In this post, MSc Social and Cultural Psychology alumna Lily Baldwin considers how her own perception of other people’s values changed when she gained a better understanding of their worldview. 

I’m open minded, but have always judged Conservatives as having priorities that are harmful and built on false assumptions. When I discovered that a mentor was a Conservative, I felt physically sick. A year on, my politics remain left wing, but my sense of indignant condemnation at Conservatives has dissipated. What happened?

Motivated by connection

I needed to become non-judgemental about politics if I was to preserve an important relationship. The experience was a reminder that the need to attach and belong can mediate our reception of ideas. Just as we stay close to our groups by rejecting ideas that threaten our shared worldview (Kahan et al., 2007), a budding connection with someone different motivated me to resolve my feelings about her beliefs.

Motivated by concern

Although wanting to close the gap between me and my mentor, I still retained a concern that conservative politics was doing serious harm to society and the environment. Identifying conservative politics as a roadblock to climate action, I decided to do my social and cultural psychology dissertation on the views that young conservatives hold about climate change.

Informed by psychology

When I started my dissertation, the theories I’d learnt on the MSc Social and Cultural Psychology had become the lenses through which I saw the world. I had learnt that an individual’s political values and beliefs are a consequence of factors outside their control. People interpret our social system and world events through existing schemas. These schemas are acquired from the groups to which they have belonged (e.g. Moscovici, 2008/1961). There are also individual and group differences in the epistemic and existential needs that a particular belief system satisfies (e.g. Jost et al., 2003).

From social cognition I had learnt that we are motivated to accept ideas that do not threaten our security as part of a group and reject those that do, and that we are skilled at doing so (e.g. Kahan, 2007). From Alex Gillespie’s development of semantic barriers (Moscovici, 2008/1961, Gillespie, 2020; 2008), I learnt that we are highly skilled at batting off ideas that might disrupt our worldview and therefore our sense of belonging to important others, our pride, our justifications and explanation for difficult things, our soothing stories. From social representations theory (Moscovici, 2008/1961), that a new idea or phenomenon often looks different to different people, because they are using different maps of meaning to make sense of it.

These theories gave me a new perspective on belief and difference. It became clear that feeling superior to someone based on their political beliefs is not rational. What have I done to be superior, if our beliefs are determined so strongly by contextual factors outside our control?

What does it take to understand someone else?

In failing to grasp the origins of difference, I had wildly under-estimated how different people are. I had been trying to understand how someone like me, with my map of meaning, could believe and enact the things that conservatives believe and enact. The answer to this conundrum could only be that they are not morally right (because my morals are egalitarian, and they are not acting in an egalitarian way). They could either be immoral on purpose (because they are cruel or selfish people), or by accident (because they fail to see what is objectively wrong and what is right).

But the Conservative map of meaning is different to mine; the world looks and feels different when interpreted through it. Their different morals and truths are as true to them as mine are to me.

Listening to understand

I went into my interviews with the goal of understanding how climate change feels when you use a Conservative map of meaning to make sense of it. My main observation was that the situation felt a lot calmer.

Explaining the calm

The sense of calm I observed was relative to my perspective, which was one of anxiety and anger. My feelings can be traced to my left-wing map of meaning. Fundamental to this map is that people without access to the means of production need to be protected from exploitation by those with access. Business leaders are not to be trusted, and will make more profit for themselves at any expense. Coming from this perspective, I am anxious that climate change will not be addressed. In contrast, Conservatives trust business leaders, which may explain in part why they were more confident that things would be ok. Furthermore, there is a strong motivation for Conservatives to believe that climate change can be solved without disrupting the status quo, which conservativism is geared around justifying and protecting, making it a less anxiety-inducing phenomena.

While many on the left see the prioritisation of economic growth over climate mitigation to be an unfathomable evil, for many on the right there is no question that the economy must keep growing. Solving climate change can only take place within this container of limitations, which is outside our control. Believing in non-negotiable limits to action may make it hard to accept that climate change cannot be fixed within these limits. Climate change feels a lot less alarming if you believe that it can be solved without making radical changes, without having to win against powerful entities. Alternatively, believing in a limit to possible action might lead to a feeling that we are doing as much as we can, and so, that anxiety is pointless. In contrast, I am anxious because I believe that we could be doing a lot more, that we need to be doing a lot more, and that we are up against very powerful groups in doing so.

Meanwhile, the failure to curb C02 emissions fits perfectly into the narrative of corporate carelessness in the face of things that I value. It is therefore natural for me to be angry, sad and anxious. Conservatives do not have this narrative. There is no weight of one more item added to an age-old list of wrongs. Instead, climate change was seen as an unfortunate externality of an otherwise valued and defended system.

Finally, within my social milieu, climate anxiety and anger are mandated and serve a social function. I am part of a world where sharing worries about climate change doubles as a way of saying, “I am one of you”, and “we dislike the same people and the same ideas”. Exchanging feelings of climate anxiety and anger contributes to my sense of security as part of my group. For conservatives, the opposite is true. In fact, a sense of pragmatism, realism and calm are mandated, and it is the display of these emotions which provides social validation and security. For participants, anxiety about climate change was an example of their age-old narrative of the left’s hysteria. They dismissed it as un-pragmatic, or as an emotion stirred up in youngsters by malicious players with ulterior motives to overthrow capitalism.

The young Conservatives I interviewed called climate change a “serious threat”, but they were calm about the issue. Understanding the map of meaning from which they are looking has helped me to see why they mean something very different by “serious threat” than I do.

Conclusion

The maps of meaning we acquire are out of our control and determine how we respond to the world. To understand someone else is to know their map of meaning. There is huge variation in the maps that different people are using to make sense of the world, and yet we are driven by many of the same underlying needs. We can find compassion for everyone through these shared needs and vulnerabilities, and by seeing people not as pre-culture and experience, basically alike individuals morally responsible for their own beliefs and actions, but as made by culture and experience and therefore basically different, acting and believing in ways that can be explained by their context. This truth is a bridge between us all.

• The opinions in this post are of the author, not of the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science or LSE.
• All images belong to the author.

References

• Gillespie, A. (2020). Semantic contact and semantic barriers: reactionary responses to disruptive ideas This review comes from a themed issue on social change (rallies, riots and revolutions). Current Opinion in Psychology, 21–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2020.02.010
• Gillespie, A. (2008). Social Representations, Alternative Representations and Semantic Barriers. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 38(4), 375–391. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5914.2008.00376.x
• Jost, J.T., Kruglanski A.W., Glaser, J., Sulloway, F.J. (2003). Political Conservativism as Motivated Social Cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 229-379, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.129.3.339 
• Kahan, D. M., Braman, D., Slovic, P., Gastil, J., & Cohen, G. L. (2007). The Second National Risk and Culture Study: Making Sense of – and Making Progress In – The American Culture War of Fact. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1017189
• Moscovici, S. (2008/1961). Psychoanalysis: Its image and its public (1st ed.), Wiley.