 This video is going to be a review of Chapter 4, Constructing People from Thinking about Social Problems. This review is in preparation for your exam. So when we talk about people and constructing social problems, there are two categories that we look at. Victims and villains, and we'll get more in depth about victims and villains in a minute, but let's talk for a minute about why we want to concentrate on people when we're talking about constructing social problems. If you look at it from the point of view of motivational framing, it is easier to make emotional appeals if you are talking about people. Rather than ideas. By looking at victims and villains, you have a less risky strategy because people will buy in emotionally to thinking especially about victims. This approach emphasizes feeling because people relate to other people over reason, which ideas are harder to have warm and fuzzy feelings about. Or it's also harder to get excited and angry about it unless you understand how it is impacting human beings. So by concentrating on victims and villains, you evoke sympathy and anger versus more cerebral thinking about the problem. Also, this is a way to buy into what Lowsky calls humanitarian frames. This kind of framing is going to ask questions about how to make a better world and where the harm comes from. So obviously how to make a better world takes a look at victims and tries to be sympathetic, compassionate, even pity for the victims. And also when you're constructing harm, if you have a villain, it is easier to evoke feelings of hatred, revulsion, hostility or loathing for those villains. So by constructing these people in the stories that you're telling when you are talking about social problems, you are in fact creating emotional connection with your audience. So the important thing about victims is they must be sympathetic. What do we mean by that? Well, they need to deserve help. They're not responsible for their harm. They are not in the wrong. They are morally right. They're not troublesome people, you know, people who create their own problems as it were. And they are somebody who is deserving of help. So this is really important because a lot of people who social problems address are not always deserving victims. Let me give you an example, which I think I've talked about before, is you are somebody who is attempting to help men who molest children. Nobody is going to give you a great deal of support in their money, their time, their attention to do this. You cannot construct your victim to be the child molester. But helping child molesters figure out why they're doing what they're doing and how to modify their behavior and how not to hurt other people and change what they do is actually has some public good. Because in doing this, you reduce recidivism. Most child molesters hurt more than one child. And if you can intervene and stop that behavior, then you save them from victimizing other children. So the victim that you need to talk about is not the child molester. The victim that you need to talk about are their victims, the children that you are saving by addressing this. Children, in fact, are essentially the perfect victim in constructing a social problem. Children are never considered responsible for the harm that comes their way. The question of whether right or wrong is not a big question when you're talking about developing children because children take time to develop their sense of morality. Even troublesome children can be regarded as sympathetic victims because their troublesome behavior is seen to be a result of other people's actions and not the action of the child, his or herself, and children deserve help. The other part of understanding sympathetic victims is that you create strategies to help understand the harm that is being done to them. So you will find in the construction of the conditions, the strategy is to show how these victims are suffering. And the suffering is not, you know, little problems, they're horrible problems. And then one of the things that happens in constructing the stories that are told in creating a call for or creating a social problems claim is always going to go to the most negative or nearly the most negative. So the more you can show these victims as suffering, the better chance you have to grab, you know, the hearts and minds of your audience. Another thing that's important is constructing this victim is not just the ones who have already been victimized, but potentially it could be anyone or many people who are victimized. So part of the strategy is to show victims, sympathetic victims, but also to suggest these are not the only ones who are going to be hurt unless the problem is addressed. Also, you want to make sure that you talk about victims, you never talk about anything that would take away from that, that deservingness. So you are going to construct a victim that is pure, right, that is going to be never at fault for what's going on with them. It's never going to be a complicated picture. It's going to be a very clear picture. These are the people who are getting hurt. They don't deserve to be hurt. This is what you know about them. You very much tap into cultural biases in doing this because you will be picking people that in our culture we consider these people deserving victims. So children, the elderly are easy from a cultural bias point of view. The point too is sympathetic victims where the poor prisoners, prostitutes, there's a cultural bias that says, well, maybe they're kind of asking for it. They are not quite as deserving. So oftentimes when stories are constructed, like for instance, stories constructed around human trafficking. So human trafficking happens to a lot of people. Not just children, but because of cultural biases about who is at fault and who is not at fault, who is deserving, who is not deserving. Most of the time when somebody is trying to appeal to policy changes or appeal to audiences to do something about human trafficking. They will emphasize underage kids, children, you know, teenagers and younger kids, more than they will emphasize the adults who get caught up in this. And this is on purpose because you want to construct a sympathetic victim and the cultural bias is that children deserve sympathy more than an adult does. The other strategy is personalizing it. So you don't talk about the children. You talk about this face that