Monthly Archives: April 2017

Living in the Danger Zone

Cognitive psychology, Politics, , ,

We often receive information about alleged benefits or harms of existing or possible states of affairs. We may be told that North Korea has missiles that can reach the United States or that carbon sequestration and storage is a viable strategy for preventing climate change. How do we determine whether such information is credible?

One basic principle is that “bad is stronger than good.” We are more likely to pay attention to and remember negative information than positive information. The costs of mistakenly believing hazard information, unnecessary precautions, are much lower than the costs of mistakenly disregarding such information, which may include injury or death. There is no such asymmetry between the costs of mistakenly accepting or dismissing positive information. We are more vigilant toward hazards because the stakes are higher.

This is related to the principle of loss aversion in decision making. We consider losing $1000 to be a more negative outcome than gaining $1000 is positive. The larger the amount, the greater this disparity. According to Kahneman, loss aversion is a product of our evolutionary history: “Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.”

In 2014, the journal Behavior and Brain Sciences published a target article by political scientist John Hibbing and two colleagues presenting research suggesting that conservatives are more physiologically and psychologically responsive to negative information than liberals. This negativity bias causes conservatives to prefer stability rather than change, which can be seen as threatening. The article was followed by 26 commentaries by social scientists, most of which questioned details of Hibbert’s argument, but did not seriously challenge its basic assumptions.

A new article by Daniel Fessler and others explores the implications of negativity bias (or threat bias) for information processing. They conducted two separate, but similar, studies involving a total of 948 participants recruited through the internet. Particpants read 16 statements, half of which claimed the existence of a benefit while the others claimed to have identified a hazard. The majority of the statements (14 of them) were false. Here are two examples.

  1. People who own cats live longer than people who don’t.
  2. Terrorist attacks in the U. S. have increased since September 11, 2001.

Respondents were asked whether they believed each statement on a 7-point scale ranging from absolutely certain the statement is false to absolutely certain it is true. They were also asked judge the magnitude of each benefit or hazard on a 7-point scale running from small to large. (The benefit and hazard items had been matched in magnitude on the basis of previous testing.) The authors created an index of credulity by multiplying the judged truth of the statements by the magnitude of their benefit or hazard. Negativity bias was computed by subtracting the credulity of the eight benefits from the credulity of the eight hazards.

The authors constructed a summary measure of liberalism-conservatism combining input from four measures: an issues scale asking them to evaluate 28 political concepts, i.e., gun control; a social principles index asking them to choose between 13 social principles, i.e., punishment vs. forgiveness; self-ratings on a 9-point liberalism-conservatism scale; and political party affiliation.

Replicating Fessler’s previous research, they found that, for the sample as a whole, hazards were rated as more credible than benefits. As they predicted, there was a positive relationship between conservatism and this negativity bias. Breaking the effect down, they found that conservatives rated hazards as more believable than liberals, but there was no difference between liberals and conservatives in the credibility of benefits.

Of the four components of the conservatism measure, the issues index accounted for greatest portion of its relationship to negativity bias. This index contained three types of items: social conservatism, i.e., school prayer; military conservatism, i.e., drone strikes; and fiscal conservatism, i.e., tax cuts. As shown in the chart below, only social conservatism was strongly related to negativity bias. Fiscal conservatism was unrelated to it, while the relationship between military conservatism and negativity bias was positive but not statistically significant.

(For you statistics nerds, in these charts, the small squares indicate the sizes of the correlations and the lines indicate the confidence intervals. If the line crosses zero, the relationship is not statistically significant. Study 1 is on the left; Study 2 on the right.)

It is impossible to state, in the abstract, whether conservatives have a better strategy than liberals for processing information about potential hazards. If we had independent evidence suggesting that the hazard information were true, the conservative strategy would be more rational, while the liberal approach would be more sensible if the information were known to be false.

We can say, however, that their negativity bias leaves social conservatives vulnerable to alarmist rhetoric such as candidate Donald Trump’s often repeated claim that the homicide rate in the U. S. is the highest it has been in 45 years, or his attempt to publicize crimes committed by immigrants.

In a previous post, I reported that conservatives are more likely than liberals to rate syntactically correct but meaningless statements—technically known as “bullshit”—as profound. There is also evidence that conservative websites contain a higher percentage of “fake news.” It would be interesting to know how many of these fake news stories report alleged threats to people’s well-being. There may be a pattern here.

Much of today’s most alarming rhetoric deals with threats of terrorism. Since 2001, an average of 40% of Americans report that they fear they will be victims of terrorism. The actual probability of perishing in a terrorist attack—about one in four million per year—contrasts favorability with more prosaic dangers such as being killed in an auto accident or drowning in the bathtub. Fear of terrorism imposes enormous financial and social costs on our society, way out of proportion to the actual threat. These fears are ripe for exploitation by politicians. How much freedom have Americans already surrendered in the name of false security? As Timothy Snyder notes in On Tyranny, “It is easy to imagine situations in which we we sacrifice both freedom and safety at the same time: when we . . . vote for a fascist.”

