Open mind for a different view: Flexibility mindsets as a strategy to reduce polarization
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3
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ComputeranimationVorlesung/Konferenz
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ComputeranimationDiagramm
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Computeranimation
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Computeranimation
Transkript: Englisch(automatisch erzeugt)
00:04
During the last days, we heard a lot about the pandemic and climate change and so on, but when I started my PhD some years ago, there was one topic that was very heavily discussed in the German, and I also think in European societies in general, and that was the immigration of refugees.
00:24
So my research at that time mainly focused around this topic, and I think it's obvious to all of us that the case of the so-called EU refugee crisis was one that really polarized our society. So there were, on the one hand, people who were welcoming towards the refugees and had
00:43
very positive attitudes, and on the other hand, we still have many people who were also rejecting refugees and even behaving hostile towards them. And I think what is important here is that the polarization that we could observe here
01:02
is mainly based on the attitudes people had towards the outgroups, so on their outgroup prejudice. And yeah, what is important is that prejudice cannot be only a driver of intergroup conflicts, so between the refugees and the host societies, but it can also be a driver of polarization within the host society, and I think this is also why it fits quite well to this
01:23
symposium, and we heard a lot about the potentially negative effects of polarization for society, so I'm not going to go into detail on that particular issue. Yeah, so what we identified is the problem of outgroup prejudice that might drive polarization,
01:40
and when you look at the social-psychological literature, of course, there are a lot of interventions that have been suggested to solve this problem or to tackle this problem. But still there is need for more interventions to reduce outgroup prejudice, especially if you have a look at the potential caveats or downsides of the established interventions.
02:01
For instance, I mean, intergroup contact theory is probably the most prominent example of this. It is certainly an effective method, but sometimes it's simply hard to establish, especially when people are really prejudiced in the beginning, they are not motivated or they do not want to get into contact with the other group.
02:21
Other approaches aimed at attitude change via communication over the outgroup, but this is also very difficult and sometimes ineffective, but it is possible, as some recent research shows. So what we did was to choose a slightly different direction, and our target was not to change,
02:44
let's say, the content that people think about, but rather the way people process information generally. So our strategy is to change the way how people process information. And this is because we know that stereotype activation and also prejudice often result
03:04
from spontaneous information processing. So people just follow their default reaction or their dominant response, and this leads them to activate stereotypes and also to show prejudiced attitudes towards outgroups. So the main research question that we started this work with was, how can we reduce people's
03:26
reliance on their spontaneous and often prejudiced judgments of outgroups? And as a second question, we also wanted to see whether we could take this to a more applied context, so we wanted to see whether we could implement the methods that we identified
03:43
to communication in the political domain. And the solution that we suggest are the mentioned flexibility mindsets. So what is this exactly? From the creativity literature, we derived a definition or certain characteristics that
04:04
we associate with flexible information processing, and this is, first of all, divergent thinking, the use of broad categories, and also switching between different categories. And what all these instances have in common is that people consider alternatives to their
04:23
dominant responses, and this is also important when it comes to polarization, I guess, because they are also considering alternatives to your dominant response could be quite effective. But how do we want to achieve this way of information processing? And this is where the mindset literature comes into play.
04:43
So in general, mindsets are activated cognitive procedures or processing strategies that are elicited by certain priming procedures. And the crucial thing is that they carry over to subsequent unrelated situations. So taken together, once a mindset is activated, it transfers to other situations where it
05:02
guides our mental operations and actions. And in our research, we wanted to combine these two strands, and what we created are the so-called flexibility mindsets. And what flexibility mindset means is, just as written down here, an activated cognitive strategy that leads to the consideration of alternatives beyond the dominant one.
05:26
And if we now transfer that to the area of prejudice or intergroup relations, the hypothesis that we derived here was that once such a mindset is activated, it would reduce people's reliance on their dominant, prejudiced outgroup judgments.
05:43
So in the end, I would say that this could then also contribute to depolarization when we think of people having polarized attitudes as their dominant response. So this is basically the overall framework, which was also recently published in the European
06:02
Review of Social Psychology, where we basically show all the findings that we gathered on this issue. But this is, of course, way too much to put it in the talk right now, so I just wanted to give you an overview and show you that there is really much work going on there. And yeah, so basically, the idea here is that this list, which could potentially be
06:26
extended on the mindset priming side, they all lead to the same or a similar way of information processing, which is characterized by flexible thinking. And as an outcome, we always observe that people rely less on their spontaneous responses.
06:45
So basically, we observe a lot of bias reduction in a host of different domains. But what I'm going to focus on today is my own research in this regard, which was mainly on cognitive conflicts and counterfactual thinking as solicitors of a flexibility mindset.
