thought it’d be interesting to learn more about election security issues.
Elizaveta Friesem (www.elizavetafriesem.com) thinks and writes about media and our relationship to it. Her recently published book is Media Is Us and it examines the idea that media is not something “out there” but more something that is part of us, something that happens internally, similar to any other human communication. And perhaps this means that acting as if “media” (of whatever sort) is to blame for various problems we have is a simplistic way to view the world. And maybe it’s also a tempting way to see the world as it lets us humans off the hook for being responsible for what we believe and share.
Elizaveta opens her book with something we can all probably relate to: she shared an angry take on social media (in this case, about a Dove soap ad that was accused of being racist), but it turned out to be a bad take, based on something that was wrong and taken out of context. So we talk about that story, and how that phenomenon seems so common, with social media aiding so many people in over-reacting to bad or distorted or outright false information. We also talk about power dynamics in society, and how power is defined. And we talk about the power of empathy and understanding others.
Zach Elwood: Hello and welcome to the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast about understanding human behavior, whether that’s reading your opponents at tennis or poker or board games, or about understanding the political motivations of people, or about understanding humanity in general. You can learn more about this podcast at www.behavior-podcast.com. If you want to get on my email list, I don’t have anything automatic set up yet on the site, but feel free to send me an email from that contact form and I’ll put you on it. I’m actually starting to work on a book about healing American divides and about how we have a lot more in common than we tend to think and how our main problem is our us-versus-them animosity and not as much about the issues as we think. So if you’d like to be kept in the loop on that, send me a line.
On today’s episode, recorded August 5th, 2021, I interview Elizaveta Friesem. Elizaveta wrote a book called “Media Is Us,” which recently came out. You can learn more about her work at http://www.elizavetafriesem.com
Elizaveta opens her book with something we can all probably relate to: she shared something on social media, but it turned out to be a bad take, based on something that was taken out of context. I don’t know about you but this has happened to me many times and I’ve learned to be very careful about the things I see and share online; I’ve just been bitten too many times and I’ve believed and shared too many bad, distorted takes, so I’m much more careful. And that carefulness, that sense of personal responsibility for how we consume media, is what Elizaveta’s book is partially about.
We tend to think of “media” as something out there, as something that affects us, as something that can do something to us, as something we have to be cautious of lest we fall pray to bad media. Or if we don’t feel that about ourselves, we tend to think that’s true for other people: we have to police what they get ahold of, lest they, in their ignorance, fall pray to it.
Elizabeta’s book examines how we perhaps should not think about media as objects or systems that are “out there”, but should instead think of media as something that happens inside of us. Reading a book or watching TV is essentially the same process as talking to someone or talking internally to ourselves; it’s all just various forms of communication, of spreading or reinforcing ideas. Hence the book title “Media Is Us.” That may seem kind of obvious or a semantic point at first but if you really think about the implications of that, it might be very important. For example, it might mean teaching people to have more responsibility for what they consume, for the conclusions they reach, instead of a focus on eliminating bad media. And maybe if we started thinking more like that in society, with more focus on our own responsibility and less focus on blaming certain technologies or certain outlets, it would eventually lead to less division and more alignment on a common reality.
And Elizaveta’s book is also about avoiding blame, about recognizing how amazingly complex humans are, and how amazingly complex human relationships and communication is. And when you really recognize how complex things are, how many factors there are in these areas, it’s hard to blame people, it’s hard to get angry. And so Elizaveta’s book is about more than media, it’s about life, it’s about how we view the world and other people, it’s about everything really.
A little more about Elizaveta: she’s an editor of the Journal of Media Literacy Education and she currently teaches courses at Columbia College Chicago. She’s passionate about using empathy to heal ideological and cultural divides, and her current work explores how media literacy education can be enriched through principles of nonviolent communication.
The anecdote Elizaveta opens her book with is about her seeing angry takes on social media about a Dove Soap ad that many people thought was racist. If you google ‘racist Dove soap ad’, you can find more about this ad, it was from 2017. But basically the gist was that there was a section of the ad that showed a black woman removing her shirt to reveal a different woman, a white woman, there. And many people were drawing parallels between that ad and old racist ads that associated black skin with dirtiness. And Elizaveta did vet this angry take a bit; she saw respected news outlets talking about this. A Washington Post article, for example, reads “A Dove ad showed a black woman turning herself white. The backlash is growing.” A Time magazine article read “Dove’s ‘Racist’ Ad Isn’t the First Time the Company Was Criticized for Being Offensive”. You get the idea. And it was these well known outlets sharing these takes that induced Elizaveta to share it online.
