Back in my early days at Syracuse, my department experienced a crisis. The school’s student government had commissioned a survey that asked a large cross-section of students to provide feedback on their coursework. I don’t really remember much of it, but one of the results that emerged was that students didn’t care for the required writing course(s). Obviously, as the department that taught those courses, we were distressed to learn about this.
Part of the problem was that our own course evaluations, conducted at the end of each semester, didn’t really reflect the low opinion that students seemed to have of us. Generally speaking, our own evaluations were fairly positive; if nothing else, students tended to agree that our courses did the things that they were supposed to do, and by and large, they liked the way we taught them. But we ended up taking that other survey pretty seriously, revising our outcomes, redesigning the courses, etc.
I kept this to myself at the time, but honestly, I always thought that we overreacted. I’ve talked a little bit about polling before, and how it can shape answers; it matters not only what is being asked and how, but when. Students completing course evaluations are probably more likely to be generous, considering that those surveys tend to be delivered personally (even though they’re anonymized and faculty don’t see them until after grades are submitted). By the same token, though, given a little distance, they are more likely to consider required courses less than fondly. When I was growing up, it wasn’t especially “cool” to get along with one’s parents, and in the same way, compared to a students’ major courses (which they’ve chosen themselves), required courses will almost always pale by comparison. Nobody comes to college excited to take first-year writing, and the second course of our introductory sequence is required during the spring of their second year, all but guaranteeing that it will displace a course they want to take.
So the truth, insofar as there was such a thing, was probably always going to be somewhere in the middle. Even if students enjoy our courses, they’re not likely to admit to it or to rank them highly when comparing them to electives. But those are two very different questions whose answers are fairly predictable. No matter how great our recipes might be for preparing vegetables, and no matter how healthy they are for the students, first-year writing is still a vegetable course. And most of the students had already moved on to their entrées or desserts.
One of the things that Dannagal Young talks about in Wrong is the psychological characteristics that lend themselves to conspiracist thinking. Political psychologists Kevin Arceneaux and Ryan J. Vander Wielen distinguish between the “need for cognition” and the “need for affect”—everyone has both of these needs, but they operate in different ratios for each of us:
“those high in need for cognition and low in need for affect are more likely to engage in deliberate thoughtful reflection (System 21). Their research shows that those more prone to thoughtful reflection (high in NFC and low in NFA) are more likely to “tame their intuition,” adjusting their immediate reflexive responses through a more thoughtful process” (105).
I raise this idea here, because the context for polling questions—the when, where, how, and why—can play an outsized role in determining the ratio behind the what, the answers that result. I’ve answered a few political polls and surveys in my day, sometimes out of interest bur more often out of “polite” conflict aversion, and even when I’m willing to do so, I’m looking to get it over with quickly. Even though I’d probably locate myself closer to the cognition end of the spectrum, I’m rarely thoughtful when I answer poll questions. And most of the time, pollsters aren’t really asking for close reflection. Give us 5 minutes and access to a search engine, and our answers to “How do you feel about X” look far different than they would in the moment. Regardless of our individual cognition-affect ratios, the circumstances themselves will lead to answers that are more affect-driven (i.e., more reliant on emotion and/or intuition).
I’m not trying to link polling to conspiracy thinking in any way, although that’s not to understate the degree to which polls can sometimes be put to nefarious uses. Instead, I want to emphasize the fact that polling is often far more about vibe than it is a reliable way of understanding reality. I talked a bit about this, and quoted Kyla Swanson, last fall when I went on that digression into economics. Here’s one of the bits I used from Swanson:
If people have an experience (say, living through the 2008 recession) and evidence (home prices skyrocketing) that might shape some of their expectations - “wow, another unprecedented event to live through” which shapes their perception (things suck) and their interpretation of the future (things will continue to suck) - that shapes their narrative, which can shape reality.
It’s not that vibes aren’t real—far from it—and in that sense, there’s certainly some value to be had in polling. But that value needs to be tempered with the understanding that Swanson lays out, and if we layer in the ecological understanding from Young’s book, then it’s hard to ignore the extent to which any sort of poll shapes our reality, at least as much as it might claim to reflect it.
