UM research: Political reminders can intensify wolf divisions
Laura Lundquist
(Missoula Current) In a follow-up to their study showing a large majority of Montanans tolerate wolves, University of Montana researchers have shown that people can feel more negative toward wolves when reminded of their political affiliations, often because they overestimate the extent of their group’s negative feelings.
On Tuesday, the science journal “Conservation Biology” published the last of three studies by UM researcher Alexander Metcalf and others on human behavior as it relates to wildlife, and the results might help improve how people relate to wildlife, particularly more prominent species like wolves.
“Our results demonstrate that one form of identity activation—political identity—can unnecessarily exacerbate differences between groups regarding wolf management
in the United States. Attitudes toward wolves are positive across the political spectrum until political identities are activated, after which polarization increases significantly. These dynamics, at least with respect to wolves, appear to be driven by inaccurate meta-perceptions of political in-groups, rather than out-groups,” Metcalf wrote in his paper.
Over the past decade or so, several political science and human-dimension studies have shown that people would rather stick with their tribe than vote for their own interests on various issues. A pertinent example is demonstrated by repeated polls showing that a significant majority of Westerners value public land and don’t want excessive or unregulated natural resource extraction but then they vote for politicians who don’t support these values.
A popular black-and-white narrative is that Republicans hate wolves and Democrats don’t, but Metcalf has already shown that a majority of Montanans express tolerance for wolves. So Metcalf and coauthor Justin Angle wanted to drill down to see not only how political party affiliation might affect people’s opinion of wolves but also how their assumptions about their party’s stance could exacerbate their attitudes.
Metcalf and Angle used a two-part study to investigate whether people tend to feel more strongly about wolves when they are “politically activated” and whether they understood how other members of their party actually felt.
The first part of the study looked only at whether people reacted stronger to wolves when they were reminded of their political affiliation. So they split around 1,000 people into two groups: one that wasn’t reminded of politics and another that was told the study was looking at the difference between Republicans and Democrats. They asked both groups about their attitudes toward wolves and a relatively unknown species, the babirusa. They figured participants would have more of a neutral attitude toward an unknown species and they could compare that to the reaction to wolves.
In the group where politics wasn’t raised, they found that people responded similarly to both the wolf and the babirusa although those who identified later as conservative felt somewhat less positive toward the animals than those who identified as being liberal. But in the politically-activated group, the feelings about wolves were more extreme, with liberals noticeably more positive and conservatives more negative.
This first part of the study supported the idea that when people are reminded of political affiliation, polarization materializes and they feel more negative or positive about wolves than they might otherwise. To investigate why this might be, Metcalf and Angle designed the second part of the study to test what people assumed about the attitudes of the two parties.
Other studies have shown that group identity can distort people’s perceptions, causing them to “overestimate the extremity of out-group members’ beliefs, moralize in-group positions, and even justify inhumane treatment of out-group members.”
So the second part of the study asked around 1,300 people, equally divided into Republicans and Democrats, about the attitudes of the two parties toward wolves and compared those assumptions to the results found in the first part of the study.
They found that, in general, Republicans tended to assume that both Republicans and Democrats felt more negatively toward wolves than the results showed - although they rated Democrats only slightly more negative. Democrats tended to think Republicans had a much more negative attitude but closely predicted the attitude of Democrats in the first study. Further analysis showed that people who expressed more extreme feelings toward wolves tended to assume that members of their own party felt the same.
Next, the researchers showed the participants how their assumptions compared to the results of the first study to see if they’d change their minds when they saw the difference. Republicans took a more positive attitude toward wolves after they saw the results from other Republicans but not the results from Democrats. The same applied to Democrats being more influenced by their own party’s results.
Metcalf dubbed the situation where many people actually agree but become polarized because of how they imagine others feel as “tragic.” In this case, the polarization connected to wolves is driven by in-party or in-group opinions rather than those of the opposite party. That runs counter to political science findings that show that people react more strongly in response to actions of the opposing political party.
“Conservation itself may be fundamentally unique from political domains where much of this research is conducted,” Metcalf wrote. “Beyond that, it is critical to remember that attitudes and outcomes do not necessarily align. Though we have demonstrated a paradigm in which attitudes can be shifted at the group level, it remains unclear how these shifts map onto specific conservation policies. Furthermore, in contexts like this, individual actors are often influential based on the extremity of their views. Indeed, these people likely shape the meta-perceptions we investigated, but they can also influence policy for better and worse.”
Based on these findings showing how political identity can distort reality, Metcalf urged policy makers and conservation organizations seeking common ground on wolf conservation to think creatively about how to avoid activating political identities or other group identities that might exacerbate conflict.
Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.