Psychology scholar & 2020-21 CASBS fellow Vivian Zayas interviews David O. Sears, a two-time CASBS fellow (1988-89, 1992-93) and distinguished professor of psychology and political science at UCLA. The two discuss political attitudes and biases in the context of immigrant and minority communities, rural America, and social media.
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. Today on Human Centered, a conversation on the psychology of political attitudes and expressions. Former CASBS fellow Dr. Vivian Zayas, professor of psychology at Cornell, interviews two-time former CASBS fellow David O. Sears, the distinguished professor emeritus of psychology and political science at UCLA. We'll hear them discuss whether there's much of a difference between implicit and explicit measures of political attitudes, how those attitudes form and change over time, and how they can sometimes seem against self-interest. They'll touch on economic status and the attitudes of rural, immigrant, and other communities and how social media has altered psychologists' observations of personal positivity biases.
Vivian Zayas: So you were a fellow twice, once in '88-'89. I guess I was wondering, what was it like? Any memorable experience from that year? Anything stand out as particularly special that year? And/or, like, in terms of your own scholarship, it seemed like you were focusing a lot on symbolic politics. Do you want to tell me more about symbolic politics?
David O. Sears: Um, actually, the core idea is not psychological idea, is not fundamentally different from Tony Greenwald's thinking. Uh, the measurement I, I use is explicit measurement. I use surveys not implicit measures of the kind that Tony developed and that you have used. I think for my purposes explicit measures work pretty well. I think people are used to talking about politics. They're used to— generally speaking, this is an oversimplification, but generally speaking— social norms support expressing explicitly your political views. You know, sometimes, you know, there are complaints on the right about PC suppressing true conversations. There's a lot of talk about social media having opened up areas that people were not— didn't feel comfortable talking about before. And clearly, certain kinds of nativism or racism are more freely expressed on social media than they are otherwise. But By and large, for the kind of work I do, explicit survey measures work pretty well, I think.
Vivian Zayas: There's actually some work looking at, like, correspondence between implicit and explicit. And when it comes with, to, like, political attitudes or political ideology, I mean, there— it's a strong relationship there between implicit and explicit. People do feel like Whatever you capture implicitly, people are willing to say. When it comes to political ideology in general, where that link between implicit and explicit starts to break down when it comes to something like race or racial attitudes or feelings about members of different racial groups, then implicit might say one thing and explicit might say another, and so they don't converge. But with regards to political, attitudes and ideology, it seems like why not just ask people because it's essentially the same.
David O. Sears: Yeah, I've— I'm a co-author of one paper like that, and the implicit didn't— this was on the 2012 presidential election, and the implicit measures didn't add much to the standard explicit measures. But I think Tony's idea, the psychology behind Tony's ideas. But his basic idea is a kind of associational idea, and that symbolic politics is based on that kind of psychology, that there are symbols, political symbols out there, we learn associations to them, those symbols trigger those associations. And so, you know, something like "Stop the Steal" is a good example of a political symbol that evokes rage and anger among Trump supporters and triggers support for Trump and for a lot of things that he stands for. So that's kind of the basic idea. I went to the center the first time to write that book. I went to the center the second time to write that book. Still not written. So I probably won't ever get written, but But I've done some, I've published some chapters and articles that use that idea.
Vivian Zayas: So what I gleaned from that work is this other sort of, it really like lends itself to like dual processing models, right? That you have, so I'm thinking about your paper with Kinder in 1982, JPSP, looking at basically pitting group conflict theory with symbolic racism. And so there you have what you might expect would predict people's voting behavior with regards to picking between two candidates, one Black and one white, is that you might predict that maybe people would favor the white candidate over the black if they have direct experience with blacks that are negative, that might lead to sort of animosity. So that would be group conflict theory. And then you have also this other perspective, which is like, well, it might not be direct experience or direct conflict. It could be that you've just learned it and you have these representations of what black people are like, what white people are like, and then you have these beliefs and not favorable towards Blacks, and that would predict who you end up voting for. So there's a little bit of this idea of that what you're actually experiencing and what you think, there's like a dissociation. It gets to, I think, some of the work with implicit and explicit. Like implicit, the view would be it's based largely on experience built up slowly over time, although there's newer work saying that implicit beliefs can be shaped by propositional information, but that that could be sort of dissociated from people's sort of explicit beliefs, what they can report on. So I'm seeing this sort of like dual process type of account for trying to understand intergroup dynamics and bias. And here it's seems like these representations that are kind of independent of people's experiences are the ones that are really driving their behavior.
