Whataboutism

This paper proposes a game-theoretic model demonstrating that the availability of "whataboutism" as a rhetorical deflection strategy exacerbates offensive speech and can lead to the complete breakdown of civility norms, particularly within polarized societies.

The Gist

Imagine a neighborhood divided into two rival gangs, let's call them Team Red and Team Blue.

In this neighborhood, there's an unwritten rule: "It's okay to argue, but don't insult someone's family." Usually, if a Red member insults a Blue family member, the Blue members get angry. But here's the twist: Red members are also supposed to get angry at their own Red member for breaking the rule. If they stay silent, they look weak and get shamed by their own team.

This is how social norms usually work. But then, a new weapon enters the chat: Whataboutism.

The "Whataboutism" Superpower

Imagine a Red member insults a Blue family. A Blue member yells, "Hey! That's rude!"

Instead of apologizing, the Red member pulls out a magic card and says: "But what about last week? When a Blue member insulted a Red family, and nobody in your team said a word! You're hypocrites!"

Suddenly, the Blue member is stuck. They can't condemn the Red member without looking like a liar, because their own team failed to police their own behavior last time.

This paper by Kfir Eliaz and Ran Spiegler is a mathematical story about how this "But what about..." tactic destroys the neighborhood's peace.

The Game: A Never-Ending Argument

The authors set up a game that plays out forever:

1. The Spark: Someone from one team says something mean (an "offensive speech act").
2. The Reaction: People from both teams get a chance to either condemn it (say "That's bad!") or stay silent (which counts as "supporting" it).
3. The End: The argument stops as soon as someone condemns the act.

The Catch:

• If your own team condemns you, you get punished. There is no escape.
• If the other team condemns you, you can try to use the "Whataboutism" card. You win if you can find a memory of the other team doing something similar without their own team stopping them.

The Big Discovery: The "Norm Breakdown"

The authors found something scary. In a normal world (without Whataboutism), people usually try to be polite. Even if they want to say something mean, the fear of being shamed by their own friends keeps them in check.

But once Whataboutism becomes an option, the whole system collapses. Here is why:

1. The Cycle of Excuses: If Team Red knows they can always say "But what about Blue?", they stop feeling guilty. They say the mean thing.
2. The Silence: Team Blue sees this and thinks, "Well, Red is going to say it anyway, and they'll just deflect us. Plus, we did that thing last week too." So, Team Blue stays silent.
3. The Collapse: Because Team Blue stayed silent, Team Red now has perfect ammunition for their Whataboutism card. They use it to deflect any future criticism.

The Result: In highly polarized neighborhoods (where both sides really hate each other), the "politeness rule" vanishes completely. Everyone starts insulting everyone, and everyone uses "But what about..." to dodge the blame. The neighborhood becomes a toxic free-for-all.

The "Fanatic" Factor

The model also looks at "Fanatics"—people who love being mean so much that they don't care about the rules at all.

• In a normal world: Fanatics are a small minority. Most people still try to be good.
• In a Whataboutism world: The presence of Fanatics makes the "But what about..." argument stronger. If there are more Fanatics on the other side, it's easier to find a story where they were bad and you were silent. This makes everyone more likely to be mean, not just the Fanatics.

The Polarization Trap

The paper concludes that as society becomes more polarized (where people care more about winning arguments and more about being offended), the problem gets worse.

• People feel stronger urges to insult.
• People feel stronger urges to be offended.
• The "Whataboutism" shield becomes stronger.

It creates a feedback loop: The more polarized we get, the more we use Whataboutism, and the more Whataboutism we use, the more we lose our ability to agree on basic rules of civility.

The Takeaway

Think of social norms like a glass wall keeping a room clean.

• Without Whataboutism: If someone throws trash, the roommates clean it up. The wall holds.
• With Whataboutism: If someone throws trash, the other person says, "But you threw trash yesterday!" The first person says, "See? You admit you're messy too!" The second person, feeling guilty, stops cleaning.
• The End: The room becomes a garbage dump, and no one cleans it anymore because everyone is too busy pointing fingers at the past.

