I’ve been thinking of this, to me, baffling problem: what induces people to believe a fraud like Donald Trump who enacts policies that show his contempt for them and actually damages them, and yet refuse to support someone like Bernie Sanders who is offering policies, like Medicare-for-all and action on climate change, that could measurably improve their lives? How do we make sense of this? It is similar to the problem that absorbed Tolstoy in War and Peace: how could someone like Napoleon induce hundreds of thousands of men to move from West to East and risk their lives in brutal wars, and likewise, more hundreds of thousands to follow the lead of Russia’s Emperor Alexander in a mass movement from East to West to war on that same Napoleon? Tolstoy concluded that it was not Napoleon’s so-called “genius” or Alexander’s noble aura that moved millions, but some larger global force that he likened to destiny or spirit. And that “great men” were merely swept along in these global movements. I’m not going to conclude here that a similar global or spiritual force drives Trump’s minions (or those of any other movement), but rather look to what we now know, or think we know, about psychology, culture and/or brain structure for my tentative answer.
When I was in the Army reserves many years ago, I was required to go for an annual two-week summer camp for ‘training.’ This one year we were in upstate New York, at a little-used base where the barracks we were housed in were in desperate shape. The latrines were filthy and the floors, covered in a kind of linoleum tile, were dirt-covered and deeply careworn. The sergeant of our barracks, a weekend warrior like the rest of us but rather gung-ho, decided that we should really spruce up those floors and outshine our co-warriors in neighboring barracks. But we had no real spit-polishing supplies. So he decided to take up a collection, and one trooper would be designated to go to town and buy things like wax or mop-&-glow or some such commercial cleaning product, and we’d have the shiniest floors on the base. To raise the necessary funds, everyone would chip in a dollar or less. All were enthusiastic about this chance to rise above our neighbors, and willingly contributed. I alone refused. I explained my reasons: why should we be responsible for buying supplies? If the Army wanted the floors to be shiny, then they should supply us with the goods; the military budget was ridiculous and bloated enough to be able to afford us basic supplies. My stance was met with surprise, dismay, and outright anger. ‘I was not going along with the program. I was not a team player.’ And it was true. I was not. The whole thing seemed like puerile pandering to the “bosses,” a vain attempt to prove how much we valued our training and the spirit of the military—which I did not.
Those two positions—obedience to current authority, as opposed to thinking something through and evaluating it—seem to me to mark the poles of this question. When faced with a choice, does a person accede to the constituted authority—be it Napoleon or my sergeant or a boss or some wannabe dictator like Trump—or think things through and come to a decision based on the information and conditions that pertain? How do people decide? What inclines some to go one way and some to go another? What motivated so many Frenchmen to defy authorities and opt for revolution in 1789, even agreeing to cut off the heads of the king and many of his nobles? Why did others refuse to take part? Surely it had to do with more than bread, though starvation must have been a major factor. And I am not here talking about heroics; I am wondering about average people who are either driven to take actions from which there is little hope of returning, or of opting to side with order and authority no matter how battered by that authority they may be. I suppose in the end it is a question of risk. What inclines some people to opt for some action that risks their very lives and way of life, or to refuse the action, fearing to take that risk?
Social psychology has confronted this question extensively in recent years. The experiments may seem trivial, but they are nonetheless revealing. And they involve, in the classic experiments created by Nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman, presenting test subjects with a choice: how willing are you to risk $10 on a bet? Would you do it if the odds were even, that is, rewarding you with $10 for a win? Or would you need more potential winnings to risk your $10? The answer is that the majority of subjects required the chance of winning to be 2-1/2 times the chance of losing before they’d take the risk. If they were offered a potential $22.50 return for a $10 bet, most people would go for it. Less than that—say the possibility of winning only $15—and the fear of losing the $10 they already had loomed too large. In other words, average people most fear losing what they have, and will not risk it unless the possible gains are substantially greater than the loss. The pain of losing appears to be greater than the possible exhilaration of winning. This seems relevant to our discussion of people’s choices in a crisis. Many people will be reluctant to take a chance on some candidate like Bernie Sanders who promises revolutionary change—even if that change promises much-needed relief to them and theirs. The fear of losing what they have, or think they have, is much greater than the potential gains offered. By contrast, some of the people attracted to Trump are clearly attracted to his slogan, “Make America Great Again.” The promised gain here suggests that the America where they had good jobs, and were in solid control regarding their position in the social hierarchy—that is, as white Americans who were clearly in a superior position to Blacks and Hispanics and immigrants—would be restored, or at least preserved. And it was great enough to move them. There would be no left-wing social leveling with consequences that were unpredictable, if not dire to them. There was a risk—which they are now discovering thanks to a virus—but it must have seemed that the great potential rewards in revived social superiority were worth that risk.
