By Katrina VanHuss
I grew up barefoot, with hard calluses. I rode a pony most places, and my ginger skin was sunburned most of each summer. Our Virginia family raised tobacco, chickens, beef cattle, grains, vegetables, and morality.
We were steady churchgoers: Sunday morning for Sunday school and preaching. Sunday nights sometimes. Always on Wednesday nights for the shared meal and Bible classes. Our family and community were close-knit, bound by religion, geography, and the work of growing things.
Support for the MAGA movement is high in my home community. Where the church was once the foundation, MAGA is now the Bible that dictates beliefs and behaviors. My own family is riven by differences in politics, religion, and views on social justice. The fact that I now live a three-hour drive away from where I grew up feels like a blessing.
My career, from which I recently semi-retired, is mostly built around nonprofit work. The tools of my trade include understanding how a community functions psychologically, and which “Easy” buttons we can press to get humans to exhibit the behaviors we are after. By 'those behaviors,' I mean donating to a nonprofit, volunteering, advocating — doing tactical good. I work hand-in-hand with a very-very local psychologist, Dr. Otis Fulton, my husband. We explore social psychology, social good, and politics in our tandem writing.
And that is how we pissed off a good hunk of our own community of do-gooders, the national network of nonprofit professionals I have spent 37 years being a part of.
My crime? My husband and I wrote in a recent article that trying to change a Beloved Relative’s mind about MAGA is not worth the resulting sacrifices. We called that relative Uncle Bob.
In summary, we argued that changing Uncle Bob’s mind had two possible outcomes:
- Failure. Uncle Bob has integrated MAGA into his identity. Once that happens, arguing with him is arguing against his identity, not his beliefs. Your argument will not change his identity, only solidify it. Your efforts will guarantee he will haul his blue-jeaned behind out of bed to go vote against your argument. Your confrontation will cause him to experience reactance, a response to a perceived challenge to his personal autonomy. The result: definitely voting MAGA.
- Success that leads to something worse than #1. Assume you succeed. Assume that your confrontation has led to Uncle Bob now being anti-MAGA (not a chance in hell, but let’s pretend). He loses his church, his local restaurants, his family, his social network, his ride to the ballgame. He is ostracized. You lose nothing, including your self-satisfied smirk and feeling of superiority.
In our article, we suggested a different path: Continue to love Uncle Bob and NOT to confront him. Don’t guarantee he goes to vote against your beliefs. Let him continue to go to church, the ballpark, the Burger Barn. Leave him be. He might just not vote at all. Use your time and energy to mobilize people who already believe what you believe. Love Uncle Bob anyway.
All Hell Breaks Loose.
You’d have thought we had shot the dog. It was like we complained about Grandma’s cooking. It was like I had answered a question from my mother with a loud “What?”
Otis and I had violated our own community norms when we argued that Uncle Bob should be left alone in his. Some part of our own community of social good professionals held a social norm that we had not given enough weight (any weight, truth be told).
Our group norm was that Uncle Bob and those like him must be held to account, punished, confronted, made to face consequences — that his political preference is an action that demands accountability. That attempts at accountability typically do not work to change minds and can even reinforce identity was irrelevant. The community’s rules were the only thing that mattered.
We got dragged in the comments for the first time ever. My husband’s eye twitched. I had to promise myself not to respond after even one glass of wine. My filter barely held.
As we say in the South, what had happened was…
We Created a Perceived Threat.
We caused a ruckus, and the conversation moved fast to questioning our morality, all on a sleepy Saturday afternoon in a LinkedIn thread.
Research shows that outgroup hostility becomes more likely when there is perceived threat, conflict, strong identity investment, and, especially, the moralization of conflict.
In our current political environment, it doesn’t take much to check all four boxes. An hour of cable news can give you a big dose of threat and conflict; certainty that your side holds the moral high ground can take care of the rest. We stepped into that nest of deer ticks and stood there.
Uncle Bob’s belief system, in my community’s mind, is truly harmful. Our arguments to reserve some space and grace for him did not fly. Uncle Bob needed punishing, and now that we had suggested otherwise, so did we.
We argued that perhaps you might not want your loved one to go through a social norming abrasion process, and then, by God, our ingroup ran one on us! They landed a social skinning like a trip down the asphalt on a bare ass. It was an amazing spontaneous social experiment. And we were watching it from the inside, ass on asphalt!
The raucous thread illustrated another cognitive miss on everyone’s part. Otis and I were asking, “What is most likely to produce the desired outcome with Uncle Bob?” This highly engaged and enraged part of our community was asking, “What does morality require of me, and you?” Two very different questions with very different answers. One woman tried to teach me about Rosa Parks. I am old and liberal. I know about Rosa Parks.
But there was even more at work. We had not just violated our group’s social norm. Our transgression was greater. Because we were part of the ingroup, our offense was made even more egregious. We were the black sheep.
The Black Sheep Effect.
A second, even more interesting psychological mechanism was likely operating: the black sheep effect. The term comes from a classic 1988 study by social psychologists José Marques, Vincent Yzerbyt, and Jacques-Philippe Leyens. They found that we can judge undesirable members of our own group more harshly than comparable members of an outgroup, particularly when their behavior is relevant to our social identity.
Black sheep can be judged even more harshly than outgroup members. They were madder at us than at Uncle Bob because we were part of the ingroup.