David O. Sears: Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, that— I mean, that's the kind of— that was the kind of fundamental distinction we were making back in that paper, in which, uh, that's my story, I'm sticking to it, you know. I have a quite recent paper on— that is explicitly on dual process models applied to the acquisition of partisanship among Latino immigrants. Kind of an interesting problem because the conventional wisdom about partisanship is that a lot of it comes from early political socialization, family socialization. you know, with some modification, maybe in early adulthood, depending on what kinds of experiences you have, like going to college or stuff like that. But immigrants, you know, their parents didn't grow up in the American political system, so they don't have that source of partisanship. So you might think they might not be very partisan. And of course, there is the stereotype of Latinos as being somewhat apolitical, not voting as much as other people do and so on. And we're fortunate enough to get a sample of Latino immigrants, a national sample. And we took the kind of dual process model that Danny Kahneman has promoted and comes out of cognitive psychology and made the argument that System 1, as Kahneman puts it, is this immediate affective, uncontrollable response, associative response to whatever the stimulus is. And then System 2 is the more deliberate, quasi-rational, controllable— you know, goes back to the old automatic and controlled dichotomy in cognitive psychology. And so our argument was that that Latinos learn, even immigrants learn quite quickly who the good guys and bad guys are. And so their spontaneous response when you give them any kind of partisan symbols is pretty defined. It's pretty crystallized. It's fast. It's controlled. It's automatic. They know where they stand on partisan issues. And then, Where they are at a disadvantage is on the more— the system 2 monitoring of the more general political world where they don't— they haven't had the experience of learning about all the issues and psychologically associating various issues to the parties and to the candidates and so on. And so we find very little difference between native-born and immigrant Latinos in terms of how coherent and closely associated basic partisan attitudes are. But we find big differences in how those— how connected those are to the broader issues of the political world, where the native-born Latinos are more coherent. Their thinking is more coherent than the immigrants. But it's a pretty— that's a pretty direct translation of the Kahneman type of tool process thinking into that peculiar problem of immigrant socialization.
Vivian Zayas: So how, you know, in terms of, it seems like there's a, they're quick at sort of responding to symbols of partisanship, of identifying who the good person, who the good guy is, bad guy is. Some Latino immigrants are gonna say Trump's the good guy. And some Latino immigrants are going to say Biden's a good guy. Well, how did that get established, um, in, in the first place? Is that— what's the thinking there?
David O. Sears: There you have— I mean, there's a, you know, pretty large literature on how, how those kind of dispositions get established ordinarily, uh, yeah, the immigrants— setting the immigrants aside as a special problem. But, uh, and there the family is a big influence. There's some turmoil in the, uh, you know, late adolescence, early adulthood period. Uh, we had a— one, one paper I did was based on a sample of adolescents in Wisconsin, and we found that, uh, it was a panel study, so we interviewed them at the beginning of a presidential campaign, at the end of the campaign, and then a year later. And we also interviewed their parents. And we found a big increase in the crystallization of their partisanship through the course of the presidential campaign for the adolescents, not for the parents. Parents were pretty— had their story at the beginning of the campaign, and it was the same story at the end of the campaign, and not much change. In the year after the campaign. The adolescents showed a pretty sharp increase in crystallization during the campaign and then no change in the year after. Our idea was that there are episodes that happen that are socializing episodes, and a presidential campaign is a good example of that. That, you know, there's a heavy information flow relative to the rest of the time, and it's during those periods that those basic predispositions get formulated. And we had another paper that showed that the extent to which the adolescents communicated with peers during the campaign was an influence in promoting that kind of crystallization. So taking it to the immigrant example, I can easily imagine you got a guy out on a construction crew working on some remodeling job, And they're listening to Spanish language radio and music while they're working. And there's a news flash, something comes on, Trump says something derogatory about Latinos. And two Latino immigrant guys look at each other, they roll their eyes, that Trump, well, maybe it doesn't take much more than that. Now I know how my peers feel. About Trump?
