Representation

What does it mean for a group of people to be "positively," "negatively," "accurately," or "inaccurately" represented in media? Ed Schiappa has spent quite some time thinking about these questions, and his research complicates what many think of as a "good" representation. 

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Transcript

 When We Disagree is a show about arguments, how we have them, why we have them, and their impact on our relationships and ourselves.  Social division is rampant in the United States. Sometimes it can feel like the only thing we agree with one another about is that we are in a state of total, risky disagreement.

How can we as individuals create connection in a divided world, or even possibly persuade someone to moderate or change their views?  One tactic is, quote, staying in relationship. Let's say that someone you love has grown more extreme in their political or religious beliefs. When you talk about anything with them, even the weather or pizza, somehow it always just comes right back to their extreme belief. 

If you want to be persuasive to them, sometimes the act of staying in relationship is far more influential than anything you can say or any facts you can muster. Thank you. Your continued presence is proof that your side can be loving. And reasonable and intelligent. Your continued presence is proof that people who disagree are not monsters.

Fear as the saying goes, grows in isolation. The best hope for persuasion is presence, not absence. This advice of course applies to folks you love and want to persuade, not to relationships of unsafety or abuse. But in the end, the lesson is this. We'd like to think that persuasion is a golden argument, the perfect fact at a critical moment, but it's often slower and more systematic.

Persuasion is relational.  I'm Michael Lee, professor of communication and director of the civility initiative at the college of Charleston. Our guest today on when we disagree is Ed Schiappa. He holds the Brashard Chair of Humanities at MIT. He has written about a dozen books, including most recently, Argumentation, Keeping Faith with Reason.

Ed, tell us an argument story.  You betcha.  

So you have to understand that I'm a former debater, both in high school, college, and I also coach college debates. So I, I like. To argue, um, I think it's a productive way to test our knowledge and this has entered my scholarship and my publications over the years as a professor. 

So my story goes back about 20 years.  And an article came out in a journal that was talking about the then popular TV show Will and Grace and the scholarly article based on its nuanced interpretation of the show, um, argued that, you know, this may look like it's a progressive show, but actually it reinforces certain, uh, traditional  societal norms.

Uh, and, um, I didn't believe it.  I found their argument unpersuasive, largely because it was based on purely their reading, if you will, or their interpretation of the show.  So I got together with a couple of my buddies at the University of Minnesota, and we decided to do a study.  And that study basically was a survey that we gave to about 170, uh, people there at the University of Minnesota, asking them all kinds of questions about, uh, whether they watched the show Will and Grace, uh, how often they watched the show, and what they thought of the primary characters.

Because on that show, there are two primary characters. Uh, gay male characters that are leading characters, and I, my guess,  my opinion was that that can only enhance, uh, people's attitudes and hopefully decrease prejudice by getting to know, uh, those characters.  But I didn't have any evidence for that claim.

So we did the study and without getting too technical, we did find that the more often that people watch the show, uh, the lower their prejudice level was towards, uh, gay men in particular. And what we found most noteworthy was if they were, they really liked those two characters, uh, and if they, um,  wanted to, you know,  Get to know them better, things of that sort, what we call  parasocial involvement, if I can use the technical term.

Um, and what we found that blew our socks off. was that when we subdivided the people who filled out the survey into different groups based on how many gay people they knew,  we found that the, the strongest connection between reducing prejudice happened with the group who did not know anybody. In the real world that they knew to be gay. 

Uh, that was remarkable. And without getting into the statistical nuance, it was a very strong relationship.  And that led us to, frankly, a whole theory.  Uh, that just as in psychology, we've seen since the 1950s that a, uh, the best way to reduce prejudice between a majority and a minority group is productive contact. 

And what our theory did for the first time was prove empirically that you can do that. Through mediated contact through TV or film contact. So that led us to do a whole series of studies over a period of a couple years  that we've published. If I may be so bold, it won a national award from the National Communication Association for its influence.

It's been cited at 1500 times, things of that sort, and all of that.  There's a Wikipedia page about the theory. All of that. Came out of an argument came out of uh, disagreeing with this  article that we saw that came out in the journal. 

Take us back through your initial response to this essay about Will and Grace.

You see this essay published in a journal that you frequent relatively often in your work. And it's a piece that's critical, and if I can characterize at least the tagline argument that this critical piece said is that it may seem progressive because they're giving visibility to two gay men, but in fact, it's retrograde, regressive, discriminatory politics, prejudice dressed up to look like.

something mold breaking. Is that about right? 

