Rob Sellers on recent social psychology

Scientific fields are shaped by many apparently contingent and capricious facts. This is one of the key insights of science and technology studies. And yet eventually it seems that scientific communities succeed in going beyond the limitations of these somewhat arbitrary starting points. The human sciences are especially vulnerable to this kind of arbitrariness, and facts about race, gender, and sexuality have been seen to have created arbitrary starting points in various fields of the social and human sciences.

A case in point is the discipline of social psychology. Social psychology studies how individual human beings are shaped in their behavior by the social arrangements in which they mature and live. And yet all too often it has emerged that researchers in this discipline have brought with them a lot of baggage in the form of their own social assumptions which have distorted the theories and methods they have developed.

Rob Sellers is an accomplished social psychologist at the University of Michigan who has thought deeply about the intersections of race and academic life. He also has an unusual and deep appreciation of the history of his discipline. In this recent interview he discusses the legacies of four important African American social psychologists and their impact on the discipline. His subjects are Claude Steele, James Jackson, James Jones, and Jim Sidanius. He argues that these men, all of the same generation and born in the late 1940s, brought about a crucial reorientation in the ways that social psychologists thought about and studied the lives of black people. They have each had distinguished careers and have overseen large numbers of PhD students. Their influence on social psychology has been very substantial.

The interview is worth watching in its entirety -- I hope there will also be a second interview that pressures some of these issues more fully -- but here are some highlights.

There was an assumption among earlier generations of social psychology that white behavior and experience was normal, and that other identities were abnormal. James Jackson provided a fundamental reset to this presupposition by demonstrating how normal black lives were. This represented something like a paradigm change for the discipline, in that it brought about a fundamental reorientation of the perspectives social psychologists brought to their research.

A parallel assumption in earlier research in social psychology, according to Sellers, was that black lives were somehow "damaged" -- low self-esteem, low ability to cope. Jackson demonstrated that this assumption too was fundamentally wrong. Black individuals performed similarly to whites in accepted tests of self-esteem. And the premise of damage underestimates the dignity and persistent success of African American communities.

Claude Steele contributed to an understanding of differences in performance across major social categories through his theory of stereotype threat (link). As Rob Sellers observes, Steele's experimental research on the effects of stereotypes and presuppositions about differences in capacity between groups has made a very large contribution to both social psychology and the field of education. At the same time, Sellers signals in the interview that he has some hesitations about the magnitude of the effect of stereotype threat (19:45).

Sellers credits James Jones's research on prejudice with making a large difference in which we understand contemporary racism and the experience of being black within a racially divided society. He also made highly original contributions to the study of African-American culture, finding linkages back to West African cultural meanings and practices. Sellers accepts the idea that cultural assumptions and practices can persist for many generations beyond their original setting.

Another common assumption in social psychology was that intergroup conflict (for example, racism) was cultural and historically contingent. Jim Sidanius advanced a general theory, social dominance theory (along with Felicia Pratto), which undertook to explain racism and other forms of intergroup oppression as an evolutionary consequence of competition for resources, including access to reproduction.

Another important observation Sellers makes in the interview is that the men described here, for all their heterodoxy, were pretty mainstream in their scientific behavior. They established their reputations and careers through research that found acceptance in the main journals and institutions of the time. By contrast, another group of black psychologists rejected the mainstream more directly. Sellers described the revolt in 1969 of the Association of Black Psychologists and the competition this engendered between the mainstream APA and the more activist ABP.

One interesting point that comes out of this interview is the depth of Rob Sellers' own knowledge of the social psychology of high-level athletes. His comments about Jackie Robinson are particularly interesting.

The question I hope to pursue in my next conversation with Rob is whether the particular experiences of race that these men had in America in the 1950s as children (in the Midwest) and the 1960s as young adults shaped their scientific ideas in any direct ways. It seems intuitively likely that this was the case. But it isn't possible to easily read off of their work the imprint of the experience of racism in earlier stages of their lives. And yet when we look closely at the biographies of a range of black intellectuals we find a clear imprint of the early experiences on contemporary consciousness. (For illustrations see posts on Ahmad Rahman and Phil Richards; link, link).

