The Overview (Tuesday, February 22)
A small town grappling with two realities, correcting misconceptions about the prevalence of misinformation, and more.
I don’t share a lot of my academic research in these newsletters, but I wanted to mention a new article I co-authored with a friend—Logan Strother at Purdue University—that was recently promoted by its journal, Politics, Groups, and Identities. The article, “Racial group affect and support for civil liberties in the United States,” examines the extent to which people’s support for constitutional rights is conditioned by their views of the people exercising these rights.
Logan and I surveyed 1,013 Americans and split them into random groups, each group receiving a different series of stories to respond to. These stories, or vignettes, highlighted a potential violation of someone’s constitutional rights at the hands of the government. Importantly, these vignettes varied the identity of those experiencing the rights violation from group to group, allowing us to compare people’s responses to each vignette in a controlled, measurable way. We also measured people’s attitudes toward different groups, including racial identity, the group of interest in this particular study.
Our findings, while perhaps intuitive, were nonetheless striking:
Ultimately, we find that group attitudes influence attitudes concerning constitutional liberties, and therefore act as a constraint on full-fledged support for civil liberties in cases where the receiving group is viewed unfavorably.
Consider the figure above. We plotted the difference in attitudes towards whites and Blacks (as measured via a feeling thermometer) on the X-axis against whether the respondent thought an action—in this case, the government denying a group a permit to hold a protest—was a rights violation on the Y-axis. Our vignettes varied the identity of the group seeking a permit to include both a Black Lives Matter march and a Make America Great Again march. Here is the vignette our respondents saw:
Earlier this year, a small contingent of a larger [insert either BLM or MAGA] group’s rally damaged property at several businesses near the rally. In response, the city has decided to refuse to permit the group to hold any future rallies. Do you think the city’s refusal to allow the group to hold rallies is a violation of the group’s rights to free speech and free assembly?
For those exposed to the BLM vignette, those with warmer attitudes toward whites were less likely to see the permit denial as a rights violation. But for those exposed to the MAGA vignette, those with warmer attitudes toward whites were far more likely to see the permit denial as a rights violation.
After analyzing these effects in the context of other rights—including those found in the Second and Fifth Amendments—we conclude the following:
In the US, attitudes toward different racial groups have become strongly associated with political and partisan attitudes, and are key to understanding support for pro- and anti-democratic policy proposals around the country. These racial group attitudes manifest in a variety of ways, including, as we have shown, in how people weigh the protections of constitutional rights as applicable to those in different groups.
The bottom line is that people’s attitudes towards racial groups affect these people’s support for constitutional rights. These rights, therefore, are not always seen as universal in their application, but rather as conditional based on the group or person exercising them. This could spell trouble for American politics and law as the US becomes more pluralistic in the decades to come.
We’ll be discussing results of a related study—this time focused on religious identity—next month at the Institute for Humane Studies. So, stay tuned for that.
In the meantime, here’s the Tuesday, February 22 edition of The Overview:
1) I missed this January article from the AP’s Tim Sullivan, who shared one small town’s battle over what is true in the (mis)information age. From early in the story:
One little town. Three thousand people. Two starkly different realities.
It’s another measure of how, in an America increasingly split by warring visions of itself, division doesn’t just play out on cable television, or in mayhem at the U.S. Capitol.
It has seeped into the American fabric, all the way to Benson’s 12th Street, where two neighbors -- each in his own well-kept, century-old home -- can live in different worlds.
The article is an excellent microcosm of the epistemological divides facing our society, where two groups can hold what they see as exclusively legitimate accounts of the world and see their opponents as duped by misleading media. The story isn’t exactly encouraging, but it is accurate.
2) In his Substack newsletter, Matt Yglesias offers evidence that the “misinformation epidemic” so often talked about in the media is not necessarily as bad as it seems. Consider this:
A survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that in 2006, only 33 percent of people could correctly identify the three branches of government. By 2021, that was up to 56 percent. That’s way higher than 33 percent! It’s also a powerful reminder that a huge share of the population doesn’t pay any attention at all to politics and government. A broader survey of political knowledge from the American National Election Survey shows no change in civic awareness except perhaps a small rise since the 1990s in knowledge of which party controls the majority in Congress.
Or this:
A normal person can tell you lots of factual information about his life, his work, his neighborhood, and his hobbies but very little about the FDA clinical trial process or the moon landing. But do you know who knows a ton about the moon landing? Crazy people who think it’s fake. They don’t have crank opinions because they are misinformed, they have tons and tons of moon-related factual information because they’re cranks. If you can remember the number of the Kennedy administration executive order about reducing troop levels in Vietnam, then you’re probably a crank — that EO plays a big role in Kennedy-related conspiracy theories, so it’s conspiracy theorists who know all the details.
Or this:
In terms of the media, I think it’s much more likely that people are seeking out anti-vax content than that they are being brainwashed. There is fundamentally no way anyone could be unaware that the bulk of public health and medical professionals say the vaccines are safe and effective. The anti-vax stance isn’t misinformed about this reality; it simply asserts that public health and medical professionals are bad and you shouldn’t listen to them.
His point isn’t that people don’t hold wrong ideas; obviously, we do, just as we have forever. Rather, his point is that social media, cable news, and other boogeymen aren’t the drivers of these bad ideas, but are instead simply willing suppliers for those seeking out wrong information to lend credence to their misinformed belief systems.
I don’t consider this to be applause-worthy news, necessarily, but it does kind of reorganize the conversation over misinformation and the future of democracy, in that people wanting to be misinformed is far more of a problem than people simply being misinformed.
3) Even with Yglesias’s perspective in mind, misinformation and the embrace of outright falsehoods to suit political ends is still a problem. That’s I’m proud to work with the American Values Coalition, which exists to “reconnect [the politically-homeless] to a fact-based national narrative in order to prevent radicalization and restore democratic norms in America.” You can follow their work via Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and sign up for regular updates here. I’ll leave you with one AVC video on why conservatives have tended to distrust the media, and where we go from here.
Here's Dr. Bennett being quoted in the New Yorker!
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/14/amy-coney-barretts-long-game