 ideas and disruptions changing the face of our democracy. I'm Yvette Alexander, Director of Learning and Impact at Knight Foundation. Today our show focuses on unpacking how racial attitudes affect American opinions on policy and social issues, including election laws and free expression. Knight has a long history of commissioning research to understand how free expression attitudes are evolving over time. We count ourselves immensely fortunate to have our guests today advising the foundation on this research. By the way, please make sure to ask your questions using the hashtag nightlife or drop them in a comment. Now please welcome to the show David Wilson, incoming Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California Berkeley. Hi David. I'm doing good. Good to see you again today. I'm just going to let our viewers know some brief background. I'm currently Professor of Political Science and Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Delaware where he is wrapping up his role as Senior Associate Dean for Social Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences. David is a political psychologist. He studies political behavior using survey-based experiments and his research has been published in many of the top outlets for public opinion research. Prior to his appointment at the University of Delaware, he was Senior Statistical Consultant and Researcher at Gallup and he holds bachelors from Western Kentucky University and a PhD in Political Science from Michigan State. His upcoming book, Racial Resentment in the Political Mind, will examine how racial resentment motivates resistance to improve the circumstances faced by racial minorities. And in addition to his scholarly contributions, I discovered that David also served in Desert Storm and that he has managed to visit every national park in the United States. A fact I hope we have time to probe on at the end of the program. So thanks again, David, for joining us and for sharing your wonderful research with us today and how it can shape our future. So let's dive in and I'm going to cut right to the chase. What exactly is this term racial resentment? What do political scientists mean by that and why does understanding it matter to the future of our democracy? Yeah, so you can think about resentment as believing that someone is getting something they don't deserve. It's a very basic definition. And if you get something that one feels like you don't deserve, it doesn't make you happy. It doesn't make you prideful. It makes you a bit upset about how someone is violating rules. And racial resentment is about deep-seated beliefs that race is an unfair criteria for the distribution of rewards or merit in society. So racial resentment tends to ignore the history of race in society, in American society, especially, and tends to ignore the ways in which race can impact the lives of others. Now it's important to keep in mind, from a scholarly perspective, that resentment is not the same as prejudice or racism. And the research that we do in the racial resentment in the political mind book seeks to help the public and scholars as well understand the nuance of racial attitudes, how race, as a criteria for processing information, as a filter for thinking about things, doesn't just have one pathway. It's not just about the racial target group being inferior or needing to be held down or having certain cultural traits. It could be about the use of race in broader society in general, so that when you have a policy that may benefit racial ethnic minorities, people immediately come to reason it, not simply because minorities may need support, but because they feel like race should not be the basis of that need. Other people have problems as well. It doesn't matter that one group may be in a stronger position to be successful in life. It matters that, for the racial resentful person, that everybody has the opportunity to work as hard as they can, and then they get what life gives them. And we call that a just world belief system, where people believe that good people get good things and bad people get bad things. But when there's a disconnect, bad people getting good things or good people getting bad things, then we tend to raise our surveillance and our alarms about something being fair or not. And racial resentment is really about how mostly dominant group members tend to think that minority group members are unfairly benefiting on the basis of race and that most people today have not had anything to do with the problems of the past. That's really interesting, and I think it does add a lot of nuance to the conversation on racism and racial views in the U.S. today. It sounds like that some of what you just described, the distribution of resources and their criteria, kind of challenges American notions of Americanocracy or the bootstrap idea mentality that I think we all kind of inherited in our culture. Can you explain a little bit more about how these sort of beliefs about justice, fairness, and deservingness make ordinary citizens appear racist? What sorts of outcomes can lead to that appearance or the issues in society that could extend racist systems? So in the study of political behavior, which is essentially human behavior when you have to make decisions. So politics is not just about parties and government. Politics is whenever you have to bring people together to decide on something, or when an individual has to make a decision, they use information to help make that decision. That information can be biased, it could be skewed in some direction, it can be false, but they're still going to decide and that is the essence of politics deciding. And so what happens is people tend to believe they know enough. They tend to rely on things that are at their disposal, their friends, their family, their early experiences, what comes to mind, their groups, and things like merit seem obvious. Like, well, if I work hard, I should get X. They don't tend to think about, well, some people can do things easier than others. So is it really about hard work or is it about talent? And then what is a measure of hard work? Is it productivity? Is it quality? Is it overall performance? And who rates