The notion of control is also an important factor here. Ray Lancaster, in a November 2018 post on quora.com, emphasized three factors—control, connection and consistency—that are crucial psychological needs for most people, relevant to decision making. The first of these, control, looms large both today, and in our evolutionary past. For hunter-gatherers, that is, it was crucial that they could control their access to food. This was not only the case in fair weather, but perhaps moreso in cold months when food was harder to come by. Thus, controlling food so that some was stored for winter would have been crucial to survival, and those who exerted such control would have better survived to pass on their genes (this goes mainly for groups in temperate climates with severe winters; those who live in the Amazon, for example, have been shown to be noticeably casual with food supplies that are almost always available). The fear of loss would operate here, too; those who refused to risk losing their food reserves—e.g. who maintained control of their food supplies—would have had a better chance at survival than those who were profligate with food.
But for these same ancestors, maintaining connections to others in their group would have been no less important. Connection with others would have been crucial for access to females, always a negotiation where leaders tended to monopolize such access, but also for successful hunting and for finding and maintaining shelter. Connection—here shorthand for social and cooperating skills—thus was, and still is a key development for humans. Maintaining such connections, indeed, is what prompts much of our decision-making discussed above. Why do most people tend to obey authorities, even though they might really want to go off on their own and please themselves? Because they fear to lose that social connection that obedience assures them. They go along to get along. Indeed, many try not to stand out for the same reason: to maintain that social connection by conformity. And the inhibition on refusing to go along in a social situation—like the one in my army barracks noted above—stems from this same fear of social exclusion. Which is why ostracism was such a dire punishment in ancient cultures like Greece and Rome, and even for Napoleon himself, exiled to Elba. The many eons when ostracism meant certain loss of the protection of the group, and often certain death, still resonates in our psyches. Finally, consistency would have been necessary, to remember what processes had been used to store food, and what to keep doing, not just for food preservation, but also for the relationship between signs and meanings. The rise of a certain phase of the moon, or star, or the appearance of a given plant would be always looked for to maintain the best chance of survival. So would ways of cooking or hunting or eating or a thousand other procedures, all of which become consistent parts of the group’s cultural heritage. And consistently maintaining these would, to a large degree, help ensure individual and group survival. We see this today in the thousands of ways that cultural groups conserve practices or rituals that, to us now, seem useless. We also see it in the reluctance of decision-makers to withdraw their support from a leader like Trump because of new evidence; such a switch of allegiance would make them seem inconsistent, not only to others, but to themselves.
The above-cited conditions do not exhaust the list of factors that affect risk aversion in choice. Research has shown that three more factors—individualism, masculinity, and power—also seriously matter when it comes to taking risks. People from cultures that privilege the individual—like the United States—over the collective—like many Asian countries—tend to be more risk averse. The reasoning is simple: if your decisions are solely your responsibility, then the burden of that risk, and possible losses, are yours alone to bear. Conversely, if you have a family or group to share that burden, the risk of loss is more likely to be shared, and thus proportionately less onerous for you. All other things being equal, you can afford to take more risks. The relative masculinity of a culture likewise affects risk aversion. People from cultures that privilege masculine values such as aggression, that operate on fear, and which are highly goal-oriented toward wealth and career, also tend to be more risk averse. That is, where these things matter highly or even exclusively in the way people assess an individual’s worth, the loss of any of them figures to be critical to most of its members. The tendency is to be extra reluctant to risk whatever one has accumulated (money, property) because it means a loss of social position as well. On the other hand, those with power tend to be more willing to take risks. The obvious reason is that people with power have more confidence in their ability, and thus are more confident in their ability to win. They are also likely to have more wealth to fall back on, and more education, another factor that has been found to make such people willing to take more risks than those without education.
