Last week, the Situationist blog had a most illuminating take on Sarah Palin's speech, which was also quite illuminating about the nature of situationism, for those of you still trying to figure out what I've been talking about, on and off, for all this time. It's a relatively short piece, so I'm going to include the whole thing, along with some comments. It starts by setting things up, and explaining the term "naive cynicism", which is a form of defense against situationist awareness:
Sarah Palin a Naive Cynic?
Posted by The Situationist Staff on January 12, 2011
Situationist Contributors Adam Benforado and Jon Hanson have written extensively about a dynamic they call "naive cynicism."
Their work explores how dispositionism maintains its dominance despite the fact that it misses so much of what actually moves us. It argues that the answer lies in a subordinate dynamic and discourse, naive cynicism: the basic subconscious mechanism by which dispositionists discredit and dismiss situationist insights and their proponents. Without it, the dominant person schema - dispositionism - would be far more vulnerable to challenge and change, and the more accurate person schema - situationism - less easily and effectively attacked. Naive cynicism is thus critically important to explaining how and why certain legal policies manage to carry the day.
Naive cynicism often takes the form of a backlash against situationism that involves an affirmation of existing dispositionist notions and an assault on (1) the situationist attributions themselves; (2) the individuals, institutions, and groups from which the situationist attributions appear to emanate; and (3) the individuals whose conduct has been situationalized. If one were to boil down those factors to one simple naive-cynicism-promoting frame for minimizing situationist ideas, it would be something like this: Unreasonable outgroup members are attacking us, our beliefs, and the things we value.
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Is Sarah Palin exhibiting that dynamic? Below the video of her remarks you can read some excerpts from the transcript.
I find that having that checklist of assault targets in hand makes it lot more bearable to watch this video. The selected parts and my comments on the flip.
Two-three years ago, I caught a lot of grief telling people that Barack Obama was not their boyfriend. He was a politician, kissing babies and giving speeches like the rest of them. Okay, better than the rest of them, but in the same manner as the rest of them. Not your boyfriend.
I didn't make a lot of headway. Like I said, he's better than the rest of them. But now the worm has turned, and increasingly folks are acting like Barack Obama's their boyfriend who jilted them. Take for, for example, this comment from TSlavin in glendenb's diary, "Let's Talk About Tomorrow: Moving Democrats Forward" that I front-paged yesterday. It begins:
Truly I don't believe it was incompetence that has put us in this position. Obama clearly has the rhetorical skills and his political team has the skill sufficient to get elected President, no small achievement. The fact Obama has not only refused to use his rhetorical skills to achieve progressive goals but also has actively sold out progressive goals (e.g. spiking the public option) strongly suggests the problem is NOT incompetence.
The problem is that Obama is most comfortable with Republican solutions to policy problems. He sees the government as having an extremely limited, only in emergencies, role in the free market. That's not progressive. Indeed, even looking back at Democratic party history, that's not even in the mainstream of Democratic policy since the Depression. The problem is that Obama is comfortable with the status quo of too big to fail banks, endless mergers, a police state (e.g. wiretapping without warrants), and state sponsored murder, as well as using state power to cover up illegal actions by the state.
Obama truly believes it is okay for the government to allow high unemployment indefinitely, for at least a decade, so that the free market will let banks heal themselves by fake outsized profits gained by borrowing from the Fed at a low rate (say 1%) and buying Treasury bonds at a higher rate (say 3%), among other tactics.
This is very different from the picture you paint of a hapless Obama and a hapless Democratic leadership. This is simply "Bush Done Right" by a politician who calls himself a Democrat. Based on his policies to date, Obama cares little or nothing for working people and the need for government to always balance the different (and often contradictory) interests in our society. Instead, Obama is quite happy for the government to be on the side of plutocracy at the expense of working people. If Obama cares at all for the middle class, he believes the free market eventually will help the little people by helping first the most advantaged.
Now, I'm not saying that TSlavin is totally off the mark here. I've said some of these same things myself--particularly comparing Obama to Tony Blair who openly staked out the position of Thatcherism done right, ergo Obama as Bush done right. So how do I differ? And why? The answer is that I don't explain complex political positioning in terms of personal relationships.
Politicians are actors in complex institutional settings, and the actions they take largely reflect the constraints and powers that come with those settings. They like to pretend to a high degree of autonomy, but that's just part of the standard politicians act. That act usually helps to impress or intimidate, which helps generate more political power for the politician who plays the part. But that doesn't mean it's real. There's actually a great deal of social science behind this. In fact, the mistaken belief that people are acting of their own conscious and unfettered volition, rather than as a result of situational factors, is known in social science as the fundamental attribution error, which Wikipedia describes thus:
Who could be against virtue? Who could be opposed to the embodiment of what is right?
But what if that'a not exactly what I mean? What if I mean "against" as in "next to"? And what if goodness is not necessarily best understood as emdobied? What if it might also be understood situationally?
What if the notions handed down to us from ancient Greek philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle--especially Aristotle, the great systematizer--what if they were all wrong?
Or perhaps not all wrong, but mistaken the same way that Newtonian mechanics is mistaken compared to quantum mechanics and relativity? And what if the world as we live in it today were very far from the conditions in which Newtonian assumptions hold good?
Unfortunately, as so often happens, the ginned-up [not] ground zero [not] mosque controversy has overshadowed a much more telling story this week--the Chamber of Commerce lashing out against women's equality on the anniversary of the 19th Amendment, and then beating a hasty retreat after getting called on it. It was actually so far out as to be comical, with the Chamber actually chastising women for their grubby materialism, specifically, "a Scrooge-like fetish for money."
