Populist psychology: How class division empowers autocratic leaders | Michele Gelfand | Big Think

Populist psychology: How class division empowers autocratic leaders
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Working-class people take rules more seriously. Upper- and middle-class people do not. Why? The latter have financial and social safety nets, so they can afford to break some rules.

Research shows that, by the age of three, working-class children are primed to be more rigid about rules. Those rules help working-class people survive what sociologists call 'hard living': extreme poverty, dangerous jobs, and unsafe neighborhoods. Having strong rules increases chances of safety and survival.

Harnessing this evolutionary psychology can be very powerful in politics. Populists like Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen exaggerate fear and threat to gain popularity. They understand "the role of fear and threat in mobilizing people to want more tightness and to want autocratic leaders," Gelfand explains.

In Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World, Michele Gelfand explains her research into 'tight' and 'loose' cultures. Get a crash course here.
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MICHELE GELFAND:

Michele Gelfand is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Gelfand uses field, experimental, computational, and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture--as well as its multilevel consequences for human groups.
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TRANSCRIPT:

MICHELE GELFAND: You know, I think often we think about social class as just being about our bank accounts. We don't think about how is class cultural, truly cultural in terms of differences in values and norms that are socialized in different groups for good reasons. And tightness-looseness, it just doesn't differentiate nations and states, it also differentiates social class with the same exact logic. We went out and we've been surveying people from the working class and people from the middle and upper classes, and what's fascinating is when we ask people about rules, 'just tell us five words that you think of for rules', we see that the working class sees rules very positively. Rules in the working class are important. They're important for helping people to slide into hard living, as sociologists would call it—to poverty, to the dregs of poverty. Rules are helpful if you're going to be going into occupations where there's a lot of danger, where there's less discretion. The middle class and upper class they saw rules more negatively. They saw it as goody two shoes when you're following the rules. For the working class, rules are important for survival. For the middle class, there's a safety net so you can actually afford to be rule-breaking in this context.

And what's fascinating is, we measure the ZIP codes of people coming into our lab and then we track the neighborhoods they live in. And, for sure, the working class live in much more threatening environments when it comes to crime, unemployment. They report being subject to many more threats. What's remarkable is that this starts very early. We wanted to see how early can we see these differences developing? And we started to see this even as early as three years old. What we did was we brought three-year-olds into the lab, working-class and middle-class kids. And you can't exactly ask them about rules, right. But what we did was we borrowed a technique from the Max Planck Institute where we had them interacting with a puppet. His name was Max the Puppet. And they got to know him and they enjoyed playing with him. And Max the Puppet suddenly after a little while became Max the Norm Violator. He started violating all the rules of the game and announcing that he's actually playing the game correctly. And we simply wanted to know: how did the kids react? Is there a different reaction by age three? And there sure was.

The middle class, in general, were much more likely to laugh and kind of let it go, and the working-class kids wanted Max the Puppet to stop. They told him to stop. They told him it was wrong. And parents are already socializing their kids, by the age of three, to help them fit into the kind of threatening or non-threatening environments they're going to be working in. So it's really important to see that these differences arise for a reason and they arise early.

So the rise of Donald Trump has been such an enigma to so many people. Is it an ideology? Is it a personality? In fact, Donald Trump is...

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/populist-psychology-how-class-division-empowers-autocratic-leaders