The self-defensive cognition of self-defense.

• Author: Kahan, Dan M.

Why do certain self-defense cases--ones, for example, involving battered women who kill their sleeping abusers, or beleaguered commuters who shoot panhandling minority teens--provoke intense political conflict? The conventional and seemingly obvious answer is that people judge such cases in a politically partisan fashion. This paper, however, suggests a more complicated explanation. Social psychologists have shown that individuals resolve factual ambiguities in a manner supportive of their defining values, both to minimize dissonance and to protect their connection to others who share their commitments. This form of self-defensive cognition, it is submitted, shapes individuals' perceptions of violent interactions between parties seen to be complying with or defying contested social norms. As a result, even individuals who are trying to decide such cases based on honest and politically impartial assessments of the facts polarize along cultural lines. The paper presents the results of an original empirical study (N = 1610) that supports this hypothesis. It also explores the normative significance of this account of the origins of political conflict over self-defense cases and how such conflict can be mitigated.

INTRODUCTION I. DOCTRINAL AND THEORETICAL BACKGROUND A. Self-Defense: The Doctrine and Its Precarious Rationale B. Evaluating Self-Defense Evidence: Three Models 1. Neutral Umpire 2. Political Partisanship 3. Self-Defensive Cognition II. THE EXPERIMENTAL STUDY A. Study Design and Hypotheses 1. Sample 2. Vignettes 3. Measures 4. Hypotheses 5. Statistical Tests 6. Missing Data B. Results 1. Simple Outcome Judgments 2. SEM Analysis C. Discussion 1. Summary of Results 2. Issues for Future Research III. THE SELF-DEFENSIVE COGNITION OF SELF-DEFENSE: AN APPRAISAL A. Is There a Problem? Self-Defensive Cognition Meets Cognitive Illiberalism 1. Individual Judgments: Values or Blunders? 2. Collective Judgments: Accuracy, Legitimacy, and Illiberal Status Competition B. What to Do? 1. Against Exhortation and Excoriation 2. For Affirmation and Charity IV. CONCLUSION APPENDIX A. STUDY VIGNETTES INTRODUCTION

Self-defense cases can be as politically controversial as they are physically violent. Their conflict-provoking potential is reflected in two icons: the battered woman who shoots her abusive husband in the head as he sleeps, and the beleaguered urban commuter who opens fire on an African-American teenager who solicits him for cash. (1) Behind these figures, however, stand broad, and continuously expanding, classes of disputed verdicts that variously move competing groups--conservatives and liberals, men and women, whites and minorities, straights and gays--to decry the partisan bias of the law. (2)

Contestation of this sort is disheartening. The contours of self-defense doctrine express the extreme value that the law attaches to human life and the dedication of the law to protecting the lives of all citizens regardless of social identity or moral outlook. Recurring political controversy not only confronts us with evidence that individual juries might sometimes be insufficiently dedicated to these values; it gives us reason to wonder how sincerely committed to these values all of us really are. If we are constantly falling into factional dispute about such decisions--one day applauding a verdict our adversaries denounce and the next day denouncing what they applaud--then either some large segment of our society is consistently rejecting the principles that inform the law or, more likely, we are all selectively rejecting them when we find their dictates unappealing. When push literally and lethally comes to shove, we all give in to the temptation to place our parochial attachments ahead of the universal values embodied in the law.

Or do we? Our aim in this paper is to suggest a more subtle and complex explanation of political conflict over self-defense. The account we propose does in fact acquit jurors, and the rest of us, of the charge of infidelity to the values embodied in the law. But it does so at a cost: the exposure of a threat to realization of the law's ends that is arguably even more troubling--because less amendable to detection and therefore to correction--than rank parochialism. The source of political contestation over self-defense, we will argue, are a set of related constraints on human cognition.