these things? Who decides? And mostly people walk around without having to process these questions. Well, if I take a class and I make a high grade, I should then be rewarded with a degree or an A or something like that. But maybe there are other aspects of merit that really matter because merit is just an appraisal of how you're performing based on some set of standards. And so for the political psychologists, we're interested in those standards. Who set up those standards? Who's making the evaluation and what people get because of that? Justice comes into play when some people believe the standards are either fair and somebody's getting something and they haven't met the standard, or they think it's unfair because they're not getting something that someone else is getting. And so justice becomes this standard that people use related to merit definitions that they may not really think about. And when policies come out that support single mothers, rural farmers, senior citizens, veterans, immigrants, people that have lost their homes or companies that want to locate in an area and get tax breaks, when those policies come out, people think about them in terms of whether it's fair, whether they should have gotten the policy benefit. And that process comes to replicate the same thinking that happens in racism and racial inequity beliefs in that something is not fair. And so race as a criteria for merit is not fair in the minds of many people because they don't feel like they had anything to do with race and therefore they shouldn't be punished. And it's not always them being punished, but they feel like it's unfair that others are getting things and they're not. Or race could be used in a way that's, you know, I don't like this group. And this group shouldn't get anything regardless of how hard they work. Both of those things can still lead to the same policy position. And what research has shown is that they're not just about racial targeted policy. They come to affect any policy that helps anyone in society. In other words, gives anyone some advantage regardless of how hard they work. So giving seniors a tax break comes to be resented. And racial attitudes even affect these policy issues because they feel like some rule has been broken. Even seniors are expected to do something to get an outcome. And since people don't have full information, they don't know what seniors are doing, they tend to say, well, until we know what they're doing, they're not deserving of that benefit. And this is a basic process that happens along the way from parenting to thinking about who should live in your neighborhood, to thinking about who should be promoted to a certain grade or in a job, or who should be your boss and who shouldn't. It's the reason why we have selection committees because we need to have diverse perspectives to choose. And again, choosing politics. And it seems like a lot of our views is shaped by information we're consuming from a very young age that we're mostly unconscious of the consumption process happening, right, and how it's shaping our beliefs. So underlying racial resentment, it's not something you can easily see and touch. Oftentimes it's not something that people are aware of themselves, ourselves. So maybe it seems also very powerful, right, in terms of its subconscious, or maybe because of its unconscious nature. So maybe you can unpack for a moment how research can empirically prove, A, that it exists, and more importantly that it has an impact on the way Americans view policy issues. That's a very good question. So resentment is a sentiment. And it's a little bit different than a pure emotion. So happiness and anger are what we call primary emotions. They're the essence. Resentment is a sentiment and a sentiment combines emotion and belief. In other words, the emotion can activate the belief or the belief can activate the emotion, but you've got to have both of them together to have the sentiment. And so knowing that means that, one, we have to be able to study people's beliefs. And if those beliefs can tap into these inconsistencies such that there's a level of deservingness and that in order for someone to get rewarded, they have to meet the criteria for the reward. And we can ask people, how do you feel when somebody gets something they don't deserve? Or let me pose an argument to you that reflects a level of undeservingness such as special considerations on the basis of race or that certain groups should not use race to gain advantages in society or even meet equality to gain equality in society. Or that sometimes certain groups are pushing too hard and they should just wait their turn in society and that kind of thing. Those kinds of questions, when people agree with them, they are literally tapping into a belief system. And the combination of that belief system reflects what we call an ideology. Now, most people just think of ideology in two dimensions, liberal and conservative, but an ideology is just a collection of beliefs. And there are a collection of beliefs about a certain set of standards and ideas or values as we'd like to talk about. So values about change. I don't think change is good. Well, okay, if that's the case, then what about racial progress? That's changing from a group status from one level to another. Well, if you're opposed to change in general, then it's easier for you to resent policies that may help one group gain additional status deserving this, if you believe in certain standards of merit, that for example, the way that things are distributed in society now are fair and work well for you, then when somebody's pushing to change those standards to give other people an advantage, you will come to resent that change because it's meaning you may lose out or you may have to take some additional steps to change your life. And that's not fair. That's not just one of the key areas again is climate change. For example, climate change has nothing to do with race in a broader sense. But racial attitudes come to have a correlation with opposition to policies that help to improve the climate. Why is that? Because climate change policy requires almost everybody to have to change. And so this notion of