The authors show that while "But what about..." feels like a clever defense, it is actually a self-destruct button for civilized conversation. It turns a society where we can disagree politely into a society where we just scream at each other forever.

Technical Summary

Here is a detailed technical summary of the paper "Whataboutism" by Kfir Eliaz and Ran Spiegler.

1. Problem Statement

The paper addresses the phenomenon of whataboutism, a rhetorical strategy where an agent deflects criticism of their own misconduct by citing similar (or worse) misconduct by the opposing side that went unpunished. The authors aim to formalize this strategy as an equilibrium phenomenon within a game-theoretic framework to understand:

• How whataboutism alters the social norms governing offensive speech.
• Why whataboutism leads to a breakdown of civility, particularly in polarized societies.
• The endogenous nature of the "social cost" of offensive speech, which depends on the equilibrium behavior of both camps.

The core intuition is that whataboutism is not merely a logical fallacy but a strategic tool that relies on the equilibrium distribution of past behaviors. If the opposing camp frequently engages in offensive speech without internal condemnation, the cost of being condemned externally drops to zero because the criticism can be successfully rebutted.

2. Methodology

The authors construct an infinite-horizon extensive-form psychological game involving two symmetric rival camps (Camp 1 and Camp 2).

Model Structure

• States: The game proceeds in discrete stages. In each stage, a state $s$ is drawn from a set $S$. States are characterized by a sensitivity parameter $m$. Higher $m$ implies higher sensitivity (lower intrinsic utility for the offender, higher disutility for the victim).
• Agents: In state $s$, an agent from Camp $I(s)$ is selected to decide whether to perform an offensive speech act ($a=1$) or not ($a=0$).
• Payoffs:
  • Intrinsic Utility: Performing the act yields a random utility $v \sim U[0, g_m]$.
  • Social Costs:
    • Internal Condemnation: If the next agent is from the same camp and chooses $a=0$ (condemnation), the offender pays a cost of 1. This cost is unavoidable.
    • External Condemnation: If the next agent is from the rival camp and chooses $a=0$, the offender faces a cost of 1 unless they can mount a "whataboutism" rebuttal.
• The Whataboutism Mechanism (Psychological Game Component):
  • An agent facing external condemnation can rebut if they can recall a history where a member of the rival camp performed an offensive act in a state $s'$ at least as sensitive as the current state ($s' \succeq s$), and that act faced no internal condemnation.
  • The success of the rebuttal is probabilistic and depends on the ex-ante equilibrium strategy profile $\sigma$. Specifically, the probability of a successful rebuttal is $1 - \alpha_\sigma(s')$, where$\alpha_\sigma(s')$is the probability that a random play path in state$s'$ ends with the rival camp condemning the offender.
  • This makes the game a psychological game (Geanakopolos et al., 1989), as payoffs depend on beliefs about the equilibrium distribution of strategies, not just the immediate history.

Equilibrium Concept

The authors analyze Psychological Subgame Perfect Equilibria (PSPE).

• Agents follow symmetric, stationary cutoff strategies: An agent performs the act ($a=1$) if and only if their intrinsic valuation $v$ exceeds a state-specific cutoff $v^*_s$.
• Dynamic Stability: Since multiple PSPEs may exist, the authors introduce a dynamic stability criterion. An equilibrium is stable if small perturbations in the fraction of agents choosing $a=0$ lead to a smaller change in the individual's best-response probability. This selects the unique equilibrium with the lowest amount of offensive speech.

