S1E28 / The Political Psychology of Pandemics / Michele Gelfand & Howard Lavine

I'm Dr. Celine Gounder, and this is Epidemic. Today is Friday, June 12th. A June study from the Pew Research Center found that Republicans and Democrats are deeply divided over almost everything you can think of when it comes to COVID. How big a threat coronavirus is to public health, what to think about testing, social distancing, reopening the economy too fast or too slow. There's almost nothing partisans from either political party can agree on. In this episode, you'll hear me and my former co-host Ron Klain interview two experts to figure out what's going on here: Dr. Michele Gelfand and Dr. Howard Levine. We'll hear why the shift towards identity politics is complicating different states' responses to COVID.

You can disagree on whether deficit spending or tax cuts is the, you know, better policy move to get us out of a recession. And then you can go and play tennis together and have fun. But if you disagree on fundamental, gut-level things like gay marriage or school prayer or things like race, it's a lot harder to maintain close relations.

And how a community's history of threats in the past can shape their response to crises today.

We have the ability to negotiate when should we tighten, when should we loosen, and be strategic about it. And that applies at the national level, organizational level, and it even applies to our households.

Today on Epidemic, the political psychology of pandemics. Michelle Gelfand is a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World. She also recently published an op-ed in The Boston Globe titled, To Survive the Coronavirus, the United States Must Tighten Up. It's not just about medicine, it's about culture.

So Michelle, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

So let's give our listeners an orientation to some of the things you wrote in The Globe, elsewhere. Let's start with explaining the difference between loose cultures and tight cultures.

Sure.

So I'm a cross-cultural psychologist, which means that I study human behavior around the globe to try to understand what are some of the deeper cultural codes driving our behavior. And what I've been studying over the last couple of decades is how strict strict societies, states, organizations are with respect to their social norms. And social norms are these basically unwritten, sometimes more formalized rules that really are important in our everyday lives for helping us to predict each other's behavior, coordinate our behavior. As a human species, we developed norms really to help us survive. And what I find though is that while all cultures have norms, some cultures are more strict. They have more rules, they have some more severe punishments for violating the rules, and other cultures are loose. And they're much more permissive.

So Michelle, you've said that the US has a relatively loose culture. How did we evolve that way?

Yeah, so in a paper that we published in Science some years ago, we differentiated cultures that were tight and loose on a continuum. So some cultures like Singapore and Japan, even Germany and Austria tend to veer tight, and other cultures like Brazil and Greece and the Netherlands and the US, they tend to veer loose. That's not to say that all cultures don't have tight and loose elements, but we can differentiate tight and loose cultures. And what we found in that study was something pretty interesting. We found that one big predictor of tightness and looseness was the degree to which cultures had a lot of threat. And threat could have been from Mother Nature, like think constant natural disasters or famines, or from human nature, think constant territorial invasions or pathogen breakouts or population density. And it's a pretty simple idea that when you have a lot of collective threat, You need to have strict rules to coordinate to survive. And we've seen that both in our field data, we've seen it with computational models. And so it's not all loose cultures are on easy street, not all tight cultures have had threat, but it's a pretty important factor that causes the evolution of tightness and looseness.

And just a follow-up to that, you know, within the US, do we have certain regions that have tighter or looser cultures?

Absolutely. The tightest states in the United States, in a paper we published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, tend to be in the South and the Midwest. Midwest, whereas the looser states tend to be on the coasts. And that actually speaks to another factor that predicts tight-loose, which is diversity. When we have diverse states or nations, it pushes us toward looseness because it's harder to agree upon norms and rules to guide our behavior. And also, the tighter states tended in our data to have more natural disasters, including places like Kansas and some places in the Midwest where there are a lot of tornadoes, for example.

You know, Michelle, it's interesting to me because as you describe, there's almost a juxtaposition, a reversal between your description of tightness and looseness in the US and where actually the tightest social distancing restrictions have been imposed and where the loosest ones have. So in the states you're describing as having loose cultures, in fact, we now have the tightest restrictions, and in the states with tight cultures, we now have the loosest restrictions.

Yeah, it's a really interesting anomaly. Part of it's political, part of it is messages from the government for whom some of those tight states are really guiding responses in terms of the lack of tightening up.

