The God Squad, Part 3: Projection

When I took General Psychology many years ago, I memorized the definitions of the Freudian defense mechanisms—repression, regression, reaction formation, etc. One of them was projection, usually defined as attributing one's negative qualities to other people. For example, a person who is tempted to cheat on his or her spouse may be suspicious that the partner is fooling around. It isn't clear, however, that projection should be limited to negative attributes.

A more general principle that encompasses Freudian projection is the false consensus effect—a cognitive bias in which we overestimate the percentage of people who share our attitudes and behaviors. Social psychologists usually explain false consensus at least in part by a need for social validation. If other people share our attitudes, presumably those attitudes are more likely to be “correct.” (The fact that we selectively associate with people similar to ourselves is another explanation for false consensus.)

The YouGov poll cited in Part 1 asked participants whether they thought Jesus would support or oppose each of the seven social policies included in the survey. In general, participants thought Jesus was more conservative than they were, and Protestants thought he was further to the right than Catholics did. However, there were large differences between what Republicans, Independents and Democrats thought Jesus's opinions were.

Do you think Jesus would support . . .?	Republican	Independent	Democrat
Gay marriage	9%	32%	48%
Legal abortion	6%	19%	29%
Death penalty for murderers	43%	35%	27%
Stricter gun laws	28%	40%	68%
High taxes on the wealthy	18%	43%	63%
Universal healthcare	23%	52%	80%
Reducing carbon emissions	31%	51%	68%

© www.equinoxpub.com

Decades of social psychological research show that one of the best predictors of friendship is attitude similarity. We like people who agree with us. It follows that if you are going to spend time conversing with an imaginary friend, you would want to create one who shares your attitudes. Thus, Republicans see Jesus as a Republican and Democrats see him as a Democrat. As sociologist Phil Zuckerman noted:

[R]eligion is one big Rorschach test. People look at the content of their religious tradition . . . and they basically pick and choose what suits their own secular outlook.

This is most consistent with a false consensus interpretation of projection. What better way to increase your confidence in your own political attitudes than to believe they are shared by the gods?

You may also be interested in reading:

The Revolt of the Nones, Part 1

The Revolt of the Nones, Part 2

The God Squad, Part 1:  Religion as Selfish Individualism

The God Squad, Part 2:  The "Greening" of Christianity

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

The Myth of the Conservative Voter

The obvious fact that majority public opinion is unable to prevail in Washington has set off a flurry of research on why the political system is so unresponsive. The latest contribution comes from David Broockman of the University of California, Berkeley, and Christopher Skovron of the University of Michigan. They sent surveys by mail and email to all of the 2012 candidates for state legislatures in the country. The response rate was 19.5% (1907 candidates), which is about double the typical response rate for mail and email surveys. The candidates were asked to estimate what percentage of their constituents would agree with the following statements:

1. Same sex couples should be allowed to marry.
2. Implement a universal healthcare program to guarantee coverage to all Americans, regardless of income.
3. Abolish all federal welfare programs.

They were also asked their own opinions on the first two issues. A new technique called multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) was used to estimate the attitudes of the citizens in each legislative district. It would obviously be very costly to survey the entire voting population each of the country's 6500 state legislative districts. MRP uses national survey data to determine level of agreement with the three statements based on education, race, gender, social class, religiosity and having voted for Obama. The percentage of people in each of these demographic subgroups in each legislative district is determined from the 2010 census. This generates an accurate estimate of the opinions of the people in each district. Although indirect, this method has been validated against real survey data.

There were positive correlations (rs = .43 to .51) across districts between the candidates' estimates and actual opinions, but they are not very impressive, accounting for only about 20% of the variance. The interesting thing about the data is that the candidates' perceived their constituents to be about 10% more conservative on these issues than they actually were, a difference roughly equal to the average difference between voters in California and Alabama. Stated differently, 60% of citizens would have to favor a liberal policy in order for their legislators to perceive them as a majority.