You may also be interested in reading:

Bullshit: A Footnote

Publicizing “Bad Dudes”

Are the Terrorists Getting What They Want?

Why “Bad Dudes” Look So Bad

Prejudice and discrimination, Social psychology, ,

A 2016 Washington Post analysis showed that Black Americans are 2.5 times as likely to be shot and killed by police officers than White Americans, and that unarmed Blacks are 5 times as likely to be shot dead than unarmed Whites. While there are many explanations for this finding, there is little support for the knee-jerk conservative response that attributes this racial disparity to the fact that Blacks commit more crimes. An analysis of the U. S. Police Shooting Database at the county level found no relationship between the racial bias in police shootings and either the overall crime rate or the race-specific crime rate. Thus, this racial bias is not explainable as a response to local crime rates.

When police officers shoot an unarmed Black teenager or adult, they are not likely to be convicted or even prosecuted if they claim to have felt themselves threatened by the victim. This suggests that it’s important to look at factors that affect whether police officers feel threatened. A study by Phillip Goff and others found that participants overestimated the ages of teenaged Black boys by 4.5 years compared to White or Latino boys, and rated them as less innocent than White or Latino boys when they committed identical crimes. While age may be related to perceived threat, the present study by John Paul Wilson of Montclair State University and his colleagues is more relevant, since it looks at the relationship between race and the perceived physical size and strength of young men.

The researchers were extremely thorough. They conducted seven studies involving over 950 online participants. Unless otherwise specified, participants were shown color facial photographs of 45 Black and 45 White high school football players who were balanced for overall height and weight. In the first study, the Black athletes were judged to be taller and heavier than the White athletes. Furthermore, when asked to match each photo with one of the bodies shown below, they judged the young Black men to be more muscular, or, as they put it, more “formidable.”

In a second study, participants were asked to imagine that they were in a fight with the person in the photograph, and were asked how capable he would be of physically harming them. The young Black men were seen as capable of inflicting greater harm.

In the third study, the authors examined the possibility that racial prejudice might predict these physical size and harm judgments. A fairly obvious measure of prejudice was used. Participants were asked to complete “feeling thermometers” indicating their favorability toward White and Black people. This measure of prejudice was only weakly associated with the participants’ judgments of Black-White differences in harm capability and not at all with Black-White differences in harm perception.

Up to this point, Black participants were excluded. However, the fourth study compared Black and White participants. Both Blacks and Whites saw the young Black men as more muscular, though the effect was larger for Whites. Only White participants saw the Black men as more capable of inflicting harm. Apparently Black participants subscribe the the size stereotype, but not to the stereotype about threat.

The fifth study was an attempt to apply these results to the dilemmas faced by police officers. Once again, both Blacks and Whites participated. They were asked to imagine that the young men in the photographs had behaved aggressively but were unarmed. How appropriate would it have been for the police to use force? White participants saw the police as more justified in using force against the young Black men than against the young White men. For the Black participants, there was no difference.

Previous research had shown that Black men who have an Afrocentric appearance—that is, who have dark skin and facial structures typical of African-Americans—are treated differently than Black men who are less prototypical. For example, in a laboratory simulation, participants are more likely to “shoot” a Black man if he has Afrocentric features, and a Black man convicted of murder is more likely to be sentenced to death if he is prototypical. The sixth study showed that young Black men whose facial features are prototypical are seen as more formidable and the police are seen as more justified in using force against them. Furthermore, this is true even when participants are shown photos of young White men. That is, White men with darker skin and facial features resembling Black men are seen as more muscular than other White men, and participants believe the police are more justified in using force against them.

In the final study, participants were shown the exact same photographs of men’s bodies with the head cropped off, but they were given additional information indicating the man was either White or Black. The photos were color-inverted to make the man’s race difficult to detect. The man’s race was indicated either by a Black or White face said to be the man in the photo, or a stereotypically Black or White first name. Results indicated that the very same bodies were seen as taller and heavier when the man was presumed to be Black than when he was presumed to be White.

You might be wondering whether Black and White men actually differ in size. Data from the Center for Disease Control shows that the average Black and White male has exactly the same weight, and that Whites are on average 1 cm taller. Therefore, when participants see Black men as larger, they are not generalizing from their real world experience.

These studies are important in explaining why police officers feel more threatened by young Black men than young White men, and why jurors are more likely to see the killing of young Blacks as justified. It may help to explain why no charges were brought against a Milwaukee police officer who shot Dontre Hamilton 14 times. The officer described Hamilton as “muscular” and “most definitely would have overpowered me or pretty much any officer I can think of.” Hamilton was 5’7” and weighed 169 lbs.

It is important to realize that the results of these studies are not readily explained by conscious race prejudice. This size estimation bias is probably automatic and unconscious, and is most likely to affect behavior when a police officer must make a split-second decision. The fact that officers are likely to be found not guilty of using excessive force against a Black victim if they testify that they felt threatened is troubling, since it suggests that implicit racial bias can be used successfully as a defense when charged with a violent crime.

You may also be interested in reading:

Publicizing “Bad Dudes”

Teaching Bias, Part 1

Making a Mockery of the Batson Rule