Belief Systems and the Perception of Reality

Bastiaan Rutjens, Mark Brandt, Bastiaan Dr Rutjens, Mark Dr Brandt, Bastiaan Rutjens, Mark Brandt, Bastiaan Dr Rutjens, Mark Dr Brandt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138070806
• eBook ISBN: 9781351629072
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book focuses on the social psychology of belief systems and how they influence perceptions of reality. These belief systems, from politics to religion to science, not only shape one's thoughts and views but also can be the cause of conflict and disagreement over values, particularly when they are enacted in political policies.

In Belief Systems and the Perceptions of Reality, editors Bastiaan T. Rutjens and Mark J. Brandt examine the social psychological effects at the heart of the conflict by bringing together contributions under five themes: motivated reasoning, inequality, threat, scientists interpreting science, and people interpreting science. This book aims to create a more integrated understanding of reality perception and its connection with belief systems, viewed through the lens of social psychology.

The synthesis of expert contributors as well as the literature around social psychology and belief systems makes this a unique resource for students, researchers and academics in behavioural and social sciences as well as activists and journalists working in this political field.

THEME 1

Motivated reasoning

1

What is right is right

A three-part account of how ideology shapes factual belief

Megan M. Ringel, Cristian G. Rodriguez, and Peter H. Ditto

In the days after Congressman Steve Scalise and three others were shot and wounded while practicing for an annual charity baseball game between Republican and Democratic lawmakers, the calls to inject a more civil tone into America’s increasingly toxic political discourse resounded from both sides of the aisle. The sentiment behind those calls for civility was no doubt sincere, but we suspect that many attempts at civil discussion that were initiated by those calls met a similar unfortunate fate. As liberals and conservatives sat down to discuss the issues of the day – taxes, guns, health care, and the rest – their civil intentions were almost certainly tested upon discovering that many of the basic facts underlying their political opinions were not shared by their discussion partners. Republicans citing data showing that low taxes spur economic growth, that more gun owners make communities safer, and that Obamacare is imploding in an irreversible death spiral quickly found their Democratic friends citing data supporting diametrically opposite conclusions on each of these points. As such conversations continued, frustration on both sides was likely to build as each attempt to move toward some productive mutual understanding was stymied by the inability to agree on the ground-level facts that necessarily form the foundation of any attempt at compromise or negotiation. It is tough to have a civil political discussion, let alone a productive one, when the two sides begin that discussion with different sets of facts.

The questions we explore in this chapter concern the causes and consequences of the factual divide between Red (conservative) and Blue (liberal) America. Specifically, we propose a three-part account of how such differential beliefs arise or, more precisely, an account of how prescriptive beliefs (ideologically and morally based beliefs regarding how the world should be) shape descriptive ones (“factual” beliefs regarding how the world really is). Our account identifies three important contributing processes: moralization (the infusion of issues and events with moral significance); factualization (the construction of pseudo-descriptive justifications for moral evaluations); and socialization (the reinforcement of morally palatable beliefs by selective exposure to ideologically sympathetic people, groups, and media sources). Our core contention is that the factual gulf between liberals and conservatives is an important contributor to the corrosive polarization that currently afflicts American national politics, not just because the inability to agree on basic ground-level “facts” makes political transactions like negotiation and compromise more difficult, but also because differences in factual belief can fuel negative perceptions and feelings across party lines. If one person believes a fact to be true that another believes just as certainly to be false, it is hard for either one not to see the other as stupid, disingenuous, or both.

Politics, morality, and facts

Politics is and in fact should be about moral vision: individuals and political parties offering their unique vision of what is right and wrong for the country and its citizens, and how to realize that vision through public policy. It is not surprising or odd that people differ in their vision of what constitutes a morally enlightened society, nor that these different moral visions form the basis of major political divisions and coalitions such as that between the left (liberals, progressives, the Democratic party in the United States) and the right (conservatives, traditionalists, the Republican party in the United States). Differences in moral sensitivity and value have the dual function of binding subgroups together in defense and celebration of the shared moral vision of their (liberal or conservative) tribe and driving a wedge between the subgroups as the differences in what each side values and fears translate into real-world conflicts over policies that are alternatively viewed as championing or defiling each side’s vision of a just and moral society (Graham et al., 2013).

