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Currently Reading:
"What's the Matter With Kansas?" by Thomas Frank
The puzzle that Frank attempts to unravel in this book is how the formerly socialist-leaning midwestern states abandoned their nineteenth-century allegiances and became die-hard supporters of the conservative party in recent decades (Frank was writing in the aftermath of the Bush v. Gore election). His explanation hinges on a shared sense of victimhood in the cultural sphere, which is a mantle donned by high-earning business executives just as easily as by their struggling employees. All references to economic disparities and class distinctions are suppressed in this world view. Shifting social norms, such as the prohibition on "Merry Christmas" greetings in a federal workplace, or more welcoming stances on reproductive rights and same-sex relationships, are the sole basis for "red state" voters feeling oppressed.
The Republican party's successful appeals to this sense of victimhood, by themselves, only partially explain the high degree of polarization observed today. The Democratic party's strategy of "triangulation" during the Clinton administration combined a more business-friendly economic policy with firmly liberal stances on social issues, in an attempt to secure the high-dollar campaign contributions of the socially-liberal "creative classes" centered in New York and Los Angeles. By forgetting to actively court votes in "red states" based on real differences in economic policy, however minor, the Democratic party conceded a substantial amount of territory to Republicans, who never stopped fomenting the backlash in their red state campaigns. The Democratic party's pandering to the "creative classes" receives further elaboration in Frank's more recent book Listen, Liberal, while the need to campaign in red states is the thesis of at least two chapters in Bernie Sanders' essay collection Where We Go From Here.
The crux of Thomas Frank's thesis, a shared sense of victimhood and a backlash against the imposition of foreign values, has echoes in the larger grievance culture of the United States. From our peer groups and our elected officials, we learn the habit of shifting blame to external agents, never letting responsibility fall on the cherished members of our in-group. When the US president blames China's currency manipulation for the dearth of decent-paying US manufacturing jobs; when college administrators blame lack of county funding for not delivering the negotiated faculty salary increases; when academic deans justify the sweeping cancelation of classes by citing the registration choices of prospective students; in all these instances I hear echoes of the backlash mentality that underpins Thomas Frank's thesis.
As a teacher I regularly encounter the "attribution error" among my students. Their performance on an assessment is the result of multiple factors: what background knowledge they brought to the class, how I designed each lesson, how they absorbed those lessons, how they reflected on those lessons in the time leading up to the assessment, what specific questions appear on the assessment itself, and the random circumstances of their lives around the time of the assessment. When the contributions from intrinsic factors are downplayed, and the contributions from external factors embellished, a backlash response to perceived aggressions is often the result. Even in the absence of a reinforcing media environment (as documented by Thomas Frank for the conservatives who see themselves as cultural victims), a self-serving story repeated over many years to an uncritical audience of close friends can make the correct attribution difficult to accept.
The simplest template for an outcome with multiple causes is "outcome = baseline + random noise", as Daniel Kahneman reminds us in his chapter on regression to the mean in Thinking, Fast and Slow. The second term L of this decomposition (L for luck) contains all the "unknown unknowns" that are not incorporated into a predictive model. The baseline term is often broken down further into a term K we can control ("knowns"), and a term U we cannot control (AKA "known unknowns"). When the variance from the U and L terms dwarfs the variance from the K term, then the backlash mentality is on firmer empirical ground. But if the "known" term provides most of the variance, the backlash mentality would appear to be unjustified.
Post-mortem analysis of the factors that contributed to an outcome starts by trying to establish the baseline prediction, using either the historical record of similar scenarios or some other source of unbiased data. When students in my college classes compare their past performance to how they did on the latest exam, a substantial difference between the historical average and the recent performance spurs them to update their variance estimates for U, L, and K, with most of the additional variance tacked on to U and L. Rarely do they use the feedback of an exam to update their estimate for K, even after they have been informed that studying strategies that worked in high school will need to be revised for college-level classes.
In this week alone, I found three more examples of attributions that distribute the variability among the three components K, U, and L in strikingly different ways.
1. As a job applicant with hundreds of rejections and non-responses from employers, I observe in myself the thought pattern: "The reviewers of my resume didn't make enough of an effort to see how my experience aligns with the job description." This instance of the attribution error deliberately plays down the factors under my control, e.g., how I tailor the resume to each job, and the personal choices that brought me to the current position of teaching part-time with ever-diminishing prospects for in-house promotion.
2. At this week's Democratic primary debate, Senator Warren read into the electoral losses of her male opponents a lesson about those candidates' national prospects, as if the failures to win statewide races in fiercely conservative or independent Indiana or Vermont tell us more about the candidate than about the priorities of the voters in those states. Meanwhile a win in deep-blue Massachusetts is brandished by Senator Warren as her own personal accomplishment, with no mention of the conditions on the ground that all-but-assured her victory.
3. Falling asleep tonight to the Amanda Palmer album There Will Be No Intermission, I heard in the song Judy Blume another example of attributing the greater part of a traumatic event to external circumstances. Here Amanda Palmer takes refuge in a universe of fictional adolescents, whose preoccupations are on those topics that adults deem off-limits. The outcome of not feeling like a valued member of adult society is again decomposed into K+U+L, but with K contributing an insignificant part of the total variance by virtue of the sentiments ubiquitous among Judy Blume's characters. (This assumption is analogous to the weather modeling practice of filling the main diagonal of the covariance matrix with the lab-established discrepancies among copies a given instrument, rather than estimates of the variances out in the field.) Taking a longitudinal view from the perspective of someone whose adolescence is long past, the reader would recalculate K with the additional knowledge of life's trajectory. Indeed, the mismatch between adolescent thoughts and adult expectations is entirely within the error bars of a baseline prediction from this vantage point, leaving almost no unexplained variance for the U and L terms to pick up. Until that vantage point is reached, though, the typical middle-schooler looks to the sentiments expressed in the song to justify the self-preserving tactic of minimizing contributions from U and L.
I can't remember the details of seventh grade
All I remember is lying and being afraid
But I don't forget Katherine and Michael going all the way
Steph on the scale in the bathroom alone that day
Karen pretending to puke so her dad would stay
Margaret arguing with God while she masturbated
All of them mixed up in my head like a love letter
All of them saying "Amanda, you know better,
You are not to blame
The world's a frightening place
So go on and think how you want
You will not be alone with your thoughts
Well you will, but you won't in a way
'Cause a girl thought it too in a book that the library bought."