Winners and Losers by Mutz Diana C.;

Author:Mutz, Diana C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

THE ONE VERSUS THE MANY

In contrast to having difficulty visualizing trade winners, respondents had no difficulty conjuring mental images of trade losers. Indeed, case studies in news reports are full of them. They are often, but not always, sturdy-looking white men in jobs requiring manual labor.

In the US media, the dominant frame in media coverage of unemployment is an individual person’s job loss.43 Highlighting a single individual might logically seem unlikely to generate public reactions given that it is just one person who has lost one job. But as suggested by the quote frequently attributed to Stalin, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” Individual victims evoke sympathy and a sense of moral responsibility in ways that collectives do not.44 These studies attribute their highly consistent findings to the stronger emotional reactions evoked by the identified victims, especially in cases involving victims experiencing loss.45 More emotionally engaging portrayals create greater sympathy for victims and facilitate effects on policy attitudes.46 Individuals are essentially affect-rich and highly vivid targets, whereas statistical collectives are affect-poor and less vivid in the mental images they facilitate.

In the experiment on trade winners and losers, I did not provide respondents with personal details about those experiencing job losses or gains, so there were no individuals identified by name or other characteristics. Nonetheless, many generated their own mental images of trade winners and losers. Because the study describes one loser (or winner) who is an American/foreigner and a collective of other winners (or losers) who are Americans/foreigners, it is possible to examine whether the greater vividness of individuals versus collectives applies even when the individuals are not described to audiences. Given that all characteristics were randomly assigned—who gained/lost jobs and whether the winner/loser was described as a single individual or as a multiple—I compare the vividness of the depersonalized single individual to a collective of losers/winners. Based on the general theory, when the policy was described as one in which 1 person would lose [gain] a job for every 100 who gained [lost] jobs, the individual, rather than the collective, should be more vivid, all else being equal, that is, regardless of whether the individual was the loser or the winner.

As shown in Figure 8.3, this expected pattern did not arise in the vividness of people’s mental imagery, perhaps due to the lack of personalized identification of the single individuals. In this case, collectives were used as a means of giving respondents a sense of the quantity of people helped or hurt by the policy rather than as human interest devices. In direct contrast to expectations, when one compares the vividness of a single foreigner in the mind’s eye with the vividness of a whole collective of foreigners, the collective is more vivid than the individual. When forming mental images of distant winners and losers in trading partner countries, the more abstract mass collective of foreigners produced greater vividness than the individual foreigner. This finding brings to mind the emotional impact for many Americans of viewing mass poverty in an underdeveloped country.

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