Good news about bad news: Anti-U.S. attitudes can change

The reports from some countries about their attitudes toward the United States can be so negative as to make the relationship appear to be beyond repair, but a recently published paper by Associate Professor of Economics Basit Zafar suggests that there is hope.

The news from some countries about their attitudes toward the United States can be so negative as to make the relationship appear to be beyond repair. This seems especially true of certain Muslim countries where events and reactions to events sometimes seem like they feed into an endless downward spiral of anger and aggression. But a recently published paper by Associate Professor of Economics Basit Zafar written with Adeline Delavande titled, “Information and Anti-American Attitudes,” suggests that there is hope.

As part of a larger study on the effects of information on belief formation, Zafar and Delavande examined how information can impact negative political views of the U.S. To put the matter to the test, they chose one of the most anti-American countries on the globe, Pakistan, which is also Zafar’s country of birth.

“Baseline attitudes toward the U.S. are very unfavorable,” says Zafar. “Only attitudes toward India are worse.” India is considered an existential threat to Pakistan, so U.S. popularity there is very low indeed.

Pakistan and the U.S.: It’s complicated

Although ostensibly allies, Pakistan and the U.S. share an extremely complex and often contentious relationship. Pakistan historically has received a lot of support from the U.S. in exchange for strategic influence in the region, while often acting against our national interest. Consider that the U.S.’s public enemy No. 1 at the time, Osama Bin Laden, was finally caught in Pakistan, and you start to see the contradictory nature of the relationship. This record of both constructive and antagonistic relations between the two countries make it an ideal place to test the flexibility of attitudes. But the bottom line is that the playing field of public opinion in Pakistan is tilted, and not in the U.S.’s favor. “The local media is quite biased, so people tend to have negative priors of the U.S. to begin with,” says Zafar.

There are two fundamental outlooks on places like Pakistan and their negative attitudes toward the U.S. “One explanation is that it’s cultural, so you can’t change it,” says Zafar. This perspective holds that a particular belief is innate to a culture, in effect, in its blood.

“The other explanation,” Zafar continues, “is that attitudes are malleable based on changes in the environment.”

For example, if an attack on civilians by American forces occurs and the people hear about it, their attitudes will change for the worse. But if they hear positive news, like how much medical help the U.S. provides, attitudes can change for the better.

The impact of positivity

The research conducted by Zafar and Delavande engaged a sample consisting mostly of college students who were given information about the U.S. to see how that impacted their attitudes. In some cases, they were given positive information about U.S. activities in Pakistan such as its significant levels of humanitarian assistance. In other cases, they were shown negative information about the U.S., such as the number of drone attacks conducted in the region. And the third control group was given irrelevant information, which had neither a positive or negative tilt.

Immediately following that sharing of information, the Pakistanis' attitudes toward the U.S. were re-assessed. What researchers found was that despite the strong anti-American feelings that existed to begin with, people’s attitudes shifted to align to the positive or negative information received.

“What this means is that even in a place like Pakistan where attitudes seem to be so entrenched, people’s responses are still rational,” says Zafar.

One nuance worth noting is that when information was moderated by a degree of positivity or negativity, that did not have much impact. For example, if a drone attack was reported as being less damaging than expected, that did not yield a positive change in attitudes even though the news was ostensibly better. “It’s about the actual saliency of information,” concludes Zafar, “not how it compares to prior beliefs.”

Another useful finding is that one-time information interventions weren’t enough. “You have to give constant reminders if you want to have an impact,” Zafar says.

The implications for public policy are of course significant, suggesting that there is no such thing as a lost cause when it comes to promoting U.S. popularity abroad. The audience targeted just needs some credible good news to feed increased positivity.

Information dissemination, which is a relatively cheap intervention, is a pretty powerful intervention that we know works.

The corollary to this is that because public opinion is malleable, it is also adversely affected by negative events. Even in places where we think we have few or no friends to begin with. So when the U.S. is considering some action perceived as aggressive, it would do well to weigh the costs in terms of public response as well.

The resilience of disagreement

A deeper dive into the findings reveals that even in an environment where the predominance of reporting is one way, people will disagree if they’re exposed to information that contradicts or undermines the majority view. Statements like “they all hate us” suggest a uniformity of opinion that may not really exist, given the diversity of information people are exposed to. Even when the majority are led to believe that there are many more drone attacks and fatalities by the U.S. than is factually true, there is still a minority that is open to hearing more positive stories about the U.S. and then adjusting their opinion accordingly.

This suggests that proactive, positive information campaigns, not to mention an actual policy that supports positive reporting, can play a meaningful role in improving the attitudes toward the U.S. around the world.

When the majority is anti-American, then the ability for the minority to disagree is extremely helpful. But in our own country, more information isn’t always better, according to Zafar. He cites disagreements engendered by divergent information, like that provided by MSNBC and Fox News. He says people not only disagree about the information but about where to get it. Divergent sources of information, like MSNBC and Fox News, almost guarantee that disagreement will continue. It’s only when we look at the same information that greater agreement is created.

From education to politics

Zafar’s main area of research is belief formation in the context of education. How do people decide whether to go to college, what college to attend, what major to choose, how much they should expect to earn? These are the kinds of questions he works to answer. “As policymakers, we need to know what people’s assumptions are,” he says, “so we can better serve them.”

This study ran in 2008 – 2009 when there was intense concern about the Islamic schools called madrasas and their influence on radicalizing young men to take on violent attitudes toward the West. “We wanted to understand what drove people to attend madrasas. Since we were going to do all this survey work, we decided to find out about anti-American attitudes as well.”

Another area of belief formation that interests Zafar is immunization. In the U.S., we’ve seen a strong pushback against immunization based on information falsely alleging a link to autism. In Pakistan, resistance to immunization has helped to make it one of only three countries on earth where polio exists. Why won’t Pakistanis use the polio vaccine on a wider basis? The pervasiveness of conspiracy theories about how the vaccines are part of an attack by the West is alleged to deter many. This is made more complicated by the fact that U.S. intelligence did use a fake vaccine campaign to try and confirm Bin Laden’s location. This in no way diminishes the real value of polio vaccination, yet it has fed the fear around it.

“One real data point can confirm your priors,” says Zafar, “whether they are real or not.”

This is why information matters, and why it is in the U.S.’s best interest to continue to create and share good news.