If you have not read Drew Westen’s outstanding piece, “What Created the Populist Explosion and How Democrats Can Avoid the Shrapnel in November“, on the Huffington Post, Alternet, and other venues, read it immediately. Westen states as eloquently and forcefully as anyone what he, I, and other progressives have been saying from the beginning of the Obama administration. I agree fully with everything he says. But …

Westen’s piece is incomplete in crucial ways. His piece can be read as saying that this election is about kitchen table economics (right) and only kitchen table economics (wrong).

This election is about more than just jobs, mortgages, and adequate health care. All politics is moral. All political leaders say to do what they propose because it is right. No political leaders say to do what they say because it is wrong. Morality is behind everything in politics — and progressives and conservatives have different moral systems.

In the conservative moral system, the highest value is preserving and extending the moral system itself. That is why they keep saying no to Obama’s proposals, even voting against their own ideas when Obama accepts them. To give Obama any victory at all would be a blow to their moral system. Their moral system requires non-cooperation. That is a major thing the Obama administration has not understood.

The conservatives understand the centrality of morality. They attacked the Obama health care plan as immoral for violating the moral principles of freedom (“government takeover”) and reverence for life (“death panels.”) The Obama administration made a policy case, not a moral case. The conservatives have characterized the bailouts as thievery and Obama’s ties to Wall St. as immoral — as being in bed with the thieves. The attacks on government are seen as moral attacks, with government seen as taking money out of working people’s pockets and giving it to people who don’t deserve it. Whether it is the birthers, or the anti-Muslims, or the anti-immigrants, of the pro-lifers, the attack is a moral attack. The Tea Party cry is moral — for “freedom” (see my book Whose Freedom?), for God, for patriotism. Even jobless benefits are seen as giving money to people who are not working and don’t deserve it. Even social security that workers have earned, that are deferred payments for work, are seen as undeserving people “sucking on the tits of the government.”

The moral case is not answered just by good policy that will help people who need help — as Westen proposed. The good policies — extending unemployment benefits, help to small businesses, help for teachers and firemen, limits on credit card rates, restrictions on rate increases and service reductions by HMO’s — in themselves fit a progressive moral system, but don’t in themselves make a case for progressive moral leadership.

Why are so many people about to vote against their interests? The Republicans are not offering kitchen-table benefits. When people are voting against their interests, more interest-based arguments don’t help.

Westen’s discussion of “the center” and of populism in general, misses what is crucial in this election. There is no one “center.” Instead, a considerable number of Americans (perhaps as many as 15 to 20 percent) are conservative in some respects and progressive in other respects. The have both moral systems and apply them to different issues — in all kinds of ways. You can be conservative on economics and progressive on social issues, or conservative on foreign policy and progressive on domestic issues, and so on — in all sorts of combinations.

Neuroscience 101, which Westen correctly invokes, tells us that in the brains of such voters, the two incompatible systems inhibit each other, that strengthening one weakens the other, and that the stronger one can have its influence spread to other issues. The “swing voters” are really “swing thinkers.” And it is language — moral language, not policy language, heard over and over — that strengthens one political moral system over the other and determines how people vote. The Democrats need to reach the swing thinkers — the people who are moral conservatives on some issues and moral progressives on others — and strengthen their progressive moral views. The kitchen table arguments must become moral arguments as well — arguments about freedom, life, fairness, and the most central of American values.

What are those values? They are the values that won the 2008 election for Barack Obama — and they were not just hope and change. Candidate Obama made the case that American is, and has always been, fundamentally about Americans caring about each other and acting responsibly on that care. Empathy, which he proclaimed over and over was the most important thing his mother taught him, and is the basis of our form of government. Responsibility is both personal and social. “I am my brother’s keeper,” as he said over and over in the campaign. And thirdly, excellence — doing everything as well as we can, individually and as a nation. That is why we have life, freedom, fairness, equality — and quality — as fundamental values.

We haven’t heard that kind of moral leadership since the inauguration. Americans are longing for it. And those moral values really do motivate every kitchen table policy!

It is morality, not just the right policy, that excites voters, that moves them to action — that creates movements. Legislative action must come from a moral center, with moral language repeated over and over.

What should be avoided, besides policy-wonk and pure-policy discourse? Again, the answer comes from Neuroscience 101. Offense not defense. Argue for your values. Frame all issues in terms of your values. Avoid their language, even in arguing against them. There is a reason that I wrote a book called, Don’t Think of an Elephant! Don’t list their arguments and argue against them using their language. It just activates their arguments in the brains of listeners.

Don’t move to the right in your discourse or action. That will just strengthen the conservative moral system in the brains of swing thinkers. Frame your arguments from your moral position.

In addition, beware of the same pollsters and focus-group-dialers who missed Scott Brown’s moral message to the swing-thinkers in Massachusetts and claimed that Martha Coakley would win so handily that she could go on vacation. Just because a message plays well in focus-group-dialing doesn’t mean it will win elections.

Finally, Democrats need a truly effective communication system. They need unified, morally-based framing of issues. They need to train spokespeople all over the country in using such framing and avoiding mistakes. They need to organize those spokespeople. And they need to book them, as conservatives do, on radio, TV, in civic and religious groups, in schools and universities. This is doable, but this late, it will take resolve from the top.

