Week 7: How Public Opinion Changes

From last week’s post on meditation, it might be clear that I spend a lot of time thinking about individual change. During my life I have changed in a number of ways and I will continue changing. When thinking about these changes I do think about them in negative and positive lights. Certain behaviors are ones I want to cultivate while others are less desirable.

A large determinant of who I am is the context that I live in. This might seem simple but it has ramifications for my understanding of self. My believes are strongly shaped by both the place and time that I live in. If I grew up in a different country my believes would be quite different in a few different ways. If I grew up in the same place but during a different time period my believes might be even more distant from my current ones.

Since I am influenced by the society I grew up in, to understand myself it is necessary to understand that societal context. Our society is not constant, it is something that is constantly changing. Many of the large changes in society have been technological or scientific. Those technological changes have improved the living conditions of many people. Reading Hans Rosling’s books Factfulness and How I learned to Understand the World make it immediately clear how much living conditions have improved over time. I am also a big fan of Jason Crawford’s work on developing a field of progress studies to understand how these technological changes happen. While these technological changes have drastically impacted the lives we live, I am also interested in exploring the related topic of how society’s morality or believes have changed.

Even if we only reflect on a recent time scale, society’s morality or ethics has changed immensely. Our views on sexual orientation, religion, marijuana, and criminal justice have changed quite drastically during my life time. If you take a slightly longer period of time, it becomes even clearer how much views have changed. The moral landscape when my parents were born feels so divorced from where it is today. Looking over a hundreds of years it becomes quite clear that society’s morality has always been changing. Since society’s morality has always changed, there are believes we have today which are going to be changed in the future.

I find this framing of what moral believes we have today, that we might look back on poorly as a really helpful question to think about behavior change. I first saw this question asked in a blog post (which I can no longer find) by Beto Dealmeida about why he is a vegetarian. Recently, Holden Kaurnofsky has also been writing about this question. Holden is exploring a system for how we can live lives that will not be impacted by the ways morality is going to change that he calls “future-proof ethics”

When discussing how society’s morality has changed, it is easy to see all changes as positive. We have slowly increased the scope of who is included in society and tried to protect more beings from harm. I personally believe these have been positive changes, but I have grown up in a society post these changes. It seems theoretically possible that we could have large moral changes that are actually negative. There is not some definitive force that means all of the changes we are going to make will be good ones. We know that individuals sometimes change in harmful ways so why couldn’t a society as well? When thinking about shorter time periods there are absolutely examples of negative changes that a society underwent which caused harm.

Thinking about how society’s morality changes leaves me with a lot of unanswered questions. Two ones that immediately jump out are:

• How do big moral changes happen? What causes them?
• What makes a moral change positive?

If we understand the possible answers to these questions a little bit better then we can work to make positive changes happen sooner

Growing up, both my school and my parents repeatedly taught me the importance of politics. I was told that it is a personal failure not to vote. Winning or losing an election has a large impact on the society we live in. If one party wins our society will be vastly different than if the other party does. This opinion was so strongly ingrained in me that it influenced my decision to work at the political polling start up Change Research. I believed that one of the most impactful things I could work on was helping better candidates win elections.

Working at CR gave me the opportunity to see how much politicians are focused on winning elections. Doing polling it was quite transparent how connected what politicians say is to what people are saying in polls. During the election cycle candidates want to understand what messages connect with their supporters. They do testing to identify what message they believe will help them win the election. Using that optimal message crafted from testing, they hopefully win the election. Once they are in office their focus shifts toward enacting policy that aligns with their crafted message. If while they are in office they do something completely different than what they said,they will no longer be in power after the next election.

Since politicians continually have to win elections, a lot of what politicians do in office is directly dictated by public opinion. At the surface this observation is quite straight forward. It is our representative democracy working as intended. What it means though is that the actions a politician takes in office are not necessarily a reflection of their personal views. They are forced to keep their actions in line with public opinion. While, the outcome of each election is still quite important, it implies that large structural change does not happen based on the outcome of an election. Change happens when public opinion move which then impacts elections.

Since large changes to society do not happen at the level of individual elections, the best use of my time is not necessarily helping certain people win elections. If I really want a more equal distribution of wealth then I should focus my energy on changing public opinion. If large scale wealth re-distribution was really popular, then it would happen. The best way to achieve large societal changes is by moving public opinion.

While the outcome of one election does not mean large structural change, politicians still have quite a large role in making that change happen. Politician’s role is through being influential public figures rather than enacting policy. Public opinion is influenced by politician’s opinions. People are influenced by the President’s opinion. The biggest way for politicians to have an impact is not through passing an unpopular bill, but by using their platform to shift public opinion. Other public figures can also serve similar roles as politicians. Influential individuals have the ability to change people’s opinions which might eventually change our society.

Understanding more about how our political system works helped me see that large societal changes are driven not by the outcome of elections, but by shifts in public opinion. This might feel tautological, but large moral changes in society happen through changes in public opinion. Changes do not happen due to one individual or a group of individuals (at least in the present version of the United States) acting in discordance with the rest of the public. For a large change to happen, many different individuals each have to be convinced of the change.

