Herding Cats

You've all heard that trying to get liberals united behind a common goal is like herding cats, or that when liberals go into battle, they form a circular firing squad. A new study appears to support these clichés, and attributes the problem to a liberal personality trait, the need for uniqueness.

The false consensus effect is a cognitive error in which we believe that more people agree with our attitudes than is actually the case. For example, both those who favor and those who oppose the legalization of marijuana might think that theirs is the majority view. One explanation for false consensus is that we tend to associate with others who share our views and are therefore exposed to a biased sample of opinions. The opposite of false consensus is a false uniqueness effect in which people incorrectly believe that most others disagree with them. However, most studies of the general population find false consensus rather than false uniqueness.

In the study by Chadly Stern and others, 292 participants recruited over the internet were asked their opinions on 41 topics, 22 non-political and 19 political. They were asked to classify themselves as liberal, moderate or conservative. Then they were asked to estimate the percentage of people participating in the study “who share your political beliefs” who agreed with them on each item. A true measure of false consensus or uniqueness was obtained by comparing the participants' estimates to the actual beliefs of the study participants in their political in-group.

It was found that all three groups were inaccurate. Both moderates and conservatives showed the usual false consensus effect, but liberals showed false uniqueness. They underestimated the percentage of fellow liberals who agreed with them. In a second study, 287 participants were this time asked to estimate the percentage of people who shared their political beliefs in the American population who agreed with them on each item. The same results were obtained.

The authors proposed an explanation for the false uniqueness effect among liberals: That they are higher on a personality trait called need for uniqueness, defined as a strong dispositional desire to feel unique. The authors used 11 items from this 34-item Need for Uniqueness Scale, but I'm not sure which ones. Liberals are indeed higher than moderates and conservatives in need for uniqueness. An analysis showed that the relationship between political ideology and overestimation of consensus was mediated by need for uniqueness, meaning that the correlation between ideology and overestimation was significantly reduced when the effect of their common relationship to need for uniqueness was statistically removed.

I have some concerns about this study. For example, I'm not sure how participants interpreted the phrase “people who share your political beliefs.” It would have been better if the instructions had specifically referred to fellow liberals, moderates or conservatives. There are good reasons to expect liberals to underestimate the percentage of people in the general population who agree with them. As Justin Lewis has demonstrated, the corporate media tend to exclude progressive opinions from public debate, leading liberals to feel outside the political mainstream. For example, the media continually identify support for modest cuts in Social Security and Medicare as the centrist political position when their own polls show that the public is overwhelmingly opposed to such cuts. If the participants in the Stern study were confused about the group whose attitudes they were estimating, this could partially explain the results. Liberals have been marginalized by the corporate media.

I am also unimpressed with the attempt to explain liberals' behavior as resulting from a need for uniqueness. In my opinion, the words “need” and “uniqueness” are both overstatements. The items in the scale largely reflect the respondent's willingness to engage in nonconforming behavior. All the data in this study are correlational, not causal. The apparent "need" for uniqueness could be as much a result of the illusion of uniqueness as its cause. In any case, the relationship between ideology and overestimation of consensus appears to still be statistically significant after the effect of need for uniqueness is removed, so it's not a complete explanation for the phenomenon.

In the article, the authors contrast the Occupy Movement to the Tea Party. They note that the Tea Party became a potent political force, while they claim the Occupy Movement broke down due to internal bickering, presumably a result of their individual needs to feel unique. This ignores a far more important reason for the Tea Party's greater success. They received behind-the-scenes financial and logistical support from wealthy conservatives and were welcomed into the Republican Party. The Occupy Movement, on the other hand, received almost no outside support, and was shunned by the Democrats, who chose to side instead with their wealthy political donors, mostly members of the 1%.  To attribute the failure of the Occupy Movement to the personalities of its members is politically naive. One of my pet peeves is the tendency for psychologists—even social psychologists, who should know better—to attribute behavior primarily to personal motives and overlook situational forces that are much more likely explanations for the behavior.

Regardless of why liberals underestimate their political strength, it is important that they examine public opinion polls directly, rather than trusting the corporate media to interpret them. (See, for example, my recent post on the public's “surprising” views on climate change.)

You may also be interested in reading:

The Myth of the Conservative Voter

Public Getting Warmer

Who Cares What They Think