Winning this election will require the right policies and actions, but it will also require moral leadership with honest, morally-based messaging and a communications that will not just blog and knock on doors, but will be there in the districts with the crucial swing-thinkers 24/7 day and night.

The Democrats cannot take their base for granted. Only moral leadership backed by actions and communicated effectively can excite the Obama base once more. Without that excitement, the Democrats will lose big.

George Lakoff is Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of The Political Mind, Don’t Think of an Elephant, Moral Politics, Whose Freedom, and Thinking Points — as well as many books on the brain, mind, and language.

Participants explored the emotional foundations of morality and experienced the nuances of human decision-making. Armed with this knowledge, they set about working in small groups to identify the goals and priorities that perpetuate problematic organizational structures.  Then they considered strategies that might shift these social norms in a manner that allows us to address global threats like climate change and resource depletion.

At the core of our discussion was the keystone concept of situated identity, which I call the functional unit of social change:

Situated Identity is the story a person lives that is informed by the confluence of cultural myths, cognitive models, institutional structures, and universal constraints.  The identity is ‘situated’ in a particular historical-cultural context and reinforced through the institutional and built structures of society.

We discussed how vital it is to consider (1) the stories people live, (2)  the conceptual models that shape their understandings of the world, and (3) the incentive structures inherent in social institutions. All three elements of identity converge with fundamental aspects of human nature to constitute social behavior. Persistent change always involves at least one of these elements of situated identity.  And changes in one element will have repercussions across the others.

Our purpose for doing this was to both acknowledge how difficult large-scale behavior change is and realize that we know enough to begin designing campaigns that engage people in a significant behavioral change process.  The workshop provided a great learning opportunity for people who recognize the need to develop more systematic approaches to advocacy and organizational change.

If you are looking for tools and insights that increase the effectiveness of your campaigns, you will want to stay informed about what we’re up to at Cognitive Policy Works.  We are already beginning to adapt this workshop into a webinar so that practitioners around the globe have the opportunity to incorporate situated identity into their campaigns.

Here are five things I’ve discovered that lead me to the conclusion that change processes can be designed and implemented effectively:

#1: We now know we were wrong about human nature.

Throughout most of the 20th Century,  research into the foundations of human nature was dominated by a series of what philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn called “scientific revolutions”.  Every decade or so a new theory would arise that pulled the foundations out from under the one that came before it.  In the early 20th Century, focus was on behaviorism with the assumption that it wasn’t possible to measure aspects of subjective experience.  This was challenged by the work of Sigmund Freud when he demonstrated that influences from subconscious experience could be measured (and were quite significant).  Later came the “cognitivist” period dominated by formal arguments about the “abstract logic” of human thought.  This was challenged by studies into the emotional influences of intention and belief for altering behavior.

The dominant theory that persisted throughout this entire period has been the Theory of Rational Action that claims human beings are abstract symbol manipulators (much like a calculator or computing machine) that seek to maximize their self-interest.  This theory laid the foundation for most of the major institutions of society today, from stock markets to government agencies.

And we know that this theory of human nature is wrong.  The first step to bringing about large-scale behavior change is finding the errors in our ways from past efforts that didn’t work.

#2: We now know how REAL human nature works (mostly).

While many puzzle pieces are still missing, scientists have pieced together enough of the picture to know that human beings are embodied creatures.  This means we work the way we do because of the kinds of brains we have, the kinds of bodies we have, and the typical experiences that pervade our evolutionary history.

The basic picture is that human nature is:

• Profoundly moral: Our behavior is shaped by value judgments, deeply held beliefs, and assertions about right and wrong;
• Profoundly social: We are influenced by the behavior of those around us through shared stories, common expectations, and the need for cooperation (and competition);
• Deeply emotional: Contrary to past assumptions, we reason with our emotions.  Just imagine trying to ask someone out on a date without those important emotional cues about alertness, enthusiasm, and appeal;
• Rational in context: Decisions are made via context-based logic determined by how we understand the situations we find ourselves in;
• Informed by the interplay of body, brain, and environment: All of these factors arise at the junction of bodily experience in the world where we interpret, plan, and act.

#3: It all comes down to good design.

Attempts to change human behavior will depend on knowledge like this.  We have to design new modes of interaction (such as social media platforms like facebook and MySpace), better structures in the built environment (to change the patterns of experience), and more human-oriented organizational forms (that take REAL human nature into account).

With positive knowledge both about where we went wrong in the past and what we now know that is right, we can engage in system design to promote socially desirable outcomes like reductions in environmental impacts and greater sensitivities to the needs of others.

#4: This includes how motivation works.

One of the most important areas to consider good design is in the incentive structures that drive much of human behavior.  The assumption that humans are self-interest maximizers has lead to many pay-for-work models that reward selfishness and greed in order to rise up the ladder.  This theory has been deeply critiqued and challenged by studies into human creativity, such as that of Daniel Pink.

The key to behavioral change is understanding how motivation works in different environments.  Then one needs to observe how people are using the environments they find themselves in now.  The combination of these two knowledge sources will provide insights into how new environments should be designed.

#5: It’s been done before (many times).