So Michelle, I know you have a paper coming out soon in which you look at cultural and institutional factors that are helping slow the COVID-19 curve and reduce deaths from this. Can you just talk us through what your data shows?

We were looking at two factors. How efficient is the government in a particular nation in terms of coordinating action across the public and private sector? And how strict are the social norms? How tight or loose is the society? And what we find is pretty striking results is that both factors predict tight cultures and cultures that have efficient governments are able to slow the growth rate and they're also able to have lower death rates. And it's the combination of having both tight cultures and efficient governments that seems to be really important And I want to mention that when I wrote the op-ed in the Boston Globe about how we have to tighten up in the US, I got a lot of negative feedback on that article because I think people conflate the idea that when you say we should become tighter, they're thinking that I'm saying we should become autocratic. And that's not at all what we're saying. In this time, in this moment, we need to be tightening up to deal with COVID And then once we've dealt with that threat, and I think it will help reduce the threat, then we can loosen up again. This is what I would call kind of being ambidextrous, like being able to be tight and loose at different times as needed.

I think that's a really important point, 'cause I don't want people to listen to this and think that you or we are saying China got this right 'cause China's got a tight culture and a very authoritarian government. In fact, China got this wrong, probably as wrong as any country on earth other than the United States right now. But other countries, particularly in Asia, places like South Korea, that are very robust democracies, but have this combination of tight culture and a very efficient government that got testing widespread quite a ways. So, you know, South Korea and the US, we both had our first case on the same day. A month into this, they had tested 4,000 or 5,000 people out of every million. We had tested fewer than 100 out of every million. And so I don't want this to come off, I'm sure you don't want this to come off as some kind of tribute to authoritarian regimes as being the answer here.

That's right, exactly. People misunderstand that we're not saying we should become autocratic. We're saying we can tighten up in these domains, these important rules with respect to social distancing and handwashing. And I think the issue is that because we've had relatively low threat in this country, I'm not saying no threat, low threat history, we're separated by two oceans from other continents. We haven't been afraid of Canada and Mexico chronically invading us. We haven't been afraid of constant fury from Mother Nature. And so as a result, we have a harder time tightening up than other countries under these conditions, because it's hard for people to sacrifice this kind of liberty and freedom that we've had for constraint and rules. It gives us a little bit of dissonance. And you could see that, you know, where people in Florida, in other areas of the country, it's taken a while to say, hey guys, we got to tighten up.

We certainly have had our share of natural disasters, tragedies, Obviously, 100 years ago, the Spanish flu took more lives than any other event. You know, more recently, we came together as a country after 9/11, or during World War II, people made extraordinary sacrifices, not just the ones who went and fought and made the biggest sacrifices. I mean, you know, just, I feel like we have enough horrible things in our history that it isn't just a lack of history.

Yeah, actually, I mean, I want to emphasize, I'm talking about the relative difference between what we've experienced. I want us to imagine like that we've chronically experienced natural disasters every at the level of the nation, or we've constantly had Boston bombings on our territory. It's not that we haven't experienced threat, it's just relative to other countries. And our data and science show this. We can rank order countries. Japan is one of the more threatened nations that has very high population density, a history of a lot of conflict, very little arable land, and a lot of disasters. So it's relatively speaking, but your point is really well taken. And I just wrote a piece in The Hill about this that does say we have to remember that we've been able to tighten up and ration and have the best of being able to be tight and also loose in our history, including in your example of World War II. So I do think we have great examples of when we'll be able to come together, have the best of our cultural codes in terms of being able to tighten up, but also be really super innovative, which is a benefit of looseness in fighting corona.

You know, I wanna go back though to something you just said about kind of some of the advantages of looseness. I mean, right now, obviously we're really struggling as a nation to get tighter and to do these temporary measures. But you alluded a while ago to the fact that looseness gives us innovation and creativity. What might be lost if we tighten up too much as a country, and how do we find this balance between looseness and tightness that will maximize our ability to address this coronavirus crisis?