society kind of being fine the way it is means you don't want to change. Policies that improve racial situations require change. You oppose change. You may oppose the group. So all of it gets conflated to show the same thing. So our job as survey researchers is to get people to think about the issue in a certain way and measure that through surveys and then have another group that's not being told to think about it in a certain way and then comparing those responses. So we could essentially prime people's resentful sentiments and then see how they affect other things through data and other mechanisms. It's a standard kind of political or just behavioral psychological research. Yeah. Great. Maybe we can bring it down to specific topics that I know some of your research has touched. So we all had a very contentious election year last year. And the idea of engagement was front and center in ease of people to exercise their voting rights was front and center. And now we have some voter ID laws that came into play as well. Can you talk a little bit about your research on how attitudes towards race intersected with this idea of voter identification and policies around it? Yeah. Another subtle area about the status quo being kept as is. So voter ID laws came about after the 2000 election primarily between Bush v. Gore where the world pretty much witnessed there could be an election where someone gets more votes and still loses. And that concerned people. And so there were calls to improve the election system, but there were some politics behind it. And those politics said, well, this works for us. Maybe we should consider laws that allow it to happen, but don't give the open appearance that that's what we'd like to do. So right now you don't need an identification to register to vote. But you do need an identification in a majority of states to vote. And in some states you need what we call a strict form of identification, a picture, a signature, government issue, up to date, signature matching, all of these things. So when we started looking at voter ID laws, we found that the incidences of voter impersonation or fraud were less than a hundredth of a single percent, that it wasn't occurring very often. But we tended to see these new policies being pushed forward that we needed to have voter ID laws to minimize fraud. The 2000 election wasn't about fraud. It was actually about the system itself. But these things percolated through the system and have come into play and be expected. My research shows that the reason why it's so broadly accepted by the public is because they don't see it as controversial at all. And what the resentment piece is is people think that ID is so commonplace that it's the status quo. And if you're trying to allow people to vote without showing ID, then you're disrupting the status quo. That's threatening to many people. And they come to see or start thinking about, well, who would be doing this? Who would be trying to vote without ID? I have ID. What's the problem? Well, many seniors don't have ID issued by the government. Many people living in urban areas because they don't need to drive, don't have IDs issued by the federal governor state government. Many students who are just becoming voting age and don't live in areas where they don't need to drive and they just have their student ID don't have that federal ID. One can even argue that you could give a free voting ID to someone, but even that requires a level of ID to prove that you need ID. And so the research has shown that these tend to be support for a voter ID tends to be motivated in large part by beliefs about who is trying to skirt the rules. That is who's trying to violate justice to vote, even though it's not a problem that exists in society. So we tend to call those non attitudes or apolitical attitudes and they exist because most people don't find the issue controversial, but they find having to change the issue controversial. Yeah, wow. And, you know, free expression is another area I know that your research has touched. And, you know, night submission is also very closely related to, you know, our belief in, you know, the importance of exercising rights or free expression. I think you're a little bit more focused in looking at how those attitudes towards that and the distribution of rights and enforcement related to free expression. Could you share a little bit about, you know, what recent research has shown on that topic? One way to think about free expression is if we all have it is who also deserves to have it. And in many ways, when people are imbued with rights, they tend to value those rights and put them on a pedestal of importance and set up criteria for other people to get those rights and to get them at some level. And what we see a lot of times is that some groups we call them, we can call them members of our own group or in group members tend to think that our group members need to reach some level of deserving this before they can have the same status and the same level of rights as others. This happens with parents and children. Children need to go to a certain level of progress and status growth before they should be able to talk and have conversation or sit at the big table with adults. You can think about this the same way with oppressed groups and non oppressed groups or groups that are lower in status or groups that are higher in status. And so as you're thinking about who deserves free expression, your biases kick in and not just biases about disliking groups, but your biases about the means by which they tend to express themselves. And so you can look at, for example, you know, an insurrection at the capital of the United States as one form of free expression versus a peaceful protest. People could look at those two events in the same way or they can look at them differently depending on their own personal biases and perspectives. This is a challenge for democracy because people tend to interpret these kinds of rights through their own lens rather than through a lens of, you know, the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness and equality and fairness and justice. And once you start using your own personal lens to