The Inside-Outside View Asymmetry
The Inside-Outside View Asymmetry
Discussions on contentious issues are unproductive because disagreement is often about framing where available facts provide insufficient means for distinguishing the adequacy of different frames
We fight for and against not men and things as they are, but for and against the caricatures we make of them.
—Joseph A. Schumpeter
In 2015 Munk Debate on whether the West should engage or isolate Russia, on one side of the argument were historian Stephen F. Cohen and journalist Vladimir Pozner while the former world chess champion turned political activist Garry Kasparov and journalist Anne Applebaum were on the other. In one of his replies to Kasparov, Pozner made a point that much of the debate between them was about wording. “This is all about the wording. It’s not about the facts”, he said.
He was, among other things, referring to the way Kasparov described people surrounding Putin: “Putin’s cronies…why are they cronies? Why are they not his comrades?”, asked Pozner.
I was reminded of this scene while I was reading a recent New York Times article describing the relationship between Kamala Harris, Democratic presidential nominee, and Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’ widow and Silicon Valley’s wealthiest woman. Their relationship is described as one of “genuine friendship”. Nowhere are words that suggest something illicit going on, like “crony” or “cronies”. The whole piece is written in a rather cheerful tone. “They even shared the same celebrity dermatologist”, the article mentions.
Here’s a snippet from the article:
Politicians often use the word “friend’ to describe patrons who can power their campaigns and careers. Neither Ms. Harris nor Ms. Powell Jobs, who both zealously guard their privacy, would comment for this story. But in interviews, three dozen people with insight into their bond described a genuine friendship built on a shared political philosophy, an interest in art and culture and their mutual trials as women in the public spotlight.
So why are they not cronies?
I was wondering what words would be used if, instead of Harris, the article was describing the relationship between Donald Trump, another presidential candidate, and some other billionaire. But wait, we already know that by looking at examples of billionaires like Peter Thiel or Elon Musk. While the NYT piece doesn’t express any concern with the fact that a “billionaire could help elect the country’s first female president”, Thiel’s and Musk’s relationship with Trump is (and was) often portrayed as a case of “cronyism”, “threat to democracy,” raising ethical questions about the intersection of business interests and political influence.
Peter Thiel has been described in the past as Trump’s “shadow president” by Politico, and his support for Trump as a “signature long-shot bet that is paying big dividends in terms of access to and influence on the new administration.” Surely their relationship is not based on something as profound as a “shared political philosophy” (or dermatologist)!
While Powell Jobs helping the political career of Kamala Harris by hosting a series of fund-raisers is described as a sign of “genuine friendship” (one could say— comradery) in the NYT article, Trump’s vice-presidential pick, J.D. Vance, is often described as someone with whom billionaire Thiel “essentially bought a senate seat and put a pawn in his place”.
A CBS article with the ominous title “The billionaire who fueled JD Vance's rapid rise to the Trump VP spot” begins as follows:
Former President Donald Trump's selection of Ohio GOP Sen. JD Vance to be his running mate shows one thing remains constant, even in a presidential race upended by an attempt to assassinate one candidate and doubts about whether the other is fit to run: money in presidential politics is still king.
On the other hand, although Powell Jobs—often described simply as a “philanthropist” (which probably means something like “a good billionaire” or “our tribe’s billionaire”)— “played a hidden but key role in helping usher Mr. Biden out of the race, which cleared the way for a Harris run” (NYT), no similar concerns about the role and power of money in politics arose.
These concerns simply do not emerge even though the NYT piece talks explicitly that “Ms. Powell Jobs might want a formal role in the administration, such as secretary of education”. This is in stark contrast to the reception of Elon Musk's potential role in the Trump administration, described as “the move [that] could spark conflict of interest concerns due to Musk's business empire” (CBS).
And can you imagine the NYT writing an article with a title “The billionaire who fueled Kamala Harris' rapid rise to the Biden VP spot” or calling Powell-Jobs a “White House puppet master”?
Even if all of the facts about the Harris-Powell Jobs relationship and Trump-Thiel/Musk or Vance-Thiel relationship were the same, or equally (un)problematic, the way one could describe those facts could diverge and leave a completely different impact on the reader.
This brings me to the following point: most of the bias and dishonesty in mainstream media consists not in stating factually incorrect statements but rather in omitting relevant information and setting a certain tone in the way information is conveyed—a tone that suggests how one should interpret the information.
The tone is achieved by selecting specific words—often words with negative connotations like “pawn”, “puppet”, “fueled”, “shadow”, “crony” instead of “friend” or “comrade”— i.e. by the wording.
Another way to describe what I mean by “setting the tone” or “wording” is framing, different ways of presenting the (same) facts.