Vivian Zayas: I guess one question is people are getting news all the time, so even before they're immigrating to the United States, they have opinions of the U.S., they have opinions of parties, right? What party, you know, when the— if, if the U.S. treated them well, who was in power? If the U.S. treated them poorly, who was in power? And so even before immigrating, you might opinions of which side you are on, and then you come in and then everything that you hear then is filtered through, you already have a representation. I'm wondering how much does that—
David O. Sears: I think that's right. We had some supplementary measures, how long have they been in the US, how informed are they politically, and things like that. And all those things did contribute to stronger crystallization among the immigrants. And— but I think the distinction I would make is that that may be fairly shallow information— shallow socialization or shallow crystallization, may not go much deeper than attitudes toward the presidential candidates and toward the party. So at least that's what we found. That all the other stuff that, that you and I would connect with the parties and with the presidential candidates may not be part of that, you know, because the informational world that they are exposed to in, in that setting is pretty thin. I mean, they're not watching, they're not listening to NPR for 4 hours a day. You know, they may, they may get 2 minutes of radio news or something like that a day at most, or maybe not, or maybe every week they may get that much or something. So that would be my thought, that it's just a kind of shallow or thin information flow hitting those people unless they're here. And the presidential campaign is a case where you have a lot of political information flowing, and even adolescents pick it up. You know, the parents are watching the news and and the school— their teacher may have a mock election in the classroom. And, you know, and it's not extensive. Americans don't get a lot of political news, but it may be enough to just push them to the left or to the right, depending.
Vivian Zayas: I think this is bringing to mind, like, a related issue with that you've discussed, which is how people often— people's political attitudes may not necessarily, like, be in alignment with their own self-interest. How do we make sense of that?
David O. Sears: Well, I think I've written a lot about self-interest. That's something I did do when I was at the Center. I think Americans in particular, maybe, maybe Westerners in general, were creatures of the Enlightenment. The founding documents and the Founding Fathers were all coming out of the zeitgeist of the Enlightenment, 18th century. And at the core of that was a view of human psychology that was heavily influenced by the utilitarians, that we are motivated by money and the, you know, it was a bourgeois era and that economic self-interest was the dominant psychological motive. And I think we take that so for granted as our account of What Makes People Tick. It's kind of the psychological, the psychology of capitalism, or at least it's the theory, psychological theory behind capitalism. And I think we just take that for granted. We don't even think about it. And so that's why I've tried to challenge that assumption in my work, that when it comes to politics, by and large, and this is not true for everybody, it's not true all the time, but economic self-interest is not as important to people in making their voting choices as you might think. And even, I mean, there's a line of work, and Don Kinder is one of the ones that's really pushed this, a groupocentric line, which is different. It's not selfocentric, it's groupocentric, that the groups that you belong to are very important in determining your political preferences. And I, you know, that's part of it. That's in there. I think the support for Trump among military families goes beyond— I think the value is— my view is a more value-oriented theory than it is either egocentric or groupocentric. He communicates certain kinds of values, and maybe there's some group thing in there. I mean, he certainly communicates contempt for people like you and me, elites, intellectual elites who look down our noses at working-class families or people who recurrently enlist for assignments overseas in the military, cops, firemen, often, you know, those working-class people. He communicates, I think, pretty effectively his— that he's on their side against people like us. There's a wonderful book written by a political scientist at Wisconsin who developed the concept of rural resentment. It's very parallel to our concept of racial resentment, except it's on the— it's people who live in rural areas in Wisconsin. She went around spending her free time going to diners in the mornings in little towns all over Wisconsin, hanging out with retired guys and older guys who were having coffee together in the morning and talking to them. And they were quite resentful of Milwaukee because that was where all the Blacks were and the elites were giving much too much to Blacks who were just hanging out on the street corner, not doing anything. And quite resentful of Madison, which is the Ithaca of Wisconsin. Which, you know, the big university and liberals and professors who teach one course a semester and, you know, really don't do anything either, but they get a lot of money. And I remember one quote she had. She said, the guy said, "Well, you know, people like us, we take a shower at the end of the day." So she had a really nice story about how you have this resentment of the kind of the liberal elites in the university or in the state government who are favoring people that don't really do any work, Blacks, and whose kids go to fancy schools and, you know, blah, blah, blah. So it's, I think it's, there's that, divide between our social class, the professorial men, the professional, you know, whose kids are going to go on to college and so on, that class and the old white working class. And, you know, they're, you know, whereas they might, their parents might have had union jobs that earned them a lot of money and owned a house and a couple of cars and stuff like that. You know, they're going to be greeters at Walmart, you know, their kids, you know.