Known as "defensive bias" or "identity-protective cognition," one of these constraints refers to the tendency of individuals to form factual beliefs that affirm their defining values. It is reassuring to believe that behavior one admires is beneficial to society, and behavior one finds offensive detrimental; it is disquieting to contemplate that the opposite might be true, particularly when such beliefs threaten to put one at odds with persons whose character one respects and whose good opinion one covets. For these reasons, it is natural for individuals subconsciously to resist evidence that challenges factual beliefs supportive of their values, particularly when those beliefs are widely held within groups with which they identify. (3) This dynamic has been shown to be the source of intense political conflict over diverse factual issues, from the causes of global warming to the safety of guns, from the deterrent effect of the death penalty to the efficacy of vaccinating young girls for HPV. (4)

We contend that the same mechanism generates political controversy over self-defense cases. As the iconic cases of the battered woman and beleaguered commuter illustrate, deadly confrontations can interact with contested group norms--ones relating to who should be afforded respect and deference by whom, and what sorts of behavior are appropriate for persons occupying different roles. Where that happens, jurors who decide self-defense cases, and citizens who react to what juries decide, are impelled by a form of psychic self-defense to form a view of the facts that affirms their groups' norms. These citizens aren't ignoring facts that denigrate their group commitments; rather they are deriving the facts from their commitments. As a result, citizens end up culturally polarized about the outcomes of such cases despite their good-faith intentions to judge them in a nonpartisan fashion.

To support this view, we present the results of an original experimental study. That study, which involved a diverse sample of some 1,600 Americans, strongly supports the conclusion that political disputes over self-defense cases arise from self-defensive cognition of the type we posit.

The obvious question posed by these findings is, What to do? One answer, of course, would be nothing. Perhaps nothing can be done. More important, perhaps there's no reason to do anything anyway: since the operation of self-defensive cognition is perfectly consistent with good-faith efforts on the part of decisionmakers to be impartial, perhaps there's nothing morally problematic about judgments that reflect this influence. The discovery that self-defensive cognition is at work, it might be thought, dispels the anxiety that political controversy over self-defense cases is anything to fret about.

But we don't take this position. The contribution that self-defensive cognition makes to reactions to putative instances of self-defense, we believe, is a manifestation of another constraint on cognition that interferes with individuals' power of moral reasoning. Cognitive illiberalism refers to psychological tendency to impute harmful consequences (or to deny the same) to behavior that offends (or gratifies) one's cultural norms. (5) This condition subverts the ends of persons--we think the vast majority of citizens in American society--who genuinely believe the law should not be used to impose a cultural orthodoxy, even if the values being forced on others are their own.

Treating these conditions as they afflict judgments in self-defense cases is no easy task. The effects of self-defensive cognition can't be counteracted through admonitions to be "fair minded" and "nonpartisan." Citizens laboring under the influence of this form of subconscious cognitive motivation already are doing their best to be impartial.

Indeed, moralizing exhortations likely just make things worse. The phenomena of identity-protective cognition and cognitive illiberalism are related to--and indeed interact in a self-reinforcing way with--another psychological mechanism known as "naive realism." (6) Naive realism consists in the tendency of persons to recognize the influence of group values on the factual perceptions of persons with whom they disagree while being oblivious to the like influence of their own values on their own beliefs. A deliberative environment in which citizens admonish their opponents to be "fair and reasonable," then, predictably breeds reciprocal, self-righteous charges of "bias"--thereby magnifying the conviction of culturally aligned groups that their opposites are either morally bankrupt, profoundly stupid, or both. This common apprehension transforms seemingly "factual" policy disputes into occasions for illiberal forms of cultural conflict, making it even more likely that individuals will react with self-defensive skepticism to views of facts that differ from their own. (7)

This dynamic, though, does suggest one modest intervention that citizens of good faith could take to ameliorate political divisions over self-defense. It is that they stop decrying the bias of the law when they see verdicts with which they disagree, and stop accusing their cultural opposites of the same bad-faith for forming impressions of those verdicts with which they disagree. Instead, they should openly recognize what is in fact true--that nearly all of us are honestly trying to be fair, yet we all labor under the constraints of self-defensive cognition. An environment in which citizens of diverse commitments reacted this way to inevitably disappointing verdicts would itself...