We’ll pick up the story from when Elizaveta is talking about her decision to share her own angry take online.
Elizaveta Friesem: So I went to Google and I wrote ‘Dove ad’. I even wrote ‘Dove racist ad’ because obviously there are a lot of ads. So I thought, “Well, let’s see what comes up.” And lots of things came up. Lots of articles, blogs, and people were clearly writing about it big time. And some sources were trustworthy sources or something that I considered trustworthy back then. And I was like, “Well, if everybody’s saying that, I guess they looked into it and I shouldn’t look into it any further. [chuckles] So I guess there’s a problem.” So I shared it on my Facebook wall and I wrote, “Oh, my God, how come it’s so bad, it’s still happening?” So I shared that and I made this post public. And I was kind of surprised because maybe like an hour later, I had three people who I didn’t know, so three strangers responded to that. Normally, I don’t have strangers responding to my public posts. And all of them were critical of my interpretation. Two were kind of very succinct, sarcastic, sort of like, “If this ad exists, it must be racist.” [chuckles] Or something like that. And I was like, “Yeah, whatever. They probably don’t know, they don’t care.” And then the third one was a little longer and that one made me pause. It said, “Well, did you see the whole thing? Because that White woman actually also takes off her shirt and then turns into a different woman who has darker skin again?”
And my mind was actually blown up at that moment. [laughs] I was like, “Oh, my God, did I just miss something?” Because I was sure that every media outlet that I looked at– and I didn’t do comprehensive research, but I looked at a few– and they had this screenshot of putting together the picture of a Black woman taking her shirt, and then a picture of a White woman. Like, next to each other, two pictures. So it seems like they’re just that, right? So this third comment revealed to me that, “Whoa, there’s another person there?” So I started reading more and I realized that yeah, there’s a third person. And maybe her skin was not as dark as the first woman, but it was still darker than the second woman. And she looked more Hispanic, I guess. And her hair was definitely dark black even. Right? And then I read more and more and at that point I started feeling really, really bad. I was so embarrassed. [laughs]
Zach: Right. There was a lot more context. It was just a small piece of the ad and taken out of context and looked bad, but they were just switching between many people basically.
Elizaveta: Yeah.
Zach: Yeah. I thought that was a great introduction because I think it gets things that happen so often these days. I mean, it happens to me so often. And I see people overreacting to so many things online that are just, you know, the latest outrage of the day where the next day you look into it and get the full context and it’s just people overreacting to something that was either deliberately or accidentally taken out of context and shared. People getting the immediate view… You know, I’m a video film major and I actually worked as a forensic video analyst for legal and law enforcement for a very short time. And the thing I know about video and audio is even when it’s real, it’s so easy to take things out of context. And for something to be shown at an angle that that looks bad, like for real videos, I think your intro was great, I thought. Because I think it’s something that we can all relate to. Like, anyone who’s a little bit critical and thinking about how they use social media has probably lived through that multiple times at this point and hopefully, has become more skeptical as we have over time. So if you had to give the one-minute elevator pitch to someone about your book and why you wrote it, what would you say?
Elizaveta: Well, I guess I would say that I wanted to provide a different perspective on media. And part of my background is media studies and media literacy so I’ve read a lot of books and articles about media. And I taught classes about media and communication and I realized that something’s missing. So that’s why I felt that I wanted to write this book. So in this book, I talk about how media is seen as something that has appeared recently– fairly recently. I mean, the last 150 years, recently, if you took the whole history of humanity, right? And it’s something enabled by the latest technologies, right? And so the idea is that media did not exist before and now it exists and it creates a lot of problems for us human beings. And I see a lot of people from different walks of life talking about media and being concerned media. Scholars, educators, parents, politicians, a lot of people say that media is something we should be concerned about that it can cause troubles and negatively impact our lives, essentially.
