The other day in California, last week, a woman, 66 years old, a veteran was killed, raped, sodomized, tortured and killed by an illegal immigrant. We have to do it! We have to do something! We have to do something!
Presidential candidate Donald Trump
Judgmental heuristics are the simple rules or mental shortcuts that people use to make decisions quickly and efficiently. One of those rules is the availability heuristic, which states that the frequency of an object or event is judged on the basis of the number of instances retrieved from memory and the ease with which they come to mind. The easier it is to think of examples, the more frequent the object or event is assumed to be.
The availability heuristic often leads to correct inferences. In the northeastern United States, robins are in fact more common than other birds. But availability can be misleading. For example, when estimating the frequency of various causes of death, people overstimate dramatic events such as homicides and traffic accidents and underestimate less public illnesses such as strokes and diabetes. The presumed explanation is media salience. Estimates of the frequency of causes of death are highly correlated with space devoted to types of death in recent newspapers.
The availability heuristic is one explanation for for a common cognitive error known as the base-rate fallacy. This refers to a tendency to overgeneralize from individual examples while ignoring statistical base rates. A specific case is more emotionally interesting and easier to remember; it is more available. A statistical statement is not as interesting. Base rates are usually underweighted, and sometimes completely disregarded, especially when specific instances are available. It follows that if propagandists want people to overestimate the frequency of an event, they should publicize examples of that event, preferably with vivid pictures and lots of memorable details.
Availability biases can influence social policy. An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events that starts with a small number of cases that are heavily publicized by the media, leading to public panic and large-scale government action. One goal of terrorism is to start availability cascades. An availability campaign occurs when some pressure group, for altruistic or self-interested reasons, tries to instigate an availability cascade.
I was reminded of this by last Tuesday night’s address to Congress when President Trump introduced four alleged victims of crimes committed by immigrants who were seated in the audience and announced an executive order creating an office called Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) within the Department of Homeland Security, whose purpose is to make public “a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens.” (He didn’t say that the “aliens” had to be in the country illegally.) Right-wing news organizations have been heavily reporting real or fake crimes committed by immigrants for several years.
Apparently the President thinks that one way to increase support for his immigration policies—the wall along the Mexican border, mass deportations, the Muslim ban—is to induce Americans to overestimate the frequency of crimes committed by immigrants. To this end, he is starting an availability campaign.
What is the actual base rate of crimes by immigrants? Research consistently shows that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans. Robert Adelman and his colleagues analyzed data from 200 metropolitan areas from 1970 to 2010. They found that as immigration increased, rates of murder, robbery, burglary and larceny decreased, and rates of aggravated assault remained the same.
In a forthcoming study, Charles Kubrin and Graham Ousey conducted a meta-analysis combining the results of over 50 studies examing the relationship between immigration and crime published between 1994 and 2014. Their conclusion: “More immigration equals less crime.” However, the rate of crime by second generation immigrants–that is, the children of immigrants–does not differ from than of other Americans.
Kristin Butcher and Anne Piehl studied why immigrants commit crime at lower rates than non-immigrants. They concluded that people who self-select to immigrate to the U. S. are less criminally active than the native born population, and are more responsive to deterrents to crime, such as the threat of a jail sentence.
This is not the only instance in which the president has presented misleading information apparently intended to persuade us that the exception is the norm. He has criticized the media for “underreporting” acts of terrorism by Muslims, when in fact the opposite is the case. In last week’s address, he cited an unrepresentative 116% increase in health insurance premiums in Arizona to support his claim that the Affordable Care Act was failing.
Trump’s behavior is a classic example of scapegoating. Scapegoating refers to the singling out of an individual or group for blame that is not deserved. Scapegoating is presumed to be responsible for the increase in prejudice and violence toward already stigmatized minority groups during economic hard times.
Until 1938, it was the policy of Hitler’s Ministry of Justice to forward all criminal indictments of Jews to the press office to be publicized. With VOICE, the U. S. now has its own government-run ministry of propaganda given the mission of convincing us of something that isn’t true—that immigrants commit more crimes than native born Americans.
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