Yeah, this is such a great question. And we found a really important trade-off between tight and loose, and it's basically how much we emphasize order versus openness. So tight cultures really corner the market on order, and they're more synchronized, and they have much more self-regulation in terms of impulse control. When you live in a context where there's strict norms, you have to manage your impulses more. So you have less debt, and you have less obesity, and less alcoholism. And loose cultures struggle with order. They're less synchronized, they have more crime, and they have more problems with self-regulation. But loose cultures corner the market on openness. Repeatedly in our research, we see that there's more openness to people that are different, whether it's people from different races, religions, immigrants. There's more creativity, more idea generation, and more adaptability. So you can't say one is better or worse. It really depends on the criterion, and it also depends on the context. And I do believe that it's, you know, we have the ability to both tighten up on social norms that are important for the spread of corona, but also maintain that ingenuity and that creativity that we have So, Michelle, you allude to the fact that some of these changes can be temporary, but some of them might stick longer.

Do you think some of these things will change, whether it's not shaking hands anymore or maybe wearing face coverings in public, at least in the winter cough-cold season?

I believe that, you know, cultures are really pretty adaptive. And so as we adapt and we're able to change these norms to fight corona, when they're no longer needed, they might last for longer than necessary, but I do believe that we'll be able to get back to a new normal, and hopefully we'll learn a lot from how we responded to this crisis. I think getting back to our data, you know, having tighter norms which are relevant to the spread of the pandemic and also having an efficient government response, they're both really key. And so I think we can use culture and use our knowledge of what is really helping to prevent the spread of corona and really, as a nation, come together better in future times.

This obviously is something that's going to stick in our national consciousness for a long time. Do you think we will become a tighter culture for a long time into the future? Do you think this will be something like, once it's over, everyone will just kind of go back to the way they were?

Well, I think, you know, our data speak to the fact that when threat subsides, that groups get looser. It might take longer. We know that it's harder to go from tight to loose than from loose to tight. But at the same time, when the threat is not chronic anymore, it allows you to loosen up because you don't need to coordinate as much to survive. This is a pretty general principle that when groups get threatened, they need strong rules to coordinate. And when the threat subsides, then we can afford to be more permissive. And so I do believe that we will see those associated changes.

Well, Michelle, thank you so much for joining us. I do hope that at least some of the lessons learned, at least with respect to efficiency of government and need for coordination, do stick in the long run. But really, thank you so much for joining us here on Epidemic.

Thank you for having me.

It's a pleasure to welcome to the podcast Howard Levine. He's the associate dean of social sciences and a professor of political science and psychology at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the psychological underpinnings of mass political behavior. He's the co-author of the book Open vs. Closed: Personality, Identity, and the Politics of Redistribution, and he's the editor of the journal Advances in Political Psychology. Welcome to the Epidemic Podcast, Howard.

Thank you very much. I'm delighted.

So, Howard, why is it more important for people who really pay attention to politics, who follow politics closely, to vote their identity rather than their personal interest? Why might demonstrating that partisan affiliation actually be more in their interest than perhaps the policy that might seem to be in their self-interest?

Well, this is at the core of our book, which we call the Reversal Hypothesis, and that is that there's no straightforward relationship in the economic realm between personality and policy preferences. I mean, really, there's a political history to this, and so I'll try to summarize it, and that is that this was not the case before the rise of what we call the second dimension of politics, the non-economic dimension, the cultural dimension that Nixon exploited in 1968. So that dimension has become more and more important, and that is the dimension that links to identity. It's not the spending dimension. All right, that had nothing to do with personality and therefore with, with, with partisanship. The other thing is that over time there has been a very substantial sorting of social groups in terms of party identification. So the notion is that people who are Engaged in politics are motivated to achieve their social identity goals, which are always very important because they relate to basic human social motivations. And people are doing this with respect to any number of endeavors in life, but people that are engaged in politics are trying to use partisan politics as a means of achieving these psychological benefits associated with strong social identity. And they include things like self-esteem, the reduction of uncertainty, and social belongingness. People are forming their economic preferences as the result of identifying with a politician, a candidate, or a party. So it's not that they look at the policies and think, "Gee, these are antithetical to what I believe." Rather, people are making up their minds on the basis of attempting to generate consonance between the elites that they like for other reasons, largely for partisan identity reasons. Not only that, but the tendency to follow the leader. Is much greater among those that are engaged. And this is why we interpret this as a matter of trying to fulfill the needs of social identity.