As I’ve been thinking about that, I realized that the question that I want to ask is, “Do we really understand what media is?” Because in all the books and articles that I’ve read, there was surprisingly little space for definitions of media. It was just taken for granted. And most of the time, there were just presented with huge lists or small lists. Like a sample of lists of, smartphones, social networks, films, commercials, video games, or media industry as people working in the media industry. And all the time it was… So, media was presented indirectly as something different from the person doing the writing, and something worse than that person or something that can cause harm to that person or other people similar to the person doing the writing or thinking in this piece of publication, whatnot.
So I felt that I was not satisfied with that. And I felt that really in order to better understand media, we cannot see it as something separate from ourselves. It is important to talk about latest technologies, it is important to consider new cultural forms and how they have changed our lives. But if we only look at those differences, we are missing a lot. Because there are also important tendencies that have existed through ages that are not new and that can be connected to something deeper within us. So when we start connecting questions about media to those deeper inquiries, we actually turn it into questions about ourselves. So my book argues that in order to make sense of the modern media, we should actually explore some deeper fundamental principles of human communication, and essentially, what it means to be human. So yeah, the book starts almost like a media studies and media literacy exploration, but then it turns really philosophical.
And then I talk about how ideally, this whole exploration will help us better understand ourselves and others. So it’s not just about understanding media literally. Like, “Let’s look at this movie and analyze what the author wanted to say or what can happen if somebody watches it.” It’s not just that, it’s way bigger than that for me. And so when we understand ourselves and others, we can enhance our awareness and self-awareness and enhance our empathy. So that’s a big part of my journey and my exploration in that book. And then engage in collaboration that would replace polarisation based on blame. And so as you can see, I use a conversation about media to start a really ambitious discussion here about polarisation and all this stuff.
Zach: Well, yeah, that’s what surprised me. I expected your book to be about media theory, and then it gets into the broader philosophical discussions of what power is, how we relate to each other, you know? And I think you’re right in the sense that it spoke to me because you, to me, you can’t talk about any of these things without talking about our humanity and how we relate to each other. Media is how we relate to each other. I mean, that it is what it is. It’s another form of us relating. Like when we read a book, we’re relating to the person that wrote that or we’re injecting these thoughts into our mind. And it made me think of, you know, to write a modern completely helpful media literacy thing would require– as yours does– it requires talking about the psychology of humans and how they relate.
And that’s what I thought was great about your book and really spoke to me because you’re digging into the complexity and the interconnectedness of everything in a very holistic sense. It’s like, you can’t examine one piece of any situation without realizing how hard it is to separate that piece from everything around it, you know? That really speaks to me and that’s what I see in the world. Sort of the distortions of social media like your Dove ad experience, it’s like we’re seeing one thing and overreacting to one thing, and not trying to understand how this thing is connected to so many things. I mean, let alone the distortion– there’s the distortion element. But even if we think we’re seeing it completely, we’re not realizing just how connected everything is. Yeah. So I thought it was great.
Elizaveta: When you talked about social media right now, I was thinking about how I wrote this book to counter this view that ‘it’s just media’, like films or social networks that distort the way we see the world, and that’s the reason why we don’t understand what’s really going on and why we fight. So when I least– I provided this list of five fundamental principles of communication and I talk about how people just by virtue of being human, when they communicate, they create the world around them in their mind. And what I mean is that– just to give you a simple example– is well, you think you turn on news and there’s somebody there who decided what story to tell and how to tell it and how to make a video for the story and from what angle to shoot and whom to interview. So they create the way you see the story, right?
But you don’t think about how, say, you go to work and then something happens to you, you talk with your colleagues, you have a fight with a boss or whatnot. And then you go home and then you tell the story to your spouse, and the exact same thing happens! You choose how to tell the story. You choose words, you choose the angle, you choose what to tell, you choose how to tell. So it’s not just something connected with technology. It doesn’t come from technology, it comes from us being human. [chuckles] So it’s important to do all this thinking when we’re watching the news, but it’s also important to do the same kind of thinking when we are talking to each other and telling each other how we see the world and how we see things. And at that point is, “Yeah, everything is connected exactly how you said it.”
