It feels increasingly difficult nowadays to avoid righteousness; or, worse, self-righteousness. People are constantly being told what to do by those who supposedly have seen the light. For example, I was recently scolded by a colleague for suggesting that my employer should aim to hire the best people, regardless of their sex or race. I was struck by the confidence that this person felt in instructing me on what I should value; it felt high-handed and uninformed.
Of course, there is a difference between righteousness and self-righteousness — but the slippery slope between them is short and steep. The advantage of righteousness is that it is justified, as in the case of a zealot who opens people’s minds to the possibility that they are prejudiced. By contrast, lecturing a stranger on how to weigh the trade-off between merit and equity strikes me as self-righteous.
Why is there so much of this behavior today? To address that question, we need to understand what makes people so sure of themselves. The answer might be a little surprising: Self-righteousness comes from judging the world by the perceived correctness of actions rather than by the quality of outcomes.
Illustration: Kevin Sheu
Consider tariffs. To evaluate the issue objectively, one must understand the causes of trade, trade imbalances and their effects. In other words, one must frame the issue “consequentially.” Presumably, the goal of a tariff policy is to produce beneficial outcomes, but that can be accomplished only by understanding why people trade and how to create conditions for the kind of trade you want. You must think about how the world works and how to tweak it to produce the outcomes you desire.
This might seem obvious, but successful execution requires a deep understanding of difficult economic questions. Once you begin trying to understand how trade works, you discover how complicated it is. Everyone is always looking for the best deal by guessing what everyone else is willing to buy and sell. Would imposing a 25 percent tariff on Canada cause Canadians to meet your demands, or would it drive them into a corner? This is not a question about what you value. It is a question about how the world works. A good consequentialist analysis would try to deliver an objective answer.
Owing to this complexity, consequentialist perspectives are shockingly rare among politicians and the public. People tend to adopt a much simpler one, seeing issues in terms of sacred values with which a given action either does or does not accord. Thus, instead of looking at the causes and consequences of trade, the administration of US President Donald Trump focuses on a particular action, as if tariffs are, by virtue of their righteousness, some kind of cure-all. The framing of the issue plays the same role as a religious dictate. It is a core belief, in this case based on little more than the faith of one man.
If one’s position on trade can be determined by sacred values, imagine the role such values play on issues such as concealed-carry permits for firearms, abortion, assisted suicide or religion in education. Framing issues in terms of sacred values makes them seem simple, but only because it avoids all the hard analytical work needed to link consequences to causes.
Psychologists have shown that this perspective makes people more intransigent and less likely to compromise. Violations of sacred values cause outrage to the point that people would take actions to purify themselves (as with self-flagellation) and to right the perceived wrong. Sacred-value frames are thus a recipe for hostility, polarization and conflict, because sacred values are inherently personal, they force the conversation to be about individual faith-based commitments that can brook no dissent, deepening the sense of opposition and corralling people into distinct identity groups.
By contrast, it is quite hard to be self-righteous when adopting a consequentialist frame. Discussions of causes and consequences are not only difficult; they require attention to detail, recognition of real-world complexities and humility about what you do not know. It is less about yourself and more about the issue, because such conversations leave no cognitive or emotional space for indignation. New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox fans can have a conversation about strategy and statistics. However, as soon as one side starts cheering for its team, there is little that the other side can do but cheer for its own.
The problem with certainty is that it is rarely justified. Issues that elicit strong disagreement tend to be complicated. Offering an informed argument about trade policy requires an enormous amount of expertise, and even experts disagree — at least about the details; even advocates of tariffs agree that Trump’s implementation of the policy has been suboptimal.
People simply do not know how little they know. People live under the illusion that they have a better understanding of how things work than they actually do. Strong opinions demand justification. The conviction that the US should impose tariffs just because you like tariffs, or because they are good for you personally, does not cut it. Strong preferences give people strong convictions, but they would not persuade those who do not share them — nor should they.
So, before asserting self-righteous claims about someone else’s opinions or actions, think about their end goal. What consequences are they trying to achieve? In small matters, such as how to interact with the people around us, and large ones, such as how to strengthen the economy, thinking in these terms can open persuasive lines of argument. Perhaps more importantly, it would force us to stop talking past one another.
Steven Sloman, professor of cognitive and psychological sciences at Brown University, is the author, most recently, of The Cost of Conviction: How Our Deepest Values Lead Us Astray.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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