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Most of us like to think of ourselves as thoughtful, rational, and moral — not irrational, status-hungry, power-hungry, or amoral. Thus, when asked questions like "Why did you buy that Gucci handbag?" we don't tend to give answers like "Because I wanted to feel rich, sexy, and powerful." Similarly, when voters are asked, "Why did you vote for President Bush?" we don't tend to say "Because Bush makes me feel smarter and higher status than Kerry makes me feel."
American Environics begins from the premise that we are all, in the words of one philosopher, "strangers to ourselves." We often do not know why we believe what we believe. The answers we give to the question "Why do you believe that?" are often not to be trusted.
The AVS draws on cutting-edge empirical methods from fields such as social psychology to get at the underlying drivers of opinion and political behavior. For our 2007 study we worked with University of California sociology professor Dr. Robb Willer to develop methods to examine new mindsets, mental postures, worldviews, and values.
- Status Anxiety. Social change strategists have increasingly been grappling with the ways in which voters often do not vote their "material self-interest." Working-class conservatives support tax cuts for the rich while upper-income voters support social programs to help the poor. The question is, why? Often voters are looking to meet their status needs, albeit in very different ways from one another. Why do liberals get their status needs met by thinking of the poor as victims deserving of our help, while conservatives get their status needs met by thinking of the poor as deserving of their fates? The AVS analysis helps to identify the different values and worldviews people hold to meet different psychological needs, and helps its clients create strategies to meet these needs.
- Fear, Terror Management, and Death Anxiety. After 9/11, much has been written on the ways that the Bush White House triggered primordial fears-running ads with images of menacing wolves, for instance-to justify the war in Iraq and the domestic curtailments of civil liberties. But less discussed was why those fear-based appeals were more effective with some voters than with others. Why, for instance, were voters in places like Akron, Ohio, more fearful of being attacked by terrorists than voters in places like New York?
Recent psychological research finds a high correlation between above-average levels of "death anxiety," "system instability," and "terror management," and political conservatism. When people are primed to think about their own death, subjects in laboratory experiments tend to cling more strongly to their own cultural worldviews. Our survey tracks how strongly voters hold these and other mind-sets and allows us to detect opportunities to avoid triggering these factors.
- Complexity, Ambiguity, and Change. "Reluctance to change," "aversion to complexity," and "discomfort with ambiguity" — these are well-established drivers of political conservatism. The question is, who strongly holds these values, and why? The research shows that while some people hold these as underlying social values, other people become uncomfortable with change when they aren't getting particular psychological needs met. The AVS identifies those Americans most open to change-and helps find opportunities to overcome resistance to change by appealing to other social values and meeting other psychological needs.
- Social Dominance Orientation and "Just Deserts." Do people basically get what they deserve in life, or are larger social and other forces at work that determine our fate? The AVS examines a range of attitudes around status and social inequality to discover why people believe these conditions exist and what, if anything, should be done about social injustice. Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) measures the extent to which individuals believe inequality-whether racial, sexual, national, or other-is justified. SDO sees various justifications for inequality as having a single psychological motivation that is an individual personality variable.
- Internal vs. External Locus of Control. Are you in control of your life-or is what happens to you out of your control? Locus of control is a very simple binary that seeks to understand the degree to which people feel they have control over their destinies. Do you believe hard work determines one's fate, or is it really just a matter of luck? People with a higher belief in luck — external locus of control — tend to be more depressed. But what are the implications for social change? How should social change strategies vary to appeal to different groups with different degrees and loci of control?
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