That is right on. That's exactly what they argued. Part of what they argued is what I call the Goldilocks test, which is they said that the Jack character was too effeminate and too stereotypically gay. Whereas the Will character was sort of too straight acting.

And to me, that missed the point because the point is that not all gay men are like, not all gay men are flamboyant, uh, and they're also likable. They have various traits that one might admire. And what we found, especially over the course of a series of studies, is that Uh, those kinds of judgments, if you will, if you decide you like this character or that this character is trustworthy, or this character is admirable in some way, that can actually influence your attitudes about the whole group  of which this character represents. 

And that is absolutely consistent with  Hundreds of studies that were done by psychologists on what's known as the contact hypothesis, that direct face to face contact, and what we were proving for the first time is that you can basically simulate that contact through It's pretty cool.  Watching people on television through watching them on film, um, you know, if anything, it's, it's more comfortable.

It's easier for somebody to sit back in their living room and get to know about a minority group that maybe they wouldn't go out and meet in person. 

Yeah, and to summarize your results, to be clear,  the decrease in prejudice was greatest for those who had the least contact with the group in question. So if I knew the fewest gay men and had contact with this show, my potential prejudice would decrease. 

against other groups more specifically.  

Exactly. And we found that across a whole series of studies and it sort of makes sense because what's happening when you're watching that show is you're actually learning about that group.  Uh, and if you have had little, to no direct contact beforehand, the opportunity to learn, uh, is greater.

So, for example, we found that people who already had, say, three or more gay friends, their attitude wasn't being influenced by the show at all.  Which, you know, they already had learned what they needed to learn to reduce their prejudice, however, they were, however much they were willing to do so. So that was the really striking result, which is that very first study about Will and Grace that led, as I said, to a series of other studies as well, that we got increasingly more sophisticated in our research. 

Design and that sort of thing. 

The first study is rather critical and at least is theorizing maybe from their own kind of read of the show without much Experimental evidence that they 

had no audience research at all. Right. There are 

limits to visibility politics Visibility politics or exposure therapy or the parasocial contact hypothesis.

However, we want to talk about it  Right can get worse If we see stereotypes masquerading as something progressive in your studies, your follow up studies, have you found any of those limits to be true? Or have you found on the whole that visibility is good? Exposure to be 

a certain kind of visibility.

Okay. You know, there's, there's very good evidence that you can also have your prejudice increased by exposure to negative stereotypes. Representation or negative portrayals. So, uh, you know, uh, we didn't do those studies, but I'm, I'm familiar with them. But if the portrayal of the characters is comparable to the way straight characters are being portrayed, uh,  You know, that's sort of the minimum threshold, uh, so as long as they're not the villains of the show, so to speak, uh, then you have the opportunity for, for learning about the category, realizing it's a more complex category, maybe includes likable members of the category, and that's what moves the dial.

If we're going to, let's say, intentionally set out to moderate attitudes towards a particular group of people, step one, make sure they have visibility. Step two, let's not make them monsters. Step three, maybe they're heroes of the show, or maybe they're just complex people with normal real life foibles. 

Yeah. I mean, we looked at different kinds of shows. Uh, you know, one show. Which is a new version of which is now being aired called Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Uh, you know, there were five gay men, so a lot of potential learning there about how complex the category could be. And they were the heroes, and they were very positively, uh, portrayed, and, you know, again, we did a study that proved that it could reduce prejudice.

We did another study on the show, Six Feet Under, where there were simply a couple of gay characters out of a whole ensemble and, uh, but again, they were positively portrayed. They weren't the heroes necessarily, but they were positively portrayed relative to the other characters, and we found, again, that if people watch the show, if they, uh, related to those characters or liked those characters or trusted those characters, almost any one of those factors, Could lead to reduce prejudice. 

I have a kind of backup question of how you got involved in this, how you became inspired to do this in the first place. So kind of two parts, one, what inspired you to be interested in a topic, both the specific show, as well as the larger topic in the first place, and then  second. We've all read articles that we disagree with and then done absolutely nothing about.

So what inspired you to then do a pretty detailed study in response?  

Well, it goes back a few years before even the story I just told, um, which is I had noticed over a period of time, a lot of critiques of popular culture that were based on the scholars interpretation of what was going on there.  And in fact, one of my teachers from graduate school, uh, had published a piece about how, uh, the movies, The Firm and Jurassic Park  promoted  skepticism among, postmodern skepticism among Generation X. 