The responses were analyzed separately for liberal and conservative candidates based on their own answers to political questions. These data are shown in the table above. The horizontal axis represents the actual opinions in each district, and the vertical axis is the politicians' estimates. The black line is perfect accuracy. Anthing below it means the politicians are overestimating their constituents' conservatism. The blue line is the estimates of the liberal politicians, and the red line, the estimates of the conservatives. Although both groups believed their constituents were more conservative than they actually were, the conservatives seemed to be living in another world. They were off by over 20%. Nearly half the conservative candidates believed their district was more conservative than the actual opinions of the most conservative district in the entire country.

These findings may help us understand differences in the personal style of politicians. The well-known tendency of liberal politicians not to stand up for their beliefs contrasts sharply with the overconfidence of conservatives. Both may be explained by their fundamental misperceptions of public opinion.

Candidates were surveyed again after the election, but there was no evidence that they had learned anything. They were no more accurate than before, and their accuracy was unrelated to any of the activities they reported during the campaign, i.e., time spent talking with voters.

The first question about these data is their generalizability. The study should be replicated using federal and local as well as state candidates, and with a wider variety of issues. However, the differences are quite large, so I assume these findings are robust. How can they be explained? Broockman and Skovron do not speculate other than to suggest that political elites are not motivated to learn the attitudes of the people they represent.

Before giving them a political spin, we must be sure these errors are unique to politicians. It's possible that a random sample of the population might make errors of a similar magnitude and direction. If so, the data represent cultural influences to which we are all exposed. For example, the corporate media present an almost unrelentingly conservative view of the American public opinion, insisting that this is a “center-right” nation and referring to right-wing politicians as “moderates.” These data may reflect back what the media inaccurately tell us. The liberal-conservative difference may mean that the media outlets preferred by conservatives are even less accurate than those preferred by liberals.

Suppose the general public does not make errors that are comparable to these candidates—that is, these biases are unique to politicians. If these politicians are themselves more conservative than the general public, there might be a false consensus effect. False consensus refers to the tendency to assume that other people's opinions are more similar to our own than they actually are, to project our own beliefs onto others. There is reason to believe that political candidates are more conservative than the people they seek to represent, since so much money is required to run for office—either their own money or funds obtained from wealthy donors.

This shades into a second possibility, which we might call the “loudest voices” hypothesis. When considering this hypothesis, remember that money talks too. In fact, the Supremes have ruled that money is speech.

Suppose there are two types of political issues, economic and social. Economic issues are those issues that have major economic consequences, even they are sometimes debated using non-economic arguments. Therefore, they include not just taxation and public spending, but issues like climate change, health care, and foreign policy, including debates over war and peace. In the present study, health care and welfare are economic issues.

When the issue is economic, the loudest voices politicians are exposed to are those of campaign donors, whose views are well to the right of the general public. In fact, politicians may spend much of their time inside a bubble filled with rich contributors and corporate lobbyists. If you spend most of your time talking to these people, you are not likely to arrive at an accurate perception of what the general public thinks.

Social issues are those that have only minor economic consequences, such as abortion, gay rights and gun control. Although they are sometimes called “sideshow issues,” they are as important to some people as economic issues. For example, if you are pregnant, whether you have access to a safe, legal abortion is a matter of life and death. Social issues are represented in this study by gay marriage.

When the issue is social, political pressure comes primarily from grassroots organizations. Sadly, the loudest voices the politicians hear almost invariably come from the right. Conservatives are better organized, perhaps because they hold their attitudes with greater strength. Of course, what we call “grassroots” is sometimes actually astroturf. These groups receive financial and logistical help from the wealthy, since rich people know that they benefit when conservative candidates are elected.

Therefore, the loudest voices hypothesis suggests that, regardless of whether the issue is economic or social, the candidates hear mainly conservative voices. This is especially true of candidates who are themselves to the right of center. You can get a pretty distorted view of public opinion that way. Ask Mitt Romney.