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Digby calls attention to a particularly high-fallutin', disingenuous excuse for conservative mendacity and racism. Don't let its title fool you--"How web journalism can make people seem hateful"--the main focus is selectively reported cognitive science--particularly what's known as "motivated cognition"--that has relatively little to do with the Internet per se. It's written for CNN by Gregory Ferenstein, who, we are informed, is "an author and educator who writes about the intersections of technology, business and politics. He teaches at the University of California, Irvine, and is a fellow at the University of California Center for the Study of Democracy." But a search of the UCI website reveals that he is a "political science graduate student", rather than a faculty member. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but it may help explain the undigested feel of his work--and provide some hope that he can still grow out of it.
I could take a cheap shot and call attention to his cheap shot article attacking Capitalism, A Love Story ("Michael Moore ignores capitalism's blessings") in which he cites the existence of open-source software and the occasional democratic work group as proof that Moore has it all wrong. (More fundamentally, Ferenstein uses "capitalism" and "free market" interchangeably, indicating a rather severe case of not getting it.) But more illuminating than this is his earlier CNN piece, "Why the web benefits liberals more than conservatives" In this earlier article, he notices that liberals and conservatives are different:
From the micro-donation platform first popularized by Howard Dean in 2003 to the million-strong Barack Obama Facebook page to the huge audience of the Huffington Post, liberals have been the dominant political force on the internet since the digital revolution began.
Now, research out of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society suggests that the reason behind this imbalance may be the liberal belief system itself.
Liberals, the research finds, are oriented toward community activism, employing technology to encourage debate and feature user-generated content. Conservatives, on the other hand, are more comfortable with a commanding leadership and use restrictive policies to combat disorderly speech in online forums.
But Ferenstein seems to have forgotten all about liberals and conservatives having any differences in his most recent piece, in which he adopts the "balance narrative" and writes of "a powerful psychological tendency for ideologues unwittingly to distort facts to fit their preconceived biases," going on to say:
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These tendencies have been exaggerated by the internet, whose polarizing sites -- the Drudge Report and The Huffington Post, just to name a few -- give citizens the option of sealing themselves inside an echo chamber of their own beliefs.
We're so lucky that never happens with the grown ups in Versailles, aren't we? They would never go to war based on phony intelligence! Or create a massive financial house of cards based on ponzi logic, and then turn to the perpetrators to clean up the mess!
While it's certainly true that cognitive science reveals defects in human cognition that affect us all, one doesn't need to know anything about the field to find the "balance narrative" unconvincing. For one thing, it just doesn't jibe with what Ferenstein wrote in his earlier article. Remember he wrote:
Liberals, the research finds, are oriented toward community activism, employing technology to encourage debate and feature user-generated content. Conservatives, on the other hand, are more comfortable with a commanding leadership and use restrictive policies to combat disorderly speech in online forums.
This is entirely congruent with centuries of cultural and intellectual history, as well as the current widespread conservative war on science. So it's not the least bit surprising. But Ferenstein's new article is completely contradictory, pushing the "a pox on both your houses" line; and it chooses some pretty strange material to try to make its initial sell, leading into the "evenhanded" claim cited above:
There is very little evidence, if any, that Sarah Palin hates teachers, or that Andrew Breitbart is a racist. Yet a recent flood of viral stories propagated by internet journalists allegedly catch prominent conservatives red-handed in acts of hate.
A week ago, grainy footage of Palin rolling her eyes at a teacher who held up a protest sign during a campaign event sparked silly yet widespread speculation that the former Alaska governor secretly harbors disdain for the entire teaching profession.
That episode followed headlines over Breitbart's manipulation of a video that appeared to show U.S. Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod, who is black, making racist remarks at an NAACP gathering.
The flurry of finger-pointing, both of prejudice against Palin and Breitbart, and the counterclaims of conspiracy against the "liberal media," misses the hidden puppet master causing the scandals: a powerful psychological tendency for ideologues unwittingly to distort facts to fit their preconceived biases.
Where to start? Here's a few thoughts that come quickly to mind: (1) There's tons of evidence that Breitbart is a racist (the very fact that he's trying to bring down the NAACP should be tip-off enough). (2) It's ludicrous to compare the two incidents, immediately trivializing Breitbart's racist character attack. (3) Palin has a lot of history that went into how she was perceived, and the incident in itself was relatively trivial compared to that longer history-a dramatically different situation from Breitbart's attack on Shirley Sherrod. (4) When someone does something wrong it's prejudicial to call it "finger-pointing" when people point it out.
