A NATION LIKE YOU?

Host Jonathan Wolfman sheds light on the fact the voice of authority supports the one but for the many; the authority figure possesses a potent and rapid effect on social norms in part because they amend our assumptions about what other people think. In the United States, one way to examine that effect is to examine the decisions of the Supreme Court, a universally acknowledged source of authority. Our tendency to extrapolate the opinions of others from the opinions of authority figures helps explain phenomena like the incorrectly drawn swastikas on the playground in Brooklyn. The psychology of norms suggests you don’t need a nation of raging anti-Semites to license the use of anti-Semitism as a social weapon, Instead, an authority figure could make the expression of anti-Semitism—an old bias that had previously been subtle, implicit, and almost imperceptible— suddenly appear to be one of the broadly acceptable ways of showing pent-up anger. “A leader could whip up everyone’s annoyance and channel it to these scapegoats and make it normative to use this language,”  “encouraging people to say, ‘Ah, this is how to express my frustration, to lash out against liberalism and so-called élites. Such an authority figure can create the impression of a social consensus where none exists.

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