Perceptions – Are Americans Really Profoundly Different Today

 

We seem to be a nation ripped in half by loud toxic voices enabled by mass social media platforms and mendacious mainstream media. Hate and discord, infectious falsehoods and “us” vs “them” politics have redefined America. Individuals with extreme views use to be isolated, silent seethers in communities across the land. We’ve taken to calling hateful mass killers “lone wolves;” nothing could be farther from the truth. 18-year-old avowed racist, Payton Gendron, was deeply connected in online communities with people who shared his extremist hateful views, discussed targets and weapons openly, before Gendron sprayed his bullets mostly against African Americans at a Buffalo grocery store in a minority neighborhood. Although 13 people were shot, all 10 fatalities were Black. It’s no surprise that reactions in Black communities around America have experienced elevated fear and hopelessness about their place in America.

“[A post-Buffalo shooting Washington] Post-Ipsos poll of Black Americans finds most are saddened and angered by the attacks, but just 8 percent say they are ‘surprised.’ Even before the shooting, in earlier poll questioning, Black people saw racism as one of their greatest threats. After the attack, only 10 percent think the problem of racism will improve in their lifetimes, while a 53 percent majority think it will get worse… Three-quarters of Black people are worried that they or someone they love will be physically attacked because they are Black.

“A 70 percent majority of Black Americans think at least half of White Americans hold white supremacist beliefs, 75 percent of Black Americans say white supremacists are a ‘major threat’ to Black Americans, and 66 percent say white supremacy is a bigger problem today than it was five years ago.” Washington Post, May 21st. As you watch congressional gridlock, rising gunplay against minorities and a newfound freedom to express hateful speech and open legitimized bigotry, as even suggesting that discrimination persists in American society can get a teacher fired in red states with anti-CRT laws, what happens when you dig beneath the angry rhetoric and probe how most Americans really feel… and how they think change has occurred?

The question of how we think most people feel and how they actually feel was probed in a recent survey, “Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change” written by Jason Dana, Yale Associate Professor of Management and Marketing and Columbia Business School postdoctoral research scholar, Adam Mastroianni. The results, summarized by Roberta Kwok in the May 16th Yale Insights, are surprising. The headline: “Perceptions of Shifts in Public Opinion Are Wildly Off Base” reveals: “New research finds that people have consistently inaccurate impressions of how public attitudes on various issues have changed over the last several decades. They often greatly overestimate how conservative people were in the past, leading to an exaggerated impression of liberal progress…

“[For example:] what percentage of Americans do you think were worried about climate change in the early 1990s, and how did that figure shift over the next few decades?... One might reasonably assume that many more people are concerned about the issue now than in the past. After all, the world has been besieged by wildfires, droughts, and more powerful storms, with constant coverage of these disasters in the media. But the real answer is that 61% of people surveyed in 1990 expressed concern about climate change—only slightly less than the 65% who did so in 2019…

“Then they asked 943 study participants to guess how public opinion on those issues had shifted from the earliest to the most recent years in the poll data. For instance, people estimated what percentage of people said they would vote for a qualified female presidential candidate in 1972 and in 2010.

“In general, the study participants’ guesses were badly wrong. They overestimated how much social change had occurred for 57% of issues, underestimated it for 20%, and guessed the wrong direction of change for another 20%... For instance, people believed that willingness to vote for a female president had leapt from 32% to 70%, when in fact it had gone from 74% to 96%. They thought that feelings toward Black Americans (measured on a warm/cold ‘feelings thermometer’) were much more unfavorable a half-century ago; in reality, they were similar to people’s feelings today. And they guessed that support for an assault weapons ban had increased from 41% to 56% over the last two decades, when it had actually declined from 58% to 48%.

“Why was this happening? The bias appeared to be partly driven by an assumption that people were much more conservative in the past, and therefore that much more progress in the liberal direction had occurred… People systematically overestimated shifts in the direction they considered liberal, and this bias was even more prominent on issues that they thought were highly partisan. Participants seemed to assume that if a position was very liberal, ‘people must have really been against it in the past,’ Dana says.

“The team doesn’t know exactly how this misperception formed. One possibility is that people’s impressions are informed by TV shows and movies about past eras, which might not accurately reflect true attitudes. Or participants might have mistakenly assumed that major events, such as the 2008 election of Barack Obama, heralded a tectonic shift in attitudes. (People had estimated that stated willingness to vote for a Black presidential candidate skyrocketed from 32% to 74% from 1978 to 2010, when the change was actually much smaller: 85% to 97%.).”

The problem seems to be exacerbated by loud and often unpleasant voices articulating long-held fears, blame and biases. That mass and social media, reinforced by legislatures imposing a conservative will in traditionally conservative red states, have legitimized bigotry may have made the problem worse, but the underlying feelings appear to have been there a very long time. While the reaction of younger voters, those most challenged by intolerance, gun violence and most of all, existential climate change, may force a major attitude shift in the future, today’s opinions, loudly voiced, seem to mirror the same feelings Americans have held for a very long time.

I’m Peter Dekom, and scarce resources, over population, climate change and unrestrained leaders willing to apply police and military force to implement their totalitarian visions seem to bring out the toxic expression of very old beliefs and biases.