In a clever experiment illustrating the power of these norms, a group of mostly Hispanic high school students in Los Angeles were offered the option to sign up for a free SAT prep.44 Some students, chosen at random, were told their choice would remain a secret, while some of them were led to believe their choice might become public. In non-honors classes, the latter group of students were less likely to sign up for the course (61 percent versus 72 percent), presumably because they did not want their friends to find out they had academic aspirations.
It is true that the folk theorem could explain what is going on here. Perhaps it is true that students would be dropped by all their friends if they found out the students were nerds, and anyone who talked to them would also be excommunicated. But it is not accidental that this norm has taken hold with Hispanic students, where there is a history of resenting the norms of white culture, sometimes with very good reason; these Hispanic boys and girls, it seems, were worried about “acting white.” That worry has deep roots in their history. We never hear of Asian kids in the United States who have adopted a habit of avoiding their friends who work too hard. In the Becker-Stigler world, since the norms are norms only because people have submitted to them, there is no reason why Hispanic students would not sometimes turn out to be hard working and the Asians the slackers. It is history and the social context that seem to be guiding us toward one norm rather than the other.
LET’S TRY TO ACCOUNT FOR TASTES45
To investigate the way the social context influences us, researchers at the University of Zurich recruited a group of bankers as experimental subjects and asked them to flip a coin ten times and report online the outcomes they got.46 They were told that if they had more than a threshold number of heads (or tails) they would get twenty Swiss francs (about $20) for each extra head (or tail) they reported. Nobody checked whether or not they reported accurately, which created a very strong incentive to cheat.
The key comparison was between those who, before the experiment began, were asked about their favorite leisure activity, highlighting their role as a “regular” person, and those questions about their role as a banker, effectively highlighting their banker identity. Those made to think of themselves as bankers reported many more heads, so many more that it could not have been pure chance. The estimated cheating rate went from 3 percent for those thinking of themselves as regular people to 16 percent for those thinking of themselves as bankers.
This was not because the bankers were better at figuring out how to do well in the game; everybody in the game was a banker, and what got highlighted about them (banker or not) was chosen at random. But being reminded of their profession seems to have brought out a different moral self, one more willing to cheat.
In other words, people seemed to act as if they had multiple personalities, each with different preferences. The context picks the personality that gets to decide in a particular situation. In the Swiss experiment, the context was whether or not the person saw himself as a banker, but in life it is often the people we are with, the schools we went to, what we do for work or for play, the clubs we belong to, and the clubs we would like to belong to that form us and shape our preferences. We economists, in our fealty to standard preferences, have tried very hard to keep all of that out, but it is increasingly obvious this is a hopeless quest.
MOTIVATED BELIEFS
Once we begin to acknowledge that our beliefs and even what we take to be our deep preferences are determined by context, many things fall into place. One important insight comes from the Nobel Prize–winner Jean Tirole’s work with Roland Bénabou on motivated beliefs.47 They argue that a big step toward understanding beliefs is not taking them too literally. Our beliefs about ourselves are shaped in part by our emotional needs; we feel terrible when we disappoint ourselves. The emotional value we put on beliefs about ourselves also leads us to distort our beliefs about others; for example, since we want to shield ourselves from our own prejudices, we couch them in the language of objective truth (“I have nothing against North African cashiers, but they would not respond to my encouragement anyway, so I don’t bother”).
We don’t like changing our minds because we don’t like to admit we were wrong to begin with. This is why Abhijit insists it is always the software’s fault. We avoid information that would force us to confront our moral ambiguities; we skip over news about the treatment of migrant children in detention centers to avoid thinking about the fact we have supported a government that treats children in this way.
It is easy to see how we may get trapped by these strategies. We don’t like to think of ourselves as racists; hence, if we have negative thoughts about others, it is tempting to rationalize our behavior by blaming them. The more we can persuade ourselves migrants are to blame for bringing their children with them, the less we worry about the children in their little cages. Instead, we look for evidence that we are right; we overweight every piece of news, however thin, that supports our original position, ignoring the rest.
Over time, the instinctive defensive reaction we started from is replaced by a carefully constructed set of seemingly robust arguments. At that point, we start feeling that any disagreement with our views, given how “solid” the arguments are, has to be either an insinuation of moral failure on our part or a questioning of our intelligence. That’s when it can get violent.
Recognizing these patterns has a number of important implications. First, obviously, accusing people of racism or calling them the “deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton famously did, is a terrible idea. It assaults people’s moral sense of themselves and puts their backs up. They immediately stop listening. Conversely, one can see why calling egregious racists “fine people,” and emphasizing there are bad people “on both sides,” as President Trump did, is clearly an effective strategy (however morally reprehensible) to gain popularity, since it makes those who make these remarks feel better about themselves.