Vivian Zayas: Yeah, no, I mean, you see that. So upstate New York, or I guess Ithaca is not considered upstate. I think it's because we're the Finger Lakes, we're not technically upstate, but You know, you don't have to go very far to experience rural America, and all the jobs have been— are gone.
David O. Sears: Yeah, yeah.
Vivian Zayas: And they've been forgotten.
David O. Sears: Yeah. And not only forgotten, but looked down on. I mean, oh yeah, you know, one of the questions that Mike had for me was, you know, what is out there that is not— that has not been dealt with very satisfactorily? And And one of the things that occurred to me was that there's an old tradition in the sense that it was around when I was a graduate student and right after, of status politics that at the time was being contrasted with economic or material politics coming out of the New Deal. Economic issues were the big thing for the New Deal, and that's what brought a lot of the white working class into the Democratic Party. And then in the late '50s, early '60s, sociologists started talking a lot about status politics as being fomenting right-wing political movements. And that they never, they never really managed to do very much with that in terms of empirical analysis. In those days, they were kind of limited to demographics, and that was pretty crude way of assessing status resentments. But that's an area that I think has come to the fore in this, in this era, and which I don't think political psychologists have dealt with. Very well at all. But it's what you're talking about. And the way it gets written about is the jobs are gone and it's an economic thing. I don't think that's what's going on. And all the research that has been done in the last few years suggests that behind Trump is not the economic deprivation of lost jobs and all that stuff. It's the— I think what is there and is not measured well is a lot of status resentment.
Vivian Zayas: So what— do you have any thoughts about, like, what we should be considering, not as psychologists or researchers, but in terms of policy? Because, I mean, there's clearly a divide that's growing, and is there anything that can be done to try to, like, deal with the issues regarding status, including economics, but because it seems like the status issue— I'm not sure how best to measure it, but it also involves— is it part of it like a zero-sum situation where, you know, the more equality certain groups get in the United States, well, the less status I'm going to necessarily have? Is there any way of having groups that have been marginalized get more equality, more status, while also not undermining perceptions of status among other members of the other Americans, white Americans, and especially in certain like rural areas. Because the status is like you're disentangling it from the economics, but economics kind of goes into it. It's a part of it. It's not all of it. But then you have race that's going to go into status?
David O. Sears: Well, I, I, I'm— my thinking here is not very deep, Vivian, I must say. I, I think we have some, we have some traditional tools that I think actually work pretty well if they, if they are effectively implemented. One is education. Again, this Wisconsin woman, some of these guys would talk about how people from the suburbs of Milwaukee or from Madison would send their kids to the University of Wisconsin. But then when our kids— our kids— I remember one quote from one guy who said, well, you know, I knew this kid that went from our town to the University of Wisconsin. He didn't even last the first semester. You know, he just felt like a fish out of water there with all of those suburban kids who had tutorial sessions for their SATs, you know, and we're living in that, in that world. And my kid was getting up at 5 o'clock in the morning to milk the cows or something like that. So he just didn't feel at home there at all. And I think that is, if you have a fully functioning higher education system, that incorporates people like that proactively and makes them feel at home and gets them through college and so on, I think that helps integrate them into the broader society better, as opposed to a system that creams, you know, and, and takes those suburban kids, sends them off to Cornell, Harvard, Yale, and so on, and then, and then leaves behind the, uh, the others. So I think that's one factor. Another, I think, is— and I'm grasping at straws a little bit here— but I do think that there's something to be said for integration. That here, there is research out there that shows that anti-immigrant sentiment is strongest in areas where the proportion of immigrants has been rising most quickly, not where the proportion of immigrants is high or low, but where it's been rising a lot fast. And I think that helps, you know, foment stereotypes, fear, and so on. In a place like LA, you don't get much. To the extent that we can integrate all the different people into the same world, I think then they become less scary. So, I mean, that is a typical 1950s liberal guy saying, okay, well, just educate them and integrate and everything will be fine.