We should be cautious in this regard as well, however, for recent research has shown that leaders—presumably those with power—especially if they are men, tend to overvalue their decision-making abilities. Such men tend to be much less reflective, and hence ignore their actual ignorance and the downsides in a given situation (one again thinks of Trump). This means that such leaders often lead their countries or states or companies into highly risky and sometimes disastrous situations. We need only think of Napoleon and his ill-advised invasion of Russia in 1809, or Hitler doing the same thing in WWII. The results for both leaders and their nations was catastrophic: Napoleon lost almost his entire army of 600,000 men, while for Hitler’s forces, the punishing losses they suffered in the Russian winter marked the beginning of their total defeat by the Allies.
There are certainly other factors that affect risk aversion and choice—such as the relative presence of the neurotransmitter dopamine, so important in the brains of addicts like compulsive gamblers. More dopamine apparently means more willingness to take risks. This does not cancel out the effects of fear—mediated mostly by the amygdala—but it tends to weaken the fear response. But enough said. We can see that numerous factors can affect how given individuals respond to risk in making decisions. Does this tell us anything about how people choose in a political situation? Perhaps not. But perhaps we can see that the dominance of certain factors over others will tend to shape decision-making. And perhaps what seems baffling can make more sense, as we take some of these factors into consideration.
Consider, for example, Trump voters. On the face of it, one might think that people whose lives have been decimated by the transfer of so much American manufacturing to foreign countries, by the ravages of climate change that promise more damage in the future, would be receptive to a political promise of government action and direct help. Such as a higher minimum wage. Or better protections for workers. Or the ‘Green new deal.’ Apparently not. All these were outweighed by Trump’s scapegoating of immigrants said to be “taking American jobs.” But most of those immigrants worked in jobs like farming or meat processing which American workers had abandoned years ago. What sense did that make? But perhaps if we consider that many of these voters come from cultures that place a high value on traditional masculinity, not to mention individualism, we can better understand their tendency to avoid the risk of “liberal” promises in favor of a candidate like Trump who gave them an easily-understood target to vent their anger and frustration upon. And perhaps the image of a confident, authoritarian leader induced them to place their bets on the man who appeared capable of taking charge and implementing policies that would favor white conservatives like themselves, rather than one making “pie-in-the-sky” promises for government action that was characterized as ‘socialism.’ Far better to pledge loyalty and obedience to a Big Daddy figure; and stay with what everyone around one appeared to favor as the cultural choice (action against abortion; action against ‘government handouts’ for those outsiders who ‘can’t take care of themselves.’) Stay within, that is, the collective judgment in their traditional communities.
So what do we have? Just this. If people can be convinced that their choice will keep them within the protection of their own valued culture, the culture that has been handed down for generations (what’s good enough for my father is good enough for me), they appear willing to take a risk even on someone who resembles them hardly at all, but appears confident and powerful. Someone who inspires obedience to fatherhood and the flag and ‘one nation under (their) God.’ Conversely, they appear unwilling to take a risk on someone who seems to promise what they actually need, but whose credentials appear to align him/her with a central government that seems to favor those who do not deserve their consideration. The poor. The ones of a different color. The ones who fail to conform to what they consider acceptable sexual or social mores. Outsiders. Foreigners. Those who don’t belong. Why take a risk on them? Why risk losing one’s place—the place that one has come to believe one deserves? It makes no sense. Whereas taking a risk on someone who seems to promise to restore what one had and valued above all else, and to suppress those who seem to be eager to take it from you—that seems a risk worth taking.
And yet, even given all these sound psycho-social reasons, I have to confess that the enduring support for this liar, this philanderer, this huckster and money launderer, this bankrupt several times over, still makes no sense to me. It continues to baffle me that people, no matter how disappointing their lives, no matter how in love with their supposed white supremacy, can be so deceived in their basic ability to evaluate another human being (and themselves). It is as if all their hard-won faculties take a vacation. As if they do not see, or don’t want to see the catastrophe bearing down on them. As if they are not just unconscious of what is happening to them, but actively courting disaster. And there is, in fact, some reason to think that at least some of them—the fundamentalists who believe literally in the biblical prophecy of the end times—really do want the whole society to come crashing down just as they are elevated at last into paradise. That would really ‘make (their) America great again.’ Make it the holy site of the great Rapture* so fervently desired by evangelicals.
Too bad their choice rather ensures that they’re more likely to find themselves proceeding rapidly in the other direction.
Lawrence DiStasi
* After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever (1 Thessalonians).
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