So we just heard from Michele Gelfand and her work on tight and loose cultures. I think there's some parallels between her work and the idea of open and closed personalities. Could you talk through what are open and closed personalities and how personality might predict political affiliation?

Sure.

Let me start with what are open and closed personalities. So there are a variety of psychological traits that have been studied really since the 1950s. These are things like authoritarianism, need for closure, openness to experience, conscientiousness, loss aversion. There's a variety of others, and they typically have been studied independently, independent literatures, but they really all, at least in this particular context, you know, within our book, have identical effects. And those identical effects are that if you are engaged in politics, they predict partisan identification. And they do so through a concept that we call cultural resonance. So those strongly heritable traits lead you to resonate toward a cultural conservatism that the party, the Republican Party, has pivoted toward increasingly since the late 1960s. All right, so that's that link. And then when— and once that link is solidified, and it's only solidified among those that are politically engaged, then you get the second part, which relies on things like framing and signaling and delegation of policies that are on the first dimension, right, on the spending dimension, which is really more important to elites. That's how that works. And it's conditional in the sense that the link between personality and partisanship, which is largely a second dimension connection, right, so it's not about spending and large or small government in the economic realm. It's about the second dimension of politics, which began as the politics of racial tolerance, and then it evolved and broadened out to any number of policies related to, say, school prayer, the death penalty, terrorism, immigration, and so on. Only works for those that are engaged, because it's only those people who are aware of what those positions are. Others are using their personalities or projecting those policies into other domains of life, and gratifying those personality needs in ways that are apolitical. So we don't see this among those that are apolitical. Rather, what we see, as I said earlier, is a kind of a reversal, right? So that those who are, let's say, more threat-sensitive and more uncertainty-sensitive are those that desire more social protection, and that naturally gravitates toward being economically liberal. And this is what we see, by the way, in most of the world, right? So that social conservatism is linked to economic liberalism. That's most of the world, right? And the dimension, you know, being freedom versus protection. You know, in this country it's been a little different for, you know, specifically, you know, political historical reasons, you know, largely emanating out of the civil rights era in the 19— you know, the late 1960s when Nixon saw, uh, you know, that a good electoral strategy would be to capture those who would otherwise vote Democrat on the basis of the first dimension would vote Republican with him, as the second dimension was especially salient at that time. And then Reagan built on that, and, you know, that has continued and become a stronger and stronger dynamic to this day.

I want to try to get a little more towards the general psychology, political psychology of the public and how divided we are. If you look at polls, even some basic questions about expectations— will there be a second wave of the disease? How bad will the second wave of the disease be when it comes? How How quickly will things go back to normal or not? Even on these questions, now increasingly, they are lining up along partisan lines. Do Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, just see the coronavirus as a different kind of threat, or are they reacting to it differently because its handling is so associated with President Trump?

It's both, I think. So, let me answer the first part first. So, the way that it's different is that it's not it's not an intergroup threat, right? And this is what, you know, those with conservative personality traits tend to respond to. So for example, if you frame climate change as a function of those evil Russians trying to undermine our American scientists, you get a lot further than trying to frame this as, you know, a threat that does not invoke intergroup competition, which might be, you know, at the national level. The second piece of this is that You're talking about liberals and conservatives, and 9 out of 10 Democrats and Republicans will vote for Biden and Trump respectively, right? But all the action is in voters that are, I think, now being described as Obama-Trump-Biden voters. So you've got this sort of exhausted middle who exert an outsized influence in the Rust Belt states, probably in Arizona, who are likely to decide the election, right? So that the dynamics that are occurring among those that are polarized probably aren't ones that are as positive as those voters who are persuadable.

And then how much of this though then goes to the kind of underlying populism or polarization in the country? No real study of this has been done, but it seems from looking at the signs people are holding and the things people were chanting, the same people who were militating publicly for reopening the economy very quickly in April were the same people who were involved in the anti-vaccine movement. For example, a lot of this reflects these kind of underlying anti-science populist threads in American politics and psychology, doesn't it?

