The Perils of (Even Very Minor) Celebrity
Minnesota governor and U.S. vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz said a simple but brilliant thing when he declared that Donald Trump is ‘weird.’ This one word burst the bubble that makes up the stereotypes that people who are well-known for being well-known feed on.
Stereotypes are best thought of as a bundle of related characteristics that characterize any specific type of person or phenomenon. They are one aspect of the more generally understood area of social psychology known as “person perception.” Many studies have shown that how a person is thought of, or perceived, draws on characteristics that tend to be correlated with each other. For example, if a person is described as ‘warm’ they will typically be thought of as intelligent, friendly, pleasant to be with and so on. The important point is that we all have patterns of thought that hold many attributes together. Psychologists refer to these systems as cognitive structures, or as the famous personality psychologist George Kelly called them “construct systems.”
When considered in relation to general ideas about famous people these construct systems draw heavily on widely held beliefs about the characteristics of those people – stereotypes.
I have become aware of the power of these stereotypes and how misleading they can be in the various contacts I’ve had with journalists and other media folk approaching me for comments or more extended interviews. These relate back to even in 1985 when I contributed to a police investigation by giving some pointers that could be used to prioritize the suspects they had for a series of rapes and murders around London. I used fairly simple psychological principles. They can be summarized as assuming that actions in the crimes had features that would be typical of the offender when he was not committing crime. This is based on a reversal of the fundamental psychological principle that the best predictor of future actions and characteristics are past actions and characteristics. The pointers I gave turned out to be useful to the investigation, leading to the police proudly claiming that they were now using the latest scientific, psychological methods.
In a crime, you have the ‘future’ actions and characteristics, so they should allow inferences of such features of the person in the past. That is what law enforcement investigators need. The most obvious features in a crime are the way the social interaction is carried out and the time and place where it happens. Simple inferences could, therefore, be made about the sort of person the criminal was known to be, especially in terms of his known relationships, particularly with women. Where and when crimes occurred could also provide indications of where the criminal was familiar and, therefore, likely to have a base. When might suggest his work patterns or otherwise.
These inferences all got glorified by the term “offender profiling.” This was due largely to the popularity of Thomas Harris’ book, The Silence of the Lambs, and the subsequent very successful films. An industry emerged around the concept of criminal profiling, driven by autobiographies written by FBI special agents and a plethora of crime movies and documentaries that embraced the idea of a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, who was some sort of psychologist, able to help solve intransigent crime that bog-standard law enforcement could not. A number of people around the world have personified themselves as such quasi-mystical experts. They’ve even been willing to make unsubstantiated claims about their expertise, even going so far as to offer to make statements in court, based on their spurious skills. This has all generated a popular conception of the profiler almost as a superhero.
On the back of all this mention of criminal profilers and knowledge of my early involvement, I became known in many countries as one of these wizards. I even got stopped in a local supermarket once and told how clever I am — by a complete stranger! The pitfalls of this have illustrated for me the ways in which being even tentatively in the public eye builds around it a collection of stereotypes and assumptions that have their own momentum and narrative.
This was recently brought home to me powerfully when a German podcast broadcaster asked to interview me. She seemed to have read a lot about my work, so I thought it would be an intelligent discussion. To my horror, she not only started by asking me what crimes I’d solved, but also what it was like to work with the FBI. Despite all her supposed background research, she had developed a stereotypical image of ‘the profiler.’ A bundle of assumptions that gel together to create a convincing character. No psychologist has ever ‘solved a crime.’ I most certainly have not ‘worked with the FBI.’ I visited their training unit for a few days, but that was all.
The point worth mentioning is that the construct system is just that. A network of relationships. Interestingly its complexity can be understood like a metal structure. If it has a few components then altering one of them can distort all the others. Indeed, Kelly pointed out that altering this system generates emotional reactions. People therefore tend to fight against such modifications. But if the change is powerful enough it can modify the whole system. More complex systems, with many constructs holding them together are much less vulnerable to change.
Which brings me to calling Trump ‘weird.’ That one word threatens the bundle of constructs that any of his wavering supporters may have of him. Diehards will fight emotionally to defend against such a radical challenge to their idea of who Trump is. But those who have relatively few ways of thinking about him may try to incorporate the notion of his weirdness and in doing so radically change what they think about him.