Now, this was back when Generation X was in college. So, but that was the argument. And again, my reaction to it was, I don't believe it.  And I actually collaborated with a graduate student there at Minnesota, who is now a full professor, these many years later. Uh, and we did a bunch of focus group research, and we published an article that was about  audience conjectures is what we call it.

If you're going to make claims about the audience, how they interpret movies or, uh, or TV, uh, how they are potentially affected by that, then you really need to do research. some kind of audience research. And there were a lot of media critics that weren't doing that. And so  I had been sort of  beating that drum for several years by the time this study came out on Will and Grace.

And then I decided I guess I needed to put my money where my mouth was. And so we did this study. And the first study I only planned to do the one study, but the results were so interesting and so we thought important that it led to a series of, of four or five more. 

It sounds like the initial response was not that you were objecting to the claim, but you were objecting to how little evidence there was to back the claim and that the claim was becoming increasingly popular in this set of literature.

But frankly, I mean, it could be scholarship, but it could also be movie reviews.  You know, that lack audience research to back the conjecture about the impact of a film,  

right? Well, you know, and, and I don't have any problem with sort of the Cisco and Ebert apart approach, which deliberately says, you know, Cisco and Ebert, which I realize some of your listeners may not remember.

They always said, we don't care what the audience thinks.  We're doing our artistic judgment of the quality of this film as a member of a particular cinematic genre,  but that's not what scholars do. What scholars do in our academic journals is they want to make substantive arguments about the societal significance of various TV shows and films.

So I both objected to the claim that they were making, And the fact that I've, I've thought that they didn't have evidence for it. 

That's right. Yeah. And so much of, of movie reviews or artistic reviews, of course, are about the aesthetic quality, which is very individualistic, very subjective, but then also  make verifiable or not verifiable claims about the impact of Black Panther, the impact of public perceptions of violence of a movie like the Joker, or will this lead to copycats?

Or does this promote greed or,  and on and on and on we go.  And to those claims, you say,  prove it with audience research. 

And in some cases there is pretty good evidence, you know,  you mentioned Black Panther, that no question that has become a cultural phenomenon. Uh, and you know, when you see people who still today.

Uh, African American, um, celebrities, et cetera, who will do that, you know,  forever. It's a fictional land, but it's as a symbol becomes so important, uh, that it has had a lasting effect. So, uh, I don't have a problem with people claiming that things have consequences. Um, but as a former debater, I.  And more persuaded by those that have some evidence behind them.

The two part question as we close. One, what is the larger significance to you about this debate? Not necessarily about the content of the debate, but about  two scholars responding to one another and leading to a greater production of knowledge, at least the way that I'm looking at it. And then two, the larger debate about visibility.

What's the larger lesson in the debate about visibility and your intervention there with parasocial contact?  

Well, for the first question, um,  I think that the, the,  to me, knowledge progresses through a, if you will, you know, argumentative or dialectical process, you know, we, we make our argumentative behavior.

Ideas better by testing them.  And, uh, in fact, we are one of my mentors from graduate school described argument as hypothesis testing, you know, you make a claim, you test that claim, and you test it through the process of argument. So I think, you know, we can make our, uh, our knowledge better by testing it and, and having a good debate about it.

And so, um,  So I think it's a good process, and I think it's, it's something that academics should do more often in the humanities, for example, in social sciences, uh, in terms of the issue on visibility, you know, our work did get taken up by certain, uh, activist groups, uh, we were contacted by, um, uh, GLAD, which is an organization concerned with representation, uh, Um, and, you know, it's  been cited by people who are doing work literally around the globe in terms of how to reduce prejudice towards immigrants in this country, et cetera.

And in some cases, uh, we've been contacted by people who are producers. Um, and so, you know,  what I basically do there is try to unpack what the ingredients are for a, uh, formula that will help educate an audience about a particular social group.  You know, you can't,  I'm no, in no position to tell a person how to write an entertaining program.

They still have to come up with that. Um, but I can tell them what ingredients of entertaining programs are most likely to, to move the dial in terms of lowering prejudice towards various groups. 

Thanks  so much for being on when we disagree  

and my pleasure.  

When we disagree is recorded at the college of Charleston with creator and host Michael Lee recording and sound engineering by Jesse Kunz and Lance Laidlaw.

Reach out to us at, when we disagree at gmail. com.