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

[Music] You know, I think often we think about social classes just being about our bank accounts. We don't sort of think about how is class cultural, truly cultural, in terms of differences in values and norms that are socialized in different groups for good reasons. And tightness and looseness, it doesn't just differentiate nations and states; it also differentiates social class.

With the same exact logic, we went out and we've been surveying people from the working class and people from the middle and upper classes. What's fascinating is when we ask people about rules, just tell us five words that when you think of rules, we see that the working class sees rules very positively. Rules in the working class are important; they're important for helping people to slide into hard living, as sociologists would call it, to poverty, to the dregs of poverty. Rules are helpful if you're going to be going into occupations where there's a lot of danger and where there's less discretion.

The middle class and upper class, they saw rules more negatively. They saw it as "goody two-shoes" when you're following the rules. For the working class, rules are important for survival. For the middle class, there's a safety net, so you can actually afford to be rule-breaking in this context.

What's fascinating is we measure the zip codes of people coming into our lab, and then we track the neighborhoods they live in. And for sure, the working class lives in much more threatening environments when it comes to crime and unemployment; they report being subject to many more threats. What's remarkable is this starts very early. We wanted to see how early we can see these differences developing, and we started to see this even as early as three years old.

What we did was bring three-year-olds into the lab, working-class and middle-class kids. You can't exactly ask them about rules, okay? But what we did was we borrowed a technique from the Max Planck Institute, where we had them interacting with a puppet; his name was Max the puppet. They got to know him and they enjoyed playing with him. Max the puppet suddenly, after a little while, became Max the norm violator. He started violating all the rules of the game and announcing that he's actually playing the game correctly.

We simply wanted to know how did the kids react. Is there a difference of reaction by age three? And there sure was. The middle class, in general, were much more likely to laugh and kind of let it go, and the working-class kids wanted Max the puppet to stop. They told him to stop; they told him what was wrong. And you know, parents by age three are already socializing their kids to enable them to help them fit into the kind of threatening or non-threatening environment they're going to be working in.

So it's really important to see that these differences arise for a reason, and they arise early. The rise of Donald Trump has been such an enigma to so many people. Is it an ideology? Is it a personality? In fact, Donald Trump is semi—he's a very good cross-cultural psychologist. He understands the role of fear and threat in mobilizing people to want more tightness and to want autocratic leaders.

And we've seen this in our data. The people that were interested in voting for Trump felt very threatened, and they felt the country was too loose. And this is not just a Trump phenomenon; it's all over the world. When we measure support for Le Pen in France, we have the same exact data that showed that people who feel threatened want stronger rules and leaders to help them coordinate to survive.

These leaders tap into a very important evolutionary type of instinct: that when there's threat and when there's disorder, we want strong rulers to help us in those contexts. One thing that really predicts whether groups are tight or loose is the amount of threat that they face. Threat can be from a variety of sources; it could be from Mother Nature, it could be natural disasters or famine, or it could be population density. It could also be man-made; it could be in the number of invasions that you've had over the last couple of centuries.

So when there's threat, there's the need for strong rules to coordinate to survive. Actually, tightness and looseness has a really important logic, a hidden logic that helps us understand why certain groups become tight or loose. Loose groups, whether they're nations or states or organizations, face less threat, so they can afford to be more permissive. Groups tend to evolve to be calibrated to the degree of threat that they have.

When you have exaggerated threats, it means that we're sacrificing liberty for security in contexts when we don't really need to do that. The problem here is that we have to separate objective from subjective threat. It's true that a lot of working-class people do objectively feel very threatened in this country, and we need, as a loose culture, to reach out and work to help them deal with the threats that are happening from globalization. But it's also the case that we, ders like Trump and others, use threat and target people who are threatened in order to gain popularity. [Music]