If we believe that moral changes in society happen when public opinion changes, our focus should turn to understanding how public opinion shifts. Answering this question is not something that can happen in the span of an essay. It is most likely not even a question that we can currently answer well (more on that later). There are a few pieces of insight that feel like good places to start. As I mentioned earlier in this piece it seems likely that influential public figures have a role in shaping public opinion.

One theory for how public opinion changes is through generational replacement. Generational replacement suggests that people who are a similar age will have somewhat similar views, because their views are shaped by formative experiences that happen when they are a certain age. Then as the younger generations replace the older generations in share of the population, the overall public opinion will shift. This piece from the Economist has some nice graphs showing examples of what might be generational replacement. Generational replacement feels like a theory that has a fair amount of explanatory power and matches my understanding of cognitive development. Our believes are much more likely to undergo change when we are younger. As we get older we become much more steadfast in our believes. Large scale change does not happen through changing people’s minds but rather new generations replacing older ones. This theory might also explain why moral change can feel like it takes a really long time.

While generational replacement is a compelling theory, it does not feel complete. From my own experience, there are examples of people changing their mind. In the graphs from the Economist piece, the graph on marriage equality shows both characteristics of generational replacement but also broad opinion change. That for certain topics, there has been a large change through many individuals changing their existing opinions.

An appealing theory to explain opinion change is the impact of exposure. Opinions are changed only when an individual is directly exposed to an issue in a different light. Someone’s opinion on abortion is only changed when they have an experience with it that impacts them. An opinion on gay marriage might change through meeting and interacting with gay people. When I have a personal interaction with an event, that is the most likely way that I will see it in a different light and might change my opinion on it. I am less likely to change my opinion on something based on hearing an argument, then a direct experience with it.

Understanding how public opinion changes is really important for us to move society in ways we believe to be beneficial. If societal change only really happens through generational replacement, then change is going to take time. It would make sense to spend energy on influencing people while they are younger and not to spend resources on trying to change older individuals opinions. If exposure is the best way to change individuals minds then we should not spend our energy trying to argue with others but rather promote policies that bring about exposure on their own.

In this piece, I have mostly focused on public opinion change as a positive force to improve our society. I state that one element of our society slowly improving is public opinion changing. Without going into too large of a digression, I want to acknowledge that there is no reason our society or public opinion will always move in positive directions. That is actually one of the reasons why understanding public opinion is so important.

I believe the ways society has changed are positive because I live in the present day. It is easy to tell stories about history that portray society as having made progress. But that type of framework is not a strong foundation. It does not give us something tractable for thinking about change moving forward. In Karnofsky’s piece he suggests a framework for thinking about positive change using Sentientism. That we should focus on capacity for pleasure / suffering for thinking about moral progress. Good changes are ones that increase pleasure and decrease suffering for any creature.

Using Sentientism as a foundation seems directionally correct, but I think there is an aspect underlying Sentientism that Kaurnofsky does not discuss. Our morality / ethics is directly tied to our scientific understanding of the world. Sentientism only became a framework as we understood more about how other beings experience the world. Sentientism would not exist without an immense amount of scientific understanding. A lot of moral changes in our society have happened in line with a deeper scientific understanding.

Our individual visions of the world are biased to prioritize our own experience. We experience our lives as though we are the center of the universe and our needs matter the most. Through scientific discovery we have learned that this is not an accurate representation. That I am no more important than anyone else. That other humans have the same experience as me and have just as much right to seek pleasure and diminish suffering. Only through this understanding our we able to overcome our biased visions.

While this idea is not fully formalized, I believe there is an important connection between moral progress and scientific understanding. Positive moral progress aligns itself with an accurate understanding of the world. A better understanding of the world allows for moral progress. Scientific progress is a key element of societal opinion change.

Some types of changes to our society are predicated on large scale public opinion changes. Without people changing their opinions we are not going to have a more equal distribution of wealth or a more sustainable relationship with the environment. There are instances in history where there has been large changes in public opinion. But also some instances where the change has taken a really long time or maybe still has not happened. Understanding public opinion and how it moves feels under studied. It is a complex topic that does not fit neatly into one of our existing academic fields.

If I were to study public opinion changes I would start in the following places:

• Polling has done some important work to chronicle public opinion. At a baseline, we need to measure what public opinion is and see when it changes. Political polling is too focused on winning elections making it short sighted. We need to poll in a more dynamic way focused on understanding.
• A really important place to focus my attention would be on how people form believes. What makes someone form a believe and how could they change that believe?
• Public opinion is not only made up of individual believes though. Individual believes combine in complex ways. How does one person’s opinion impact others? Do certain groups opinions move in tandem? Are there certain individuals who have a lot more influence on others opinions? We should probably be thinking about public opinion as a complex network.
• I would also focus my attention on studying historical examples of public opinion change. What are the biggest examples of change and how did they happen. What are examples where change took longer or has not happened? What are the commonalities and differences among these examples?