Zach: You push back on the idea in the book that the perception that a lot of people have is there’s these entities out there that are all powerful and call the shots and we cannot compete with them, but you go into the ‘which really comes first? The ‘chicken or the egg’ thing. For example, you talk about Rupert Murdoch and Fox News and how his power is perceived. And it’s really hard. You make the case and I agree and I’ve seen other work that supports it so it’s really hard to make a case. Is he actually the powerful one, or is he the chicken or the egg? Because you can also examine how it’s society, it’s the people that desire that, and he’s just given them what they want or leading the cart. I recently interviewed Kevin Arceneaux, he had co-authored a book called Changing Minds Or Changing Channels, which was about the effects of political news TV and cable TV. And his research showed that contrary to most people’s opinions, most people were already polarised before watching these polarised TV news outlets like Fox News or CNN, I guess– on the liberal side, basically. But it supports the ideas that you talk about, that it’s hard to separate the chicken from the egg in that sense of which came first.
Elizaveta: I do talk about power. I dedicate a whole chapter to the issue of power, and I think it’s super important and super complicated. And this is actually a part of my book that I guess I’m most worried about how people will interpret that. Because I tried to be very careful in the book. Believe me, I thought about it for so long and rewrote different parts so many times to express this idea that I don’t want to say that, say, with the example of Rupert Murdoch, right? You see him as so powerful, and people who watch channels or read newspapers that his companies produce, so you see this people as powerless. Right? So I don’t want to say, “Let’s flip this so he’s actually powerless and they are powerful.” I’m not actually talking about that, because this is an interpretation that I would like to avoid. I’m actually talking about how the topic of power is so complicated that it shouldn’t be seen through a binary or through this “either you have power or you don’t have,” or “the world is divided into those who have power and those who don’t have power.” And actually, I introduced a whole new theory of power that I called Theory of Micro and Macro Power. Basically, the idea is that one thing happens– when we look at relationships or interactions between specific individuals. It’s very easy if you take a pair of individuals to see a specific situation. A specific place and time and pair of individuals. It’s super easy to say who has power over whom. Say, a parent tells a child, “Go to your room,” or “Eat those vegetables,” or a boss tells his employee, “Do this report,” and stuff like that. But then when you start zooming out of this very specific sort of snapshot of power and start seeing this relationship in the context of other relationships, because each of the people in this peer is connected to so many other people. And each one of those other people are connected to other people. That has become so complicated that our mind is exploding trying to understand all that. But the more you’re zooming out, the more you’re seeing how the person who is powerful in this specific situation, they are also influenced by other things that seem to be out of their control when they’re influenced by those things that does make this powerful person not powerful. So since Rupert Murdoch does have power, he does have so many people working for him and he does create all those media outlets and programs and-
Zach: He could definitely make better decisions and that would have big impacts.
Elizaveta: Yeah, it does matter. I don’t want to say that it doesn’t matter and that he doesn’t have power, but also it would be wrong to say that he’s sort of-
Zach: -in a vacuum.
Elizaveta: Yes, his power exists in a vacuum. Like, he just has it and that’s it. And so prior to this interview, I was thinking how to describe it in a way that would sort of make more sense. And I came up with this metaphor that I actually didn’t use in the book but I think I would use it somewhere, that I think about society as a game. And in this game, this game is not perfect by far. This game has certain rules but some people break these rules and some people cheat and some people keep winning and some people keep losing, and there are issues with this game. Serious issues. So I agree with that. But what I don’t agree with is when some people say, “Well, look at the people who keep winning. They are the ones who control the game. They can fix it, they can fix the rules.” That’s what I don’t agree with because I say, “Well, I don’t think that they can just fix the rules. They maybe bend the rules and they know how to use the rules to cheat the system, but they didn’t create those rules.” And that’s the thing. Because all of us are playing this game, all of us are creating those rules-
Zach: As we go. Yeah.
Elizaveta: As we go, yes.
Zach: To take a topical example, your book is always pointing back to the complexity. For example, a cop committing excessive force against a citizen. In that context, people would say, “Well, they have more power than the citizen.” But then a little bit later, that citizen could sue them and destroy their life and that cop could face serious repercussions. So it’s like the power dynamics are always shifting. Obviously, in some contexts where there’s not those kinds of recources or there’s less social dynamics like that, some people can get away with more. But yeah, your point is just pointing back to the fact that these dynamics are so complex and nuanced.
