Narrative control, metacognition, and locus of control: How narratives can kill critical thinking.

[A note on style and audience. This post, and many of my others, is aimed at a dual audience. It is pitched between lay readers and academics. Lay readers will have to work a little to process the explanations and definitions of terms (but they are provided). Academic readers may find some of the explanations too brief, or observations too quick. Normally references are not included in such posts, but the material demands support. Moreover, in my position, if I write for a general audience I get attacked for insuffcient scholarship, but if I write for academics I get labeled as a bad popular writer. It's serious scholarship packaged to be as consumable as possible, but it's a blog post - not a journal article. Readers are encouraged to engage some flexibility in reception.]

In this post I will investigate the interplay between social narratives, metacognition, and a person’s locus of control. So, before discussing this interplay, a brief prelude is in order to briefly define these terms.

A definition of any large and conceptually polysemous (multiple meaning) term is difficult. Later we will see how this applies even to the less well known term ‘metacognition’. Defining narrative is still more perilous because of the scope of applications of the concept. I will stick to a hybrid of the definition of social scientists and social psychologists, coupled with concepts from information theory and cognitive science. Narratives are the meaningful sets of messages that we construct and use to package meaning, communicate complex concepts, and influence people. The types and kinds of messages may be very widely varied.

We use both our cognition, and our metacognition, to process narratives. Metacognition is all of the processes involved in monitoring and self-awareness of our own cognition, or thinking. Simply put: it is our thinking about our thinking (and our knowledge, and our learning.)

Locus of control is the degree to which we think we are in control of our own outcomes and success, or failure. It is normally considered to be of two primary kinds: external, and internal. A person with an external locus of control feels that they have little control over their own life and outcomes.

Narrative social control can be achieved by convincing a person to internalise a narrative and thus make it relevant to, and causally influential in, their locus of control. For example, famous political and ideological narratives embodying ideas such as that in the United States of America, anyone can be successful. This narrative is taken to be effective at promoting the cause and ideals of free-market capitalism, and it is commonly deployed to this end (whether the association between individual freedom of agency and freemarket capitalism is coherent is another matter). Narrative control can also be achieved by inducing an external locus of control: conveying the idea that people are not in control of certain aspects of their lives. Both approaches can result in anxiety.

Evidence and research strongly links anxiety and disturbed metacognition. Stress and anxiety will, almost without exception, degrade metacognition. This in turn degrades critical thinking ability. The scientific literature about the relationship between stress and degraded cognition is also copious. Degraded metacognition can then induce further anxiety due to a corresponding feeling of lack of control and stability.

Studies have also shown that an external locus of control will diminish a commitment to engaging high level metacognition: an individual's general self-monitoring and self-assessment of their approach to gaining knowledge and appraising information. Research has demonstrated that if a person thinks that they are not in control of their own outcomes, they will pay less attention to metacognitive tasks such as monitoring their own acquisition of knowledge in order to develop strategies to improve it.

Narratives and Social Control Narratives

Narratives are everywhere: politics, religion, popular culture, and literature (Benford, 2002; Boswell, 2013). These structured and semi-structured collections of meaningful messages are as complex as our natural language communication of them. They have semantic content or meaning which is direct, and other meaning which is inferred. They have still other meanings that are only coherent when read through the lens of other narratives and their meanings. This is an area which has seen enormous scholarly application in and of itself. The reader reception and response theory of literary theorist and aesthetician Wolfgang Iser famously asserts that the individual reader inserts meaning into a given text: meaning is constructed in the response of the reader based upon their memory, knowledge base, beliefs, and internalised narratives (Iser, 1978) (If you are concerned about the reference to a humanities scholarship, note that the psychology of the emotions has become big business in psychology since the 1990s, and aesthetics and emotion are significantly tied together.)

Narratives make both direct and inferential reference to people, events, history, ideology, and to the complex milieu of the emotions, desires, and hopes of social movements and groups. Cultural texts are part of this milieu.

Philosophers of science of various ideological bents tell us that science is also replete not only with explanatory metaphors and fictions (think frictionless plane and perfect sphere), but with narratives. The narratives of science, of course, are generally held to a higher evidentiary standard, as are narratives in courtrooms. Nevertheless, few would reject the idea that the scientific theories of evolution and quantum mechanics can be construed as having narratives associated with them. At minimum, this might be the story of their discovery and the trial and error that was required to achieve them. Few in the first world would be unaware of the contest over the authority of science and the scientific method. There is an ongoing argument about which kind of narrative best suits scientific endeavour: a scientistic one that sets science apart epistemically (as a way of knowing), or one that renders science just another way of knowing things alongside faith and intuition.

There are few who understand the workings of narratives and narrative construction who would deny their potential to influence both the human psyche and society. Millions are spent in US elections and in the media – not to mention advertising – making one or another narrative stick inside the heads of some target audience. The corpus of psychological literature is replete with examples of studies confirming the influence of narratives on public perception and people’s behaviour.

Narratology – the study of narrative construction and transmission – has been a preoccupation of the humanities since the founding work of its originator, Tzvetan Todorov, in the 1960s. Most of this work has centred upon natural language narratives and cultural texts. Most researchers working in these topic areas have been continental philosophers, literary critics, early sociologists, and 20th century linguistic, psychological, and literary structuralists. However, there is also burgeoning interest in narratives among social scientists, cognitive scientists, political scientists, and social psychologists. There have been numerous attempts to investigate the cognitive impact of overarching narrative and narrative control on individuals.