Vivian Zayas: I had, I wanted to ask you a little bit about some of this work on the person positivity bias.
David O. Sears: Yeah, sure.
Vivian Zayas: And I think some of the results that you describe in the introduction of that paper are really interesting. Just for example, just how positive people are evaluated, like a congressperson is evaluated more favorably than evaluations of Congress as a whole. And I'm just wondering, I mean, that paper was what, 19— When did you publish? 1983?
David O. Sears: '80s.
Vivian Zayas: Yeah, so, you know, the internet had just come online, before the World Wide Web, before we're getting inundated with, you know, public figures and media. We're getting all the time, and then we're also getting other people's opinions about them, like much more than face to face, or you read the news once throughout the day. Do you think that the person positive— I'm just wondering, do you think the person positivity bias of evaluating people more positively than groups of people, than attributes of those people, would still hold today. You know, in a world— yeah, I just feel like I almost use it, that finding, as like counterintuitive, right? Like, because we tend to demonize everybody, right? Like, everybody's like the worst person. People are getting death threats. We I mean, representatives have, you know, or Fauci, like, you know, there's a lot of hate. And so I'm just wondering how much of that work is based on that period, which is so drastically different than where we are now.
David O. Sears: Well, counterintuitive is a nice, a very polite way of saying it doesn't conform to reality anymore.
Vivian Zayas: Which is a little sad. Right? That it's like—
David O. Sears: Well, I think there were two basic claims made in that paper, one of which was that if you look at evaluations of public figures, or I also did it with professors, that they were predominantly positive. And the second claim was that there's a special— that there's a kind of a bonus of positive evaluation given to specific human individuals compared to impersonal attitude objects like groups or institutions. And I think what you've said about the negativity that's out there now about public figures is— that's probably somewhat exaggerated. And we hear things— we hear selectively reports of things like death threats against Fauci and stuff like that. And I suspect that— and I know in fact that most people think fairly positively about Fauci. But there is a much more negative climate out there than was true back in the era that I was drawing data from. So I would be less— I'd be less confident that we'd see that. That field of generally positive evaluations to the extent that was true back then. But the other part of it, I think, maybe still true, that the political scientists talk about it as we love our congressmen, but we hate Congress. Well, do congressmen, House representatives, do they regularly lose when they run for reelection? No. It's very difficult to knock off an incumbent congressman. The parties almost never go after incumbents, they go after open seats. That's why the Democrats are so nervous because there are so many retirements this year. I think that part may still hold pretty well. Then there are all psychology studies where psychologists kind of make a mistake of looking at— of conjuring up an individual, let's say Black stimulus people, and then varying various attributes of the person and expecting to find prejudice against them. And they don't work out very well, those experiments. And I think it's because generally speaking, you know, it's a kind of Sidney Poitier phenomenon. You know, who's going to hate Sidney Poitier? You know, but you can conjure up all kinds of stereotypical images of groups of Blacks that evoke anger, evoke fear, and where you get all that prejudice. So, you know, and there's the old cliché, you know, one of my best friends is Black. Well, that— and that proves I'm not prejudiced against Blacks in general. Well, you can be quite decent toward your colleague who's Black and— or toward your cleaning lady who's Latino, and at the same time be prejudiced against immigrants, want to cut down on immigration, you know, want to tighten up laws about crime and so on, and be absolutely positive that minorities are stuffing ballot boxes and, and so on. So I think that contrast between how you feel about an individual, how you feel about groups or impersonal aggregates, I wouldn't throw that one out with the, with the bathwater.