History is filled with examples of change-makers successfully driving large-scale behavioral change.  Guided by contemporary insights we can dissect past success stories and cultivate systematic methods for designed change.  A few case studies that might be particularly enlightening are:

• The first televised Presidential debate and its impact on voting behavior;
• Inspirational social movements like the Civil Rights Movement or events that led to the creation of the Endangered Species Act;
• Transformational events like the terrorist attacks of September 11th and the bombing of Pearl Harbor;
• The rise of public relations and modern advertising.

This small sampling, if properly analyzed, can be exceedingly insightful.  I will share some preliminary results of my analysis for these and other related topics in the workshop next week.

So, in conclusion, I believe it is finally possible to design campaigns for changing large-scale human behavior because of the solid foundations we now have from the cognitive and behavioral sciences.  I will share more of the practical implications of this knowledge on August 25th in Seattle — and continue developing the tools necessary to put it to work for NGOs, government agencies, and social businesses in the days ahead.

Will you join me?

The beat goes on.

In the nearly two weeks since I wrote Part I of this series, an armed gunman was arrested en route to assaulting an obscure progressive foundation in San Francisco — one that’s often been at the center of Glenn Beck’s blackboard (which has become Conspiracy Theory Ground Zero for 2010). Also, this just in: President Obama is attempting to foment a race war, complete with New Black Panthers in the streets, in order to win the November elections.

I know. It’s just so hard to keep up.

In the last post, I defined a conspiracy theory as “any story that assumes that things happen due to the deliberate, covert actions of powerful others — even when the preponderance of evidence points to the conclusion that the events were almost certainly accidental and unintended.” And I talked about the cultural conditions that soften up people’s skulls and predispose them to accepting these baroque works of storytelling rather than simply accept what the evidence shows.

This post moves from outside influences to what goes on inside our heads. What’s going on internally that makes conspiracy stories appealing to us as individuals? As before, I’m drawing heavily on David Aaronovitch’s Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy Theories in Shaping Modern History as one of the better guides out there to all the factors at play when we willfully choose to believe the unbelievable.

The dark side of celebrity envy
A huge number of theories revolve around the deaths of celebrities — JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana. There’s a direct correlation between the public’s adoration of the good and great and the level of public obsession with every pornographically intimate detail surrounding the stories of their last moments on earth. People find these stories endlessly fascinating — and the more disgusting and perverse the detail, the more obsessed we are with it. What’s up with that?

Part of this is pretty straightforward schadenfreude: as Aaronovitch put it, “Whatever we might have envied in these people, we sure don’t envy them now.” But we may also be obsessed with the realization that such extraordinary people could die at the hands of ordinary people — people very much like us. And worse: we find it hard to confront the possibility that our own passion for them may have played a role in causing their deaths. “It was not our thirst for gossip that killed Norma Jean or England’s Rose, but the CIA,” says Aaronovitch. “It wasn’t an ordinary Joe with a rifle who murdered the young president, but the Mafia or the FBI.

“Conspiracy theory may be one way of reclaiming power and disclaiming responsibility.”

There’s another way we deflect this responsibility, too:

Beware of powerful enemies
When bad things happen to good people — especially people who were agents of positive change like the Kennedys or Paul Wellstone — it’s also easy to imagine, in our more paranoid moments, that they were targeted by the people who were most threatened by what they were doing.

Out here on the left, we’re at least as prone to this as the right wing is. In our grief, we look for reasons for our loss — and too often, there simply aren’t any. Cars and planes crash. Crazy guys with guns target public figures for reasons that exist only in their own imaginations. These are everyday events that just happen; and in the overwhelming majority of cases, there’s no conspiracy involved.

Even so: these high-profile conspiracy theories trickle down through the culture, feeding the paranoia of hardcore conspiracy theorists who eventually come to believe that they’re next on the list. (They always assume that somewhere, there’s a list.) Because I’m so right (and so smart and so important), they must be out to silence me. People who’ve gone over this edge are prone to interpret everyday events — a police car driving past the house or a temporary glitch in their Internet service — as evidence that they’ve been targeted, and are being closely watched.

And for the rest of us, they serve as cautionary tales that blunt our will to engage injustice — or, perhaps, convenient excuses that let us off the hook. Don’t rock the boat too much — or you could end up dead in a ditch, just like Karen Silkwood did.

I’m smart. You’re not.
Conspiracy theories make us feel smart. They’re populist fables that lay bare the supposed actions taken by the power elites against the people. But the real elite (at least in their own minds) are those who are insightful enough to see through the official story and divine the truth of the matter. Being the only one perceptive enough to have cracked the code irrefutably proves that you’re superior to the sheeple around you.

This attitude makes it easy to wave off skeptics. All that insistence on evidence and data and credentials and plausibility is just a smokescreen that hides the reality that they’ve closed their narrow minds to the truth. From this skewed perspective, clinging to reason is for idiots. The real “intellectual” is the one who has opened her mind to all the possibilities — even the most Byzantine and improbable ones.

Unfortunately, this assumption also feeds a grandiose sense of paranoia that actually undermines the ability to think rationally. When embarrassing holes in the story are exposed, they’re invariably blamed on those cunning plotters, who obviously cooked up these inconvenient truths to throw those of lesser intellect off the scent. In fact, in ConspiracyWorld, the bigger the pile of evidence against a theory grows, the more certain the True Believers are that they’re absolutely on the right track. We’ve all met otherwise pretty smart people who are quite sure that the more their facts are disproven by the evidence, the more right they must be.