But the big picture problem behind all of this is that the vast majority of 50+ years of research into motived cognition--the field of research that Ferenstein is referring to--overwhelmingly shows that conservatives are more biased in their cognition, more prejudiced in their attitudes, more closed to criticism and outside points of view, and more unaware of how different they are, just for starters. It's not that every conservative is more biased and prejudiced than every liberal. No credible researcher has ever claimed that. But statistically the evidence is overwhelming that the average conservative is more biased and prejudiced than the average liberal. What's more, the evidence we have shows a strong tendency for the differences between liberals and conservatives to grow stronger, the more deeply involved they are in politics. The evidence supporting this was analyzed in a 2003 meta-analysis, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition". The abstract of that paper reads as follows:
Analyzing political conservatism as motivated social cognition integrates theories of personality (authoritarianism, dogmatism-intolerance of ambiguity), epistemic and existential needs (for closure, regulatory focus, terror management), and ideological rationalization (social dominance, system justification). A meta-analysis (88 samples, 12 countries, 22,818 cases) confirms that several psychological variables predict political conservatism: death anxiety (weighted mean r .50); system instability (.47); dogmatism-intolerance of ambiguity (.34); openness to experience (-.32); uncertainty tolerance (-.27); needs for order, structure, and closure (.26); integrative complexity (-.20); fear of threat and loss (.18); and self-esteem (-.09). The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat.
That's quite a mouthful, but what it boils down to is that there are multiple different cognitive factors that differentiate conservatives from liberals and others to their left, and that there's a great deal of data supporting this finding. Are there some cognitive factors that affect liberals and conservative more or less equally? Almost certainly. Do they negate the large number of cognitive factors that affect them differently? No.
While some of the factors dealt with in the meta-analysis are somewhat remote from issues of racism and other forms of bigotry, others are quite closely related:
Theories of social dominance and system justification are useful not only for expanding the range of motives under consideration but also for clarifying the nature of the connection between political conservatism and racism, sexism, and ethnocentric intolerance (e.g., Altemeyer, 1998; Bahr & Chadwick, 1974; Jost & Banaji, 1994; Jost et al., 2001; Mercer & Cairns, 1981; Pratto, 1999; Sidanius et al., 1996; Whitley, 1999)....
Social Dominance Theory
Unlike theories that seek to explain conservatism with reference to affective differences arising from parenting styles or childhood socialization, social dominance theory emphasizes evolutionary and societal factors as determinants of politically conservative (or "hierarchy-enhancing") orientations. According to social dominance theory, human societies strive to minimize group conflict by developing ideological belief systems that justify the hegemony of some groups over others (Pratto, 1999; Pratto et al., 1994; Sidanius, 1993; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999; Sidanius et al., 1996). This is achieved through the promulgation of various "legitimizing myths" such as the following: (a) "paternalistic myths," which assert that dominant groups are needed to lead and take care of subordinate groups, who are incapable of leading and taking care of themselves; (b) "reciprocal myths," which claim that a symbiotic relationship exists between dominant and subordinate groups and that both groups help each other; and (c) "sacred myths," which allege that positions of dominance and subordination are determined by God or some other divine right (see Sidanius, 1993, pp. 207-209). Ideological devices such as these are inherently conservative in content because they seek to preserve existing hierarchies of status, power, and wealth and to prevent qualitative social change (e.g., Sidanius & Pratto, 1999).
There is more to the discussion of social dominance theory, and an extensive discussion of systems justification theory as well.
Social dominance theory not only provides a relatively straightforward explanation for why conservatives tend to be more prejudiced both in race and gender matters, it also explains why prejudice against dominant groups by subordinates differs from prejudice by dominants. It's not just a matter of opinion, the theoretical framework makes predictions and those predictions have been repeatedly verified (although those findings are beyond the scope of the meta-anlysis.)
What Ferenstein has done in this article is to ignore the extensive literature about differences between conservatives and liberals as well as screening out a significant amount of detail about the actual events he writes about. The result is a de facto apologia for continued racism on the right.
By providing the thin veneer of an appearance of scientific objectvity and "balance", Ferenstein is contributing to the continued obfuscation of public discourse, while pretending to be a crusader for just the opposite. |
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