It’s been tabloid fodder at its most primal. But the case reflects our own natural, moral minds.
Our long national struggle with the all-important “Amber or Johnny?” question ended Wednesday with a verdict that mostly sided with Depp’s interpretation of events.
The jury’s nuanced decision — which awarded Depp the lion’s share of damages but ruled in favor of one of Heard’s claims as well — ran somewhat contrary to the black-or-white, all-Amber, or all-Johnny takes that have dominated spaces like Twitter or YouTube’s comments section. Amber Heard is either a battered victim, or — the opinion that seemed to prevail in the trial’s latter stages — a narcissistic abuser, golddigger, and pathological liar.
The public’s fixations on these celebrity intrigues are frivolous, to be sure. But they have underlying usefulness as touchpoints for understanding our collective psychology — particularly our moral psychology.
What makes these media moments so captivating — and so irresistible for Netflix’s documentary production division — is that people tend to sort themselves into teams, either pro-Depp or pro-Heard, and proceed to be baffled that anyone could see the case any other way. The details of each are unique, but the O.J. Simpson trial, Ruby Ridge, the Waco siege, and Depp v. Heard are similarly fascinating to the field of social psychology because of this binary phenomenon they tend to inspire: Declaring one’s allegiance to a side, then assigning all of the blame to our chosen antagonist and none to the object of our sympathy.
Our psychological research bears this out. We call it “Moral Typecasting,” because when it comes to our moral judgments we have a template in our head: one entity, the victimizer, is 100 percent at fault, while the one we have categorized as the victim is completely blameless. If you want evidence, take a quick stroll through Twitter or Reddit:
“She’s the voice for voiceless survivors everywhere. Truly inspirational.” #istandwithamberheard thread, 7.7K likes
“Anyone who “stands with Amber Heard” after today is embarrassing themselves and quite possibly outing themselves as a fellow abuser.” #justiceforjohnnydepp thread, 8.1K likes
Most people — even the ones engaging in it — dismiss this kind of online sensationalism as melodrama. And they’re right: Moral Typecasting is dramatic. But we deploy the same flawed thinking in our personal lives more often than we realize.
Think about it: In interpersonal disputes in your everyday life, how often do you reflexively and resolutely believe that every ounce of the blame lies with the other party? You’re being dishonest with yourself if you don’t believe that it’s close to 100 percent of the time. Again, the psychological evidence supports this.
Yes, that kind of absolutist framing is both sensational and dramatic. And on an intellectual level, we might even realize it’s absurd to believe that real-life circumstances have clear good guys and bad guys, like almost every fictional narrative.
But it’s a documented fact that that’s how our moral mind naturally works. It’s why gossip with our friends invariably devolves into the “he said/she said” format with which we are all familiar.
But we’re not irredeemably condemned to a dramatic morality. Once we realize that we’re biased to all-or-nothing condemnation, we can try to reserve this black-and-white mentality for truly exceptional cases. And the more we can acknowledge shared blame in our personal lives, the better we might be able to navigate personal conflicts.
The jury’s assessment that at least a portion of the fault lay with both Depp and Heard reflects what is the likely reality in the vast majority of cases. It is perhaps dissatisfying to the all-or-nothing online crowd, but we’d all benefit from recognizing that life is messier than a storyboard. While one side may be more to blame, this almost never means that either side is blameless.
