Political Psychology Links, 3/16/2026
Philip Howard on Trust and Accountability; Jonathan Leaf on human cooperation; Steve Stewart-Williams on psychology and wokeness; Ruxandra Teslo on equality as a moral impulse
The key to social trust is accountability. Trust erodes when people no longer feel others will abide by norms of fair dealing. Selfishness grows as people see it succeeding. What’s been lost is not our values of right and wrong, but confidence that other Americans will also be held to those values.
…People judging people is the main mechanism for a moral culture. Otherwise, morality is just words.
Recall my words on this topic—also recently on crime and disorder.
what made humans distinctive was not our ape lineage but our passage away from it. To survive as terrestrial hunters who lacked the basic carnivore armature (glaring canines, great speed and balance, explosive strength, etc.), we needed to evolve in a radically different direction. This required mastery of language, domestication, and the development of our cooperative instincts. These traits are unknown or nearly so among apes. They are commonly found in dolphins, elephants, and many other animals: creatures that think and act very differently from primates.
…Limited as the powers of mind of chimps and gorillas are, they are naturally inclined to independent thought. By contrast, as we are powerfully in need of acceptance by the group and take our sense of identity from it, this impairs us in our ability to be logical and consistent. This has a huge significance.
Steve Stewart-Williams writes,
Safe-space culture may inadvertently teach people to think in ways known to cause depression and anxiety. As Jonathan Haidt put it, universities and schools are effectively “performing reverse CBT on their students.”
His substack post has many other interesting data-supported observations about the woke phenomenon.
As Western societies moved from a religious, “enchanted” worldview to a secular, “disenchanted” one, they lost the cosmic narratives that once gave every person—especially the weak or unsuccessful—a meaningful place in a divinely ordered hierarchy. In the modern world, individuals are understood as autonomous agents responsible for their own outcomes, which places a heavy burden on those who fail or fall behind. The language of oppression and equality, I argue, functions as a moral substitute for the lost religious framework: it preserves the idea that every life has dignity by attributing suffering to unjust systems rather than individual failure.
There is no way for you to believe that the ratio of your net worth to that of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos corresponds to your worth as a human being relative to theirs. But as far as the economy goes, chances are that they have created far more wealth than what they obtained for themselves. So strictly from that measure, one can argue that they are much more valuable to society.
Once again, the question becomes whether we live in luck village or effort village. If you think that the economy is a board game with a space that makes you a billionaire if you happen to land on it, then you resent the rich person’s luck. If you think that without Bezos there would be no powerful logistics system supporting online retail or that cloud computing would be nothing but an exotic niche, then you respect Amazon’s achievements.
A couple of other excerpts from her essay:
A media company founded merely to “counter the left,” or a university established to win ideological battles, risks becoming [a] hollow imitation.
…For the Founders, culture, education (which was supposed to instill moral virtues, too), and intellectual life were not instruments to be deployed in the pursuit of power, but essential foundations of a free society.
UATX has adopted the latter mission. But it admittedly was founded to counter the left. The legacy universities have been captured by a moral framework that valorizes social justice activism. UATX takes the view that the classical canon of Western civilization offers a better moral framework. The students it attracts tend to want to create value, not stage protests.
substacks referenced above: @
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Arnold's incisive blogpost, "Trust and accountability" (at the embedded link in today's post), emphasizes accountability against _cheating_.
I would also emphasize another dimension of political psychology of accountability, one that has steadily eroded for many decades: accountability versus a culture of _excuses_.
Political psychology around crime, poverty, nuisance, preventable morbidity, and "mental illness" exhibits cultural drift to the making of excuses for behaviors, or to the tolerance of behaviors, which impose massive social costs.
In the specific cases of crime/nuisance and addiction, there is even a tendency rather incoherently to combine two attitudes listed below:
1) To excuse crime/nuisance because "society" causes the behavior via structural disadvantage and/or because the individual "cannot help herself" (i.e., cannot choose otherwise).
2) To reject _incapacitation_ as a remedy.
Excuse-making replaces accountability.
“Luck village verse effort village” seems like pretty significant over simplification. I thank Bezos for the benefits that Amazon has brought me and millions of Americans. I’m not so sure an alternative wouldn’t have emerged in his absence.
There’s luck and effort. Rarely is one sufficient. And our appreciation for innovations or companies that benefit ourselves and society should frankly probably be independent from whether it came from luck or effort. I don’t really care if the guy who discovered antibiotics was a lucky moron or a genius who toiled. I’m thankful regardless.
For those who do resent them I also think you have the causality backwards. They resent others success and after the fact attribute it to luck to lessen any personal sting.