Elizaveta: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That’s a good example.
Zach: Yeah. One thing that strikes me is whether on both on the left or the right across the political spectrum, it seems like so many people have such high expectations for media, you know? There’s this sense of holding them to this standard that to me is just not realistic. Because media is just, as you would say in your book, media is just people. It’s just people trying to accomplish different things. I mean, news organizations get things wrong, they make mistakes, they’re trying to sell papers, you know? I almost feel like part of the problem is people having too high expectations for media and expecting them to do a great job all the time, when really we could just be happy if they mostly do a somewhat decent job.
Elizaveta: Yeah. Well, that’s the wording that I actually… I’ve tried to be very careful with this kind of wording in my book because I didn’t want to say, “Well…” Going back to the Murdoch example. So you say Murdoch is a problem, but look at yourself. You’re probably part of the problem. And why I had the next chapter after the chapter about power, it was all about blame and how it’s not helpful. Right? Because the whole point of the book is not to say, “Well, let’s not blame them, let’s blame them or us or, you know?” [chuckles] Right? So it shouldn’t be about blame at all, it should be about recognizing how complicated it is and learning to help each other instead of just trying to undermine each other by saying that, “Well, you are the problem.” [chuckles]
Zach: Just a note here, I took out some of the interview here, and now I’m going to come back to me clarifying a question where I was asking her about how optimistic or pessimistic she is about our current highly polarised situation. To clarify, that was my question. It’s like, can we get enough people– just enough people thinking in these ways to avoid self destruction? That’s the part where I’m a little bit more pessimistic about. Obviously, we don’t need everyone thinking that way. We just need enough people trying to combat the Us versus Them dynamics. But yeah, that was more of what I would say.
Elizaveta: Well, I think if we– you and I, and at least I’m sure I know there are other people out there who agree with that– but if we want to avoid self distraction, I think it’s better for our own sake to think that something can be done. Because otherwise, it’s just so sad that we won’t do anything.
Zach: Yeah, I think that’s the point too. It’s like even if you’re listening to this thinking, “Well, obviously, I don’t have much power, other people have more power than me and news outlets have more power to me.” Even if you believe that, we only have control over our own behavior and our own activity and our own actions. So if you do see how your own behavior can be playing a role in society– which I don’t see how you can dispute that– and if you believe that we’re on the cusp, theoretically, of very bad things and you believe that these Us versus Them dynamics are bad, then I would say we only have control over ourselves. So still, you can make the case to think about all these things and think about how you might be contributing to the dynamics with your own behavior. Because that’s the thing that… I got interested in this stuff because a couple of years ago, I was like anybody else. I was just posting whatever insults or random things popping into my mind about the other group. If I had a witty thing to say or a cutting insult, I would post it. And always operated on the assumption that someone’s in charge and someone out there is going to bring us together or save the day or something. But then seeing how things have progressed, I realized that no, there isn’t some system out there or some power, as you say. The power is spread out amongst all of us. That, to me, that’s what changed my behavior and thinking about how my own behaviors may be contributing to these things. And I think understanding how it is so holistic and interconnected helps you want to change your behavior. It’s not some empathy saintly thing, and I think that’s another misunderstanding. We’re not trying to use empathy because we think it’s the good or the right thing or some saintly thing to do, it’s more like once you see how interconnected everything is, you really can’t help but act in a way that focuses on empathy and understanding multiple points of view. Because it is the truth that everything is just so interconnected and everybody’s behaviors, you know, what you post online has an effect on the dynamics of the whole system. That’s what changed my behavior. And I think for some people, they go through that journey of making mistakes like the Dove ad that you talked about, and they start realizing, “Oh, wait. I’m contributing to this.” To make this specific point, reacting to the Dove ad has the impact of the other side seeing this overreaction, and that influences them in various ways and so these dynamics are constantly bouncing back and forth. Like conservatives seeing liberals overreact and get pretty crazy way about something minor makes them think like, “Oh, that side is completely unreasonable. They overreact, their reactions to other things are similar to the overreactions there.” So it has this dynamic of accentuating the Us versus Them dynamics. Anything you want to add to that before I move on?