Framing is about imposing, evoking, or eliciting a certain interpretation from the reader, its benefit consisting in enabling the author to influence the reader while at the same time abolishing himself of any responsibility of defending any statement since the “statement” is only implicit in the frame rather than stated explicitly in the form of a factual statement which would require arguments and evidence.
An Unpolite Phrase
That double standards expressed through different wording (or framing) have a long history is something I was recently reminded of by reading an 1836 pamphlet from the great English liberal politician and thinker Richard Cobden, titled "A Cure for the Russo-phobia".
Economist Daniel B. Klein, who brings the pamphlet to the fore in the latest issue of Econ Journal Watch, made a selection of excerpts to give us a flavor of its style and argumentation:
Lord Dudley Stuart [gives] an alarming picture…of the future growth of Russian dominion. Turkey, it seems, is to be only the germ of an empire which shall extend…over Europe and Asia, and embrace every people and nation between the Bay of Bengal and the English Channel!
Austria and all Italy are to be swallowed up at a meal, Greece and the Ionian Islands serving for side-dishes. Spain and Portugal follow as a dessert…; and Louis Philippe and his empire are washed down afterwards with Bordeaux and Champagne.
They who predict the unbounded extension of Russia, forget the inevitable growth of weakness which attends the undue expansion of territorial dominion… [They are] blind to the dangers which must attend the attempt to incorporate into one cumbrous empire these remote and heterogeneous nations.
The Russians are accused by us of being… incessantly addicted to picking and stealing. But, in the meantime, has England been idle? If, during the last century Russia has plundered Sweden, Poland, Turkey, and Persia, until she has grown unwieldy with the extent of her spoils, Great Britain has, in the same period, robbed—no, that would be an unpolite phrase—’has enlarged the bounds of his Majesty's dominions’ at the expense of France, Holland, and Spain.
We, who are staggering under the embarrassing weight of our colonies, with one foot upon the rock of Gibraltar and the other at the Cape of Good Hope—with Canada, Australia, and the peninsula of India… we are not exactly the nation to preach homilies to other people in favour of the national observance of the eighth commandment!
Nor, if we were to enter upon a comparison of the cases, should we find that the means whereby Great Britain has augmented her possessions, are a whit less reprehensible than those which have been resorted to by [Russia] for a similar purpose.
If the English writer calls down indignation upon the conquerors of the Ukraine, Finland, and the Crimea, may not Russian historians conjure up equally painful reminiscences upon the subjects of Gibraltar, the Cape, and Hindostan?
During the last hundred years, England has, for every square league of territory annexed to Russia, by force, violence, or fraud, appropriated to herself three.
Our history during the last century may be called the tragedy of 'British intervention in the politics of Europe,' in which princes, diplomatists, peers, and generals, have been the authors and actors—the people the victims; and the moral will be exhibited to the latest posterity in 800 millions of debt.
We are no more called upon [to deal vengeance] upon [Russia], than we are to preserve the peace and good behaviour of Mexico, or to chastise the wickedness of the Ashantees.
Don’t let this excerpt prevent you from reading the whole thing though. It is a remarkable piece of writing in many ways, replete with themes and motives that today's readers will find all too familiar. At a time when YouTube videos like “The Insane Russian Plan to Conquer the World” reach 3,8 million views, it seems we need some of Cobden’s “cure”.
Indeed, those who are acquainted with the history of Russophobia can read contemporary press coverage of Russia with a certain sense of amusement (or despair!) afforded by the historical déjà vu.1
The Inside View and the Outside View
Note the part where Cobden replaces the “unpolite phrase”, namely “robbed” with “has enlarged the bounds of his Majesty's dominions”. The latter wording just sounds better. At least if one is located within the Majesty’s dominion!
This is what I call the inside/outside view asymmetry: for our own actions (introspection), or the actions of our group or country (ideology), we tend to find reasons for which we suddenly become blind when it comes to the actions of other people, or other groups or countries:
In explaining our actions, introspection is biased toward finding reasons that would be plausible to the audience consuming those reasons. This is a startling conclusion when you think about it. It means that introspection is in a sense very public activity after all since its targets are other people, not the private individual.
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The “inner” view must be sensitive to the external acceptability of what is "seen" from the inside. Or better yet: external acceptability guides the "internal" search for explanations of one's own behavior. In that sense, the “inner”, “internal” and “private” are much more “outer”, “external” and “public” than they might appear.
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For the reason-producing mechanisms to work in an adaptive way, they must be designed in a way that anticipates the effects it will have on the audience hearing them. Hence, reasons are practical in nature; they are not building blocks of a scientific theory aiming to represent the world accurately. They are goal-oriented since they are selected according to their ability—and probability—of convincing others.
On the other hand, ideologies are a product of a group’s own “introspection”; they are to a group what rationalizations are to an individual (as I have argued here). While rationalizations are an individual-level phenomenon, ideologies are best understood as a group-level phenomenon.
