Introduction: The search for connections

zyxwvuts zyxwvu zyxwvu zyxwv Journal of Social Issues. Vol, 4 2 . No. 2, 1986. pp. 1-9 Introduction: The Search for Connections zyxwvutsrq Faye Crosby Smith College Susan D. Clayton Yale University Connections between the facts of people’s personal circumstances and their judgments about social and political issues are often murky or invisible. This seems counterintuitive. The nature of social issues is such that most people in a particular society possess some information about them and, if pressed, will be able to offer an opinion concerning them; it would seem reasonable to assume that these opinions reflect the individual’s personal circumstances in some way. Similarly, if a set of events is to qualify as a “social issue” it must affect people, even if indirectly; it is thus to be expected that social issues would influence the interpretation of and behavior in people’s personal lives. Yet researchers who make these assumptions are frequently surprised. What is the nature of the associations between the events in one’s private life and one’s attitudes about sociopolitical matters? How often do the abstractions of larger issues remain isolated from the concrete realities of daily existence, and what circumstances bring the abstract and the concrete into alignment? These questions are prompted in part by a set of unexpected findings obtained in empirical investigations of the theory of relative deprivation (Crosby, 1976, 1982). This theory appears in many different versions throughout the social sciences, but all versions agree that feelings of deprivation or discontent regarding one’s personal lot in life vary not as a function of a person’s objective situation but rather as a function of his or her situation relative to some subjective zyxw zyxwv Special thanks are due to Patricia Gurin, George Levinger, and Leonard Saxe for their insightful help on this and all aspects of the current issue. Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to Faye Crosby. Psychology Department, Smith College, Northampton, MA 01060. 1 0022-4537/86/06M)~l$05.00/8 l 1986 The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issuer 2 zy zy Crosby and Clayton standard. Several versions of the theory also make use of the distinction between grievances felt about one’s personal situation and grievances felt about the situation of a collectivity, such as one’s reference group (Pettigrew, 1967; Runciman, 1966). When a grievance concerns the situation of a societally defined group, this grievance falls into the realm of social issues. The distinction between personal and group discontent proved central to a Canadian study of relative deprivation. Guimond and DubC-Simard (1983) showed that French-speaking (Francophone) managers who were, in material terms, at a disadvantage in their work lives expressed discontent about the situation of Francophones generally but felt contented about their own situations at work. The managers displayed what a Marxist might call “false consciousness”: a distorted perception of the way in which social conditions, which gave preference to the English-speaking majority, affected their personal lives. The same discontinuity between personal and collective discontent surfaced even more sharply in a survey conducted in Massachusetts by Crosby (1982). The female workers in Crosby ’s study earned significantly less money than exactly comparable male workers in the study; yet the women appeared, on numerous measures, as satisfied as the men with all aspects of their employment situations, including pay. Furthermore, while turning a blind eye to their own personal disadvantage, the working women in the study-significantly more than the working men or the housewives-repeatedly declared themselves upset about the situation of working women generally. The correlation between the measures of personal deprivation and of group deprivation among the women was modest (r = .27). Findings from the studies of relative deprivation lead us to ask why members of disadvantaged groups generally perceive more collective than personal discrimination. Similar questions can be posed about members of groups that enjoy relative advantage in our society. Do members of privileged groups experience more collective threat or more personal threat? Do the social attitudes of privileged Americans connect to their personal circumstances more firmly than is the case among the disadvantaged? Preliminary answers to questions such as these may be taken from a domain at the intersection of psychology and political science that has come to be known as “symbolic politics.” In a string of elegant analyses, Sears and his associates have demonstrated that racial attitudes of white citizens appear unrelated to their own material circumstances. For example, parental opposition to busing is not predicted by the likelihood that one’s own child will be bused to an integrated school (Kinder & Kiewiet, 1979; Kinder & Sears, 1981). Other political attitudes have similarly been shown to bear little or no relation to economic self-interest (e.g., Lau, Brown, & Sears, 