Elizaveta: Yeah. I guess I want to stress again this idea that I would like people to not to think, “Oh, I’m a part of a problem,” but rather, “I can be part of a solution.” Right?
Zach: You’re avoiding blame.
Elizaveta: Yeah. Cuz it’s so complicated that I don’t want to blame any… I think it’s not fair to blame anybody for contributing to this very complex dynamics that’s in the grand scheme of things. That’s what makes our society imperfect, right? So I agree that if we look at a specific case of, say, abuse or mistreatment, we can say, “Well, here’s a person who abused that person or those people, and we should fix that.” But at the same time, we shouldn’t think that doing that or punishing that person will fix the whole problem. Because there are so many other things behind that.
Zach: Yeah. And to take it probably to a philosophical step, I don’t believe that free will is likely. And that makes me see the world in a very holistic way because at the end of the day, I think we’re all just humans having a very mysterious experience of things happening to us and things happening that were based on the moment before the past, you know, all these factors around us. You know, I’m not different from anyone else. And I think that gets to what you’re talking about avoiding blame. Because I don’t blame anyone, I see it all as so complex. And who’s to say I’m right with my point of view? What good would it do for me to preach at someone? Because I don’t really know exactly what’s going on either.
Elizaveta: Yeah. I mean, you can say you are no different in some ways, but you’re all different in other ways. Right. And that’s what makes our society so wonderful, and that’s what actually should bring us hope. It’s that because people are different– I mean, it creates a lot of problems because then they start arguing– but they can actually generate solutions together by working together than if it’s just one person and they’re just stuck in their ways and they keep making mistakes. Historically, we know situations when one person or a group of people got an opportunity to use their thinking to modify a whole way of life of a whole country. Right? And that was no good, right? So that’s why it’s good that we’re different and we should tap into that difference, right? But at the same time, acknowledging that we have a lot of things in common. [chuckles]
Zach: Yeah. And by ‘not different from other people’ I just mean I’m not different in the sense of… I’m a human like everyone else and the only thing that makes me different… We all are different in various ways, but the only thing that makes me different is my different experiences and my different physical brain or whatever, you know, these various factors. We’ll probably getting too broad and philosophical here. [Elizaveta chuckles] But I did want to ask you, when it comes to empathy and when it comes to seeing other people’s points of view– which I think is very important even just for strategic reasons, like if you want to accomplish your goals it’s very powerful to understand other people’s points of view– and I wanted to ask, you know, sometimes I get pushback or there’s pushback in general on the idea of empathy because I think people can perceive it as, you know, we could perceive it as submissive. You know, if you tell some liberal people to think about a Trump supporter’s point of view, for example, they’ll have a reaction of acting like that’s weak and that’s submissive and ‘why is it on us to do this?’ I wonder have you heard those kinds of objections, and what’s your responses to objections like that?
Elizaveta: Well, I’ve definitely heard those kinds of objections. And maybe not to people objecting to my own work, but I witnessed conversations or maybe tried saying something along the lines of like, “Well, let’s try to understand them.” And I think it’s not just the idea that if you use empathy, you’re submissive and weak. It’s also the idea that if you’re trying to understand the other side, it means you’re also accepting excusing their behavior to some extent. Actually, I watched a podcast video by this really interesting person called Robert Wright. He has a channel called Meaning of Life. And in this in this video, he used a very interesting term that spoke so much to me. And the term was ‘explain/excuse conflation.’ So, people feel like if you’re trying to explain somebody’s behavior, you’re essentially excusing it automatically. And he’s saying, “No, that’s not the same.” And I write it in other words in my book that we can understand other people’s behavior without accepting this behavior. And I think as you said, actually, this kind of empathy is beneficial for us. So we’re not doing it for them, although you can see how it can also benefit the person you’r empathizing with like, but it benefits us. Because when we understand somebody’s behavior, we can better react to the behavior or be prepared for this behavior. Or if we see somebody make a mistake and if we try and understand their reason and go with explanations beyond ‘well, this person’s just stupid,’ then we start seeing how this actually has some parallels to what we might do and we can actually be more careful at what we are doing. It’s actually completely opposite to excusing their behavior. [chuckles]It’s actually just becoming more careful with our own behavior because we see it represented in somebody else and we are not happy about it. So yeah, it can be really beneficial for us if done correctly. I think that empathy is not something that we should just uncritically put on the pedestal and say, “Oh, it’s just empathy, empathy, empathy everywhere.” Although I feel like I do that sometimes. But it also needs to be practiced in a certain way. Like, say if we are empathizing with us of easy empathy and just empathizing with somebody who you already feel we should empathize with, this is easier. Right? It’s so much more difficult to empathize with somebody who we dislike. [laughs]
Zach: That’s the hard thing.