Using “unpolite phrases,” as Cobden puts it, is a mark of an outsider, a result of a view from the outside. In contrast, being “inside the machine” means being motivated to see, describe, and frame things as warranted, reasonable and virtuous.
The inside/outside view asymmetry is one of the reasons why discussions on contentious issues rarely yield productive outcomes. A lot of the disagreements over the origin of the war in Ukraine seem to be about wording (or framing), where different wording has different moral connotations and where available facts may provide insufficient means for distinguishing the adequacy of different wording.
For example, one could say that Putin wanted to turn Ukraine into a “puppet state”, or could say that he wanted a “political alignment of a large country right next door to Russia”. Or that he wanted to change the regime that is "anti-Russian". Different descriptions leave a different impact on the reader even though they might refer to the same set of facts.
Was Euromaidan a coup?
Is the war in Ukraine a proxy war?
Is the war about security or control/power?
Was it a defense or aggression?
Reasonable opinions differ.
Consider, for example, the leaked conversation between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, from 2014. Is the content of the conversation evidence that the Revolution of Dignity was a US-organized coup? Certainly not sufficient or conclusive but it does show that the US involvement was greater than publicly admitted.
Besides, what exactly does “coup d'etat” even mean?
Was the Russian invasion about “controlling Kyiv” or “securing Russia”? This way of framing the dilemma assumes conceptual opposition where there may not be any. After all, insecurity may lead one to seek control. As is often the case, people may be arguing whether A or B is true but they rarely formulate A or B in a way that makes A clearly distinguishable from B, treating them as two different hypotheses whereas they could simply be two sides (aspects) of the same coin.2
Likewise, while Ukrainians and the West see Russia’s actions as “aggressive,” Russians may see them as “defensive”. But only one of them can be right—right? After all, “aggression” and “defense” stand on conceptually opposite grounds, right?
Well, not necessarily. As Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law from Princeton University, puts it:
The wider war is best understood as occurring on two levels: a traditional war between the invading forces of Russia and the resisting forces of Ukraine as intertwined with an encompassing geopolitical war between the U.S. and Russia. …
If this two-level perception is correctly analyzed in its appreciation of the different actors with contradictory priorities, then it becomes crucial to understand that in the geopolitical war the U.S. is the aggressor as much as in the traditional war on the ground Russia is the aggressor.
Available facts may be insufficient, or too "weak", as it were, to determine which framing is the correct one. Perhaps not that different from looking at the same scribbles but one viewer seeing the duck and the other viewer seeing the rabbit.3
The reason it seems hard to distinguish the adequacy of different wordings is that we’re dealing here with concepts that don’t have sharp boundaries— as is the case with most of our everyday concepts—and are observer-dependent, i.e. their application hinges on whether one is looking at things from the inside or the outside.
Security Dilemmas We Live By
In two of my past posts4, I considered the Ukrainian war as a result of the Hobbesian trap or security dilemma:
In this model, the crisis is generated by the perception of threat to one's own (national) security. A perception that may be “paranoid”, but it is what it is. Great powers are often brutal when it comes to defending their own national interests, operating with a broad conception of “national security”. …
[E]ach of the actors makes moves that tend to reduce their own insecurity, but each move from the perspective of the other party looks like a confirmation of their threat perception; as an act of aggression that should be responded to with a defensive move, but which, again, looks like an aggressive act to the other side. If you fire a gun at the other party out of fear that they might fire at you first, is your act “aggressive” or “defensive”?
Ukrainian leadership reduces its insecurity by pushing for NATO entry. The Russian leadership, on the other hand, sees the expansion of NATO as a threat to its security, which it seeks to reduce with a preventive war. This war appears to the Ukrainian side as a confirmation of their threat perception, and the neighboring countries, which are not members of NATO, fearing for their security, decide to join NATO, which in turn increases the Russians' security concerns. Thus, each actors’ threat perception reinforces itself according to the logic of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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We are in a regime in which the actions of all actors reinforce each other, thus falling into a vicious circle of further escalation of the conflict, where the longer the war lasts, the greater the chances of escalation.
One of the reasons I tend to prioritize the explanatory power of “security dilemma” is because security dilemmas are ubiquitous: you can find them in everyday life, in interpersonal relationships, not just in international relations—so their “prior” is high.
Take as an example a hypothetical romantic couple: they both feel the other one may abandon the other and so they both start taking actions intended to prevent that from happening, like controlling or spying on one another. The problem is that these security-seeking actions seem too intrusive to the other side.