While Uncle Bob must experience consequences, we got this kind of thrashing:
“Staying comfortable is complicity.”
“To just give up and ignore is unpatriotic and it is cowardly.”
“It is complicity. Silence is not neutral.”
“It was harmful, lazy, and full of ignorance about your privilege.”
“Please take responsibility for what you said.”
It was sublime. And it got better. The Lambasting Committee scraping our skin off called the Sheriff.
The Sheriff’s in Town.
The roiling-comment crowd grew angrier. At least some of them decided they needed backup. Having been exposed to too many episodes of Gunsmoke, I immediately recognized him as the person “you call to put down this rabid raccoon.” I’ll call him “The Sheriff.”
The Sheriff had been alerted by multiple group members to get in there and take care of this problem. Now, this sheriff was unknown to us, seemingly unelected and as far as we knew (and as far as his LinkedIn profile indicated) held no office, except in his own and his tribe’s collective mind.
Upon arriving in the chat, he hiked up his metaphorical big belt buckle and told us that because people had said our article caused harm, we were going to have to apologize. We declined his invitation to do so and explained that we were describing a psychological process, not defending it. Our failure to apologize was then offered as evidence of “denial and defensiveness,” which he identified as a characteristic of white supremacy culture.
This could have been galling. But we found it fascinating. All these people were operating with good intent, as were we. And try as we might to stand outside the conversation and evaluate dispassionately, we were in the experiment. Our white-coat shield was having difficulty holding.
As this went on, I was thinking, “This is what they meant by being beat with the Woke Stick.” I honestly had not internalized that this was happening to people this way. Then, horrified, I thought, “Does this mean I was carrying the Woke Stick?”
The Sheriff showing up rounded out an important sequence: A group norm had been violated. Other members communicated the violation. A new member with perceived authority entered to reinforce the judgment and prescribe the appropriate corrective response. And when we didn’t provide that response, that itself became another violation. This was the second scenario we’d presented in our paper, that we were trying to save Uncle Bob from. And we had sprung the trap on ourselves! Some portion of our own beloved community, our in-group — people with whom we share contempt, disgust, revulsion for the MAGA movement — had turned on us. We were being cast out!
The moral policing of ingroup behavior continued. The Sheriff explained that perhaps we didn’t have the capacity to understand our own defensiveness or process his feedback. When challenged on whether that was an effective way to persuade someone, he went further: Apparently, we “lack the competency” to change our relatives’ minds, were so defensive that we had missed his argument, and needed “healing” before we could engage in “rational discourse.”
He flashed his metaphorical badge by saying he had heard from community members, whom he named. He anticipated compliance, while ignoring (or being ignorant of) psychological processes. The result was that Otis and I would definitely not agree with him (white coat be damned). Even my naming him “the Sheriff” is my way of giving it right back.
Pro tip: There is no quicker way to shut down a comment-dragging than to start analyzing the group’s behavior out loud. Kind of bummed we did that, because who knows what other psychological mechanisms might have revealed themselves!
No One is Immune from Their Mind.
To wrap it up, our original article argued that political identities become embedded in communities, that communities reinforce the beliefs and behaviors expected of their members, and that dissent can bring social sanctions.
Then we published it.
We dissented from what appeared to be a norm within our own political community about how MAGA relatives should be treated…
…and immediately received social sanctions.
The comment section became a live demonstration of one of the psychological mechanisms we had written about.
Our own ingroup demonstrated the same basic mechanism we had described in Uncle Bob’s MAGA community: Dissent from a group norm produces social pressure to conform. Otis and I demonstrated the anticipated reaction from Uncle Bob if confronted: “Hell no.” We all did what we all do.
My personal lesson isn’t about whether our critics were right or wrong. The lesson is that none of us are above these forces. Every community works in basically the same way, whether it exists in rural Virginia, in a national social good network, or fleetingly in a LinkedIn thread.
Our social wiring helps shape our behavior. Or, in the words of my home community, “Bless our hearts. We just can’t help it.”
I don’t want to leave you with that. It feels hopeless. And I don’t think the situation is.
Here’s what I know. When I was younger and had menstrual periods (stay with me) it helped to know that I wanted to verbally thrash people who were in my face because I was having PMS. Knowing what was happening didn’t make the feeling disappear. But it gave me a chance to slow down and put down the weapon.
When I first began to fly, I was afraid. I should have been afraid. We are programmed to be afraid of heights because heights can kill you. Knowing the statistics on flying didn’t eliminate the fear, but it gave me something besides the fear to work with.
Being able to stand back during a tense moment and say to my husband, “I’m experiencing reactance” instead of “I hate that cursed movie (That Thing You Do) and we have watched it 400 times” can really help a relationship.
That may be the useful thing about understanding social psychology. We don’t stop being human because we understand the machinery. But sometimes we can see the machinery running. And once we see it, we have a little more conscious choice about what we do next.
We don’t have to give up our values or our morality. But we can learn to ask whether what feels unquestionably true in the moment is actually true, or whether some very old social wiring is helping make it feel that way.
Sometimes it just ain’t so.
Katrina VanHuss and her husband Dr. Otis Fulton have helped national and international nonprofits do good for decades. They are now semi-retired in Richmond, VA with their two dogs and a couple acres of vegetables.
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