Copycats and Contrarians
Page 24
These episodes of group mania and collective herding have much to do with the nature of the group, herd or mob as an entity in itself – but what is going on specifically in the relationship between the star and their fans and groupies? Many observe that fandom is a form of pathology – perhaps fans are exhibiting some form of mental illness. The reality is likely to be much more complex, however, and in any case, such diagnoses of mental illness fail to capture anything about the actual relationship between the fan and the star. The star offers something to the fan. They are a symbol of something attainably good and desirable.
Fan hysteria is not a new phenomenon, and fans are not always female. Nor do fan riots require modern media to start and sustain them. Beatlemania-like frenzies were observed by German writer Heinrich Heine in 1844. Heine wrote about the craze for the composer Franz Liszt that swept through Europe after Liszt’s compositions began to attract a lot of attention around Germany in 1841. Lisztomania triggered episodes of hysteria amongst the composer’s growing fan base. After one of his concerts in Berlin, fans mobbed him, fighting over his clothes and jewellery.33 Extreme emotional responses have also been observed in the admiration of art. The quickening heartbeats, fainting and hallucinations experienced by some gallery-goers standing before particular pieces – identified as ‘Stendhal syndrome’ by researchers – are symptoms not dissimilar from those experienced by fans in the presence of their idols.34 Overall, fans’ worship of their idols is more than just a form of psychopathology. Nonetheless, and in common with cult members, System 1 emotion and instinct is dominating their System 2 reason and deliberation. These responses are magnified by external institutions, including markets. Businesses selling merchandise can make a lot of money by encouraging and amplifying fans’ hysteria. Fandom is also manipulated by stars’ managers. During their US tour, The Beatles sold not only millions of records but made over $2.5 million in revenue from selling branded merchandise. For modern stars, the rewards are even greater.
Political tribalism
In the secular world, tribes are the corollaries of cults. Tribalism has been an enduring feature of human interactions ever since we lived in hunter-gatherer communities. It is also another manifestation of the complex relationships between leaders and followers. The primitive impulses to join a tribe are seen in the modern world. In modern democracies, tribalism manifests itself in our political relationships. Political leaders, often in cahoots with business leaders, can distort voting patterns and exploit crowds by the manipulation of information.
John Maynard Keynes observed that diverting a thirst for power into more material ends might be beneficial for society: better that this world is full of ruthless robber barons than brutal dictators:
dangerous human proclivities can be canalised into comparatively harmless channels by the existence of opportunities for money-making and private wealth, which, if they cannot be satisfied in this way, may find their outlet in cruelty, the reckless pursuit of personal power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandisement. It is better that a man should tyrannise over his bank balance than over his fellow citizens; and whilst the former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least it is an alternative.35
Keynes’ use of the word ‘sometimes’ is telling: in our modern world, the relationships between political leadership and commercial interests can be worryingly close. We do not benefit from the simple separation of markets from politics as advocated by Keynes. Mass media have enabled a convergence of politics and business. Just because someone diverts their activities into business rather than political leadership does not prevent them from wielding excessive power and influence on a global scale – especially if they control the media. Donald Trump is one example; another is press baron Rupert Murdoch, whose enormous business empire enabled him to wield considerable international political power too.
Modern political tribalism is intensified by the ways in which we can now herd together, facilitated by social media. Social media allow a much stronger relationship to develop between leaders and followers. Facebook and Twitter are direct conduits for personal information, which increases a sense of intimacy. Twitter feeds, Facebook walls and other online forums mean that today’s followers feel a disproportionate sense of connection to, and responsiveness from, their leaders, even though most will know they are conversing with social media teams propounding focus-grouped messages. Nonetheless, these social media tools give followers the impression that they have a tangible relationship with their leaders, consolidating the feeling that they are bound together with them and other like-minded followers by common goals as well as a shared identity. Thus, in the run-up to the UK’s EU membership referendum, the many pictures and videos of then leader of UKIP Nigel Farage drinking beer in a pub circulating on social (and mainstream) media increased his support. In portraying him as an ‘ordinary bloke’ the images directly appealed to his supporters’ sense of identity – even though, in reality and unlike the vast majority of UKIP supporters, Farage comes from a privileged and affluent background.