Cyber threats

David Sanger's very interesting recent book, The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age, is a timely read this month, following the indictments of twelve Russian intelligence officers for hacking the DNC in 2015. Sanger is a national security writer for the New York Times, and has covered cyber security issues for a number of years. He and William Broad and John Markoff were among the first journalists to piece together the story behind the Stuxnet attack on Iran's nuclear fuel program (the secret program called Olympic Games), and the book also offers some intriguing hints about the possibility of "left of launch" intrusions by US agencies into the North Korean missile program. This is a book that everyone should read. It greatly broadens the scope of what most of us think about under the category of "hacking". We tend to think of invasions of privacy and identity theft when we think of nefarious uses of the internet; but Sanger makes it clear that the stakes are much greater. The capabilities of current cyber-warfare tools have the possibility of bringing down whole national infrastructures, leading to massive civilian hardship.

There are several important takeaways from Sanger's book. One is the pervasiveness and power of the offensive cyber tools available to nation-state actors in penetrating and potentially disrupting or destroying the infrastructures of their potential opponents. Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and the United States are all shown to possess tools of intrusion, data extraction, and system destruction that are extremely difficult for targeted countries and systems to defend against. The Sony attack (North Korea), the Office of Personnel Management (China), the attack on the Ukraine electric grid (Russia), the attack on Saudi Arabia's massive oil company Aramco (Iran), and the attack on the US electoral system (Russia) all proceeded with massive effect and without evident response from their victims or the United States. At this moment in time the balance of capability appears to favor the offense rather than the defense. A second important theme is the extreme level of secrecy that the US intelligence establishment has imposed on the capabilities it possesses for conducting cyber conflict. Sanger makes it clear that he believes that a greater level of public understanding of the capabilities and risks created by cyber weapons like Stuxnet would be beneficial in the United States and other countries, by permitting a more serious public debate about means and ends, risks and rewards of the use of cyber weapons. He likens it to the evolution of the Obama administration's eventual willingness to make a public case for the use of unmanned drone strikes against its enemies.

Third, Sanger makes it clear that the classic logic of deterrence that was successful in maintaining nuclear peace is less potent when it comes to cyber warfare and escalation. State-level adversaries have selected strategies of cyber attack precisely because of the relatively low cost of developing this technology, the relative anonymity of an attack once it occurs, and the difficulties faced by victims in selecting appropriate and effective counter-strikes that would deter the attacker in the future.

The National Security Agency gets a lot of attention in the book. The Office of Tailored Access Operations gets extensive discussion, based on revelations from the Snowden materials and other sources. Sanger makes it clear that the NSA had developed a substantial toolkit for intercepting communications and penetrating computer systems to capture data files of security interest. But according to Sanger it has also developed strong cyber tools for offensive use against potential adversaries. Part of the evidence for this judgment comes from the Snowden revelations (which are also discussed extensively). Part comes from what Sanger and others were able to discover about the workings of Stuxnet in targeting Iranian nuclear centrifuges over a many-month period. And part comes from suggestive reporting about the odd fact that North Korea's medium range missile tests were so spectacularly unsuccessful for a series of launches.

The book leads to worrisome conclusions and questions. US infrastructure and counter-cyber programs were highly vulnerable to attacks that have already taken place in our country. The extraction by Chinese military intelligence of millions of confidential personal records of US citizens from the Office of Personnel Management took place over months and was uncovered only after the damage was done. The effectiveness of Russian attacks on the Ukraine electric power grid suggest that similar attacks would be possible in other advanced countries, including the United States. All of these incidents suggest a level of vulnerability and potential for devastating attack that the public is not prepared for.

Downward causation

I've argued for the idea that social phenomena are generated by the actions, thoughts, and mental frameworks of myriad actors (link). This expresses the idea of ontological individualism. But I also believe that social arrangements -- structures, ideologies, institutions -- have genuine effects on the actions of individual actors and populations of actors and on intermediate-level social structures. There is real downward and lateral causation in the social world. Are these two views compatible?

I believe they are compatible.

The negative view holds that what appears to be downward causation is really just the workings of the lower-level components through their aggregation dynamics -- the lower struts of Coleman's boat (link). So when we say "the ideology of nationalism causes the rise of ultraconservative political leaders", this is just a shorthand for "many voters share the values of nationalism and elect candidates who propose radical solutions to issues like immigration." This seems to be the view of analytical-sociology purists.