Vivian Zayas: So I guess related to that, I'm thinking about, you know, former President Barack Obama, that there was a lot of animosity there.
David O. Sears: Yeah.
Vivian Zayas: And then also a lot of animosity towards Trump and towards Biden. And now more and more, like, you hear, not my president. So then it's like, well, I think you mentioned, well, when it's your congressman, they have like the home court advantage in terms of favorable feelings. But what happens when, you know, what happens when you're like, they are not legitimate in the minds of the person? Does that then somehow put them in a different place so maybe something like this might not happen? Or, you know, again, I don't know empirically when people are asked about their attitudes or their feelings for towards Barack Obama, Trump, are they asked in that way to assess a person's positivity bias? Sometimes, you know, they're being asked approval ratings, which is, I guess, similar. Would you, is that similar? And so that would be fine. But yeah, approval ratings get really, are they lower? The question would be, are they lower than that of like the White House functioning or are they lower than, you know?
David O. Sears: Well, the, There's more— I didn't explore this in that paper, but if we had broken out evaluations of politicians by party, bipartisanship, there would have been sharp differences at that time, even in the data I was working with. And it's much more polarized now by party. So if you looked at Obama, you'd find a lot of negativity coming out of the Republicans and a lot of positivity coming out of the Democrats. Same for Trump, very strongly cleaved by party. And I think that's always been true. I think it's more true now than it used to be. The Shanta Iyengar at Stanford has has done the best work on this. And he's shown that partisans' evaluations of public figures in their own party have not become more negative over time, but their evaluations of public figures in the opposite party have become sharply more negative over time. And he even has— he's done actually quite a bit with implicit measures. Creatively. But he shows, for example, that people are now more likely to oppose, in a hypothetical situation, oppose their child marrying a member of the opposite party than they are their child marrying a member of the opposite race. Sidney Poitier, bring him on! But Don't show me a Republican.
Vivian Zayas: Are there any other thoughts that you wanna, that you feel like it would be good for us to discuss?
David O. Sears: Yeah, one thing that occurred to me in terms of what Mike had asked about questions that I don't think have been very well addressed during my time as a political psychologist And there are a couple of— I mentioned the status politics, which I think there was a very vibrant literature on that back in the '50s and '60s about attitudes that Joe McCarthy, John Birch Society, paranoid style of American politics, Richard Hofstadter, and so on. And I don't think that's been picked up empirically very well. Another is What I see is the fundamental dilemmas behind the diversity, equity, and inclusiveness model that we see so robustly implemented in universities, that it— there is a lot of attention to groups of people who have been formerly excluded and not very much to groups that liberals stereotype as having been formerly advantaged. And I think that— I wrote an essay for the Journal of Political Psychology a few years ago, a book review essay on books on the white working class, and the J.D. Vance book is one and the rural resentment book is another. Another book that is wonderful is a book by Arlene Hochschild called Strangers in Their Own Land. It's an ethnographic study of people living in a small city in Louisiana in the middle of environmental degradation. She carves out the picture of people, that these people, white working-class people, are drawing out a metaphor of a long line of people, that they're waiting in a long line of people going up a hill. Right over the top of the hill is the American dream. They're waiting in line patiently, for their turn at the American dream. The line moves slowly, but they are, stay in line faithfully. And then they look up and they see all kinds of people cutting in. They see women cutting in, people in wheelchairs, people with Black skin, people who don't speak English with brown skin, who are all cutting in in line ahead of them. And the line isn't moving anymore for them. So that's her, that's Arlene Hochschild's metaphor for some of the grievance that's coming out among the, what I would call the status deprived. And it's not so much that, it's not economic, it has to do with their self-image and their feeling of being respected and so on. And I think that DEI, movement in the universities doesn't deal very well with that, that side of inequality. In the old days, you know, we had the idea that you could integrate— I'm going now back to the 1950s, 1960s civil rights era— you could integrate Blacks into the broader society without hurting whites very much because the economy was expanding, opportunity was expanding for everybody. And that's not as true anymore. Now we're, you know, opportunity for people who are very highly educated is excellent and they're doing very well, high tech and all that. For people who don't have those advantages, opportunities are not, and they're stuck. And so Arlene's metaphor seems to me to hold pretty well for them. And we're not dealing with that very well. Even here in California, where we have this lavish higher education system, what's happening to the white working classes, they're moving out. You know, they're moving to Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, as the immigrants move in and start taking over the slots in our university system and in the community colleges and so on. We're not helping them take the next step. I think that's a dilemma that our university system is facing.