you, you know, this one person story. You see politicians do this a lot. When they're talking about policy changes, they very often bring along, you know, a person who has been affected by the problem that they're trying to make policies on. To tell their story. You also see this often in laws that end up with people's names, like Amber Alerts. So Amber Alerts, the laws that created Amber Alerts was sent it around a young child named Amber. And they passed laws that would make it easier to tell the public about children who have been kidnapped. And that's what an Amber Alert is. It was named after a child that was kidnapped. So by putting a name on it, personalizing it, making it about, I mean, you've heard the term poster child. So making it about a particular person that you put out there to the public. Is a strategy that also injures sympathy, because it's one thing to sympathize with all the kids, but it's another thing to sympathize with a really good looking kid with big eyes, looking at you pleading for help. So this is a way of, of creating that sympathy. Even with environmentalism and pollution, especially this is something that most of the people who are listening to this probably didn't experience. But in my childhood, the first announcement I ever heard about littering involved a Native American man who was going to a river and getting ready to get into the river and he's dressed up in fairly stereotypical Native American garb and goes to a river to get in a canoe and go fishing or whatever it was that he was going to do. And when he looks at the river, it's full of trash. And you see the camera go to very close in on his face, and he has one tear going down his, his face. And at the age of like eight or nine, I stopped littering because I didn't want to make the man cry. I mean, it got to me, it still gets to me today the thing, the image that I see in my head when I even like accidentally litter when something flies away from me. My first thought was is always, oh my God, I can't make him cry. I can't make the man cry. So it really works to personalize because it creates a connection that is much easier to maintain a connection with one person than a connection with, you know, a generic category of persons. Of course, the flip side of victims is constructing villains. So in the same way that you have to have a very simplified view of who is a victim. And that victim needs to be pure and blameless and so forth. You have villains that are going to be purely evil, purely problematic. And that creates some problems because if you want to evoke this kind of blame, hatred, punishment, questions of intention come up. Like do these people or these things intend to do harm? You know, a lot of counter claims may say there was a good reason for creating this harm. And so it can get very complicated, very fast. Oftentimes when social problems claims makers are constructing a villain, they stay away from constructing people as villains and actually think more in terms of institutions because as soon as there's a crack in the evilness and you see some humanization of this person or have some idea of why they did what they did. Then it starts to break down and it creates holes that somebody coming after your argument can take advantage of and create counter claims. So there are some strategies that avoid this problem with constructing and condemning villains. One is a lot of times social problems claims don't actually construct the villain. They have victims and victims have been victimized, but we do not have anything other than a vague idea of who did the victimization. This is why you hear a lot of people talk in terms of systemic or there's vague societal norms that create this, that kind of thing. You also have to be careful because oftentimes people construct villains as dangerous outsiders and that can move over into prejudices that create problems of stereotyping and so forth. So to give you an example of that, there are people who want to make arguments that we should close our borders once our borders are open again because after the plague and wanted to close borders before the plague. And then they constructed people who are trying to immigrate as dangerous outsiders that that's the problem with immigration is these dangerous people are coming over the border. That can work. I mean, there are people who begin to see your solution, but that creates kind of its own special problems that, you know, we'll get into later about unintended consequences of social problems claims but constructing villains as dangerous outsiders can have a lot of unintended consequences. Another thing that happens oftentimes in constructing villains is if there are people start asking about the good reason for creating harm. And one of the things that comes up is, you know, what's wrong with, with the person who's doing the harm. So you have you, you know, in the last 100 years or so, for instance, we have the, yes it's been more like about 150 years, we have a shift to medicalized explanations for bad behavior. So what loski calls the medicalization of deviance. So if somebody is doing something bad. One of the questions that gets asked is, is that person a victim themselves. Does that person have a mental health problem. Does that person have, you know, physical issues that are creating this problem. So there's an understanding that if people are behaving badly. They may in fact, don't deserve blame and condemnation that they do in fact deserve to be addressed as victims themselves. So it is an important part of the formula story to construct villains and more successful social problems claims do construct villains. But unlike victims, villains are a little trickier. And this is why when a villain is constructed it very rarely is a person. So in the same way that victims often the strategy is to really personalize it, you know, to see that poster child victim. Villains are much more theoretical and vague and and impersonal. So this brings us to formula stories. I've been hinting at this up until now and so did loski in the book. Let's get very specifically what she's saying is, there are specific formulas for the story that is told by the claims maker that seems to be successful in creating that social problems ownership that we talked about in the last chapter. So what are the elements of these formula stories? Well, they have a plot, right? That plot