Politics seems particularly infused with morality of late. Many key political issues are moral ones – abortion, same-sex marriage – and even issues that are not inherently moral are often seen through a moral lens. Former House Speaker John Boehner spoke of national debt as a “moral threat” (Epstein, 2011), Senator Bernie Sanders called income inequality “the great moral issue of our time” (Schulson, 2016), and former Vice President Al Gore said of climate change that “it is indeed a single, reckless and immoral act if one fails to take his part in addressing this problem” (“Climate Change,” 2010). Imbuing political issues with morality can fuel commitment and spur action in supporters (Skitka, Bauman, & Sargis, 2005), but its cost is the implication that the opposition is acting immorally. Polling data reflect this growing animosity as Democrats’ and Republicans’ views of each other have become increasingly negative since the 1960s (Pew Research Center, 2016).

These moral differences are accompanied by different factual beliefs. Perhaps the two most memorable phrases of 2017 were “fake news” and “alternative facts,” and public opinion data confirm that the political parties show sharp differences in what they believe to be true. For example, 92% of Democrats agree that there is “solid evidence” of global warming, compared to 52% of Republicans (Pew Research Center, 2017), and 80% of Democrats, compared to 33% of Republicans, agree that the “Russian government tried to influence the outcome of last fall’s U.S. presidential election” (Washington Post, 2017). In short, a factual gulf has emerged along ideological lines for many issues. The emergence and consequences of differing moral convictions, each with their associated sets of facts, are what we seek to explain in the sections that follow.

Moralization

In the last two decades, researchers have explored the role of moral attitudes (or moral convictions) in social and political behavior (Skitka et al., 2005). A moral attitude involves the evaluation of an attitude object as fundamentally right or wrong, moral or immoral, rather than a mere preference (Rozin, 1999). Moral attitudes have distinct features, including universality, objectivity, and emotion (Skitka, 2010). Moral attitudes are experienced as universal truths that should apply to everyone, regardless of circumstance or cultural differences. They are experienced as self-evident, objectively true beliefs and are strongly associated with intense emotions, such as disgust or anger, more so than strong nonmoral attitudes. Moral attitudes have unique consequences and predict behavior for which other attitude strength components cannot account (Skitka et al., 2005).

Rozin and colleagues conducted influential work on how commonplace behaviors, such as vegetarianism (Rozin, Markwith, & Stoess, 1997) and cigarette smoking (Rozin & Singh, 1999), become moralized. People may moralize eating meat because something prompts them to see the connection between a moral principle (e.g. not harming animals) and the act of eating meat. Strong affective experiences can also lead to moralization. A person may not be moved to become a vegetarian just by knowing that eating meat harms animals but may be more motivated if they were to watch an emotionally arousing video of a factory farm. Feeling strong emotions, such as disgust, is thought to be part of how cigarette smoking evolved into a moral issue (rather than a matter of taste or preference) in the United States (Rozin & Singh, 1999). The link between strong feelings of disgust and moralized attitudes has been replicated with other issues as well, such as attitudes toward homosexuality (Olatunji, 2008) and obesity (Ringel, 2016).

Political moralization

But how do political issues become moralized? We propose two types of political moralization that often have negative consequences. The first type to consider is what we call issue moralization. Issue moralization occurs when people connect broad moral values to specific political issues. Consider the contentious issue of abortion in the United States. Antiabortion proponents may link abortion to one or more moral principles, such as prohibitions against harming innocent life or violations related to notions of sexual purity. Those in favor of abortion rights may moralize the issue by linking it to concerns about harm to the mother’s life or a woman’s right to control her own body.

A person’s emotions toward an issue and how much they care about it (i.e. attitude importance) are also thought to be crucial to the moralization process (Brandt, Wetherell, & Crawford, 2015; Wisneski & Skitka, 2017). Longitudinal research suggests a bidirectional influence between moralization and affect. Strong emotions lead to greater moralization over time, but moralization also predicts stronger emotions over time (Brandt, Wisneski, & Skitka, 2015). Thus, people can enter a cycle in which an emotional reaction leads to moralization, and moralization leads to a greater sense of outrage, disgust, or other strong emotions. Attitude importance also predicts greater moralization of an issue over time – the more a person cares about an issue, the more likely they are to imbue it with moral significance (Brandt, Wetherell, & Crawford, 2015). In sum, the moralization process involves both cognitive and affective components, and should occur for issues people deem personally important.