Political herding: reason versus emotion
We do not always reason carefully through all the facts when we make our political choices. But that does not mean that reason plays no role at all. Sushil Bikhchandani and his colleagues have applied their concept of information cascades, as explored in chapter 1, to American political campaigns. Voters balance their private information about the different candidates against the social information they can gather about other voters’ likely choices. When reliable information about the different candidates is not easy to find then social information will dominate, tipping undecided voters into joining the herd.36
Convention also dictates the strategies of candidates on the ballot papers. As noted in the previous chapter, the median voter theorem suggests that, for the average politician, it makes sense to identify the average position on a given issue, and then to build a political manifesto accordingly. Again, this connects with risk, because the average politician, lacking much independent conviction, will gravitate towards a conformist position. That is the least risky strategy if they want to be elected. Political times are changing, however, and social media are shifting the centre of gravity away from the average. In November 2015, The Economist presented some evidence to show that strongly right-wing and strongly left-wing parties have a relatively substantial social media presence, perhaps because social media reward stark soundbites ahead of subtle messages.37 This evidence taps into the idea that taking risks can deliver rewards. Blunt statements risk easy condemnation, whereas nuanced communications leave the messenger with more leeway for interpretation. Historically, political extremists found it difficult to take these risks because it was not easy to promote an extreme position via traditional media. With Twitter, Facebook and other forms of social media, this constraint has disappeared.
In voters’ adoration for their political leaders and in political decision-making more generally, emotions are everywhere, reflecting System 1 thinking. Daniel Kahneman himself noted the dominance of emotions in the run-up to the UK’s 2016 referendum to leave the European Union – presciently worrying that destructive psychology was blinding people to the long-term consequences of Brexit. In an interview for the UK’s Daily Telegraph published just a couple of weeks before the referendum, Kahneman observed, ‘The major impression one gets observing the debate is that the reasons for exit are clearly emotional . . . The arguments look odd: they look short-term and based on irritation and anger.’38 This reliance on emotion is all but inevitable. Voters don’t have time, and sometimes lack the expertise, to research and understand all the details of the policies put forward by electoral candidates and lobby groups, let alone to examine the minutiae of politicians’ backgrounds. Added to these constraints is the fact that political news has become so noisy and unreliable that even those who do have the time and expertise to interpret it all are still left feeling confused. It is easier, and in some ways
more satisfying, to fall back on System 1 thinking.
Voters may also be using political herding heuristics in a relatively unemotional way. As we have seen in previous chapters, we use heuristics – simple rules of thumb – to help us to make quick decisions. In the case of political herding, each individual voter knows that his or her single vote is not going to change the outcome of any given election – so there is no incentive to be fully and completely informed about the options. We don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking deeply about our political choices because individual voters do not have to take responsibility for aggregate outcomes. This creates a free-rider problem. No-one is properly incentivised to make an effort in searching for facts. A diffused sense of responsibility for the outcome encourages individuals to express themselves via an individual protest vote, say for an extreme candidate or outcome.
This situation is exacerbated in an uncertain world when information is muddy. When we struggle to assess the trustworthiness of information, it impairs our ability to balance different information sources against each other. The Brexit vote illustrates some of the problems that can emerge when voters don’t trust the information promulgated by their leaders. In the run-up to the referendum, both Leave and Remain circulated misleading information, creating widespread confusion. Ordinary voters could not know who was being more truthful and whom they could trust. There was no verifiably trustworthy group to follow.
Herding heuristics and social learning strategies only work well when we can assume that we are not being manipulated. The way in which we learn from others is complicated by the emergence of ‘fake news’ – defined by economists Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow as news stories that are verifiably false and intentionally devised to mislead readers. Drawing on data collected during the 2016 US presidential election, Allcott and Gentzkow used econometric tools to analyse large numbers of fake news stories. They conducted a post-election survey of nearly 11,000 American voters to estimate how many articles their respondents had seen, and identified twenty-one fake news stories which had been repeatedly read and remembered over the course of the campaign. Their evidence suggests that fake news stories were worryingly influential in the election outcome.39 If we herd behind others on the basis of false ‘information’ deliberately circulated by politicians and their spin doctors, then we are being manipulated without even knowing it, especially when fact-checking is difficult. When this fake news is psychologically and emotionally laden, emotional influences creep in without us realising, making us even more vulnerable to manipulation.
The leader of the ‘Free World’
Risk-taking is an essential ingredient for political success. US President Donald Trump’s success is a story of a political triumph based around a business-world entrepreneurial risk-taking strategy adapted to the political domain. By taking what others might have thought were extreme risks, he was able to reap large rewards. Alongside his own risk-taking strategies, he also manipulated the conformist tendencies of his in-group. His battle against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election illustrates some of the tribal and political tensions, and their links with relationships between leaders and followers. Both Trump and Clinton were controversial candidates. Both were rich members of the elite, Trump in business and Clinton in politics. Both had been involved in damning controversies but, on the surface at least, Clinton had the extensive political experience, a distinguished academic and professional background and evidence of real intelligence (though she may also have faced the additional obstacle of voters’ bias against women).
Trump leveraged the wealth accumulated from his business empire to finance his ultimately successful election campaign, succeeding despite lurid and compromising allegations swirling around him – allegations that perhaps would have scuppered his aspirations in more stable times. For Trump and his supporters, his victory was marvellous and spectacular, not only because few pundits were able to predict the outcome. For others, it was a disaster, and seemed to unleash increasing division, polarisation and tribalism, not only within the American electorate but also across the globe.