But consider the alternative view -- that higher level entities sometimes come to possess stable causal powers that influence the behavior and even the constitution of the entities of which they are composed. This seems like an implausible idea in the natural sciences -- it is hard to imagine a world in which electrons have different physical properties as an effect of the lattice arrangement of atoms in a metal. But human actors are different from electrons and atoms, in that their behavior and constitution are in fact plastic to an important degree. In one social environment actors are disposed to be highly attentive to costs and benefits; in another social environment they are more amenable to conformance to locally expressed norms. And we can say quite a bit about the mechanisms of social psychology through which the cognitive and normative frameworks of actors are influenced by features of their social environments. This has an important implication: features of the higher-level social reality can change the dispositions and workings of the lower-level actors. And these changes may in turn lead to the emergence of new higher-level factors (new institutions, new normative systems, new social practices of solidarity, ...). So enduring social arrangements can cause changes in the dynamic properties of the actors who live within them.

Could we even say, more radically and counter-intuitively, that a normative structure like extremist populism "generates" behavior at the individual level? So rather than holding that individual actions generate higher-level structures, might we hold that higher-level normative structures generate patterns of behavior? For example, we might say that the normative strictures of patriarchy generate patterns of domination and deference among men and women at the individual level; or the normative strictures of Jim-Crow race relations generate individual-level patterns of subordination and domination among white and black individuals. There is a sense in which this statement about the direction of generation is obviously true; broadly shared knowledge frameworks or normative commitments "generate" typical forms of behavior in stylized circumstances of choice.

Does this way of thinking about the process of "generation" suggest that we need to rethink the directionality implied by the micro-macro distinction? Might we say that normative systems and social structures are as fundamental as patterns of individual behavior?

Consider the social reality depicted in the photograph above. Here we see coordinated action of a number of soldiers climbing out of a trench in World War I to cross the killing field of no mans land. The dozen or so soldiers depicted here are part of a vast army at war (3.8 million by 1918), deployed over a front extending hundreds of miles. The majority of the soldiers depicted here are about to receive grievous or mortal wounds. And yet they go over the trench. What can we say about the cause of this collective action at a specific moment in time? First, an order was conveyed through a communications system extending from commander to sergeant to enlisted man: "attack at 7:00 am". Second, the industrial wealth of Great Britain permitted the state the ability to equip and field a vast infantry army. Third, a system of international competition broke down into violent confrontation and war, leading numerous participant nations to organize and fund armies at war to defeat their enemies. Fourth, the morale of the troops was maintained at a sufficiently high level to avoid mass desertion and refusal to fight.  Fifth, an infantry training regime existed which gave ordinary farmhands, workers, accountants, and lords the habits and skills of infantry soldiers. All of these factors are part of the causal background of this simple episode in World War I; and most of these factors exist at a meso- or macro-level of social organization. Clearly this particular group of social actors was influenced by higher-level social factors. But equally clearly, the mechanisms through which these higher-level social factors work are straightforward to identify through reference to systems of individual actors.

Think for a minute about materials science. The hardness of titanium causes the nail to scratch the glass. It is true that material properties like hardness depend upon their microstructures. Nonetheless we are perfectly comfortable in attributing real causal powers to titanium at the level of a macro-material. And this attribution is not merely a way of summarizing a long story about the micro-structure of metallic titanium.

I've generally tried to think about these kinds of causal stories in terms of the idea of microfoundations. The hardness of titanium derives from its microfoundations at the level of atomic and subatomic causation. And the causal powers of patriarchy derive from the fact that the normative principles of partriarchy are embedded in the minds and behavior of many individuals, who become exemplars, enforcers, and encouragers of compliant behavior. The processes through which individuals acquire normative principles and the processes through which they behaviorally reflect these principles constitute the microfoundations of the meso- and macro-power of patriarchy.

So the question of whether there is downward causation seems almost too easy. Of course there is downward causation in the social world. Individuals are influenced in their choices and behavior by structural and normative factors beyond their control. And more fundamentally, individuals are changed in their fundamental dispositions to behavior through their immersion in social arrangements.