By Jesse Singal, The Daily Beast
01 April 12
Racism isn't the sole reason some people are painting Trayvon Martin
as a thug. Jesse Singal on the psychological quirks that perpetuate
rumors and twist facts in difficult cases.
How can we explain the startling ferocity of the efforts to portray
Trayvon Martin as a thug? As investigators continue to sort out why
self-appointed neighborhood-watch captain George Zimmerman shot and
killed the Florida teen last month, it's hard not to become distraught
at the extent to which a dead young man's reputation has been
gleefully dragged through the mud by so many people.
Any comment on the Martin case must be prefaced, of course, by the
acknowledgment that we're still operating with a real deficit of
information here. Other than the video and audio recordings we've seen
and heard, everything else is rampant speculation. But the rumors
themselves are still worth examining because of what they can tell us
about how the human mind works during a major news event.
It's easy to focus on the nasty racial components, which are hard to
deny. There has been a concerted online campaign to portray Martin as
a "thug" despite a complete lack of evidence that he ever engaged in
any sort of violence. Pundits and commentators are focusing on his
appearance, his style of dress, and the stupid, very teenage things he
said on his Twitter account. If they didn't think these irrelevant
details implied that Martin's own actions contributed to his death,
they wouldn't be so intently focused on propagating them.
But while race is undeniably a factor in the power of the rumors, it's
not the only one, and the connection between race-related feelings and
rumor-mongering is more complicated than it appears at first glance.
If we're actually going to understand why the Martin rumors exploded,
we're going to need some more-nuanced explanations.
Psychology is our friend here. Since rumors are such an important part
of human life, from the boardroom to counterinsurgency efforts,
psychologists have been studying for decades how they spread and what
can be done to slow them down when they are false. They've also
devoted a great deal of research to the proximal question of which
pieces of information are most likely to stick out in our minds - the
things we're most likely to pass on to a friend.
One key factor here is the overwhelming lack of concrete information
about what happened in the moments immediately before Zimmerman killed
Martin. This makes the story inherently vulnerable to rumors,
according to Rochester Institute of Technology psychologist Nick
DiFonzo, an expert on rumor research and the author of The Watercooler
Effect: A Psychologist Explores the Extraordinary Power of Rumors.
"Whenever there's a little bit of uncertainty and it doesn't seem to
make sense, people get very surprised when they hear this story, and
they're wondering, `Well, what? What happened? Why did it happen?
That's crazy,' " he said. "They'll try to fill it in with rumors,
speculation."
We are inherently bothered by an incomplete story. When we see holes
in a narrative, we do whatever we can to plug them with the tools we
have at hand. Rumors are an excellent solution, because they can be
shaped to fit any gap that we come across. "It's hard to stay in an
ambiguous mode and accept uncertainty," DiFonzo says. The more
clear-cut a given story, the less likely it is to spawn rumors. "If
people will supply some harder facts, it's harder to wiggle," he adds.
"You have to wiggle around the new facts." In the Martin case, there
is an enormity of wiggle room.
So what makes a rumor likely to go viral? Partly, how easy it is for
us to process cognitively - the extent to which it fits what we
already "know." For many Americans, unfortunately, what's been
revealed about Martin - that he was suspended for writing graffiti and
being found with an empty marijuana bag, and that he was found with
women's jewelry (which he wasn't disciplined for) - fits right into
their preexisting notion that young black men are predisposed to
criminality.
So even though these details have zero bearing on the facts of this
case, they are passed around excitedly by likeminded members of online
social networks as though they explain something.
Another potentially powerful mechanism here is the so-called
just-world hypothesis. Just as we have a powerful urge to complete
stories with missing parts, we have a similarly powerful urge to see
the world - and the stories we hear as we traverse it - as having some
underlying force for justice guiding everything.
"People are strongly motivated to believe that the world is just -
that people get what they deserve," wrote Danny Oppenheimer, a
professor of psychology at Princeton and the author of Democracy
Despite Itself: Why a System That Shouldn't Work at All Works So Well,
in an email. "So people want to believe that a victim deserved it, or
brought it on him/herself."
It's an understandable impulse, but not always a helpful one. As
science writer Jonah Lehrer put it, "we often rationalize injustices
away, so that we can maintain our naïve belief in a just world."
In this case, the idea of an unarmed teenager simply getting gunned
down leaves our brains itching, in a sense, because it reeks of
injustice. One way to scratch that itch is to decide that Martin did
something to bring about the shooting - even if there's no evidence to
suggest this is the case.
"If Trayvon was dangerous, then people can preserve the illusion that
the world is just - if Trayvon was just an innocent kid, then that
forces us to confront a harsh world that is psychologically much
harder to deal with," wrote Oppenheimer.
So it isn't quite right to say that those who are convinced Trayvon
must have been the instigator are necessarily racist. Rather, they're
trying to make sense of a tragedy, and the most straightforward,
cognitively easy way to do so might be to assume that Martin must have
done something that explains Zimmerman's deadly aggression.
Neither of these two stories - one in which an innocent black teenager
was shot because of a neighborhood-watch volunteer's overly assertive
"policing," and the other in which a black teenager was shot and
killed in part because he was acting suspiciously or aggressively - is
a particularly happy tale. Neither calibrates with our highest ideals
of justice. But one comes closer than the other, and that's why, in
some quarters, it's the more popular of the two.
None of this is to say that race doesn't play a huge role in how we
sift and filter information and decide which pieces of it to pass on.
Psychologists have known for a long time that racial stereotypes and
cues can powerfully affect how we process information and weigh
evidence - for our brains, race is a "shortcut" by which to quickly
make sense of new information. It's one of many ways in which our
quickest, most reactionary forms of thinking don't necessarily provide
good results. So it's unfortunate that these stereotypes are so
pernicious, because our brains are, in key ways, predisposed toward
racial prejudice, and this fact has never been clearer than in the
Martin case.
It's also worth pointing out that Martin's supporters are just as
prone to certain biases in how they handle the massive amount of
information about this case circulating online. They're more likely to
circulate pictures of Zimmerman in which he looks scary, and to pass
along the revelations that he had previous run-ins with the law,
allegedly involving violence.
It's a tough thing to admit, but very few of us are as interested in
objective reality as we think we are - we all have some sort of agenda
when we parse emotionally loaded information.
"When it comes to deciding what we believe is true," Oppenheimer wrote
in his email, "whether or not it's actually true isn't nearly as
important as whether we want to believe it."
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/276-74/10744-focus-why-is-trayvon-being-slandered
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
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