1978; Sears, Lau, Tyler, & Allen, 1980; Sears, Tyler, Citrin, & Kinder, 1978). Discontinuities between people’s individual circumstances and their at- zyxwvut zyxwvu zy zyxwvut Introduction 3 titudes toward seemingly relevant public issues might not surprise scholars such as Lane (1962), who has described how the “common man” tends to “morselize” his life, or Abelson (1968), who has speculated about “opinion molecules. ” The discontinuities do, however, challenge the presumption that the American political actor is primarily motivated by self-interest, a presumption that has long been woven into studies of voting behavior and of political participation (see Kinder & Sears, 1985, for a review). Psychology has also made use of the notion that people’s assessments of their own life conditions relate systematically to their sociopolitical views, including both their current opinions about topical social issues and their more invariant political postures. The massive project on the authoritarian personality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950). for example, attempted to establish how sociopolitical sympathies express modes of being that, in turn, result from identifiable types of life experiences. Aiming the causal arrow in the other direction, treatments of women’s liberation and of “consciousness-raising’’ activities delineate how a woman’s view of broad social realities can color the picture she draws of her own personal realities (Keller, 1971; Weisstein, 1971). The reciprocal causality between personal and public life has perhaps been given the most minute attention by psychohistorians (e.g., Crosby & Crosby, 1981). Lasswell (1948) helped launch the field of psychohistory in an analysis of politicians, which argued that the quest for political power is often the outward manifestation of deep-seated internal doubts. Erik Erikson developed and refined this theme in his celebrated psychobiographies of Luther (1958) and of Gandhi (1969). Both studies contained the proposition that great leaders derive their charismatic appeal by embodying in their own personal struggles the broad sociopolitical issues of their day. The assumption that an individual’s political and social action can be best understood by examining the personal actor is at the heart of psychobiography. There is a stark contrast between psychobiographical studies that document close associations between personal life and social issues, and surveys such as those pertaining to relative deprivation theory and to symbolic politics; the latter indicate a surprising lack of association. How can the different sets of findings be reconciled? It is possible that differing methodologies account for the divergent conclusions. As Allport (1965) has shown, idiographic studies can reveal patterns difficult to discern nomothetically. Perhaps researchers would, for example, find that voters do make their political choices on the basis of events and conditions in their own lives if the researchers could study each voter closely over the years. Perhaps not. Perhaps, as the work of Erikson might suggest, the divergent conclusions of the various scholars represented here come more from differences in the targets of their scrutiny than from differences in their methods. Psycho- 4 Crosby and Clayton biographers, after all, study important social leaders and accomplished political achievers. The people questioned in surveys, by contrast, represent the average citizen and not the political elite. As suggested by Converse’s (1964) findings, there may be levels of concern and familiarity with social and political issues: the connections between personal life and social issues may be copious or strong for leaders, but may occur only rarely for the average person. zy Contingencies With the simple observation that connections are sometimes observed and sometimes not, we return to the question of contingencies. What conditions must obtain for strong connections to arise? To find an answer, we suggest a system that includes the person’s subjectivejudgments of his or her individual situation, of his or her reference group, and of society as a whole. Also included in the system are the person’s actual material situation, and values pertaining to the self, the group, and society. Figure 1 depicts the scheme. We conceive of the system as an interconnected chain. Only when all links are joined is the relationship between personal situation and societal attitudes apparent. Breaks in the chain are likely, but the remaining links will still constitute an indirect relationship between the personal and the social. For example, as a large body of work on relative deprivation theory shows, the link between a person’s material situation (box A in Figure 1) and a person’s subjective evaluation (box B) can be disrupted rather easily. If this is the case, the relationship between material situation and judgments about society (box F) is likely to be obscured even if all other links are strong. Given that many values about how people, including oneself, should conduct themselves (boxes C and E) are acquired in childhood, a