Vivian Zayas: Do you think that— I think this might not do it perfectly. Attention to first-generation status can help in that regard because you can have you know, someone from a, you know, white working-class background whose family has not gone to college, then— but it's sort of like an invisible— it seems— I know that there are cues that signal status, but it is a little bit of an invisible group. And but it's a group that is assumed to have privilege.
David O. Sears: We assume that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Vivian Zayas: I don't think they understand me. But it's sort of like psychologically, they, you know, growing up in an environment with fewer opportunities that you grow up with, that it affects your psychology of what's possible. And then maybe you're first gen, so you're really, you know, the first in your family to go on to higher education. But you still have, you know, maybe beliefs about what you can or cannot do based on what you've seen growing up that are limiting. You know, sometimes, you know, we hear more and more about problems with drug use, alcohol use in rural America, especially among men. Yeah. So that's all internalized, but nobody's seeing it. And actually, what everybody would see is you have privilege, you're white and you have privilege, but they don't see any of the factors that might be limiting in some way. And they could be psychological factors too.
David O. Sears: Yeah, I totally agree with you. I, and I think, and I think social psychologists in particular, I mean, I, the, the students in social psychology that I relate to most here are interested in intergroup conflict, that's their specialty. But they define it— they're all well-meaning and liberal and so on, but they take it for granted that if you're white, you're advantaged. And if you're gay or if you are Black or Latino, then you're disadvantaged, and we ought to be tilting the playing field in favor of those latter people. And they don't have much experience with white working-class people. And they don't see them as disadvantaged. And I think that's a— and there is an invisibility problem that you're alluding to there, I think. So I do think that's a problem. And, you know, when people complain about the political bias of social psychologists, that's— there's something to it.
Vivian Zayas: There was a CASBS fellow, Phil Tetlock, who wrote a piece in response to some of your work, and then you wrote a piece in response to his critique. And I thought it was really interesting because his title was Political Psychology or Politicized Psychology, Is the Road to Scientific Hell Paved with Good Intentions? To which you responded with a paper titled A View from Scientific Hell, which I love. I also thought it was interesting because you were a fellow in 1992 to '93, and he was a fellow the following year. At that time he—
David O. Sears: Oh, I was '92, '93, is that what you said?
Vivian Zayas: Yeah, and then I think he was a fellow '93, '94. And you were both on the same coast for a while, and I think now he's at University of Pennsylvania. Is that right?
David O. Sears: I think that's right.
Vivian Zayas: Um, so I guess I was wondering, could you say more about this exchange, um, both in terms of just the scholarship, but also did you have any interaction with him through CASBS or—
David O. Sears: Well, I knew, I, I knew him. I haven't seen him for a long time, but, uh, I knew him. He was at Berkeley for a long time, for a while. He was a co-author with a political scientist named Paul Snyderman who lived in Berkeley but is a professor at Stanford. Snyderman and Tetlock wrote some quite nasty critiques of the work that we were doing on racism. Generally speaking, from the point of view that what we were measuring as racism and calling racism was actually just conventional ideology that any conservative would subscribe to the beliefs we were calling flavored with racism. And so Tetlock's piece was an outgrowth of that collaboration with Snyderman. Now I think I've written pretty extensively and researched that issue pretty extensively, and I think— I don't think it— I don't think substantively it has any merit. I think, for example, I've done factor analyses of our measures of symbolic racism in multiple surveys, and found that they— that the symbolic racism measures load about equally on two different factors, one of which centers around party identification and ideology, and the other centers around pure measures of racism. So they involve both. Tetlock in that piece was critical of measures that he claimed confounded the two different dimensions, confounded race-neutral ideology on the one hand with racism on the other. And I said, well, you know, I think it's like water. Water confounds hydrogen and oxygen, right? Are you going to tell me that water is not something worth studying because it has those two elements in it? That are fused so completely that you can't separate them. But it became personal and nasty, and Snyderman more than Tetlock. Tetlock moved on into— he's had quite a career. I haven't followed his work, but in other areas, but he's had quite a career on forecasting and how good people are at forecasting and stuff like that. So Sometimes things get nasty.