is generally not a complicated plot. It's a very simple cause and effect plot. So there is this problem. And this problem is widespread. And people are getting hurt by that problem. And there are forces that create that hurt. And so we need to intervene. And by intervening and doing whatever that the person, the claims maker wants to happen, then we will affect a change. And that's pretty much always the plot. What she means by narrow is that, you know, it's not going to be complicated with other people, other factors and so forth. It's going to be about this topic and about this cause and about this effect. We have in this formula story victims and victims do no harm. Again, that gets back to that purity of victim. This is a victim that didn't deserve what is happening to them, didn't cause what is happening to them. The victims are in circumstances that are beyond their control and they are being harmed. And villains are the ones who are doing the harm. And again, villains may not be, you know, a person per se, but it is, you know, some sort of evil force that is creating these problems. And this is always a moral tale. There is a wrong happening. And this is how you make it right. Without it being a moral tale, there is no reason to make a change. And it is always going to be melodramatic. And the reason it's going to be melodramatic is because it's going to be so simplified. All dramas are a specific form of dramas that have a very, very clear victim and a very, very clear villain. And you root for the victim and you boo and hiss at the villain. I went to a Durango, Colorado, many, many years ago, and they used to, I don't know if they still do in the summertime have shows in bars in the downtown area that is built up like the 1890s. And melodramas were very popular in the 1890s. So you go to these dinner theaters, and it's a melodrama show. And people come out and the victim is almost always female and the villain is almost always male. And the audience participates in this. When the victim shows up, everybody claps. When the villain shows up, everybody hisses. When the villain is winning, you know, and hurting the victim, everybody boos. And then, of course, the victim prevails because the hero comes and saves her. Everybody cheers for the hero and, you know, expects the tale to end happily. Well, this is essentially the formula of a lot of social problems claims. And it's a successful formula that captures audiences and gets to that social problems investment for the part of the audience ownership as Loski calls it. So why do formula stories succeed? Well, they're simple, right? You don't have to get, they're not messy at all. So you have a very clear idea of who is being hurt, why they are being hurt, and what needs to be done about it. They are favored by mass media. Okay, so I want to talk real quick about this word, concision. This is not something that is directly in Loski's book, but it's very pertinent to how formula stories work. Concision is the putting together of ideas in the most concise form that you can, probably preferably in 45 seconds or less. So in media, there are a lot of commercials. And when things are talked about in media, they expect you to put it together in little sound bites and nuggets, if you will, that have a beginning and end before you go to the next commercial. This is, if you can do that with your story, then there's a very good chance that your story will get picked up in mass media. Whereas if you have to do a lot of explanation and go over a lot of different information. Well, that's not that easy to format into a news program or a PSA or something that will get the message out. So this is probably one of the problems with the effort that has been made to get people to think about climate change. Climate change is not a concise problem. And when you try to make it concise, there is a lot of misinformation. So, you know, I mean, Al Gore made an hour and a half movie about it. It is usually documentaries, right? Not news stories. Probably the best effort that I know of to get across the problem of climate change was a film called Chasing Ice, which was about this guy who put cameras out in the Arctic circle to watch the melting of the ice sheets up there and how rapidly it was happening. And he has time motion cameras that viewed these areas for like two or three years. And then he put together very quick vignettes that showed rapidly what was happening very slowly. It was very beautiful, very well filmed, and it was very powerful. But it really didn't give you all the information that you needed to know where Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth was very boring for most people. It was like getting a lecture from a professor. And so it, you know, there's no big sound bites in it that you can point to and show on the news. You either watch the film and hear the whole argument or you don't. There have been some efforts that have been made to try to get things into the media. I think one of the more successful thing is to show animals. If you see starving polar bears, that's pretty powerful. But again, it's not getting the full message out. You know, if you're talking about children who are hungry and you show a picture of a child that is emaciated with their stomach bloated and is, you know, got flies on its face and is really like obviously sick. That tells you a lot about hunger and one image, right? It's a very good typification. But that can get into a PSA and that can motivate people to give money to help starving children. But not all social problems are that easily to make concise. So that's why formula stories exist because it's an effort to take complicated issues and make them more concise so that your message can get out in a broad way. Formula stories become public narratives. They're easy to repeat, right? You get, I mean, if you have a little meme on Facebook or on Twitter or even three or four paragraphs there, it's pretty easy to share that. It's easy to move that from person to person and make those stories retold. It's easy to talk about it with your friends. Where if you have a very complex story where you can't remember all the details, that kind of gets lost in moving it from person to person. But formula stories are very easy to turn into public narratives where people are all talking about it or a great deal of people are talking about it in the same way.