Thinking Points Discussion: Politics and the Psychology of Blame

I am an Episcopal priest.

In our version of religion worship or liturgy (root word from "the work of the people") is very important. Episcopalians worship using "The Book of Common Prayer." If you want to know what we believe, some would say, look at our prayer book.

In my seminary years of the 1970s, the focus of the liturgy in being a method of changing people's hearts and behavior was emphasized by my professors who reminded me and my classmates often that "ortho-praxis leads to ortho-doxy," right behavior leads to right belief and eventually to faithfulness. Therefore, in theory one can learn to be more loving by "acting" more loving on a regular basis. This has political implications because of community.

The seminary experience trained me to look at things from a structural point of view. Participation in learning about cognitive science has also helped me see things from a structural point of view, too. The frame.

I am a newly elected precinct representative to my party's county organization, which happens to be in Ohio. In Ohio both parties in each county have a "central committee." On the Democratic side representatives from each precinct are elected at primaries. Our first official act (this happens in every county) is to remove the power given to us, the central committee, by the voter and vest it in the executive committee (four people, i.e. executive chair, vice-chair, secretary and treasurer). The executive chair may or may not create committees with the elected central committee chairs. The executive committee in each county is the voice of the party. Not very Democratic or progressive in my mind.

Some Ohio county central committees elected members do not meet at all after this first official act. So for example, in my county there are 31 precincts, and my county executive chair invites members to meet monthly. This act alone would make my county organization very progressive, inviting the community to participate. On the other hand, there have been no standing committees for over a decade, and so the only activity that goes on at these meetings is hearing reports from the executive chair - this seems very conservative to me, i.e. top down executive knows best.

My attempt at promoting progressive values within my own party has been the encouragement of the use of committees to actually do what Dr. Lakoff says is a function of government "promotion" of our core values within the community we serve. My first act was to introduce a resolution to strategic planning. A committee was formed to study this idea and has been reporting to the central committee now for 6 months and requesting a continuing resolution each time.

My next act to behave more progressively will be to introduce another resolution for yet another committee on how to promote "strong protections" of our troops and veterans when they sustain injuries that will be with them for a lifetime, this seems like it could be a "strategic initiative" in that if returning veterans were guaranteed that their healthcare would be taken care of for the rest of their life, that would be one more step toward "universal healthcare for all of us." But I digress.

It seems to me the question you're getting at is NOT just about thinking but acting. If we continue to think in conservative ways, we will behave conservatively. Conversely, if we start behaving progressively, it may help our thinking progressively.

Am I making sense?

It's an extraordinary coincidence that the very topic you posted here is the topic I posted as a question to Dr. Lakoff, who will be presenting a talk here at the company where I work on Thursday, July 12.

I hope there will be more discussion and analysis from Rockridge, incorporating the insights of pyschologists and social psychologists as well as cognitive scientists, to clarify and better understand the role of the fundamental attribution error and other cognitive biases, as well as the role of conservative framing as defense and coping mechanisms in response to shame, in shaping the architecture of the conservative world view.

The fundamental attribution error was basically codified in philosophy by Sartre, with his contention that humans are products of their actions rather than their essences. Thus if Alexis behaves lazily, she is lazy.

I think in this case, both frustrated constituents and members of Congress took a good look at the situational factors. But whereas the members took the situational factors to be very restricting, outsiders took that perception to be false. I guess no one person can ever know which side was right.

But both Sean and Congress really are at fault for their respective predicaments. Sean may have fallen asleep in class due to the situational factor of his all-nighter, but he's still the one who planned his week poorly and so had to pull the all-nighter. Likewise, Congress was clearly hamstrung by situational factors when it came down to the vote, but it didn't do itself any favors by letting Bush tilt the playing field leading up to it. In the end, Congress is only as liberal as it acts.

I agree with these comments as far as they go, but I have a problem with viewing "Congress" as some sort of unitary body. At the very least, it has two major parties, and beyond that is composed of myriad individuals with varying degrees of influence on political rhetoric, and who are influenced in turn by a larger myriad of staff and consultants.