3. Key Contributions

1. Formalization of Whataboutism: The paper provides the first formal game-theoretic model where whataboutism is an endogenous equilibrium strategy. It demonstrates that the "cost" of offensive speech is not fixed but is a function of the opposing camp's equilibrium behavior.
2. Non-Linearity and Equilibrium Multiplicity: Unlike standard social preference models where costs are linear in others' behavior, the whataboutism mechanism introduces non-linearity. The probability of a successful rebuttal depends on the fraction of agents who fail to condemn their own camp. This creates a feedback loop that can lead to multiple equilibria, including a "breakdown of norms" equilibrium.
3. Dynamic Stability Selection: The authors show that while multiple equilibria exist (ranging from high civility to total anarchy), dynamic stability uniquely selects the equilibrium with the least offensive speech. This provides a rigorous selection criterion for predicting real-world outcomes.
4. Polarization Analysis: The model explicitly links the parameters of polarization (increased intrinsic utility for offenders and increased disutility for victims) to the frequency of offensive speech and the use of whataboutism.

4. Key Results

A. The Benchmark (No Whataboutism)

In a model without whataboutism, external condemnation is always effective.

• There is a unique Subgame Perfect Equilibrium (SPE).
• In every state, a positive fraction of agents refrain from offensive speech or condemn it internally.
• Norms never completely break down; there is always a "civility floor."

B. The Main Model (With Whataboutism)

Proposition 2: The set of PSPE is characterized by a sensitivity threshold $m^*$.

• Below Threshold ($m < m^*$): In states with low sensitivity, norms completely break down. All agents ($x_m = 0$) engage in offensive speech and never condemn it internally. Whataboutism is always used to deflect external criticism.
• Above Threshold ($m \ge m^*$): In highly sensitive states, a fraction of agents $x_m = c_m \theta_m$ refrain from the act. Here, $c_m$ is the benchmark fraction, and $\theta_m$ is a "whataboutism discount factor" ($\theta_m < 1$).
• The Breakdown Condition: If the sensitivity is too low (or polarization too high), the term $\theta_m$ becomes negative, implying no interior solution exists, forcing $x_m = 0$.

Proposition 3 (Dynamic Stability):
Among all possible PSPEs, the unique dynamically stable equilibrium is the one with the lowest possible threshold $m^* = M$ (where $M$ is the lowest sensitivity level where $\theta_M \ge 0$).

• This implies that society naturally settles into the equilibrium with the maximum amount of offensive speech that is still consistent with stability, but crucially, it selects the least offensive speech among the unstable "total breakdown" possibilities. However, compared to the benchmark, this stable equilibrium still features significantly more offensive speech.

C. Comparative Statics

• Polarization: As society becomes more polarized (scaling parameters $b_m$ and $g_m$ by $k > 1$), the fraction of agents engaging in offensive speech increases, and the frequency of whataboutism increases.
• Multiplier Effect: The availability of whataboutism creates a multiplier effect. An increase in the intrinsic utility of offensive speech ($g_m$) not only directly increases the propensity to offend (as in the benchmark) but also indirectly increases it by making it easier to find "uncriticized" examples from the rival camp to use as rebuttals.
• Norm Breakdown: In highly polarized societies, the threshold $M$ shifts such that norms break down entirely in a wider range of contexts, leading to a collapse of civility.

5. Significance

• Theoretical: The paper bridges the gap between rhetorical analysis and formal game theory. It demonstrates how psychological games are essential for modeling social norms where the "cost" of an action is determined by the collective memory and equilibrium behavior of the group.
• Policy/Political: The results offer a formal explanation for the erosion of civil discourse. They suggest that in polarized environments, the mere existence of uncriticized offenses by the opposing side lowers the social cost of one's own offenses, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of incivility.
• Implication: The model suggests that simply increasing the "cost" of offensive speech (e.g., via external condemnation) may be ineffective if the opposing camp has a history of unpunished offenses. The only way to restore norms is to break the equilibrium by ensuring internal condemnation occurs, thereby removing the "ammunition" for whataboutism.

In summary, Eliaz and Spiegler demonstrate that whataboutism is not just a rhetorical annoyance but a structural feature of polarized social interactions that can mathematically drive a society from a state of partial civility to a complete breakdown of norms.