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 Benabou on motivated beliefs.⁴⁷ They argue that a big step toward understanding beliefs is not taking them too literally.

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.

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.

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 circumstances 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.