When we blame "Congress" do we just blame the majority party of Congress? That seems too simplistic.

Congress has its own procedural rules and Constitutional constraints to adhere to, which might be seen as mostly situational factors. In particular, the requirement of a supermajority to overrule a presidential veto must be taken into account, especially in light of the fact that the Democrats do not hold a unilateral supermajority advantage in voting power. So, their ability to resist presidential vetos in circumstances where the Republican party still tends to support the president is not due to Democrat lack of spine but lack of voting supermajority (the president still seems to be "the decider" for Republican congressmen, even as they begin to attempt to distance themselves from some of his unpopular policies).

Also, there is the question of how much the rhetorical legacy from the immediately previous Congress sets a precedent for ongoing deliberations in the current Congress. Just how reasonable is it to expect the Democrats to be able to unilaterally re-cast the rhetorical framework in a matter of months? That may involve some degree of situational factors as well.

Partly this may be a matter of internal momentum within Congress (they had to deal with that framing for years, and it's hard to get out of the habit), part of it may be the external momentum of press coverage setting the terms of the debate, as well as the continuing momentum of the administration using its bully pulpit to set the terms of the debate. The external momentum would probably be fair to evaluate as a situational factor in this context.

To the extent that Democrat representatives have not consciously understood their own rhetorical framing dynamics that sustain the internal momentum, and may not even understand the unconscious dynamics at work, they may not be explicitly aware of how their rhetoric is been shaped by legacy framing, and even if they are they may not find it easy to push back against that framing when it comes at them from all sides.

At this point, I can assign some nonzero amount of responsibility to individual representatives to educate themselves more about how framing works, both generally and within their own heads. But if they are not trained in the habits of this sort of analysis, realistically it may be unlikely to expect them to become expert in a very short time, even with a good faith effort. I know how hard it is for me to learn this skill myself, even with all of the information in front of me for the picking. Old habits die hard, and it's sometimes harder to unlearn something than to learn it for the first time.

We should definitely look for ways to encourage and enable our progressive representatives to become explicitly conscious of political framing (and how it is shaped by the dynamics of cognitive framing generally), though they may be relying a lot on established political consultants for some of their political rhetoric. Perhaps we should also seek to educate the consultants and staff members who influence the expression of progressive representatives' positions?

So, in the end I guess I tend to see this more through the lens of situational factors (or perhaps "systemic factors") than individual will. I suppose that's a mark of my progressive value system.

In the end, does it really matter "who is to blame" for legislative results that we oppose? The real goal is to change the results. So, we may do well to focus on how the system works overall, and consider how we can get that overall system to deliver the results that will benefit society instead of harming it.

The responsibility of "causation" in this context is probably quite systemic, and in any collective social environment, collective social dynamics are very prominent. While individually each representative wants to do the right thing and also sustain their likelihood of re-election (can't make a difference if you aren't there in the first place), none of them individually takes full responsibility for collective dynamics, even within their own party, even if they are leaders.

I think there must be a substantial "statistical" component to the collective dynamics of representatives in a political party, and any effort to change those statistics should endeavor to use a "fractal" approach to change: look for the most influential individuals to target for the most active educational efforts, so that the effects of change have the greatest potential to be amplified and propagate themselves among the full progressive community.

Past failures are water under the bridge. How can we concentrate on moving forward? Fix, don't just "punish". Those are my progressive values. To me, "blame" is part of the "punishment" frame. I'm not sure that we need to "forgive" the failures, but what use is "blame" in the first place? Above and beyond the elucidation of real factual causal dynamics in order to learn from them and improve the system, I don't think it matters very much.

Is "blame" going to be a useful lever of policy given the need to re-elect the progressives in order to retain a majority? It seems to me that blame is useful only in individual elective dynamics (throw the bums out if they are individually ineffective or corrupt

individual accountability). But if collective dynamics are not working, the imperative is to identify the collective failure and fix it so that it works.