It does, yeah. No, there's no question that it does. But that's not, I would also say that when people are faced with that question, would you take the vaccine, right? So that, you know, one poll, and the only poll that I'm aware of, you know, on that, but I'm sure the others are roughly similar, is that the Democrats, you know, are roughly 90 to 10 And Republicans are 50/50, but really they're not completely or entirely or cleanly answering the question that's being posed, right? They're really answering the question, do I support President Trump? So I don't think we can take public opinion data of that nature and necessarily interpret it as strongly as, you know, might seem reasonable, right? That is, it doesn't translate necessarily into half the Republicans refusing to take the vaccine. But I think there's a lot of bipartisanship here, which is that people are afraid, people see the science, And I think the strongest Trump supporters, who tend to be the most populist, who tend to be reacting to elites no matter what they say, are those who mean it when they say it, that I won't take the vaccine, that I don't trust elites. And, you know, again, this is, this comes back to social identity.

Recently, President Trump went to a Ford Motor plant in Detroit, Michigan, and he did something that's kind of unusual from a public health perspective. He refused to wear a mask while he was in public view, but he boasted that he wore the mask when no one could see him while touring the plant. And he said explicitly, I'm not going to wear the mask in public where people can see me. So we expect public leaders to model public health behavior. And so we might expect a leader to wear the mask in public, but then take it off in private when no one sees them. But this was the exact opposite of that kind of behavior. So do we think Trump's relationship with the mask is shaping the resistance among some of his followers to public mask wearing, or does it reflect that resistance?

Yeah, that's a very good question. I would say the former, which isn't to say that the latter doesn't occur, right? I mean, so it is a two-way street. The threat is not of an outgroup variety, which is really what links personality to politics, right? This is a I mean, Trump can make it that way, and I suspect that that will be successful for him if he decides to try to pin this on China and to refer to this as the Wuhan virus, and he's already done that. But I do think this is more, I think, an elite leadership causal effect than one that is emanating up from the public.

Let's dig into that a little bit, because I want to really think about this, particularly in the context of public health issues, and I want to contrast it to President Trump's predecessor, President Obama, of whom it was always reported, and I neither confirm nor deny this, that President Obama, who was never ever seen smoking in public, couldn't quite give up the habit of smoking in private when no one was around. So again, let's leave aside the question whether that's true or not. It was widely believed about him. How does that kind of fit into your model of whether or not these are elite-driven or kind of tribally constituent-driven behaviors? That President Trump models bad public health behavior in public, even though he's doing the right thing in private. President Obama modeling good public health behavior in public, even though maybe he's still doing it in private.

I think with regard to Trump and modeling bad behavior, that really, before we get into the political psychology, I think the, more pressing point, or the more primary consideration here, is really the underlying crude logic of American politics. And that is by signaling that this was not, you know, something to worry about, uh, that the economy would be fine, and that it would not call attention to the collapse of the economy, which would be the death knell of an incumbent party. So I think that's the first thing to, I think, realize in all of this. The second part of it is that the Republican Party is currently constituted to be an anti-expertise party. It's a populist party. This began with Reagan, arguably with Nixon, but certainly it has accelerated and amplified under President Trump to an exponential degree. And so by signaling, you know, his opposition to expert advice, that probably binds him more closely to his base. So, he's signaling to his base, and signaling is a big deal. Mass partisans don't always know exactly what to make of public issues, and so they rely on people they trust and think are knowledgeable, and that's generally conveyed through partisanship.

It's interesting, I think, to most people that we don't hit a point where the public health necessity just overwhelms that instinct, that tribalism. If you think about the kind of the instinct, sentiment, and tribal tendencies Trump plays to in American politics, right? It's more often an exaggerated fear of foreign threats. And yet here you have an actual threat that is actually killing Americans, that actually did originate overseas, and yet the president seems to want to consistently downplay its danger. It seems kind of counterintuitive to even the core perspectives of his base and of his tribe and of his approach to American politics.

