Weekly Column by Sharon Byrne
Political debates are often born as emerging social issues framed as an either / or situation with mutually exclusive outcomes. That automatically polarizes the issue into black / white extremes. When positions become polarized, it sets up a false choice. These are mental traps. Avoid them.
A few examples of false choice framing that come to mind:
- Either we help the homeless, or we’re cruel.
- Either the gang injunction, or programs to help at-risk youth.
- Either bulb-outs save lives, or they’re annoying impediments that artificially constrain cars.
- Either allow marijuana dispensaries, or a cancer patient suffers.
Those false choice arguments, once entrenched, then perpetuate poor logic downstream. In our example above on homelessness, that initial framing expands to include:
1. Help is clearly always the right answer.
2. More help must then be better. If helping isn’t working, then we must simply escalate our efforts.
The unspoken thought here is that we can’t bear to be thought of as cruel, so we must cleave to helping. No other choice is possible.
The pitfall of false choice framing is it blinds us to information that could illuminate the real problem, and lead to a solution. When information emerges that doesn’t fit our frame, however, our first psychological move is to edit it out, pretend it isn’t there. Our second move is to reclassify it so that it falls into the opposition frame, and is thus bad.
Some have seen that our notions of help sometimes enable anti-social behaviors that we’d ideally not want to encourage. Imagine the businessman on State watching someone hand money to a panhandler, feeling good that they have done something to help a soul in need. The panhandler then trots to the nearest liquor store for a fifth, and later passes out on a bench. He awakens to another transient attempting to steal his booze, and promptly stabs the would-be thief. The cops come, and run warrants checks. Turns out the stabber has a felony warrant from another jurisdiction. People now perceive the area as unsafe, and business falls off.
First responders have long dealt with felons posing as homeless. Business owners who’ve had their windows smashed out, or experienced assaults clearly recognize that some homeless are not harmless. Neighbors might howl in despair when well-meaning individuals turn up with food for the transients that just did some drugs on the corner.
But anyone with these kinds of experiences who then tries to present this information in a public setting will be stunned to hear the equivalent of a Greek Chorus erupt, damning them as heartless meanies who don’t understand the needs of the helpless individuals lodged in a semi-permanent state of despair, further crippled by mental health and substance abuse issues. “They need our help! We’re helping them! It’s going to work someday! You’re just being cruel!”
Needless to say, the neighbors watching the corner drug users getting fed, and the businessman dealing with the panhandling inebriate will hardly be reassured, and have little faith that this sort of help will ever fix the problems they encounter.
Here, then, is the trap of the false choice frame. Information that falls outside of the frame is edited out as though it didn’t exist, or is classified as opposition, and therefore, bad.
People with countering information are thus effectively silenced by the false choice frame. A great deal of useful information is repressed from view this way.
So how do we loosen the grip of false choice framing?
Reject the argument the false choice attempts to make true. Staying with our example of homeless issues, accept that we see certain things others don’t, and that fact alone does not render us cold-hearted meanies. It actually means we’re walking around with a missing piece of the puzzle.
That’s an asset, not some dreadful character flaw.
Recognize there is likely a both / and statement available that replaces the artificial either / or. We want to both help the homeless in need and be effective at it. We don’t want to enable anti-social behaviors that can harm our community.
I’ve used one example that many of us have strong feelings about to illustrate both the power of the false choice argument, and the information it hides from view. You could easily do this for any issue.
Be prepared for resistance. Abandoning a false choice frame that you invested effort in generates tremendous psychological discomfort. Be prepared for the equivalent of social Siberia should you attempt to get someone to see outside a frame they’re particularly invested in. But seeing something different doesn’t automatically mean you’re wrong, just as shouting someone down won’t make you right.
If we want to solve some of the issues that plague us, we have to be willing to challenge the false choice frames that keep us stuck.
Comfy it isn’t, but required it is.
Thank you for a great article Sharon. False choices and other classic logical fallacies seem to be what drives our political process at every level. Just look at our Presidential race where our only choice seems to be how handsome our President will be as he erodes our liberties, entangles us in endless foreign wars and transfers our wealth from the poorest to the very richest.
The false dichotomy too often been the voice of local politics in this town. Keep exposing this intentional deception. This form of verbal bullying strikes the listener so violently it closes down further argument. For too long this has passed as faux debate on our critical local issues. Good work, Sharon. Keep it up.
One way to bust the false dichotomy is to follow the money and/or the maximizing of political influence. Who else benefits as well as the intended beneficiary? Use this to bust the “affordable housing” argument as well.
The more subsidized housing for voters, the more permanent the Democrat Party voting influence, and that leads to more voters for permanent public union-friendly elected officials. (Latest count: 17% of all city housing units are currently subsidized in some way during past Democrat control of city council.)