break between one’s current circumstances and one’s values can easily occur if the current realities represent a departure from childhood realities. Keeping the vertical linkage of our schematized chain intact may, in short, pose difficulties. Nor is the horizontal dimension unassailable. Tversky and Kahneman’s (1982) work on the nonuse of base rates shows that the widespread incidence of a phenomenon fails to guarantee that a person will observe the relevance of the phenomenon to a particular incident. It follows that people will often remain oblivious to inconsistencies between their values and views about society, and their values and views about exigencies in their own personal lives or in the life of their reference group. If, as is sometimes the case, no inconsistencies arise, then the horizontal chain in Figure 1 is not broken. Rapid individual and social change risk snapping the metaphorical links. A word needs to be said about the position of the individual’s reference group-boxes D and E in our diagram. The distance between the reference group zyxw zyxwvu Introduction zyxwvuts zyxwvut zyxw 5 TARGET sell Reloronce Gloup Soclaty D. Vlew Of Personal Group's Slluatlon E. GKUp Values zyx zyx F view 01 V I O W Of SOCI.lY I r c SOCIO18I V.IY.. Noles. People have values a b u l how mey should conduct memselves [e g always be honest. bs hard worlung]. and mese we call persond values Values a b u me ~ referenm group we call grwp v d u ~ .SOCI~UI vaiws refer 10 bDm me desired dislribution 01 g w d s and Services 10 g no one Should slawel and me desu%d prooedures [e. g equal access la goods and sewlrasl &rows are shown I0 Convey the dynamic nalure of me connections All me arrows should be envisioned poinUng in bolh directions. Fig. 1. Schematized model of connections between self and social issues. and the individual, or the reference group and society, in the chain depends on a number of factors; one of the most obvious is the status of the reference group within the society. If the individual's reference group is one without a strong social identity, or is the majority group, it will probably be equated for all practical purposes with the society in general. If, on the other hand, the reference group is clearly defined-perhaps by a somewhat marginal status-or even discriminated against by the society, the group is likely to be closely connected to the individual's personal identity. We do not attempt to indicate here the relationships among the different factors: if we were to draw in arrows for every factor that exerts an effect upon another factor, the diagram would soon resemble a spider's web. Nor do we intend to minimize the importance of dimensions that we have not included. The temporal component is one such dimension. How are current perceptions and values determined by past objective circumstances, and what is the continuity or discontinuity between present and future subjective realities? Our model is mute. Thus, with this diagram, we do not propose to provide solutions. Rather, we see it as a tool for organizing the study of the relationship between personal life and social issues. 6 zy zyxwvutsrqp Crosby and Clayton The Present Volume The papers in this volume, all of which pertain to links in our schematized conceptualization, are arranged from the most concrete to the most abstract. We start with two case studies of individuals. Abigail Stewart and Joseph Healy draw a detailed portrait of the life of Vera Brittain, while Alan Elms paints in broader strokes the development of distinctive negotiating styles among four men who have helped shape American foreign policy in this century. Both articles argue compellingly for a close connection between personal life and social attitudes (components A and F in our scheme). Stewart and Healy stress the importance of political values (components E and G) for the subject of their analysis, whereas Elms concentrates on understanding the personal values of the individuals (component C) in order to illuminate the personal life/political action relationship. The next two articles utilize survey data. In a secondary analysis of data collected by Crosby (1982), Crosby and Herek demonstrate that men's perceptions of and feelings about sex discrimination are unrelated to the employment status of their wives and mothers-an example wherein the relationship between personal circumstances and social attitudes is not as expected. Rhoda Unger then presents a scale that distinguishes between two ways of viewing reality; she shows that students who opted to take feminist courses differed at the outset from other students, and that these differences in scale score were maintained or augmented during the semester. From these data Unger concludes that people often engineer their lives either to bring themselves into contact with, or to remain distant from, certain social issues in ways that then determine changes in their views. In our scheme, Unger treats the link from components F and G to component A, and illustrates how the strength of this link may vary, depending on the nature of the individual's underlying philosophy