My UNDER THE INFLUENCE: PUTTING PEER PRESSURE TO WORK will be published on January 28 by Princeton University Press. In this thread, I’ll describe how behavioral contagion helped produce the rapid shift in public opinion regarding same-sex marriage. 1/
@PrincetonUPress @a_f13nd
@PrincetonUPress @a_f13nd
A 1989 article by Andrew Sullivan argued that the same conservative arguments traditionally offered in support of heterosexual marriage apply with equal force to same-sex marriage. At the time, legalization of same-sex marriage was widely considered a heretical position. 2/
Few pollsters even attempted to measure public attitudes toward it. One exception was The General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, which found only 12 percent of those queried in favor. 3/
Just more than a quarter of a century later, however, the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision required that every state recognize same-sex marriage on the same terms and conditions as for opposite-sex couples. 4/
The 5-4 decision, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, was grounded on many of the same arguments Sullivan had made in 1989. By that time, same-sex marriage had already won legal status in 36 states, plus the District of Columbia and Guam. 5/
But if the Obergefell decision didn’t surprise experts familiar with legal trends and polling data in 2015, it would have astonished many of those who read Sullivan’s article when it first appeared. 6/
As recently as 2008, even Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were publicly on record against same-sex marriage. And even California’s liberal voters defeated a 2009 referendum that would have legalized it. 7/
Yet when Obergefell was decided, just six years later, more than 60 percent of Americans thought same-sex marriage should be made legal. Even traditionally conservative states like West Virginia and the Carolinas had already taken that step. 8/
By May of 2018, a Gallup poll revealed that more than two-thirds of all Americans believed that same-sex marriage should be permitted. By almost any standard, this is an extraordinarily rapid change in public attitudes on such an emotionally charged subject. 9/
It’s also a change that offers useful lessons about the dynamics of behavioral contagion. Why did events unfold so rapidly? Nate Silver estimates that opinion shifted in part because of generational turnover. 10/
Support for same-sex marriage was consistently higher among younger voters, and as older cohorts died off, opinion shifted accordingly. But an even bigger component of the increase in support appeared to stem from many people having changed their minds.11/
The dotted line in the figure below summarizes Silver’s estimates of how much lower support for same-sex marriage would have been in 2014 if all respondents had continued to hold the same opinion they held a decade earlier. 12/
But why did people change their minds? Silver suggests that part of the answer is that voters are more likely to support same-sex marriage if they know a gay person personally. 13/
The likelihood of knowing a gay person was increasing rapidly during these years. In a 2013 Pew survey 77 percent of gay men and 71 percent of lesbian women said that all or most of the important people in their lives were aware of their sexual orientation. 14/
Media portrayals of gay characters also became both more common and much more sympathetic in the years since Sullivan’s article appeared. But an even more important shift was occurring in what it was considered safe to say publicly.15/
As the essayist Paul Graham wrote in 2004, “In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise.”16/
Being gay is still a capital offense in some countries. Anti-gay sentiment never ran that high in the United States, and even fifty years ago, there were already substantial numbers of Americans who believed that same-sex marriage should be permissible. 17/
But most of them also understood that they would receive serious pushback if they stated that view publicly. That’s why, as each additional person spoke out in favor of same-sex marriage, it became safer for others to speak out as well. 18/
The fact that most Americans now seem to believe that it is safe to state publicly that same-sex marriage should be permitted is in large measure a simple consequence of behavioral contagion. 19/
UNDER THE INFLUENCE: PUTTING PEER PRESSURE TO WORK describes simple steps that could harness the prodigious power of behavioral contagion to help solve the most pressing problems we face, chief among them, the climate crisis. 20/