So, to the extent that we are talking about a dichotomy of "individual/external" factors, and to the extent that collective/systemic dynamics are not located in any individual, I would consider collective dynamics to be "external" (and thus perhaps "situational") when seeking to identify the causal dynamics of collective failure.

So this has a lot to do with who has "standing" to receive "blame" - only individual persons, or do we extend that to "individual groups" (and if so, how do we really define the "group" with regard to its internal causal dynamics)? I think my instinct is to assign individual "blame" only to individuals, because accurate assessment of collective dynamics is not nearly as easy as it may seem on the surface, and thus we are very likely to get the definition of the "causally-intact group" wrong at the outset.

Voting behavior of a representative can be very complex in the sausage factory of legislative politics, given that both the legislation and the negotiations for support can be very complex. The comments that follow are entirely personal, and I don't know how others respond to voting dynamics generally.

In some cases, my representative votes correctly but the party as a group fails in its mission to pass legislation. In that case it's easy to praise my rep for the individual vote but to see the system as failing collectively.

If indeed my representative votes against my wishes on a single bill, then I have to take that into account in the context of all bills and the expectations of votes by opposing candidates should they win election. And, I take into account whether the bill passed or not (if I find that bill important enough to track int eh first place).

So for example, if the bill passes, my rep voted against, but my rep votes well on most other issues, and an opposing candidate will be expected to vote much worse across the board, then that particular vote is pretty much washed out by the greater context. Of course, if the bill fails then the question is whether my rep's vote made much difference. And, in the unending conundrum of voting margin, in all but a few cases a single vote is usually not determinative in a collective election's outcome, so in practical terms it's difficult to assign the blame clearly.

You may be right that Republicans have an "advantage" in pressuring their reps on specific votes, because they evaluate the vote on its own intrinsic "moral" terms, which is somewhat less likely to be washed away by all of these practical, utilitarian concerns.

Bu I also have to say, when I participate in voter-actions with my reps (email, calls, etc.), I certainly want to create the appearance that I care deeply about the specific vote at issue! I want my reps to feel that their specific action in the specific case will have the maximal effect on my voting choices.

Sometimes it does, though in a tricky and somewhat nuanced manner: if I am displeased with some aspect of voting choices my rep has made in the long run, I will sometimes cast a protest vote for some opponent with no chance of winning, but a better record on the issues (i.e., a third-party or independent candidate). But I'll only do this if the main two-way match-up is not in doubt, and the worse opposing candidate has no chance at winning. If the two likely candidates are both so bad as to be unpalatable, I may not cast a vote in that race, or I may vote for a third-party candidate that I like with the understanding that it is merely a protest vote.

So in the end, I try to take a big-picture view of the electoral process, and I make my voting choices within that overall context. One of the issue shere is the topology of the voting system itself. For example, I'd love to see instant-runoff voting instituted, so I can vote for my preferred candidates withou giving up my full voice in the likely head-to-head.

(For those who are not familiar with IRV, it asks the voter to create an ordered list of all candidates on a particular roster, and then does an multiple-round removal of the last-place finisher in each round, allocating those votes in the next round to the next-best candidate for each voter.)

So, for example, in 2000 I could have voted for Nader/1, then Gore/2, then Bush/3 (with Buchanan way at the end after all the other fringies), and when Nader gets eliminated my vote passes to Kerry, but Nader can still build his constituency by getting as many first-place votes as possible, and presumably the first-place votes would determine matching funds, given that such funding makes more of a difference these days to the less dominant candidates).

So, the very structure of the voting paradigm is yet another situational factor in evaluating all of this.

At the end of the day, I still don't know if this is good or bad. Can you explain more exactly what "advantage" or "disadvantage" you are referring to here? What is the goal that is enabled or hindered here, that you care about? Is this about the mechanics of electoral accountability? If so, I think the most important issue here is the influence of money on TV advertising which is still the most potent way to influence the electorate, which may have very little to do with tracking voting records, as it relies so much on image and emotional motivations.