And weirdly, people who take to this conceit aren’t entirely unjustified:

The smarter they are, the harder they fall
The stereotype of conspiracy believers is that they’re the kind of people who devour the National Enquirer along with their Big Macs and the latest episode of Jerry Springer back at the mobile home park. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Your average conspiracy theory buff actually tends to be well-educated (usually with at least at least one college degree), and a well-established member of the middle- to upper-middle class. According to Aaronovitch, they’re “the professors, university students, the artists, the managers, the journalists, and the civil servants.” It’s not the working stiffs who are propagating this stuff — it’s the chattering classes.

Why would these smart people fall for such absurd tales? Some of it may be due to intellectual arrogance. When we’re used to being an authority in one field, it’s all too tempting to assume that we’re also equally competent to assess data from other fields, too. This is why people usually fall for conspiracies where the details are outside of their own field of competence: they’re quite sure they understand what’s really going on, but they honestly don’t.

Historians generally don’t fall for historical conspiracies like the DaVinci Code hoaxes. And you won’t meet very many structural engineers or pilots who think 9/11 was an inside job. They know better, because they’ve got intimate knowledge of the field, and the flaws in the theory are obvious to them. However, the streets are packed with educated non-lawyers who don’t have the slightest idea how government records or citizenship laws work, but still insist that Obama’s not an American citizen. They’re “experts” in their own minds, even though they have no actual expertise in the field.

History as written by losers
A lot of conspiracy theories are nothing more than a cop-out — sour-grapes stories told by people on the losing side of history. If we can blame our losses on a conspiracy, then we don’t have to confront our own fatal flaws — our disorganization or stupidity or unpopularity. Instead, it’s very reassuring to tell ourselves that the loss was entirely due to the overwhelming ruthlessness of our opposition, who were willing to stop at nothing to defeat us. (See the next item.)

This factor, almost all on its own, explains the never-ending conspiracy obsessions of the Tea Party, which only gets more deranged every time the rest of the country rejects its candidates and its ideas. If you find your movement engulfed in conspiracy theories, look around. They’re a pretty clear indicator that you’ve already lost, and your broken-hearted followers are now working overtime to concoct excuses that will salve their sense of failure.

Evil has no limits
Conspiracy theories confirm our beliefs about the evilness of the other side; and this explains why there’s often a certain symmetry to them. For example: several polls have found that about 58% of Republicans doubt Obama’s right to be president. Conversely, the Scripps Survey Research Center found in 2006 that about 54% of Democrats thought that 9/11 was an inside job.

Likewise, during the Bush years, progressives were deeply worried by FEMA’s plans to build emergency housing camps, suspecting that they might be used as concentration camps for liberal upstarts. The conservatives, naturally, thought we were nuts. Now, it’s an article of faith in Tea Party circles that the government is preparing those same camps to round them up when Obama hands America over to the Muslims, the Socialist International, or the Mexicans and Canadians (the villains change weekly — it’s hard to keep up) — and most of us are pretty sure they’re nuts, too.

It’s just good old-fashioned bias confirmation at work. We tend to believe theories that point up the sulfurous and venal evil of those on the other side, and entirely discount those aimed at the paragons of virtue on our own side. And any neutral object that happens to be lying around on the landscape can be twisted around and used as a weapon by either side.

You can’t just stop at one
Conspiracy theories tend to build on each other, eating away at your reasoning capacity as they take over your brain. If your thinking is muddled or sloppy enough that you’ll accept one wrong thing as fact, you’re statistically more susceptible to accepting any number of other wrong things, too. The only antidote for this is better education and training in garden-variety critical thinking skills, with an emphasis on evaluating evidence, assessing the credibility of those offering it, and drawing sound conclusions from their data.

As noted last week: our teach-to-the-test school system isn’t helping here. But the fact that these theories are so often promoted by people who are well-educated enough to know better, we probably need to be looking at the standards of reason being taught in our universities as well. And beyond college, too many professions have also become lax about demanding rigorous standards of argument and evidence from their members.

Some psychologists who study conspiracy theories lay the blame for all this directly at the feet of post-modernism, which insists that all narratives are more or less equally true. If that’s the case, there’s no such thing as objective reality — and hence no facts to defend, and no need to critically evaluate anything. Whatever sounds or feels truthy enough must be the truth. It’s beyond ironic that the biggest post-modernists on the American scene right now are on the right wing, which creates its own reality with breathtaking abandon — and zero regard for factual truth.

There’s one simple question that separates a dedicated conspiracy theorist from someone whose rational faculties are still intact:

What would it take for you to reject this story? What evidence, if it appeared, would thoroughly refute this theory in your eyes?

If they can’t provide three pieces of evidence that they’d accept as discrediting, congratulations. You’ve found a True Believer.

But it feels so true!
Conspiracy theories often reverberate with emotional truth, even when the facts don’t make any rational sense. The first step in understanding any conspiracy theory is to look for the grain of validity at its core — the deeper truth that speaks to the emotional reality of those who believe it.