And so both sides start to resent the intrusiveness of the other side leading them to demand more space or privacy which, in turn, may be seen by the other side as confirmation that intrusiveness was warranted in the first place. This dynamic eventually escalates toward a conflict and/or a breakup.5
Or consider “security dilemmas” present in business contracts. Two parties want to contract some business, but there is uncertainty about the intentions of the other party. Each party to the contract tries to reduce its risk by adding various clauses, but the problem is that increasing its own security can expose the other party to increased risk. The end result is that the parties do not agree on the contract and the deal fails. Although both parties had good intentions, the inability of each party to credibly prove those intentions ended up with an unfavorable outcome for both parties.
In both cases, the lack of trust created a mutual fear that led both sides to take actions that caused the fear to be reinforced rather than alleviated.
Indeed, I would go even so far as to claim that the so-called culture war in the US has a structure of a security dilemma where both tribes—both Democrats and the Republicans— see the other side as a threat to their own way of life. Democrats even impose the same foreign policy framing in their intra-cultural warfare: in the same way that the war in Ukraine is a conflict between democracy and autocracy, the battle against Donald Trump, who is a “threat to democracy”, is framed as a battle against authoritarianism.
The so-called Trump derangement syndrome is a domestic version of Russophobia. In fact, the two fears were wed in the form of Russiagate.
Nothing Changes
As Dan Klein mentions in the Econ Journal Watch, during the Crimean War (1853–1856), Cobden and fellow liberal John Bright led the moral and intellectual denunciation of Britain’s involvement, citing the British historian R. B. McCallum (1898–1973), of Pembroke College, Oxford, on how the critics like Cobden and Bright had been unpopular, but:
in the end they won. … When the first enthusiasm was passed, when the dead were mourned, the sufferings revealed, and the cost counted, when in 1870 Russia was able calmly to secure the revocation of the Treaty, which disarmed her in the Black Sea, the view became general of the war was stupid and unnecessary, and effected nothing… The Crimean war remained as a classic example… of how governments may plunge into war, how strong ambassadors may mislead weak prime ministers, how the public may be worked up into a facile fury, and how the achievements of the war may crumble to nothing. The Bright-Cobden criticism of the war was remembered and to a large extent accepted.
In 1920 Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz published a study examining the objectivity and neutrality of press coverage, specifically The New York Times' portrayal of the Russian Revolution. Their conclusion was that the coverage was biased and inaccurate. News stories were not based on facts, but “were determined by the hopes of the men who made up the news organizations”:
In the large, the news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see. (...) The chief censor and the chief propagandist were hope and fear in the minds of reporters and editors. They wanted to win the war; they wanted to ward off bolshevism. (...) For subjective reasons they accepted and believed most of what they were told by the State Department, (...) reports of governmentally controlled news services abroad, and of correspondents who were unduly intimate with the various secret services and with members of the old Russian nobility. From the point of view of professional journalism the reporting of the Russian Revolution is nothing short of a disaster. On the essential questions the net effect was almost always misleading, and misleading news is worse than none at all. (...) They were performing the supreme duty in a democracy of supplying the information on which public opinion feeds, and they were derelict in that duty. Their motives may have been excellent. They wanted to win the war; they wanted to save the world. They were nervously excited by exciting events. They were baffled by the complexity of affairs, and the obstacles created by war. But whatever the excuses, the apologies, and the extenuation, the fact remains that a great people in a supreme crisis could not secure the minimum of necessary information on a supremely important event.
See
’s book Russophobia: Propaganda in International Politics for a contemporary treatment of the issueAnother thing to consider when evaluating claims of the form “Russia invaded Ukraine because of X” is the following. Since a group (like a country) consists of actors of various motives, the question in the form of “Why did group X do Y?” is never subject to a simple/single answer and analysts may reach different conclusions simply by focusing on different members of the group. In that sense, their disagreement may not be a genuine one but a case of “talking past each other”. An interesting question that emerges here, then, is which type of actors one should prioritize when explaining events. The Western mainstream media discourse clearly privileges Vladimir Putin by obsessively asking “What is going on inside his head?” (e.g. here, here, and here) which comes at the expense of, other, structural factors.
Here we may distinguish between at least three theses of “indeterminacy”:
i) all of the facts, known or unknown, are not sufficient to determine which framing is the correct one
ii) the presently available facts are not sufficient to determine which framing is the correct one
iii) given the constraints of time and cognitive abilities, the facts that we can reasonably expect to be available to the average person are not sufficient for him to determine which framing is the correct one
The first thesis is philosophical, and the strongest one while the third one is psychological, and the weakest one. The latter seems obviously correct to me.
To go even further, imagine a fight between them breaks out. The woman says to the guy: “You are not a real man!”. Are we to think that the real cause of this conflict is her denial of his manhood? No, the crucial cause of the conflict was the insecurity of each side and the disbalance of power. The role of her “beliefs” about his manhood (analogy with supposed Russian denial of Ukrainian statehood, of course) is to rationalize her deep insecurity (which even she does not understand well) and/or to insult him.