07:07
And as I said, or as I already introduced to you, particularly in the domain of stereotypes and prejudice, but I just wanted to show you that this work can be generalized to other topics and so that it also fits probably instances besides the ones that I'm going
07:26
to present. So to give you a brief overview of the empirical parts that I'm going to present right now, first of all, I'm going to start with my research on cognitive conflicts,
07:42
and then I'm going to go to the counterfactual thinking, but the logic behind it is pretty similar, so I think, yeah, it's going to be easy to process. So first of all, cognitive conflicts. What did we do in order to elicit cognitive conflicts? And what we did here was we used messages with negations.
08:03
I'm going to give you an example in a minute. So what we know from the psycholinguistic literature on negations is that if you process such a statement, and here you have an example like, asylum seekers are not deceptive, this
08:20
elicits a cognitive conflict. And why is this the case? Because you have two mental representations that you have to go through in a short, timely distance, and these are conflicting alternatives. So first of all, when you read the sentence, your attention will go to the deceptive, and this is like completely the opposite of what the intended meaning of the sentence is.
08:42
And there is really good research, luckily even from Tübingen, that shows that there are two conflicting representations in your mind when you process a negation, and this elicits cognitive conflict. And this is importantly not the case when you read the affirmation, which basically has
09:02
the same meaning, but you can directly infer that meaning from the sentence without having these conflicting representations. Another important thing to mention is that the mental simulation that is going on here basically starts automatically if you want to, well, derive the meaning from a sentence.
09:25
So if you want to understand the utterance, asylum seekers are not deceptive, you just have to go through that conflicting representation. So this is, I think, also an advantage of this manipulation.
09:41
On the other hand, what previous research showed is that once a cognitive conflict is primed, it increases cognitive flexibility. So there is also quite some research on this. And we combined it and hypothesized that then messages with negations should be suitable to
10:01
activate a flexibility mindset, and in turn then should reduce prejudiced out-group attitudes because people rely less on their dominant response. That's the basic logic behind it. And what we did in the experiments was that we presented participant statements like these
10:20
about the out-group, for instance, asylum seekers, and all these statements were either formulated using negations or affirmations, and then we had an additional control condition where no communication took place at all. And we measured the out-group attitudes before and after that communication.
10:41
And this is just one exemplary study from that paper. So we replicated these findings across a row of different out-groups, and this is a very robust effect that we observe. And the crucial thing is, I know this looks quite complex, but actually I'm going to walk you through that a bit.
11:00
So what you can see here on the x-axis, yeah, the pointer's not that great, but still you can see it, I hope, there's the initial level of out-group trust. And on the y-axis there is the out-group trust after the manipulation. And the crucial thing is when you have a look at those who are low in initial out-group
11:21
trust, who think that the out-group is not trustworthy at all, for those negations increase out-group trust compared to affirmations and the control condition. So basically this is exactly what we hypothesized, that the dominant response in this case, dominant negative response to the out-group is mitigated through the flexibility mindset.
11:47
And in some subsequent studies we also shed light on the mechanisms that were underlying these effects, and we indeed found that cognitive flexibility was accountable for the effects.
12:02
So to say we completely covered the whole model that I presented to you earlier. So messages with negation seem to work in the context of inter-group attitudes, so they are suitable means to reduce the dominant out-group attitude of participants.
12:22
And they do so because of increased cognitive flexibility. I would like to present you also another part of that work, which is on counterfactual thinking, and as I said, the logic behind it is quite similar, but of course the literature behind it is somewhat different, so I'm going to quickly also introduce you to the counterfactual
12:45
literature in a minute. But an important distinction here is that we were now not only interested in observing mindset-priming effects, but we tried to take it to a more applied context. And what we did was that we created a political speech, or the political speech was an original
13:04
one, but we added some rhetorical questions to that speech that we thought would elicit counterfactual thinking. But what is counterfactual thinking at all? I'm not sure how familiar you are with this concept, so I'm shortly going to introduce it.
13:22
Counterfactuals contain thoughts like what if X had happened, or if only I had done Y. And what is going on when you have these thoughts is that you mentally simulate alternative versions of reality. So you take, for instance, an instance, what happened yesterday, and you think about an alternative.
13:40
So for instance, if I had only, I don't know, if I hadn't been up that late last night, I probably would have prepared my slides better. That would be a typical counterfactual thought. And there is quite some literature showing that when you activate this in a mindset-priming,
14:02
it has effects in totally unrelated domains. So for instance, it reduces confirmation bias in other domains, and it de-biases decision making in general. And this is also why it fits to our reasoning behind the flexibility mindset. And from an information processing side, there is one particular type of counterfactuals
14:24
that should be particularly effective, and this is subtractive counterfactuals. And as the name says, subtractive counterfactuals are thoughts where you subtract something from the situation that had been taking place. So if you think about an event, and if you said, okay, if only I had not done X, this
14:43
would be a subtractive counterfactual, while additive counterfactuals would add something to that past situation. And the important thing is that subtractive counterfactuals elicited a processing style that is very similar to what we consider flexible processing, because it increases the use
15:01
of remote versus close associations. So people think broader in their information that is available. So we would hypothesize that also subtractive counterfactual mindsets like negations before would then reduce people's reliance on their prejudiced attitudes.