evaluate things, you lose the constitution. You lose the idea of a United States and we're seeing in public opinion research, we're seeing more and more dispute of basic facts and basic ideas about who should get what when and how in society. And that's a challenge for democracy because we either have to learn to live with it and accept that democracies don't work a certain way within a republic or we have to accept that our democracy is flawed or somewhere in between here. And we see a lot of that expressed in public opinion that is flawed and a challenge. Right. It sounds like a hard place to invite folks to come and sit with the challenges that are there and, you know, and yes. But here's the key thing. If I'm a leader, if I'm a elected official, I can just convince people that, hey, it's still better than every place else in the world. Right. And then for someone who's living here that says, yeah, but it's lower than our standards should be. Right. So the contention is not one where there's a right or wrong answer. There's just a rub against the values that we report to believe in. So justice, fairness, equality, prosperity, you know, commonalities, the whole idea of the United States is that we can be 50 different states, 50 or so different states, but we could surround ourselves around a common cause of justice, fairness, in an American way of life or some type. So, yeah. Yeah. I think there's some questions coming in that are going in the direction that I wanted to take the conversation anyway. So I'll use the questions that we have here from the audience. You know, I think it's wonderful that we're getting a better understanding of these things of underlying racial attitudes and how they affect policy views, social views. But what can we do to, like what action can be taken as a result of this growing understanding? What could we do to ensure policies are being made to enact change when it comes to race or other issues where there's a minority contingency involved? I don't know how old the country is in reality, but we haven't figured that out yet, so I definitely don't have an answer to what we can do. I can talk about what seems to not work. What seems to not work is thinking that there is one solution that can happen with one policy at one time for all groups in work. If you want to see racial equality and racial progress large-scale, there has to be an understanding that there is a history that's led to systemic differences in society. When we think about something like the unemployment rate and we break it down, and if you see that on average whites tend to be unemployed at 4% right now, but African Americans tend to be unemployed at 8%, which is above the standard of 7% of high unemployment, then one could either conclude that African Americans are not doing their part, or they can conclude that there's systemic racism, or there could be somewhere in between where there may be a little bit of both. And what happens is we just talk about the opposites and that's what the discourse becomes about. And both sides tend to believe that they're right and the other group's not listening to them. Politics is about being able to make decisions and government is about being able to talk about those things and enact them. And what we tend to see now is really a denial that there's a problem still. And if you're a data person like me, you see a problem. If you're a behaviorist like me, you see a problem. If you're a person that believes, you know, there is no problem, then you think everything's fine and you don't want to change or you see that we should become more restrictive. And I often tell people that racism is, you know, looking for racism in society is like looking for love in a marriage. It's you see it when you want to and you don't when you don't want to see it. So, you know, the effects of racism are longstanding and not just about some group getting something in society, it's about us thinking about our moral engagement and what we purport to believe that America is about or not and that other people are watching when we're doing this. And if they don't believe we're trying, but we continue to say we are, then they'll lose faith in us and our standing in the world will be diminished. Wow, that sounds like the stakes are pretty high. And, you know, what I'm hearing is that for now just simply awareness around the problem is our mission and our challenge as we try to sort out, you know, where to go from here. Somebody else is asking here in the chat, what is one thing that has stood out to you over the last year in terms of American political preferences and racial attitudes? Like, is there something that, you know, folks would be aware of from, you know, the events of the pandemic 2020 that, you know, you could shed some light on how these underlying sentiments, as you put it, affected how people view the policy issue. Policy issue of COVID or? Yeah, anything from this from 2020 the whole bucket. A lot happened last year. The first thing I'll say is that, you know, this is not just about awareness, right? This is very important to understand that just exposing people to information is not enough. You've got to care enough to want to change because of that information. And not only care to want to change, but be willing to tolerate the cost of it. This is where you get people kind of checking out that you want to create a better world. I don't think anybody wants to create a worse world. So wanting to create a better world means that you'll consume information that tells you how to do it. Now, if it means that you need to take an hour each day to do something, that's a different question. Or if it means that you have to reallocate a little bit of the wealth you have to others, that's a different question. Or if it means you have to tolerate your neighbor playing their radio a little bit louder, that's a different question. If it means you have to understand a different language, that's a different question. So the motivational piece, you have to have a will to want to actually do it and believe that the pathway to doing that is tolerance. And that's what a democracy is supposed to be about. But again, we're a republic and