Aaronovitch recalls that in the wake of Katrina, the conspiracy theories were even thicker on the ground than the mud in New Orleans. One of the most persistent stories was the levees had been breached deliberately to destroy the city’s African-American neighborhoods. While no facts have ever emerged to support this belief (which would have required implausibly massive collusion followed by years of successfully sustained cover-up by hundreds of local, state, and federal authorities), the story is a powerful parable about the way poor black Americans are always abused, lied to, and neglected by people in power. The facts may be wrong, but listening for the deeper emotional truth and responding to that is the best way to open a dialogue and regain trust.

Who’s in charge here? Nobody.
The bottom line on why we believe conspiracy theories is this: We’re terrified of admitting that nobody is really in control. It’s a lot more comforting to think that *somebody* engineered a crisis than to reckon with the horrible, sickening fact that *nobody* did.

Most humans don’t deal at all well with the cruel, capricious randomness of fate. Shit happens — and it often happens for absolutely no meaningful reason at all. That thought makes people crazy with terror, so we make up entities to blame — God, Satan, the Freemasons, the CIA, or the All-Seeing Eye of Sauron. It’s far easier to blame it all on imaginary Lizard People from another planet than have to deal with the bald fact that millions of lives have been upended (or just ended) by an event — and yet there is simply is nobody out there to blame for it.

As my friend Bob Mackey puts it: “The alternative is a universe that is controlled by absolutely nobody. There is no control, no security, no Men in Black or Black Helicopters or Black Hussein Presidents to frighten the God-fearing upright citizens.” In the end, conspiracy theories are simply stories we tell to fill the blackness of the existential void.

Bob also reminds us to “Never confuse a conspiracy with a massive cluster f**k.” The bare truth is: most conspiracies start with massive clusterfucks. And this brings us back full circle to where this series started last week — with the gusher in the Gulf, which is much easier to explain as the massive clusterfuck the evidence tells us it is than it is to attribute any of it to malice or venality on the part of President Obama.

Next week, this series will finish with some suggestions for how we can ratchet down the overheated level of paranoia, and gently move American discourse back toward the rational, reasonable, and sane.

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In order to build a better economic system, we’ll need to be explicit about these cognitive elements of the process moving forward.  Worldviews and belief systems will always be a part of the economy because they are part of every human system.  We can no longer just accept their implicit assumptions and remain blind to the systemic effects that arise through this powerful form of cognitive bias.

Briefs and Reports

“Narrowing the Gap, Leveling the Field: How We Talk about Inequality,” an in-depth report and cognitive linguistic analysis of the myriad challenges in communicating about inequality, with recommendations for improving our linguistic practices.

“Applying What We Know: What Previous Research on Taxation, Government and Wealth Can Teach Us About Messaging Inequality,” a summary report of existing polling data, framing research, and messaging on the topic of inequality.

Two “cheat sheets,” one on the barrier and gap models of inequality, and the other on the scale and vertigo models.

(Cognitive Policy Works contributed to this effort by sharing narratives about wealth and prosperity that arise through contrasting moral worldviews.)

You’ve heard the latest one, right? President Obama — or maybe it was Obama working hand-in-glove with BP — deliberately blew up the Deepwater Horizon, sent 11 workers to their deaths, destroyed the country’s biggest fishery, and smeared the coasts of five states with endless tides of oil.

Why did he do this? Why, to pass the new energy bill, of course.

This is the Conspiracy Theory Of The Week (TM) on the far right this past week — our little dip into the alternate, fact-free, gravity-free reality zone of the rabid right. Tracking the loony parade of right-wing conspiracy theories became something of a personal enthusiasm last spring, when the right wing’s Bizarro World stories took a quantum leap for the weird. Up until the inauguration, these confections had almost always been wrapped around a kernel of factual truth; but there came a point — it was somewhere in the early phases of the health care debate — when that chewy middle suddenly became optional. Some new level of outrage and irrationality had been breached; and beyond that point, the new stories being told had absolutely no relationship to any observable reality at all.

Fascinated, I hit the books. The most useful one out of the several I read turned out to be Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by British historian David Aaronovitch. While carefully dissecting the anatomy of over a dozen of the past century’s most famous conspiracy theories, Aaronovitch also draws some thoughtful insights about the nature of conspiracy theories: how they start, who believes them, and what psychological purpose they serve.

Aaronovitch defines a conspiracy theory as any story that assumes that things happen due to the deliberate, covert actions of powerful others — even when the preponderance of evidence points to the conclusion that the events were almost certainly accidental and unintended.

Unfortunately, the right wing doesn’t hold the franchise on conspiracy theories — a lot of progressives are quite ready to believe all manner of sordid things about the Bush regime, for example. But as Dr. Robert Altemeyer observed, there are distinctively conservative habits of mind (suspicion, fear of strangers, fear of change, faith in strong leaders, paranoia) that do seem to lend themselves to conspiracy thinking. It’s no surprise we’re seeing it out of them — but we also need to be more acutely aware that we’re hardly immune to the siren song of crazy paranoia, either.

Why do people believe this stuff? It turns out that it’s a complicated issue, with several answers. Some of those answers have to do with the internal state of the people who believe them; others have to do with the cultural and political environment they’re trying to navigate. This post covers some of the external factors that create a climate that predisposes people to suspend their judgment and believe the worst. Next week, I’ll follow up with a second post about what goes on inside people’s heads that untethers them from reason just far enough to be swept away by their fears.

