Adam Benforado & Jon Hanson, Naive Cynicism: Maintaining False Perceptions in Policy Debates

• Publication year: 2008

EMORY LAW JOURNAL

Volume 57 2008 Number 3

ARTICLES

NAÏVE CYNICISM: MAINTAINING FALSE PERCEPTIONS IN POLICY DEBATES

Adam Benforado^*& Jon Hanson^**

INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................. 501

I. THE NAÏVE CYNICISM HYPOTHESIS ................................................... 502

A. Overview of the Hypothesis ........................................................ 502

B. Predictions .................................................................................. 509

II. NAÏVE REALISM .................................................................................. 513

A. Component 1-"I Am Not Biased" ............................................ 515

1. How We Believe We See Things Objectively ........................ 515

2. How We Do Not See Things Objectively .............................. 517

3. Why We Believe We See Things Objectively ........................ 519

B. Component 2-"Everyone Who Is Reasonable Agrees With

Me" ............................................................................................. 522

C. Component 3-"If You Disagree With Me, You Must Be

Biased ......................................................................................... 525

III. NAÏVE CYNICISM ................................................................................ 534

A. The Basic Prediction: Naïve Cynicism ....................................... 534

B. Refined Predictions .................................................................... 535

1. Prediction IV: Conditions Encouraging Backlash ............... 536

2. Prediction V: Methods of Backlash ...................................... 536

3. Prediction VI: Targets of Backlash ...................................... 539

4. Prediction VII: Dispositionist Entrepreneurs ....................... 541

IV. AN APPLICATION: THE "BAD APPLE" PRISON GUARD ....................... 542

A. Testing Prediction IV: Conditions Encouraging Backlash ........ 543

1. Salient Actors and Clear Choices ......................................... 543

2. Complex and Counterintuitive Situationist Explanations ..... 546

3. Situationist Explanations Fail to Offer Clear Answers or

Cognitive Closure ................................................................. 552

4. Outgroup Members Implicated in Situationist

Explanations ......................................................................... 553

5. Situationist Explanations Threaten Conceptions of

Ourselves and Our Ingroups ................................................ 555

6. Situationist Explanations Threaten the Legitimacy of

Larger Systems ..................................................................... 557

B. Testing Prediction V: Methods of Encouraging Backlash ......... 558

1. Reinforcing the "Correctness" of Our Intuitions ................. 558

2. Portraying the Issues as Simple, Clear, and Obviously

Dispositional ........................................................................ 559

3. Attacking the Situationalized Subjects .................................. 560

4. Attacking the Situationists and Their Situationist Ideas ....... 561

C. Testing Prediction VI: Targets of Backlash ............................... 562

D. Testing Prediction VII: Dispositionist Entrepreneurs ................ 570

E. Final Thoughts on the Detainee Debate ..................................... 571

CONCLUSION .................................................................................................. 572

[T]hings are, for each person, the way he perceives them.

-Plato¹

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

-Matthew 7:3²

Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man [the President] has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well-known liberal bias.

-Stephen Colbert³

[T]he hallmark of the conventional wisdom is acceptability. It has the approval of those to whom it is addressed.

-John Kenneth Galbraith⁴

INTRODUCTION

Five million years after splitting with our great ape cousins, we humans ought to know ourselves fairly well. Five million years is a lot of time for observation and introspection. It is a lot of time to think about what makes us tick-what moves us to feel Y or do X; what coiled springs propel us forward; what carefully orchestrated counterweights provide the rhythm to our steady march. Yet, despite our apparent successes-our proficiency at building machines to mimic hands and map the brain, our ability to compose poetic verse exploring the human condition, and, lest we forget, our unparalleled talents at casting reality-based television programs-it turns out that we remain rather poor at constructing accurate explanations for our behavior.

Perhaps, because of the remarkable advances we have made in our learning and the evident distinctions between ourselves and those farther down the evolutionary tree, we believe our causal attributions to be, more or less, spot on. We, the inhabitants of the canopy, have the elevated perspective to see things as they really are.

Confoundingly, however, we do not all see the same things. Ours is an aerie of competing perceptions and worldviews, which leads to the realization that some of us, despite feeling certain in the clarity of our vision, do not perceive matters correctly.

The fact that incompatible belief systems manage to coexist forces us to consider two difficult questions: which perceived truth, if any, is closer to the truth?; and, how do people persist in believing in comparative untruths?

I. THE NAÏVE CYNICISM HYPOTHESIS

A. Overview of the Hypothesis

This Article and its companion articles⁵adopt a critical realist or situationist perspective. Situationists presume that answers to those questions can be found in (1) the insights of social scientific disciplines-most significantly, social psychology and related fields-devoted to understanding how humans make sense of their world; and (2) the practices of institutions- particularly market practices-devoted to understanding, predicting, and influencing people's conduct.⁶

In related work in the situationist project,⁷many of those insights and their possible implications have already been examined.⁸One of the most significant among them is the "fundamental attribution error": people ascribe the vast majority of human behavior to disposition-based choice, despite the fact that our movements are more a reflection of situation-unseen or underappreciated features in our environment and within our interiors.⁹Thus, when we make attributions for behavior, we typically concentrate on the least determinative factors and ignore the most decisive. We "see" disposition and miss situation.¹⁰

As dispositionists, we are more inclined than we should be to view the welfare mother as lazy and not taking responsibility for her own life and the fat man as choosing to eat too many bacon cheeseburgers and lacking "self- control." And, too often, our attributional analysis stops there. We focus on personality flaws (often imagined) and take little notice of potent situational factors. Dumbstruck by the man's girth, we overlook, among other things, that McDonald's is the only restaurant within ten blocks of his home, that McDonald's food options and prices reflect esoteric agricultural policies, that he is genetically inclined to eat all of the oversized portions of food that are put in front of him (particularly if they are dense in calories and sweet or salty tasting), and that his salary as a preschool teacher and janitor in New York City leaves him only $15.20 and 45 minutes with which to provide dinner for his family of four.¹¹

As detailed in The Great Attributional Divide, it takes opportunity and motive-which are far less common than they might seem-to discover and appreciate the influence of those, and numerous other, situational forces.¹²

Since we are often pressed for time and generally unmotivated to appreciate vital nuance, we frequently take the potentially misleading and satisfying shortcut. We rely on our familiar, automatic, and affirming individual-choice stories.¹³

Dispositionism poses a major concern for anyone who is interested in legal policy because, if we are basing our laws around a mistaken view of how humans interact with their world, our prescriptions are unlikely to address the symptoms or causes of serious societal problems-much less offer a cure. Indeed, they may themselves be part of the illness. If obese children are obese, not because they are lazy or because their parents are poor guardians, but because of, say, broader economic, social, and legal forces, then a program that tells kids to get off the couch or parents to monitor their children's caloric intake is unlikely to have much beneficial impact on habits or health. If middle-class consumers are on the cusp of insolvency, not because they fritter away their paychecks on flat-screen televisions and other luxury goods, but because of an unexpected job loss or health crisis,¹⁴then tightening bankruptcy laws may do little more than enrich Bank of America.¹⁵If corporate leaders are exaggerating earnings, not because they are greedy and immoral, but because of larger market dynamics and a widely held set of legitimating beliefs, then a legal regime that comes down hard on a few "bad apples" is unlikely to get to the root of the problem. And if 100,000 New Orleans residents stay put as Katrina moves in, blaming them for bad choices instead of recognizing their lack of good options will cost lives.¹⁶

While other articles in this critical realist project have focused on the role of dispositionism (i.e., our stories of thinking, preferring, willing, and choosing) in policy and policy debates, this Article and its companions examine the question of how...