I’ve been thinking again about polling because, for whatever reason, I’ve been seeing more lately about the declining public trust in institutions, what Jedediah Britton-Purdy called our country’s “trust collapse.” (I wrote about a month ago about how we’ve conflated trust and faith—mistakenly, in my opinion, but I’m going to ignore that here.) And the evidence that folks use to verify the collapse is almost exclusively poll data (much of which is almost certainly apples to oranges, but even so…). As I’ve been seeing these stories, I began to find myself thinking about them in the opposite direction. There are good reasons to frame this “collapse” as a loss of a particular quality that once existed, something that we need to “get back to.” And that’s often the imagined solution, that we need to return to or restore some sort of idyllic levels of social trust (never mind that this cohesion came at the cost of ignoring a number of important, material differences among us).
What I mean, then, by thinking in the opposite direction is that I wonder: is it that we’re experiencing a collapse of trust (as these polls seem to reveal) or instead, is it the rapid rise of mistrust (or suspicion). Commonsensically, we might say there’s no difference between these articulations, but I mean to explore this on the level of vibe, the degree to which we project a particular narrative onto our experience of the world. I’m also mindful lately of the way that those narratives get accelerated and amplified by the system that Young describes. Britton-Purdy puts it this way
The polls showing collapsing trust in “newspapers” or “television news” don’t really show a decline in trust; they show a fragmentation, trust displaced. But from the perspective of a democracy that relies on a common set of facts, acute fragmentation might as well be a collapse.
A generalized mistrust is the vibe that unites all of those fragmented positions, which in turn, allows the media to generalize about declining trust even if it’s only displaced. And publicizing that vibe also accelerates it. As Max Fisher observes in his book on social media, The Chaos Machine, “When people think something has become a matter of consensus, psychologists have found, they tend not only to go along, but to internalize that sentiment as their own.” While I don’t know that I’d go so far as saying that it’s now cool to mistrust institutions, it’s certainly become much more uncool to trust them. I wonder if suspicion has become a cultural bubble.
Another book I’ve been reading recently is Alan Jacobs’ How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, Jacobs talks a bit about Charles Mackay’s work (the original Madness of Crowds stuff) and a 1951 book by Eric Hoffer called The True Believer, which is partly about fanaticism. One of the interesting things about Hoffer’s work is that he focuses not on inner circle/secret society kind of believers, but on mass movements. As Jacobs explains, “The ‘true believer’ of Hoffer’s title is someone who belongs not to the few but to the many, someone who strives to bring the entire group (the church, the nation, the world even) within the grip of one narrative…” (135).
Jacobs goes on to explain that “its movements are exraverted, not introverted. Its energy comes from engagement with the larger culture, not from withdrawal” (135), and that’s part of what got me thinking about our mistrust. While bubbles aren’t exclusive to our contemporary age (Mackay’s writing in the19th century), I’d argue that social media accelerates that process (as Kyle Chayka put it recently, “Friction is lower online and visibility is higher,” and both of those factors feed into bubbles.
Framing trust as something that’s collapsing makes it sound as though we’re pulling back or cutting ourselves off, when I think it’s something else entirely, and Hoffer’s sense of extraversion helped that click for me. Mistrust is something more like a self-perpetuating, social media dogpile, where folks declaim their mistrust of anyone who’s not on their “side,” and anyone on their own side who isn’t doing enough to distinguish themselves from their enemies. As Jacobs notes at the end of that chapter, one of the chief concerns for fanatics is “mental purity.” And social media provides us with examples on the daily of people, organizations, and institutions worthy of our ire.
The final thing I’d note in this admittedly-kind-of-rambly post is that there are actually plenty of instances where that mistrust is warranted. And there are also bad faith agents who weaponize it to sabotage our institutions—I could probably rattle off a dozen examples just from the past few weeks. But it feels paradoxical (or oxymoronic) to think of our culture as somehow “united” by its mistrust—for me, that’s the “final form” of the kind of irony that I’ve been writing about, and I can’t help but think of this bubble as comparable to the blast radius of a nuclear detonation, one that wipes out everything it comes into contact with as it expands. At some point, we have to figure out a better path forward. At the end of Young’s book, she explains that “The identity distillation machinery benefits from aligned, predictable, oversimplified expressions of social identity,” and it strikes me that those kinds of expressions are precisely what a lot of media polls are generating for us (and against us).
System 2 here is a reference to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, where System 1 is fast and associational while System 2 is slower and more reflective. I wrote a little bit about DK last summer.