I would come back to the point that, you know, by continuing to downplay the impact of the virus, you know, he is hoping to facilitate growth in the economy. The personality part really is being trumped by partisanship in the sense that personality is what we call exogenous. Is causally antecedent to partisanship. But once you get to partisanship, then really you're talking about elite signals and frames and just simple delegation from the two partisan groups. But there are effects that are direct that come from personality, and one of those is called the need for closure, which is simply individual differences, probably largely heritable, in the desire to have certain knowledge. And very early on, I remember there was— I don't watch Fox News, but I'm on Twitter, and I remember Laura Ingraham asking, when is this going to end? We need to know when this is going to end. Well, we're not, we don't know when it's going to end, but for a lot of people, they do need to know. And so I think that that heritable trait, which is strongly linked to partisanship, is leading people to have to get off that uncertainty fence and believe one way or the other, right? That this is something that is going to go on for a longish period of time, a year, 2 years, maybe longer. And that is going to cause them to remain in an uncertain headspace, which is really too much for them to handle. So it's easier to simply believe that the virus is winding down, it's safe to go out, the bars and restaurants are open, and therefore to achieve a reduction of uncertainty in that respect. And I think that's happening irrespective of partisanship, but because it's linked to partisanship, you're seeing it more on the right than on the left.

You know, what's interesting, and really in accord with that, is the president's announcement that even if there is a second wave, no matter what kind of second wave, America will not close a second time. So he's trying to provide that kind of certainty you're talking about in the face of uncertainty.

Right. And so it may in fact come to be, right, that there is a second wave and that there is an opening and a closing and sort of a hybrid, you know, at, you know, in schools and university where, you know, we're sort of toggling between being in person and being, you know, at a distance. But this exhaustion with of, you know, sort of re-social distancing is what we saw with the 1918 flu. And my guess is that this is a general tendency that we've done our part, it's over, we can't take it anymore. And I think that's what a lot of people are expressing, and they're willing to take on more risk to achieve certainty.

So one of the things we spoke with Michele Gelfand about was this dissonance between coastal states with loose cultures like Massachusetts taking the most aggressive stances on things like masks and shelter-in-place orders, strong actions you might expect from a tighter culture. Do you see a contradiction here?

Well, I think there are two reasons for that. I mean, one is that this is not an unbounded process, and this is a real fear. This is not a symbolic fear, right? So it doesn't symbolize anything like, you know, that intergroup conflict does, that my group is different and better. This is really I think, an example in politics of even among those that are engaged and, you know, in your example, open-minded, you know, shifting their perspective from a symbolic one into an instrumental one, right? So it's not to say that the engaged can't be instrumentally driven, right? They are when their interests become clear and, you know, consequential. But the other thing too is that, you know, again, the partisan process is playing a role. What mediates those responses is their partisan identity. And the identities of Democrats, cause of the elite message, right, is to keep shut down, keep social distancing. So that's the proximal explanation for why people that are open-minded are taking the more sort of risk-averse position that they're taking, because the party is taking the position. So this is not just something that works, you know, on the Republican side.

Well, Howard, thank you so much for joining us on Epidemic.

Thank you very much.

Epidemic is brought to you by Just Human Productions. We're funded in part by listeners like you. We're powered and distributed by Simplecast. Today's episode was produced by Zach Dyer and me. Our music is by the Blue Dot Sessions. Our interns are Sonia Baradwa, Annabelle Chen, Claire Halverson, and Julie Levy. If you enjoy the show, please tell a friend about it today. And if you haven't already done so, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps more people find out about the show. You can learn more about this podcast, how to engage with us on social media, and how to support the podcast at epidemic.fm. That's epidemic.fm. Just Human Productions is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, so your donations to support our podcasts are tax deductible. Go to epidemic.fm to make a donation. We release Epidemic twice a week, week on Tuesdays and Fridays. But producing a podcast costs money. We've got to pay Zack. So please make a donation to help us keep this going. And check out our sister podcast, American Diagnosis. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at americandiagnosis.fm. On American Diagnosis, we cover some of the biggest public health challenges affecting the nation today. In Season 1, we covered youth mental health. In season 2, the opioid overdose crisis. And in season 3, gun violence in America. I'm Dr. Celine Gounder. Thanks for listening to Epidemic.