* * *

Broken Trust
People are far more likely to believe in conspiracy theories when they’ve already been objectively, seriously, undeniably lied to by people in power. Conspiracy theories are always a clear sign that people’s faith government and private institutions has been repeatedly shattered, but never mended. If they lied to us then, we can never be sure they’re not lying to us now.

It’s not just the Gulf of Tonkin, or Watergate, or Iran-Contra, or being lied into Iraq. It’s also the way our own bosses treat us at work, and Wall Street doctors the books, and the media leaves essential facts out of news reports. The current generation of Americans, left and right, has learned the hard way that people in power lie to us — constantly and habitually. Since they won’t trust us with the simple truth, there’s no reason to trust them in return.

The thing our leaders still don’t get about us is this: when we’re forced to reflexively discount the official story, it only sharpens our determination to find out what’s really going on. And the less solid information they give us, the bigger the void that has to be filled — and the wilder our collective imagination will run to fill it. In the end, whatever we make up will invariably be orders of magnitude worse than any ugly truth we’re not being told. They more they try to manage our perceptions, the more resistant to any such management we become.

History’s “Contradictions”
This distrust is particularly likely to spin out of control around big, history-shaping events, every last one of which generates its own zombie horde of conspiracy theories-that -will-not-die. A lot of these theories hang on the belief that The Official Story (as told by the Warren Commission or the 9/11 Committee or establishment historians who have taken months or years to fully investigate) fails to account for important details, which are left unanswered. Or, if they are answered, the answer is rejected as unsatisfactory.

Much of this dissonance starts with the very first news reports coming out of a crisis zone. As Aaronovitch notes, “Reporters in the West usually do the best they can in frightening and confused circumstances, but early explanations of major disasters will contain much that turns out to be mistaken or speculative.” Conspiracy theorists typically seize on these early, blurred, fog-of-war reports and give them the status of indisputable truth. When later reports — prepared with the advantage of complete information and the clarity of hindsight — come to different conclusions, conspiracy theorists make a fuss over the perceived “contradictions.”

Many of these contradictions crop up because we tend to assume that the people in the thick of the moment had the same broad perspective and complete data that we enjoy now, looking back — which, of course, they didn’t — and then use that as license to second-guess their decisions. Also, as Aaronovitch notes, “given the desire to believe, it is easy to confuse detail with thought.” Conspiracy theories are often presented as a blizzard of random “facts” (like the lists of “facts” that still circulate on the right about the Vince Foster matter) — but these “facts” don’t necessarily add up to any kind of actual conclusion. And again, it’s left to our imaginations to string them together — which our marvelous pattern-making engines will do with reckless abandon.

Scapegoating
A lot of conspiracy theories start when someone in government or business decides to create a scapegoat in order to deflect attention away from their own decisions. The problem isn’t that our immigration policies (which have been tailored to the whims of large employers at the expense of American workers) are completely ineffectual. The problem is that those damned Mexicans are conspiring to reconquer America. As long as we’re distracted by the latter, we won’t be doing much about the former.

Scapegoats also appear when ideologues don’t want to acknowledge that their own leaders have feet of clay. Our movement didn’t fail out of its own inherent weaknesses or contradictions; it was sabotaged by plotters. This was the paranoid rationale behind the Stalinist purges; but you can also see it alive and well in the conservative movement’s successful campaign to hunt their RINOs to extinction.

We’re Never Wrong
Some conspiracy theories start when a group attempts to deflect humiliation after being proven categorically, undeniably, embarrassingly wrong. For example, the Holocaust Denial conspiracy theory can be directly traced back to the old America Firsters who had strongly opposed the US’s entry into World War II. Their entire movement (which had included many high-profile, respected Americans) was completely discredited at war’s end, when the liberation of the death camps proved beyond argument that America’s decision to intervene has been the right one. After that, some isolationist diehards figured that he only way to vindicate themselves was to deny that the Holocaust ever happened; or (alternatively) to insist that the Zionist movement ginned the whole thing up to gain the world’s sympathy and support, and thus reclaim Israel.

Unfortunately, this toxic little figleaf, designed to cover up for one of the American right’s bigger blunders, created a conspiracy theory that’s now taken on a life of its own and gone global. Resurgent fascist movements in every corner of Europe these days take it as gospel that the Holocaust never happened (or, at least, didn’t happen the way the historical record says it did). And it’s gained a real following in the Arab world as well.

X Marks The Spot
Besides covering up embarrassing lapses of judgment, conspiracy theories very often contain elements that are shadow projections of our own worst attributes. It’s axiomatic on the left that if the right wing is accusing us of thinking or doing something terrible, it’s because they’ve already thought or done it themselves.

This is such a reliable phenomenon that smart reporters rely on it: whatever evil a right-winger is raising holy hell about, start digging, because he’s telling you precisely where his own dirt is buried. And so it happens that the congressman who pounds the pulpit about the Gay Agenda’s evil conspiracy to corrupt America’s youth is the very same one taking his own rentboy to Europe.