not a pure democracy. So people tend to say, well, we do have rules now. You can't just have everybody have the same voice. Some people have to be citizens. They have to not have a criminal record. We have to meet a certain age threshold. They have to pass certain tests. We have all of these things in place. So 2020, we saw a contested election that was, from a political science standpoint, that was very unsettling because we look for evidence of problems. And when we don't see any evidence, but we see elected officials still saying there's a problem, we don't have much of a leg to stand on in terms of knowledge. The US has always been a leader in higher education and accepting information at its value and really being rigorous about that information. And when we started to see pushback on that, then we didn't know how to kind of, you know, make heads or tails of it. People talked about not leaving office. And then when the insurrection happened, which was not 2020, but 2021, it told us that finally we are understanding that humans are actually humans. We don't have perfect information. We tend to believe things that aren't necessarily true. We can't always change people's opinions with facts and information. And our moral direction depends on not what our values are as a country, but what we want to see as individuals and as groups. So when COVID happened and we needed people to wear masks to help other people become protected, it became a contested issue around liberty and freedom, which was, you know, like something that was a no-brainer. And that was unsettling to us. And so we had to really come back and understand, you can't come out and report that the public is just a bunch of biased individuals, even though we all are. You can't come out and say that they're just taking a position on something because it's political. You have to really understand that behavior. And so 2020 was really about trying to gauge what are the motivations of people? Why do they choose positions again against their own self-interest? And we kept coming down to they resist change when it requires them to do something that they feel is unjust or unfair. And that took us in the same direction about resenting when governments tell you to do things that you don't think you should have to do. And it touches again, I think, on the idea of will and public will when costs or perceived costs are involved. And so, you know, I'd like to start to close maybe with some your thoughts on that. Like, is there a point of view from yourself or from the field at large on what might be done to start to generate will when it comes to these issues? It's a tough question because the country is not just polarized on the issues that polarized on people and they come to conflate the two. We call them in political psychology, we call them schemas. And so you have a schema for how you think government should behave, a schema for how your life should go, a schema for how your state should act, a schema for how your favorite team should behave and who they should sign and all these things. And they come to overlap. And so there's some type of an association where people could be talking about something related to the economy and that schema overlaps with someone's thoughts about race or someone's thoughts about poverty or someone thought someone's thoughts about immigration. So you don't have to talk about immigration, you can just talk about the economy and it actually influenced people's beliefs about immigration. You can think about the same thing with voting laws and the like that we find a strong correlation between voting laws and race because people tend to think about one group pushing on civil rights and opposing voting restrictions and those kinds of things and that connects with power and other issues. So this is a tough period for us in America and to think about free expression, to think about things like Black Lives Matter and then having to contrast that with some other groups lives mattering in an ignoring substance but thinking about superficial value and contention as a way to prove we win and someone else loses that zero sum world. That is in the political science world the slippery slope to diminish status and that's where we are starting to think about this work more is where is our country going and how do we understand public opinion when the numbers show one thing but when we do a deep dive they're actually showing something that is a hard conversation and a hard way to change things and that's what we are. Yeah well thank you so much for the important contributions that you and your research colleagues are making on these issues and understanding them better. Last words from you before we close our show today. You visited all the national parks which ones would you be most excited to visit again? Well I visited every national park in the continental United States. There are few in remote Alaska and drive Trotogus National Park in Florida, America, Samoa is out in the middle of those are different kinds of trips but I think that the national park system is a great way to see the country. Any park in Utah you can't lose Rocky Mountain National Park of course the standard Yosemite. There's a new national park that used to be a monument, White Sands National Park in New Mexico is gorgeous and of course the Everglades National Park and those in South Florida are excellent so there's you know Maine has great with it they're all low Montana Glacier National Park is excellent so I just encourage people to get out there and see the country in a different way and not just think about the people but experience the place as well. Yeah we're excited to do it. So that's all we have time for today thanks again David for joining us and sharing your knowledge on these topics. As a reminder this and prior future democracy podcast episodes can be found on Apple, Google, Spotify or whatever you get to your podcast. Remember to hit subscribe you can also stream on demand on the Knight Foundation website kf.org slash fd show. Join us next week for a night's informed and engaged show where we explore ideas and solutions for changing media landscapes and have a great rest of your day.