Elizaveta: Right? Yeah. And there’s a whole difference between cognitive and emotional empathy that’s really interesting to understand.
Zach: I think you hit the nail on the head there. Yeah. I’m glad you brought up the point that yeah, it’s exactly that about the conflation of, you know, people feel that acknowledging that you can see the other side’s point of view is saying that they have a point or that they’re right. And I see this every day because I spent a good amount of my time on Facebook and Twitter or even just in person showing people how you can have a different point of view on the opposite political side– to be specific, to show how there’s some conservative points of view. Showing those points of view to a liberal audience and showing how this doesn’t make you a monster, it just means you’re looking at it this way. Or there’s people even on your own side that can look at things this way. And I think when I try to do those things, often people focus on the issue itself, but what I’m interested in is the meta issue of how you can see those issues from different points of view. And I feel like that’s what people get stuck on. They’re focused on discussing the actual issue and showing who’s right or wrong, but I’m just saying, “Well, can you at least see the different point of view and how you could see it in a different way?” I think that’s where people really get bogged down. And they do feel that acknowledging that there might be that point of view that another person or a neighbor or a fellow citizen could have, or even they themselves could theoretically have, can drive some cognitive dissonance and make them angry. I’ve had this almost every day because I’ll post thoughts about how you can look at things from different perspectives. And I interviewed Michael Macy and he did research on showing the way our political stances grouped together are pretty random and probably arbitrary in the sense that they were kind of led by early movers and in a chaos theory kind of way. And we tend to make these narratives around like, “Oh, there’s a reason that these groups of stances are grouped together for a political party,” but really, it might be pretty arbitrary. For example, you can imagine if Trump had come out when COVID started with really strong and strict mandates, you know? With our polarisation being what it is, you can imagine Liberals taking a stance against that and being like, “This is draconian. These lockdowns are influencing communities of color and poor communities, we need to not be so draconian.” And you can see how the lines might have been drawn in a different way just based on initial conditions. There’d be a pushback to those things in a liberal framing. And I think that interview with Michael Macy and his work really opened my eyes to thinking about things in that way. Like, the things we tend to even just assume or make sense coherently are a lot of the times just us making these post hoc justifications of why the narrative makes sense, you know? And I think seeing that is related to your work, too, because it’s looking at the world and seeing this nuance and seeing how things could easily be different and seeing how it’s really hard to separate things or even say how things are, you know? And I think it’s a form of humility, really. These things are very hard to understand.
Elizaveta: Yeah.
Zach: Well, thanks a lot for coming on, Elizaveta.
Elizaveta: Thank you so much for having me again.
Zach: That was Elizaveta Friesem. You can learn more about her work at her website, elizavetafriesem.com. I’m Zachary Elwood. If you want to learn more about this podcast, check out my website behavior-podcast.com.
An interview with professional poker player Dara O’Kearney (twitter @daraokearney) on the subject of poker tells (poker behavioral patterns). Dara is also the co-host of The Chip Race, a very popular poker podcast. We talk about how important poker tells are versus strategy, about how Dara’s thoughts on poker tells have changed over time, and talk about some interesting poker hands where tells have played a role for us. (See the bottom of this post for more topics and resources.) Podcast links:
How some players (especially beginners) over-estimate the role of tells and some players underestimate them.
Some ways that poker players can get information from opponents, like insulting them or being nice to them.
How some well known players, like Phil Hellmuth, Andy Black, and Daniel Negreanu, use their celebrity and personalities to their advantage.
How early-hand tells, when the pot is small, are some of the most meaningful tells (with the big bet spots often not being as behaviorally interesting as many might think).
The complexity of poker, and how it’s a more complex game than chess.