Arguing for subsidized “workforce” housing or for “first responders” are merely buzzwords for one more taxpayer-funded public union worker perk. (aka Police, fire, union nurses and teachers – all public union workers and most already making over $100,000 a year with benefits and a massive number of paid days off.)
Add “affordable housing” as one more progressive feel-good project fueled by cynical under-pinnings. Follow the money. Follow the tax-dollar creation of friendly votes.
Interesting piece; thanks. The problem, I think, is not in the false framing but the framing itself. Social problems, in general, simply don’t fit into the concept of a “frame” as though they are bounded pictures sitting on a wall.
The concept was developed or, at least, expanded by social scientist/clinical psychologist Drew Westen in his book “The Political Brain” as a way to develop Democratic campaign strategies. Its emphasis is to convince voters by appealing to emotions. And it works as part of the zero-sum game, adversarial structure that is electoral politics.
However, once in office, the viewpoint should change to a win-win for the city and the common good as well as the individual good. Not easy and some of the local pols, but not all, fall into the trap presented by the advocates at public comment doing their role, presenting their sides of an issue in a neat frame.
It’s not the “false frames” that should be abandoned by the elected officials because basically there are no “false” frames, but framing itself.
The trend now to return tax dollars to local jurisdictions who can “make the best decisions” is fraught with error since too often city councils are even more vulnerable to special interests influence. Or the angry mob presences who show up and look these council people in they eye, and they blink.
However, this all goes back to voters. We get the elected officials we keep voting for. Track them more after they get elected, than during the campaign when they make their promises. Hold them to their promises and toss them out for their betrayals faster than the special interests can keep shoveling money at them once they get elected.
White and Murillo are on notice. We are watching and once burned, twice shy. Voters remain the best form of term limits out there. Special interests only have money; voters have the votes.
False choices are exactly what must be driving the police chief to take the current SBPD position. That is of course the same position they always take. Ticket quotas and homeless harassment. I recently heard a homeless man tell how his friend (a long time SB homeless person) was knocked over the head by one of the new cops the chief has decided to post in the lower Milpas area. This pistol whipping of course involved “resisting” the officer. My guess is all the talk of community policing and social work was the baby thrown out with the bath water.
Try convincing those “On Patrol” fans that increases in drugs/alcohol, vandalism, loitering, ect may be something more than all the enabling that the writer claims she sees going on…
Boycott Boy, you’re a prime example of someone caught in the trap. You’ve always had an axe to grind against SBPD, because of your arrest, so you find any data you can that reinforces that position, and discount or ‘other’ize anyone who doesn’t agree with you,
re: follow the money…did you read Sharon’s piece carefully? If so, are you on the verge of ‘dichotomizing’ the issue of unions and democrats vs private sector and republicans? Are you inferring that a union member must be an uber-liberals, and that all ‘non’ unionists are fiscally responsible conservatives>
Very true! Another classic is school bonds – if you are against, you’re not supporting our kids, teachers; you’re a Scrooge. The fact that the $ spent in K-12 per pupil has risen 95% (inflation-adjusted dollars) in CA over the past 40 years, with no change to SAT scores or other performance measures is a point only raised in small circles. Is the bond money going to truly help the schools or improve anything? Not to mention the ethical question around the money grab from property owners that the bond represents. http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=14024
Charity towards the homeless also needs to take into account ‘teaching to fish’ vs. giving a fish. Are we fostering dependence and enabling them to remain lost, or are we providing a temporary stopgap and expecting them to participate in improving their situation long term? Great example is Father Boyle and Homeboy Industries in L.A. If a gang member wants a “job, not jail” offered by Homeboy, he/she must show up to work on time (after a certain number of tardies is let go), attend life skills classes, etc.. There is a commitment on both sides.
If we can’t pull the homeless up, do we let them take the neighborhood down to their way of life? That’s a good question. Of course, it’s another framing that also excludes a lot of the meat and ideas and good stuff. Generalities always do.
Cant wait to hear more of the hussein promises from 3 years ago and fact check today! stop the mamby pamby nanny state! grow a set and do the right thing.
I’m a “prime example”…. LOL Just do us all a favor and give us another example, prime or not, of anyone you know that has an axe of their own. It’s either that or return to your anonymous life that fits you so well!
Best outcome of this discussion is to recognize and call out the false “either or” framing, when one hears it. First step is recognizing it and not feel you have been hit by a verbal 2X4. Second step is to dispassionately identify the inaccuracy of the framing choices and to depersonalize the choices offered by the verbal bully. Then finally steer the discussion back to somewhere in the middle where things remain workable.
Repeat after me:
1. That is a false dichotomy.
2. We shall continue to discuss this without polarizing the topic into inaccurate either-or choices.