about reality. An article by Donald Taylor and Lise Dub6 discusses and presents data concerning the tension between the need for a unique personal identity (similar to the need for uniqueness about which Goethals, 1972, has written) and the need for a sense of group belongingness (related to the illusion of consensus). Taylor and Dub6 argue that even Francophone Canadians, who tend to be less individualistic than Anglophones, dislike situations in which decisions about individuals are made on the basis of group membership. While concentrating on what would be a link between components B and D in our scheme, Taylor and Dub6 shed light in their analysis on the connection between D and F. One reason that these links may be tenuous, as Taylor and Dub6 make clear, is that individuals have not one but many potential reference groups that vary in their importance and salience across both persons and situations. Following the continuum from concrete to abstract, the next article in our issue is a theoretical piece by Gregory Herek dealing with the very nature of social attitudes. Herek describes the possible reasons for holding attitudes, and Introduction zyxwvuts zy 7 points out that attitudes may serve either instrumental or expressive functions. If someone holds a positive attitude toward a group because he or she anticipates rewards (e.g., money, promotion) from affiliating with the group, the attitude serves an instrumental function. Expressive functions are served when an attitude is held because if affirms a sense of self. A discontinuity between one’s personal circumstances and one’s avowed opinions about society may result when attitudes are held for instrumental reasons; for example, if a heterosexual person who has never encountered a homosexual person disparages homosexuals because the person believes such opinions will win favor with influential others. Herek’s analysis speaks to the links between components A, C, and F in our scheme. So does the article by Tom Tyler and Kathleen McGraw concerning the quiescent American. When it comes to evaluating the fairness of political systems, argue Tyler and McGraw, Americans operate under the assumption that procedures matter more than outcomes. People assume, furthermore, that having an opportunity to participate in the process (whether or not the opportunity is taken) assures that the procedures are fair. By examining the reasons for people’s misplaced faith in procedural justice, Tyler and McGraw help explain why even disadvantaged members of society appear content with their lot, despite their own experiences or their personal status in the system. Traditional studies may have looked too much at issues of distributive fairness and not enough at procedural fairness; citizens’ perceptions of their personal circumstances may be as contingent on the latter as on the former, and societal values (componentG in our scheme) may stress process over outcome. The three final pieces in our issue deal with the research tradition that can be subsumed under the rubric of “symbolic racism.” These pieces are at the far end of our concrete-abstract continuum because of their meta-analytic nature; their focus is not on how people respond in a given situation but on how to interpret the way people did respond, and on what methods of interpretation are valid. In recent years, the work of Donald Kinder, David Sears, and John McConahay has been extremely influential in political psychology. Separately and together, these scholars have shown how Americans hold opinions on a variety of social issues, including racial ones, that cannot be predicted by looking only at narrow selfinterests. These symbolic racism researchers have argued that racial bias is now expressed in new subtle forms more than in the traditional blatant forms, and perhaps in societal values more than in personal ones. Symbolic politics analyses clearly relate to whether the link between components A and F has been supplanted by that between G and F in this domain. Paul Sniderman and Philip Tetlock criticize the research on symbolic racism. They identify what may be serious logical and methodological problems in the work of Sears, Kinder, and McConahay, and state that the importance of personal factors (components A-C) and reference group factors (components D zy 8 zyxwvutsrq zy Crosby and Clayton and E) in making societal judgments should not be minimized. Kinder replies to these criticisms by clarifying the concept of symbolic racism and by reviewing empirical evidence. The debate ends with Sniderman and Tetlock’s reply to Kinder’s rebuttal. It is clear, even from this brief preview of papers in the volume, that in the search for connections between personal life and social issues, special attention must be paid to contingencies. What conditions promote the link between the material conditions of people’s lives and peoples’ subjective judgments about their lives? What conditions keep unbroken the link between people’s judgments of their own or their groups’ circumstances and their judgments about society? 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