15:25
And as I said, we wanted to take this to a more applied setting, and we created some rhetorical questions that we thought would elicit subjective counterfactual thoughts. And we presented participants a political speech, an original speech that was given
15:43
at that time about immigration and the integration of refugees and so on. And there were some recent terror attacks that had taken place there, and our questions, so to say, referred to that event. So one question, for instance, was wouldn't it have turned out better if we had not been so gullible, meaning towards the outgroup in this case?
16:05
So what we see here is that the construction of the sentence relates to the subtractive counterfactual structure, and we thought that this would elicit this kind of thoughts within the participants.
16:20
And coming to the results, the pattern is, again, as expected. So what we see here is in the control condition, where participants only read the original speech without any questions, political orientation here, so on the right side you have more right-wing political orientation, is related to lower perceived trustworthiness of the
16:44
outgroup, which is no surprise. But this relation is weaker after subtractive counterfactual questions have been added to the speech. And so all in all, the slope of the regression here is less steep in the experimental condition,
17:04
and we find basically attitude change on both sides of the spectrum, which is also in line with our reasoning, because flexibility mindsets change your original response, right? So if your original response towards the outgroup would be positive, it would also be reduced.
17:21
So basically we find a mitigation of extreme attitudes, that's it. And yeah, we also conducted some studies using classical mindset priming procedures, so no relation to the outgroup at all, and we find the same pattern of results. Here we also had additive counterfactuals as an additional control condition, but what
17:42
we found is that across four studies, when we merge the analysis, that it is only subtractive counterfactuals that drive the effect. So here, as before, subtractive counterfactuals lead to a reduction of the relation between political orientation and perceived trustworthiness.
18:04
So wrapping things up, I hope it was not too much at that time of the day to process. In case you have any questions, of course, go ahead later on. But I showed you that cognitive conflicts in the form of negations and also counterfactual thinking are suitable means to elicit a flexibility mindset and in turn reduce prejudice to outgroup attitudes.
18:27
So I would also say that they could be suitable means to reduce polarized attitudes in general. And I think this is why I was invited in the first place and why I think this fits very well to the topic of the symposium.
18:43
But of course, I would like to end with also some potential boundary conditions or limitations. So we certainly have to take into account the processing conditions under which the manipulations take place. Because we know from previous research that epistemic motivation might play a role.
19:04
So are people motivated at all to process the information that is presented to them? And interestingly, we also have this in our data sometimes. But we never found any moderation effect through epistemic motivation. So it did not seem to play a role in our case here.
19:22
And as I said, for negations, it makes sense in my opinion. Because it does not depend on motivational aspects so much. Because when you want to understand what the sentence means, you just have to process it. And you have to go through that cognitive conflict.
19:41
And as I said, for the counterfactuals, there might also be some unwanted effects that should be considered when using such manipulations. So for instance, these manipulations also reduce initially positive attitudes. And of course, it is the question whether this is desired or not. Notwithstanding that it's like totally in line with the idea of a flexibility mindset
20:02
reducing dominant responses. But this should be taken into account especially when it comes to interventions. The limitations that I would like to clearly mention is that, of course, with all mindset priming procedures, the question comes up,
20:20
how sustainable or how long lasting are these effects? And we so far did not conduct any longitudinal studies. So I can only speculate on that. But there are other researchers who used similar manipulations and they actually find also long-term effects.
20:41
So it could be a promising way to go, but we definitely have to gather some data on that ourselves. And also, at least the results that I reported are mostly based on self-report and attitude measures, which is also, of course, a weakness of this research. But for me, the benefits are also worth mentioning.
21:04
And I think the most important thing is that the underlying mechanism that we present in our framework is highly generalizable. And I think this is also why it's so interesting to put it to other contexts and to see whether it also works there. And yes, as I showed you, it might also be something that could be applicable
21:24
to communication in the real world. And just a brief outlook, I don't have any data on that yet, but we're also collecting data and we already conducted some studies on other topics where we want to apply these methods, for instance, in the domain of climate change beliefs
21:41
and also in the domains of vaccination, but this is all preliminary so far. So yeah, I didn't put anything into the presentation right now. Okay, and with that, I would like to thank, first of all, my colleagues here at the Social Processes Lab at the EVM. And I want to thank you for your attention,
22:01
and I'm really happy to receive any questions. Thanks.