Faux “Experts”
Americans are famously suspicious of egghead intellectuals, and conspiracy-mongers take full advantage of that suspicion. Most of the “experts” promoting these theories are either celebrities (if Charlie Sheen believes that 9/11 was an inside job — well, then, it must be true!), or “experts” and “researchers” whose credentials don’t even hold up to the most basic scrutiny.

Many of these popularizers received their lofty titles from “think tanks” or “institutes” that are run out of somebody’s PO box or den. Almost none of them have credentials or professional experience in the field they’re holding forth on — and the ones that do have relevant qualifications are more often than not regarded as embarrassments by their colleagues. And so it happens that David Ray Griffin, the leading author of books on the 9/11 conspiracy, isn’t an aviation expert, physicist, structural engineer, or authority on terrorism; he’s a retired theology professor who asks his readers to take a lot on faith.

Despite the lack of academic or professional cred (or perhaps because of it), the folks who promote conspiracy theories go overboard to put a thick veneer of scholarship on their claims. Books and essays are ostentatiously footnoted; but the references typically link back to even more obscure conspiracy publications with even flimsier evidence — or else to other works written by the same author, in a self-reinforcing loop. Some theorists use scientific jargon to dazzle the crowd and obfuscate weaknesses in their story; others borrow terms of art from the intelligence trade, giving the impression that they’re getting their data from sources on the inside who know what’s really going on.

Media Sensationalists
The media needs to fill airtime, and doesn’t feel the least duty to do even a minimum level of fact-checking. With our self-proclaimed gatekeepers of the truth asleep on the job, those above-mentioned fake “experts” and “researchers” find it easy to get on the air and spew fact-free nonsense. It’s cultural pollution — but if an hour-long examination of Obama’s birth certificate or Dan Brown’s latest book grabs eyeballs, that’s all that matters.

The worst conspiracy mongers totally abdicate their obligation to the facts by using the “I’m just asking” tactic, which is a particular favorite of right-wing talking heads like Glenn Beck. “It is irresponsible to speculate? It would be irresponsible not to.” No data is provided, no evidence offered; the theorist merely offers up some disturbing questions out of “a simple desire to find the truth” — and then leaves the audience to make up their own minds (which, as we’ve seen, is basically an open invitation to insert their own fantasies here). We report, you decide. But the questions themselves only make sense if you already think there’s mischief afoot — and once they’re asked, the conspiracy is free to take on a life of its own.

The Failure of Critical Thinking
Americans believe in conspiracy theories for the same reason we’re so quick to accept the right wing’s faux science and reconstructed history: we simply don’t teach most of our kids the basic skills of critical thinking any more.

This is where 25 years of teaching to the test has brought us. We don’t know who to trust, or when, or why. We can’t evaluate the claims of history or science, or even get a basic timeline straight. We can’t sort out what’s plausible and likely from what’s implausible and unlikely. We can’t assess the relative credibility of various experts, or figure out what agendas they’re serving when they make their claims. We’d rather take Rush Limbaugh’s explanation as gospel than spend .062 seconds on a Google search that would give us some alternative data to work with, because then we’d be forced to evaluate that data on our own.

And then we wonder why in the hell so many of us hold such implausibly baroque beliefs; but can’t seem to locate the simple truth at high noon with both hands.

Next week, I’ll take a deeper look at what’s going on in our own heads that predisposes us to believe the unbelievable. And in the third and final part of the series, I’ll talk about what needs to be done in order to conspiracy-proof our discourse and restore some reason to our political conversations.

• Deconstructing the cultural and political frames of an academic research department at a major university;
• Analyzing media frames around health care, foreign policy, immigration, presidential campaigns, environmental issues, social justice, democracy, economic development, and more;
• Advising executive-level managers of non-profit organizations, professional unions, government agencies, and social businesses on strategic social change issues;
• Educating citizen activists in virtual classrooms and in-person workshops about the workings of the political mind.

In all of these settings I’ve found that many people have heard of frames, yet few really understand what they are or how significant their existence is for social change efforts.  Also, I’ve typically found that people have wide ranging misconceptions about what frames are, how they work, and why it is so important that people learn to identify them effectively in their efforts.  This essay is an attempt to start shedding light on this difficult topic.

What the Heck IS a Frame?

George Lakoff, a linguist famous for his insights into frames as they apply to politics, describes them as:

“Frames are the mental structures that allow human beings to understand reality – and sometimes to create what we take to be reality. [T]hey structure our ideas and concepts, they shape how we reason, and they even impact how we perceive and how we act. For the most part, our use of frames is unconscious and automatic – we use them without realizing it.”

Stephen Reece, in the field of media studies, gives this working definition:

“Frames are the organizing principles that are socially shared and persistent over time, that work symbolically to meaningfully structure the social world.”

Frames are everywhere around us. They are the conceptual models that allow us to make sense of the world.  We cannot have a coherent thought without them.  There is no such thing as “choosing” to use frames, only a matter of consciously selecting frames or blindly using them without knowing it.

Can Frames Be Framed?

One big challenge of discussing frames is that we have to use frames to reason about them.  This means we have to evoke a conceptual model of something familiar to explain something that is not.  As any teacher can attest, this process often leads to misconceptions and faulty understandings of the new concept.  It is especially confounding when the new concept we want to talk about contradicts many commonplace assumptions about thought, language and behavior that are prevalent in our culture.