Vivian Zayas: Yeah, well, the titles kept it light, a little bit light-ish, especially the title of your response. And I thought it was—
David O. Sears: Well, I just, you know, I just felt with respect to the political bias part, I think it's better to be open about what your politics are. If you're working in this field, why try to pretend that you're completely dispassionate? And then make your— my argument was make your methods and your reasoning transparent. And if people disagree and think that you're fudging things because of your politics, let them replicate it and see if they come up with something different. You know, the measures are out there. Go to it, you know, and nobody has done that. They never did that. They just complain. Another area in which I don't think political psychology has been very effective are in studying the dynamics of political movements. You know, we're so based on theories that are kind of individually focused, dispositionally focused, situationally focused, the immediate situation. But in politics, you get crazy things happening suddenly that can be very destructive. I think of things like genocide. For example, you go back to the Clinton era, the genocide in Rwanda, Hutu versus the Tutsi. Tutsi and the— begin with B, I can't remember. But it happened quite quickly. Groups of people that have been living together in peace, intermarrying for many generations, and suddenly they were killing each other, or one was killing the other. The same thing in the Balkans, you know, under the banner of rectifying a terrible defeat at the hands of Muslims, I think, in the 15th century. Same thing, obviously, in Nazi Germany. I wrote about it a little bit in the context of the California tax revolt, which was in the late '70s, that very suddenly a movement arose to impose crippling limits on property taxes. There was a very damaging run-up in real estate inflation. That priced a lot of people out of their home, out of real estate. But suddenly this movement took place, and with all kinds of draconian limits on public spending and, and so on, which is for, for many years, um, kind of crippled public services in California. So these are these kind of wildfire things that are not very predictable according to conventional psychology. that can be extremely dangerous and damaging. The Trump phenomenon, why is that spread like wildfire? You know, you look at Mitt Romney in 2012, you look at Trump in 2020, and it's like they come from different planets. The January 6th event, completely different from anything Republicans had been involved in for many years. Where is that coming from? You know, so this is something, and maybe people would say, well, that's for the sociologists, or that's for the political sciences scientists. But psychologists ought to have a piece of that.
Vivian Zayas: But I think for something like that, it's almost like we have to be meteorologists to see when the weather system is forming. But then for that, we need to have the type of data to kind of see these patterns. To try to identify how something is unfolding while it's happening. I mean, but what kind of data would be available through, I guess, social media sites?
David O. Sears: Well, people are being very creative about that, about using social media and Google searches and so on. I mean, these are inevitably going to be things that I'm going to leave to the next generation. I'm not going to do that. But there are— we're not bereft of data sources, even if people don't write letters anymore, they don't keep diaries that much anymore, but there are traces This was super fun for me. Yeah, it's been great, Vivian.
Vivian Zayas: I think this is really fascinating. Enjoyed every— I could continue on for longer.
David O. Sears: Okay. Well, great to meet you all, and that was really fun, Vivian. Thanks. Hope we meet in person sometime.
Vivian Zayas: Me too.
David O. Sears: Okay, so long.
Narrator: That was David Sears in conversation with Vivian Zayas. To learn more about this episode, you can check out the show notes. We'll have some links to their respective sites. And to learn more about the center, you can visit us at casbs.stanford.edu, or you can always join the conversation at Twitter. We're @CASBSStanford. As always, you can follow us in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss any of the latest episodes of Human-Centered. And while you're there, scroll through past episodes. You'll find great interviews and panel discussions with fellows and thought leaders from around the world. Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.