Out of my mind
Who's able to understand or manipulate what others think?
Painting by Ruirui Kuang
Last week, I worked on an episode about that day, two weeks ago, when rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol. The episode is laced with moments that sound surreal, including one experienced by a Black officer in the Capitol Police. As Buzzfeed reporter Emmanuel Felton relays, the officer found himself in a shouting match with rioters, some of whom were carrying Blue Lives Matter flags. One rioter pulled out his police badge and told the officer, “We’re doing this for you.” Another Black officer whom Felton interviewed described facing a similar crowd:
“We were telling them to back up and get away and stop, and they’re telling us they are on our side, and they’re doing this for us, and they’re saying this as I’m getting punched in my face by one of them.”
I’ve tried to imagine how disorienting that would have felt—to hear people say they’re acting on your behalf at the same time as they’re attacking you. This scene brought to mind a particular strategy meant to disorient its victims: gaslighting. As the term gaslighting has become ubiquitous in the last several years—Trump has been accused of gaslighting America (that’s the title of a 2018 book about Trump, in fact); the Dixie Chicks’ 2020 album is called Gaslighter—its definition has expanded.
But in a terrific article, sociologist Paige Sweet carefully defines and unpacks gaslighting. She describes it as a strategy to create a surreal social environment by making a victim appear or feel “crazy.” Gaslighting, she says, specifically happens in the context of an intimate relationship, where an abuser can exploit existing trust from the victim. While gaslighting involves psychological manipulation, Sweet argues that it’s fundamentally a sociological phenomenon. Gaslighting works by exploiting inequalities—power-laden relationships and macro-level inequalities including gender, race, and immigration status.
Gender inequality is gaslighting’s essential ingredient. When Sweet interviewed victims of intimate partner violence about what their abusers did to them, one phrase came up again and again: “crazy bitch.” It’s the aspersion the men cast on their partners, one built on the stereotype that women are irrational, emotional, not to be trusted. Sweet finds plenty of other ways that abusers use feminine stereotypes for the purposes of gaslighting. One woman said that every time she tried to end the relationship, her partner dismissed her, saying she had an imbalance in her hormones. He forced her to take anti-depressant pills, saying she needed them because of “women’s issues.”
Gaslighting tactics, Sweet points out, become more damaging when abusers exploit institutions in which women experience fear or aren’t seen as credible. When one woman called the police, her partner told the officers that she was crazy and was mad because they can’t get back together. Incredibly, the abuser made the police believe that she was the aggressor (leaning on stereotypes about Black women and aggression) and arrested her. Abusers who exploit institutions like courts and mental health systems—the very institutions we believe to aid victims—make it harder for women to escape these damaging relationships.
A recent paper by psychologist Sanaz Talaifar and colleagues looks at another arena in which macro-level inequalities have an effect on interpersonal interactions. Researchers have found that the people who have the most insight into others’ minds are from groups that are low in status and/or power.
Here’s a sample of those findings:
Lower class people excel at reading others’ emotions (e.g. this paper).
Minority groups are better at judging the emotions of majority groups than the reverse.
Women are more perceptive than men on a range of matters, from judging personality traits to inferring others’ emotions.
Gay men are better at predicting others’ sexual orientation than straight men—aka Gaydar, which is also the title of the paper that found this.
They write:
“The most poignant aspect of such asymmetries is that the perceivers who need understanding the most are both the most incisive and the least understood.”
There are at least two components to understanding another person: having 1) information about the other person and 2) motivation to process that information. If the perceiver is interacting with someone who is similar to them, they will likely have more information to draw on and more concern for the person. But if the perceiver is asked to take the perspective of someone very different from them, their level of information and motivation tends to track with status/power.
The views of lower status people tend to be less represented in popular culture and they’re less visible in day-to-day interactions (the researchers go into detail on this claim if you’re interested). The researchers also theorize that people with low status/power are dependent on those with higher status/power and therefore are motivated to understand them. There are a number of possible reasons why a higher status person would be disinclined to understand the perspective of a lower status person. One is that they would have to grapple with the possibility that they benefit from unfair advantages.
Citing earlier research, the psychologists point out that high status and power appear to play a causal role in lowering people’s perceptiveness. People who are granted high power or status tend to show less insight into others. For instance, their ability to detect the emotional tone in speech and their concern for others lowers.
The bulk of the paper is about extending these earlier finding on class/race/gender etc. to self-esteem. They ran a series of studies that found that people with low-self esteem are far better at understanding the desires of people with high self-esteem than the reverse. Even after the high-self esteem participants learned about the general preferences of people with low-self esteem, they expressed incredulity.
The authors observe that at least some people with high self-esteem have insight into the minds of people with low self-esteem. They note one group in particular: “Predators who routinely abuse their partners, for instance, may develop a keen eye for new victims.”
I can’t stop thinking about:
Words: I realized just how much I don’t know about Mormonism by reading this cover story.
“Unlike most American Christians, Latter-day Saints don’t get to choose whom they go to church with. They’re assigned to congregations based on geographic boundaries that are often gerrymandered to promote socioeconomic diversity. And because the Church is run almost entirely by volunteers, and every member is given a job, they have to work together closely. Patrick Mason, a historian of religion, calls this ‘the sociological genius of Mormonism.’”
Sounds: The podcast about Hurricane Katrina, Floodlines, has kept me company as I’ve cooked over the last few weeks. The show has such a distinctive sound, from the ethereal music to the unforgettable voices of the central figures in the story.
Video: Alvin Ailey Dance Theater’s legendary suite of dances called “Revelations” is on YouTube. There’s such a range to the moods and styles of the dances.
I made
Last week I helped produce the Embedded episode mentioned above, “January 6: Inside the Capitol Siege.” It was transporting, immersive stories like this one that made me want to enter audio journalism in the first place.
Now you know
18th century spelling and grammar books for children routinely used “fornication” as an example of a four-syllable word. [Source: The Way We Never Were by Stephanie Coontz]
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