Outside influences such as politicians and media sources can encourage citizens to moralize a political issue. Marietta (2008) contends that politicians often use “sacred rhetoric,” which leads people to frame issues in terms of nonnegotiable moral values rather than pragmatic assessments of costs and benefits. Morally framed messages tend to contain strong emotional language, which appeals to audiences that are likely to share the same emotional response to a given issue (Brady, Wills, Jost, Tucker, & Van Bavel, 2017; Kreps & Monin, 2011). Rhetoric invoking disgust – considered one of the most influential emotions in moral judgments (e.g. Schnall, Haidt, Clore, & Jordan, 2008) – has been found to lessen support for gay rights (Gadarian & van der Vort, 2017). People perceive the communicator of a moral message as more certain and confident in their position, thereby increasing the communicator’s persuasive appeal (Kreps & Monin, 2011). Given these benefits of moral framing, it is no wonder that politicians and other skilled communicators use it to their advantage.

A second type of moralization that can shed light on political behavior is what we call personal moralization. Personal moralization represents the darker side of political conflict, wherein people are not focused on arguments about an issue itself but rather focused on mistrust, blame, and demonization of the other side. One reason politics becomes invested with moral significance is that people tend to intentionalize differences of opinion about issues. Rather than seeing a political dispute as simply a pragmatic disagreement between actors who all want the same outcome, people often ascribe nefarious intentions to those on the other side. When people feel highly involved in a political issue, they are more likely to attribute selfish and biased motives to those who disagree with their position (Reeder, Pryor, Wohl, & Griswell, 2005). When this occurs, it becomes easy to demonize the other side. With the issue of illegal immigration, for example, rather than each side framing the issue in terms of which policies work best to regulate safe immigration into the United States, it has devolved into a fight about intentions. The right accuses the left of not just being soft on illegal immigration but of intentionally encouraging immigration as a way to grow the democratic voter base. The left, in turn, sees the right’s tough stance on immigration as stemming from racist motivations rather than a more noble desire to enforce existing immigration law and protect American workers from unfair competition for jobs.

Personal moralization is particularly problematic in that it involves a broader view of oneself and one’s own group as morally good, while individuals on the other side are seen as morally bad. This fits with what other researchers have described as the intergroup relations function of morality (Ellemers & van den Bos, 2012). The in-group’s morality, a crucial part of in-group identity, can be affirmed by disparaging the out-group’s moral standing and establishing the moral distinctiveness of one’s in-group. This may explain why former Vice President Joe Biden often spoke out eloquently against this kind of intentionalization, urging fellow politicians to question their opponents’ judgment but never their motives (Singer, 2015).

Consequences of political moralization

Political moralization has troubling implications for interpersonal and political behavior. According to Tetlock and colleagues’ (2000) sacred value protection model, the belief that certain values are sacred leads people to take rigid stances on issues and reject pragmatic compromises. Merely construing an attitude as moral increases its strength, leading to greater attitude-behavior correspondence, greater resistance to persuasion, and more extreme and universal evaluations of behavior than non-moralized attitudes (Luttrell, Petty, Briñol, & Wagner, 2016; Van Bavel, Packer, Haas, & Cunningham, 2012). Individuals who hold moral attitudes show greater intolerance of people with opposing viewpoints and less desire to interact with dissimilar others (Skitka et al., 2005). People who moralize a greater number of political issues hold more positive feelings about their in-group and greater animosity toward, and even dehumanization of, political out-group members (Pacilli, Roccato, Pagliaro, & Russo, 2016; Ryan, 2014). In sum, moralization may increase political gridlock both by increasing attraction and loyalty to one’s own side, and by lowering willingness to interact and compromise with the other side.

Finally, experiencing a threat to one’s moral values can also change how a person responds to messages related to the threatened value. When the in-group’s moral image is threatened, in-group members tend to respond with defensiveness and outrage toward the out-group (Täuber & Van Zomeren, 2013). After exposure to a value-threatening news story, people who held nonviolence as an important moral value were more likely to believe disparaging claims from scientific and political sources about the effects of violent video games (Rothmund, Bender, Nauroth, & Gollwitzer, 2015). Similarly, people evaluate an attitude-congruent scientific study more favorably when they hold a relevant value as personally important and feel the value is under attack (Bender, Rothmund, Nauroth, & Gollwitzer, 2016). If an individual feels like a cherished moral value has been threatened, their motivation to protect this moral value can lead them to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Theme 1 Motivated reasoning
• Theme 2 Inequality
• Theme 3 Threat
• Theme 4 Scientists interpreting science
• Theme 5 People interpreting science
• Index