An example is the reaction to the word ‘frame’ as if it meant “I was framed!”  The conceptual model for being framed is one of a malevolent person placing blame for wrongdoing on another person who is actually innocent.  In this context, to “use frames” is to intentionally mislead people into believing that a good person has done something wrong.  The listener is naturally cautious about incorporating frames into their practices because they see the use of ‘frames’ as malicious and deceptive.

This conceptual model evokes an important semantic frame having to do with the distortion of truth that is linked to it in the meaning-making process.  This happens because a particular philosophical tradition – what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson call “objective realism” in their ground-breaking book Philosophy in the Flesh – is prominent in Western culture.  Objective realism presumes that there is a single, objective reality that is true and knowable.  It asserts that the way language works is for every utterance (or written text) to either be true or false relative to some kind of “God’s eye view” of the universe.  As such, to ‘frame’ something is seen as putting an additional layer of interpretation between a word and its correspondence with the world, thus ‘distorting’ it by creating a layer of interpretation between it and its ‘true’ meaning.

Ironically, one of the major implications of frame semantics is that no such “God’s eye view” exists.  A single word or phrase can correspond with many different, equally legitimate meanings.  Linguists call this phenomenon polysemy and it has been extensively documented by the cognitive psychologist Raymond Gibbs in his research on communication intent. (An excellent overview can be found in his book, Intentions and the Experience of Meaning.)

This leads to two obstacles for the practitioner seeking to implement frame analysis in their organization:

1. The need to correct misconceptions as they arise;
2. The need to anticipate and manage doubts and concerns that are bound to deeply held assumptions in Western culture.

The practitioner will need to be mindful of misunderstandings about frames while giving careful consideration to his or her communication strategies in order to avoid defensive reactions where new discoveries about the mind conflict with standard assumptions that happen to be incorrect.

The Critical Piece – Psychological Process of Change

As I’ve attempted to convey strategic insights about frame analysis to practitioners, I’ve learned a valuable lesson:

Pay attention to psychological processes in the face of change!

Attempts to convey new understandings of human thought and behavior will inevitably tap into personal feelings and predispositions people have about their own minds (and their unstated theories of human nature). Unlike other kinds of knowledge about “objects” in the world, learning about the workings of our own minds requires us to consciously grapple with and update our notions of ourselves.  In other words, to use frame analysis effectively a practitioner has to go through a personal change process.

The reason for this is simple.  The conceptual models we have about human thought apply equally to ourselves as they do to those around us.  If we have assumptions about rational thought being purely conscious, quantifiable, logical, and literal we’re going to measure ourselves relative to this ideal.  As we learn that none of these attributes accurately reflects the workings of our own minds we have to reconsider our sense of ourselves.  This is a psychological change process.

My colleagues and I handle this by establishing a safe learning environment and building trust with our students so that we can guide them through the strange landscape that is the accurate depiction of the human mind.  We take care to incorporate our understandings of psychology into the learning process to help us see when a student is uncomfortable with the material and help them along.

The Challenge of Institutional Structures and Norms

Ultimately, frame analysis is only useful if it leads to a change in organizational practice.  Merely identifying problematic (or helpful) frames won’t get practitioners very far if the exercise doesn’t lead to changes both in communication and outreach strategy.  Furthermore, the deconstruction of cultural narratives (which frame analysis is a key part) often reveals hidden assumptions on the part of the advocacy organization itself.  Improvements in overall effectiveness will be contingent on the ability of executive-level managers to be self-critical and reflective about how their organization is framed and what its practices mean to key publics it must engage with in order to have success.

Even more challenging, however, is the adoption process for replacing existing practices with new ones.  Any practitioner who has attempted to bring new ideas into a bureaucracy knows how difficult initiatives like this can be.  One of the reasons frame analysis gets relegated to the “messaging silo” is that this is the easiest way to dismiss its implications for organizational change.  And such resistance is commonplace when people are confronted with the uncomfortable prospect that they may have to do things differently.

At a higher level, shifts in organizational strategy will implicate new configurations of alliances and partnerships.  When the innovative organization adopts frame-based methodologies, it will have to get other organizations on board in order to cooperate.  This “trans-organizational” level of application is the most difficult we have attempted so far, having some success with two coalitions of NGOs in the UK around the theme of Identity Campaigning.

By now, I hope that it is clear why more people haven’t adopted frame analysis in their work.  Many enthusiastic readers of George Lakoff express frustration that his brilliant ideas have not been more widely adopted.  Complications like the ones presented here should begin to clarify why the change process has taken so long.  To summarize:

• Frame analysis is based on nuanced and unfamiliar concepts that are easily misunderstood;
• Skilled use of frame analysis involves an introspective personal change process that must be guided by expert trainers;
• Implications for changes in organizational practice are often met with resistance;
• Merging the innovative practices of one organization into the web of institutions they cooperate with is a time-consuming and difficult process.

Through our work at Cognitive Policy Works we are carving a path for others to follow.  We will continue to share our insights as we provide the valuable services of frame analysis, professional trainings, and strategic management in the midst of organizational change.

In the service of this vital work,

Joe Brewer
Founder and Director
Cognitive Policy Works

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