It also explains why facts or fact-checking don’t seem to make much of a dent on people’s views, at least in the short run, as we observed in chapter 2, in the context of migration. It remains possible that in the longer run, when the initial “How dare you challenge my beliefs?” reaction fades, people will adjust their views. We should not stop telling the truth, but it is more useful to express it in a nonjudgmental way.
Since most of us like to think we are decent people, forcing someone to affirm their own values before exercising a judgment involving others might reduce prejudice. Psychologists these days encourage parents to tell their children not that they should be nice, but that they are nice, and all they have to do is to behave in conformity with their natural kindness. That applies to all of us.
This strategy is more likely to work when self-esteem is not already battered. Part of the problem low-income whites face in areas where anti-immigrant and anti-black sentiments are the strongest is that in some observable ways their lives come very close to their own caricature of how those despised “others” live. In 1997, William Julius Wilson wrote in the context of what was happening in the black community that “the consequences of high neighborhood joblessness are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty… Many of today’s problems in the inner-city ghettos—crime, family dissolution, welfare, low levels of social organization, and so on—are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work.”48
Twenty years later, J. D. Vance wrote in Hillbilly Elegy: “Wilson’s book spoke to me. I wanted to write him a letter and tell him that he had described my home perfectly. That it resonated so personally is odd, however, because he wasn’t writing about the hillbilly transplants from Appalachia—he was writing about black people in the inner cities.”49
That Wilson’s description of the social problems in black neighborhoods applies so well to white communities in the Rust Belt now literally adds insult to injury. Since the perception of their own worth is tied to a sense of superiority with respect to blacks and migrants, the convergence in social circums
tances exacerbates the poor white American’s sense of crisis.
There are two ways to proceed to restore the sense of self. One is denial (for instance: “We can afford to be resolutely anti-abortion since none of the girls in our community ever get pregnant”). The other is increasing the distance between us and them by turning the other into a caricature. For a white person who has to be on disability because it is the only way to get welfare, it is not sufficient anymore to say a black or Latino single mother must be a welfare queen; that was a Reagan-era insult. Now that white people have to be on welfare as well, the insult has to be ratcheted up; she must be a gang member.
This underscores why we need social policies to reach beyond economic survival and try to restore the dignity of those whose occupations are threatened by technological progress, trade, and other disruptions. The policies must effectively counterbalance the loss of self-confidence; old-fashioned government handouts are not going to work by themselves. What is needed is a wholesale rethinking of the social policy apparatus, the subject of chapter 9.
COHERENT ARBITRARINESS50
We know that people will go to great lengths to avoid evidence that would force them to revise their opinions on what they consider to be their core value system (including their opinion about other races or immigrants), because it is so related to their views of themselves. Unfortunately, it does not follow that people are particularly thoughtful about forming those initial opinions.
In one of the most famous experiments in the field of behavioral economics, Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler chose college students randomly to receive a mug or a pen. Immediately following the gifts, they offered to buy them back from the newly endowed mug and pen owners. At the same time, they also offered those who did not get a mug or a pen the opportunity to buy what they did not get. Strikingly, the price at which the newly endowed sellers were willing to part with their mugs or pens was often two to three times greater than what those who did not have the pen or mug wanted to pay for them.51 Since who ended up with a mug or a pen was entirely random, there was absolutely no reason why the arbitrary act of being chosen to get one of them would create such a divergence in valuations. The difference in the bids must have been because those who ended up with a mug started liking their mug more, while those who got a pen did the same with the pen, suggesting there is relatively little intrinsic or deep about how people value things like mugs and pens.
An even more dramatic form of arbitrariness was revealed by another experiment. Students were asked to bid on trackballs, wine bottles, and books. Before bidding, they were asked to write down the last two digits of their social security number with a dollar sign in front of it and imagine it was a possible price for the product they had. They obviously knew their social security number had nothing to do with the price of a wine bottle, but nevertheless they were influenced by the “price” they had written down. Students with social security numbers ending in the number eighty or larger bid between 200 percent and 350 percent more for the same good than those whose social security numbers ended in a number less than twenty. In most other ways, they still behaved according to the standard model: for example, they were less willing to buy as the price went up and were most likely to buy cheaper items. But they seemed to have no idea how much these products were worth to them in absolute terms.52
But of course mugs and pens are not immigrants and Muslims. Are we really seriously implying this arbitrariness applies to preferences on these much more serious issues as well? We are indeed.
