TSA Moderately Liked, Despite Everything

I know few people who have had positive personal experiences interacting with the Transportation Security Administration. When someone says TSA, what often comes to my mind are (1) to the traveler in me: long queues awaiting partial disrobing and x-ray examination and (2) to the researcher in me: a government agency with a $5.8 billion annual budget that has never been subject to either systematic audit nor reported statistics on how many threats have been stopped due to airport security screening.

Having recently flown, both ideas were fresh in my mind when I stumbled across recent poll numbers from Gallup that indicated most Americans have positive (but not overwhelmingly positive) views of TSA. How could this be? How could an agency subject to consistently negative publicity (see The New York Times’ listing of stories about the TSA as an indication) and that seems to be loathed by nearly everyone who travels possibly be viewed in a positive light by most Americans?

The data from Gallup offer surprisingly few insights: there seems to be little variation in support for the TSA across demographic groups (though older Americans are somewhat less positive) nor among those with or without children (who may have experienced differential difficulty with airport screening). Indeed, even those who fly regularly seem to have similar views of the TSA as those who never fly.

The answer likely lies in people detaching their individual experience from their attitudes toward an agency that is the national symbol of a highly important post-September 11^th value: security.

When we consider issues in light of core values, research by Paul Brewer and Kimberly Gross (gated) suggests that when citizens think about political issues in terms of a core value, they are actually much less likely to think about those issues in general. By focusing our attention on broad, and indeed fundamentally human, concerns with security, our own less-than-positive experiences removing our clothes, being subject to pat-downs, and having our bodies and property x-rayed are overwhelmed by our attention to the “larger issue” of security. (Brewer and Gross’s research considered different issues and different values than airport screening and security, but similar findings have been found on other issue and value combinations, including hate speech and the PATRIOT Act.)

While a large body of research has shown that speaking to core values can narrow humans’ frames of reference for understanding political issues, security as a value is a particularly interesting case for attention to values trumping personal experience. A piece in the Annual Review of Psychology by John Jost and colleagues (gated, ungated) emphasizes that concerns about security are a fundamental component of political ideology with conservatives more concerned with safety, security, and structure than liberals. (My hope is that Gallup will follow-up on their reporting with additional details of attitudes toward TSA broken out by political ideology of respondents.)

Similarly, security and safety play a key role in common psychological theories, including Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (where safety comes second only to food and water) and terror management theory (where the lack of security induced by fearing one’s own death causes a whole swath of interesting attitudes and behaviors). A detailed (but long) review of this research is available in a chapter by Thane Pittman and Kate Zeigler.

Presumably, given all of this research, I should be unsurprised that Americans have a positive view of an agency that has “security” in its name, but it remains an interesting example of how seemingly negative personal experiences can be trumped by appeals to core values.