How was Trump able to attract such massive electoral support? He seems to share little in common with those who voted for him, whether blue-collar or white-collar workers. Trump was heir to an enormous fortune and has lived a life of wealth and privilege, and yet ordinary Americans, some of whom eke out a living in the most straitened of circumstances, believe that he is their champion. Trump was innately able to encourage ordinary people to identify with his rebellion against established elites. His emotive and impulsive outbursts were shocking to some, but very appealing to others. Through the election cycle and after his inauguration as president, he seemed unafraid of conflict. He took on all comers, especially those conventionally regarded as authoritative – including key members of his own Republican Party as well as American intelligence advisers and the judicial system. Trump’s calls to rebellion and his eventual victory allowed ordinary people to believe that they too could wrest control of their own destinies away from the political elite.
The ability to tap into voters’ sense of identity links back to psychologist Henri Tajfel’s insights. As we saw in chapter 2, Tajfel explored how easy it is to build identity with our in-groups and encourage conflicts with our out-groups. By encouraging fear of the out-group, the in-group creates a strong identity that feeds on itself, as members of the group reinforce each other’s views, strengthening the group’s power. This is the basis for Trump’s populism. Trump exploited fear of the out-group to a controversial degree – such as during the election campaign, when he accused some Mexican immigrants of being rapists and criminals, and pledged to build a wall along the US’s southern border. On a platform of ‘making America great again’ he tapped into Islamophobia and fears about terrorism with his divisive and seemingly ill-judged ‘Muslim ban’, enforcing stricter rules on visas for travellers from a selected group of Muslim-majority countries (tellingly, not including Saudi Arabia).40 So it may be surprising to think that, possibly without knowing it, Trump was displaying a wily social intelligence. He understands crowds and what motivates them – an innate talent perhaps, but consolidated during his time as a TV celebrity on the US version of The Apprentice. His supporters are simultaneously copycats and contrarians, herding together with a minority of other Trump-supporting copycats while rebelling against the majority of voters who oppose him. Trump did not need majority support to legitimise his role as leader, and his plummeting approval ratings after the election have not made much practical difference either. Within a year, Trump’s remaining support base had fallen to around 35 per cent, but still large enough, and perhaps more importantly, fanatical and cohesive enough, to give him a solid base of power. Trump’s cunning came in understanding that his minority tribal following was more interested in powerful social media messages than demonstrable facts. His accusations of ‘fake news’ became notorious and he attacked his detractors on a near weekly basis, circulating other inflammatory statements via Twitter every day. His advisers, and websites associated with him during his election run, orchestrated highly effective campaigns using spoof and smear stories. Trump realised that an ability to understand and tell the literal truth is not the path to political power.
So why would he tell the truth? PolitiFact monitors the verifiability of politicians’ statements in the US, and their verdict on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was that 70 per cent of his statements were in the range ‘mostly false’ to ‘pants on fire’, with another 14 per cent only ‘half true’ – so only 16 per cent of his statements can be said to be true.41 By contrast, during her presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s record was 26 per cent in the ‘false’ range with 51 per cent seeming to be ‘true’ and ‘mostly true’, suggesting that most of what Clinton said was checking out.42 Quite aside from the other reasons not to vote for him, the questionable veracity of Trump’s statements did not seem to deter a large number of voters. Why wouldn’t a ruthles
sly ambitious politician lie if there is no institutionalised penalty for manipulative grandstanding? And if politicians’ assertions appear in a Twitter feed, ephemeral and quickly removed, then they may even escape much in the way of rebuke – though the message may still have an emotional impact on supporters.
So, whilst it might be easy to conclude that those voting for Trump were not as well informed as those voting for Clinton, this reflects a poor and potentially divisive understanding of the dynamics between leaders and followers. Democracy is built on principles of consensus. When facts are hard to find and the world is uncertain and confusing, then consensus is built on unedifying foundations. Populist politicians have encouraged us to reject objective information and the judgements of experts, and their ability to promulgate their populist messages quickly is amplified by Twitter and other social media. The influence of social media was a key factor behind the seismic political changes of 2016, not only the election of Donald Trump but also the UK vote for Brexit. Indeed, as US Senate committees continue to deliberate on whether social media were exploited by Russian interests keen to deliver a victory for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, the platforms are under fire. Far from being heralded as a channel for triumphant democracy during the Arab Spring uprisings of 2010–12, social media are now castigated as providing the means for the exertion of sinister geopolitical manipulations at the highest echelons of international power.43 Whatever the outcome of the investigations, it’s clear that Trump is a genius of reinvention and, curiously for such a largely self-absorbed demagogue, has an acute kind of social consciousness. If he did not, then he would not have been able to inspire such a loyal herd of copycats to follow his lead.44