ROBBERS CAVE
Something similar shows up in social preferences, what economists call preferences that concern other human beings. In 1954, Muzafer Sherif and Carolyn Wood Sherif carried out an experiment in which twenty-two eleven- and twelve-year-old boys were invited to a summer camp in Robbers Cave, Oklahoma.53 The boys were randomly divided into two groups. Each group spent some time living in a different location of Robbers Cave, so that the groups were initially unaware of each other’s existence. Then at some point the two groups were introduced to each other and made to compete, for example, at tug-of-war. This created animosity between the groups, leading to name-calling and attempts to vandalize the other group’s possessions. In the final days, the researchers artificially induced a water shortage, making it useful for the two groups to work together. After some initial hesitation, they did so and mostly forgot their animus.
Some version of this experiment has been repeated many times, and the basic insight has proven very robust. Interestingly, the fact that arbitrary labels heavily influence our loyalties is true even without the bonding experience the initial isolation provided. Just giving a different name to a randomly chosen group of participants got in-group members to favor their own over the others. This was as true of adults as of eleven-year-olds.
Both parts of the Robbers Cave experiment are important: the fact that it is easy to divide as well as the fact that it is possible to reunite. That it is easy to divide is a strong reason to be extremely frightened by the xenophobes and the cynical manipulators of xenophobia who rule so many countries today. The damage they do is not permanent, but unless it is carefully undone it can leave a terrible scar on a nation. In Rwanda, the Belgian colonialists created the myth of the superior Tutsis and the inferior Hutus out of a more or less homogenous population as a way of securing allies in the process of governing. In the immediate post-colonial period, the Tutsis embraced their purported superiority, much to the resentment of the Hutus, and this became a crucial contributory factor to the horrific genocide of 1994.54
At the same time, the fact that preferences are not necessarily internally consistent makes attaching ad hominem labels—such as “racist,” other “ists,” or for that matter “deplorables”—to other human beings suspect, because many people are both racist and not, and their expressions of prejudice are often expressions of pain or frustration. Those who voted for Obama and then Trump may be confused about what each candidate stood for, but to dismiss them as racists after they voted for Trump is both unfair and unhelpful.
HOMOPHILY
Since our preferences are strongly influenced by whom we associate with, social divides are particularly costly because there is very little mixing across these divides; people tend to associate with others like themselves. In US schools, black teenagers mostly associate with blacks, and whites with whites.55 This is what sociologists call homophily. For obvious reasons, this is especially true of those from the largest social group in the school. Those who are a part of a small minority have no choice but to have relatively more friends outside their group.56
This does not have to be evidence of intense prejudice. That students in the biggest group do not reach out to outsiders can easily be explained by the fact it is easy for them to meet others like them, and therefore as long as they have a mild preference for their own group, they have no reason to reach out beyond it.
The source of the mild preference does not have to be a negative view of anyone else; it could just be that it is easier to be with people who speak the same language, who share the same gestures and the same sense of humor, who watch the same TV shows and enjoy the same music, or who make the same unstated assumptions about what is appropriate or not. Abhijit, who is from India, is always struck by how easy it is for him to talk to people from Pakistan, notwithstanding the past seventy years of animus between India and that country. The sense of what is funny or what is private (hint: South Asians are nosy), what creates intimacy and what distracts from it, is something, he says, instinctive in all of us South Asians, something partition did not manage to destroy.
The downside to this very natural behavioral pattern becomes evident when we meet people from other groups. We hold back; we walk on eggshells, rationing our human warmth because we worry we might be misunderstood. Or we blunder forward, giving offense when none was intended. Either way, something important gets lost, with the result that we are less likely to communicate smoothly with people from other
groups.
This is partly why people mostly marry people like themselves. A little over fifty years after the landmark decision Loving v. Virginia, which in 1967 struck down prohibition of interracial marriage in the United States, only about one in six American newly married couples was biracial.57 In India, 74 percent of families say they believe marriages should be made within castes. Our research suggests this is in part because the men in each caste are looking for women who are the equivalents of their sisters (in other words, the familiar) and likewise for women, and the best place to find such a match is naturally within the group they belong to.58
ECHO CHAMBERS AND HOLOGRAMS
Such behavior leads to accidental and probably largely unconscious segregation. We may not realize that if all of us choose to hang out with friends like us, we end up forming entirely separate islands of similar people. This feeds into the intensification of apparently bizarre preferences and/or extreme political views. One obvious downside of sticking to our own is we don’t get exposed to other points of view. As a result, differing opinions can persist, even on points of fact such as whether vaccines cause autism or where Barack Obama was born, and even more obviously on matters of taste. We earlier observed that people might rationally choose to suppress their own opinions and join the herd, but of course not being exposed to any opinions outside the herd only makes things worse. We end up with multiple closed groups with contrasting opinions and very little capacity for communicating respectfully with each other. Cass Sunstein, a law professor at Harvard and a member of the Obama administration, describes these as “echo chambers,” where like-minded people whip themselves into a frenzy by listening only to each other.59
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