Voting is substance, but TV ads operate on precisely the value framing that underlies this discussion. So in some sense, the voting record per se is substantially disabled as an electoral dynamic in the first place, unless it can be selectively amplified into a value message.

Bottom line: I think all of this needs to be evaluated in the context of the media, because 30-second TV ads shape a dominant proportion of the most effective electoral messages and that's why value framing has become such a determinative factor in citizens' voting behavior. That's where the rubber hits the road.

So, a specific vote by a rep probably only comes into play when it is selected as a talking point for a value-based ad. And then it's really just about supporting whatever story it is that the candidate's campaign wants to tell to drive home the value point.

So, I'm not sure if this helps answer your question or not, specifically whether "blame" or perhaps simply "accountability" in general has a structural role in electoral dynamics and if so whether it favors one value frame over the other.

I think that whatever role it has is tremendously distorted by the functional topology of the broadcast media, and that distortion must be taken into account first, before we can proceed with any further evaluation.

(PS: This is why I like the Internet, with its interactive capabilities, and why I think it is so important to protect that common-carriage design, i.e., net neutrality. This could be taken away from us, too.)

I think the decisions and actions of members of Congress were very much influenced by the situational factors. I think all ours were also, to greater or lesser extent. Thanks to very large, consistent financial support for decades, and a resultant army of Think Tanks, Talk Radio hosts, authors, etc, promoting the conservative worldview, newspapers, TV, and radio have flooded our senses with that viewpoint. Competition and resultant cost cutting in media have very much abetted this, in that investigative reporting has been replaced with taking reports from Think Tanks or government and publishing them without significant editing, criticism, or fact checking.

Without education on the concepts discussed by Rockridge many of us are unaware of the extent of this conservative framing in the media, or that it even is conservative. This is aided by conservatives regularly repeating the charge that the media is liberally biased. They have managed, over decades, to move the definition of "moderate" considerably to the right. Many of us grew up with these frames, and as a result they are embodied in us. Lakoff says, if the facts don't fit the frame, the facts are rejected. Some of us reject the above scenario because we are thinking in those frames. You bet I think situational factors affected the decisions of congressional members! And that they are not aware of it.

The episcopal minister's comments reminded me of Ghandi's advice; "Be the change you want." If you want the world to be more progressive, BE progressive in everything you do, vote progressively, voice progressive views proudly at every opportunity, and if someone calls you a damn liberal, swell your chest proudly and thank s/he heartily for the compliment!

Btw, I really like the new book offerings posted. I hope people buy and not just read, but study these and how they apply in their everyday interactions. If all voters assimilated those concepts, wow, what a difficult populace that would be to deceive and mislead!

Tom W.

Yes, I had a similar response. When I first read Moral Politics, I commented to a friend that I thought it was one of the most important books written this century. Not only because of the insight it gives on the basis for progressive and conservative outlooks, and potential impact it can have on politics, but also because of the attention it brings to the field of cognitive science in general. It was my first introduction to that field, and I was fascinated. The further reading I have done has made me even more fascinated. The description of how our thoughts are shaped by our bodily interaction with our surroundings in Philosophy in the Flesh made so much sense to me. I had the same thought - that everyone needs to know these concepts.

If this subject were taught widely - starting in high school - our country would be quite different I think. It would greatly increase peoples' freedom for one thing, in that they would not be as as susceptible to manipulation and propaganda. As Lakoff says, to be free you have to be able to imagine the possibilities. Deep frames limit the scope of our perception and imagination. If we at least understand that, we can try to look beyond, realizing those limitations are self-imposed. The world becomes so much more rich, as we start to glimpse why people in other cultures think the way they do, and that understanding leads us to embrace diversity and celebrate it, not fear it. This is the most important potential of cognitive science I think, to help break us out of our rigidity and narrow mindedness through the realization of how our thoughts are limited - just to wake us up to the fact that they are limited and that this has a very real impact on our freedom. I think you are doing very important work.

Tom