I'd like to do a quick run-through, for any who might have missed it, and then dig down a bit deeper into the Chambers essential use of "choice" as a means for rationalizing inequality. In the law review article, "Blame Frame: Justifying (Racial) Injustice in America", Jon and Kathleen Hanson explain that "choice" is one of the three most prominent rationalizations that have historically been used to justify the enormous gap between our abstract ideology of equality and the cold hard facts of injustice. Although their focus is on racial injustice, it fits just as nicely with this example of gender injustice as well.
Chamber Blames Women For Pay Gap: They Should Choose The Right 'Place To Work' And 'Partner At Home'
Today is the anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted the right to vote to women. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has decided to use this day of equal rights for women to argue that women are now to blame for unequal pay in the workplace. On the organization's official blog, ChamberPost, Senior Director of Communications Brad Peck today makes the argument that the pay gap between men and women in the American workforce - women currently earn roughly 77 cents to every dollar a man earns - is "the result of individual choice rather than discrimination." He argues that, instead of bold legislative action being taken to help correct this pay gap, women should pick the "obvious, immediate, power-of-the-individual solution: choosing the right place to work and choosing the right partner at home":
Most of the current "pay gap" is the result of individual choice rather than discrimination. [...]
It is true that culturally speaking women are more likely to have to make the tough choices about work-life balance. But as we all seek to fit our values into a dynamic 24/7 economy, let's not overlook the obvious, immediate, power-of-the-individual solution: choosing the right place to work and choosing the right partner at home.
Peck's argument that women could close the pay gap by simply choosing jobs in better paying fields and marrying wealthier men is based on a faulty premise - that the pay gap in the United States between genders exists because women choose to work for less and men choose to work for more.
While it's true that women sometimes migrate into fields that have lower pay, what Peck ignores is that even within the same occupation, women are paid less. For example, data collected by the Census Bureau in 2007 shows that "female secretaries...earn just 83.4% as much as male ones" and female truck drivers "earn just 76.5% of the weekly pay of their male counterparts." A report put out this year by the University of Minnesota finds that women in that state are "are paid $11,000 dollars less each year than men with the same jobs." A 2007 American Association of University Women report compared men and women with similar "hours, occupation, parenthood, and other factors normally associated with pay" and found that "college-educated women still earn less than their male peers earn"; the report concludes that workplace discrimination is the culprit in the wage gap.
And Michael Whitney's takedown at FDL included this handy-dandy recapitulation of the some of the Chamber's greatest hits against women:
I intend to present some diaries about situationism next weekend, and to help set the stage for them, here's a brief video from the National Science Foundation (via the Situationist blog)dealing with situationism, and social cognition, with special attention to authoritarianism, stressing a point that Robert Altemeyer made that is often overlooked: that Milgrim's experiments with obedience are but one source of evidence among many that situational influences are far more powerful in generating authoritarian compliance than any of the internal factors he studied. This doesn't mean that authoritarian traits are irrelevant. But it does mean that intelligent social engineering can help prevent situations like developed at Abu Grhaib. And as such, it's also an appropriate 4th of July weekend reflection on the nature of freedom, and the role of social architecture in protecting and preserving it.
Rebecca Saxe is the Carole Middleton Career Development Professor in the department of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT:
This is an interview of Jon Hanson, director of Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School and cofounder of the Situationist blog. Once upon a time Hanson was a law & economics guy, whose analysis was based on the rational actor model. But based on his experience before studying law, he already had his doubts, because he'd seen how doctors facing life-and-death choices don't really act according to the rational actor model--and might even be insulted by its suggested use. Here he's answering two questions: "What is wrong with our legal system's notion of human behavior?"; and "What led you to study the link between law and cognition?" This begins to get at some very deep aspects of how our legal and political systems are as mistaken as the idea that the Sun revolves around the Earth.
Throughout the month of August, I responded to several Salon columns by Michael Lind--published on Tuesdays--the following weekend. This week, I responded to Lind's column the same day, in "[I Should Be] Looking For The Next FDR With Michael Lind". Out of that came a very clarifying comment by John Emerson that inspired me to write a followup diary this weekend. But as I started work on it, I realized that I first needed to finally correct a long-standing oversight, and discuss the importance of social science situationism, not to be confused with the revolutionary Situationist Internationale. The Situationist blog associated with The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School explains:
There is a dominant conception of the human animal as a rational, or at least reasonable, preference-driven chooser, whose behavior reflects preferences, moderated by information processing and will, but little else.Laws, policies, and the most influential legal theories are premised on that same conception.Social psychology and related fields have discovered countless ways in which that conception is wrong."The situation" refers to causally significant features around us and within us that we do not notice or believe are relevant in explaining human behavior. "Situationism" is an approach that is deliberately attentive to the situation.
An important part of my core differences with Lind spring from a situationist perspective. I don't think that many people's basic attitudes have changed as much as he does, nor do I think that some of the actors he identifies are responsible for the changes he associates them with. Rather, I think that the political/economic situation has changed dramatically, and that we need to adopt political practices that take account of that changed situation, and seek to modify its impact.
One of the clearest ways to get a handle on that change is from the various presentations of changes in income and wealth concentration from the work of US Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez. Here's an example:
It's my primary contention that people living in a highly income-polarized society--as we do today--will act in ways quite different from those living in a more income-equalized society, such as predominated during the Post WWII New Deal Era, and even into the 70s and early 80s. It's my second contention that while changes in attitudes and actions have taken place, and vast ideological structures have been erected, these are more reflections of a changing economic situation, and have substantially less to do with changes in core attitudes. It's my third contention that the neoliberal trap Obama is caught in--which Lind wrote about in the column I agreed with most--is itself a manifestation of old-style non-situationist thinking, which systematically misapprehends the foundations of human action. In short, the problem goes much deeper than the Team of Rubins.
STATE BLOGS
Who could be against virtue? Who could be opposed to the embodiment of what is right?