Analytic philosophers have also debated the degree to which human identity itself is narrational. Those who believe our identities are based upon an overarching narrative accept what is called the narrative view of identity and self. Those who reject this view regard our identities as episodic: existing in a series of largely disconnected episodes that do not, and need not, comprise any larger narrative. Galen Strawson is probably the best known and most influential philosopher that supports the episodic theory of identity (Ricoeur, 1991; Strawson, 2004, 2010). His approach largely rejects that narratives have any significant role to play in personal identity. However, even if we agree with Strawson’s perspective, narrative social control can still affect the beliefs and understanding of the episodic person who internalises them (Bamberg, 2012; Hammack, 2008). Moreover, stress due to overarching political and ideological narratives can certainly affect their metacognitive appraisal of their own thought and learning.

Narratives and Information

Narratives are, to risk dad joke humour, not the whole story. Cognitive encoding of narratives as mental representations requires non-narrative processes and systems. Moreover, not everything depends upon, or makes use of, narratives. There are many complex and information rich natural systems that would keep evolving and process natural information without any cognitive sentient agent around to formulate any narrative about them (K. Friston et al., 2017; Nanay, 2015). The basis of metacognition is evolved neurological and psychological systems and processes, rather than narratives. Moreover, although narratives encode, embody, and carry information, but they are not themselves information. However, there is little doubt about the interplay between cognition, perception, and narratives as semantic cognitive content. From a psychological perspective, we can think of cognitively represented narratives as associated with the information of what psychologists call top down and executive control: information stored in higher brain function in brain regions like the prefrontal cortex.

Narratives of the kind that social movements and political parties use to influence outcomes by swaying opinion (or in some cases programming the population in stronger manner via education or citing expert authority) are a specific type of encoded information. They are artefactual encoded information: information encoded into natural language messages from non-linguistic situations and from nature by our brains – our neurological function (K. Friston et al., 2013; K. J. Friston et al., 2017; Levine, 2018). Both normal primary thought, or normal cognition, and second order thought, or metacognition, are involved. However, cognition and metacognition, as well as the encoding of information upon which they depend, happen at different levels of abstraction in the brain.

A level of abstraction is a technical construct borrowed from computer science. It is like a level of explanation, where an explanation can be about small details of underlying physical mechanisms, or it can be about the larger outcomes that are sustained by those smaller details (Floridi, 2016). For example, metacognition considered at a low level of abstraction is about specific physical neurological systems: those that monitor the processes of encoding and storing sensory stimulus information in memory and the processes of recalling such information from memory (psychologists and neurologists talk about such things as visual sketchpads, central executives, and phonological loops) (Ackerman & Goldsmith, 2011; Efklides, 2008; Petty et al., 2004). Metacognition considered at a high level of abstraction is about such things as a person’s self-monitoring and self-assessment of how good they are at certain learning tasks, which tasks reduce to the aforementioned neurological processing of memory and information.

Narratives used for narrative social-psychological control generally involve the use of natural language and visual information to influence group epistemic updating. Group epistemic (knowledge) updating is the process whereby members of a group acquire new information from within and without the group, and use it to update their epistemic, or knowledge, base. Epistemic updating involves both cognition and metacognition. In the case of narratives, the information to be updated into the individual’s knowledge is often primarily linguistic and based upon natural language. However, in hypertextual-visual mediums like The Internet, images and sequences of visual information are also important.

Information is not itself knowledge, but knowledge requires information. Acquiring certain kinds of information might require certain kinds of knowledge, but it is best to regard knowledge as the articulate possession of information. Information can exist without knowledge, but you need information to have any knowledge. (This largely remains the case regardless of one’s theory of knowing, or epistemology.)

A narrative can be construed in classical information theoretic terms as a long message, or as a set, sequence, or collection, of long and short messages. One of the notorious problems with classical information theory (due to the computer and communications scientist Claude E. Shannon) is that it does not concern itself with the meaning, or semantic content, of any messages. Both Shannon and his predecessor Ralph Hartley famously separated physical and psychological elements of information transmission:

A quantitative measure of "information" is developed which is based on physical as contrasted with psychological considerations… It is desirable therefore to eliminate the psychological factors involved and to establish a measure of information in terms of purely physical quantities (Hartley, 1928)

Narratives constructed for social control, of course, are all about meaning, and about establishing pre-eminence of one’s meaning over the meaning of others, or over the meaning of the narratives of others. However, we can certainly refer to the physical basis of a long message with meaning in terms of strings of symbols, or of representations: in terms of its syntax.

Cognitive scientists often consider mental representations to be based upon sequences of symbols in an intermediate cognitive language called ‘mentalese’ (Carston, 2006). The question of how meaning and symbols become bound together in the brain, and in general, is an important outstanding question in cognitive science and the philosophy of information. It is related to what is called the symbol grounding problem: the question of how meaning is reliably and systematically attached to symbols at all.

Narratives are processed and represented, or remembered, using the same brain processing as we use for all of our mental activities. These processes include cognition, or our standard thought processes, and metacognition, which involves our introspection, or self-awareness and monitoring, of those cognitive processes.

Metacognition and Metacognitive Efficacy

In this post I am interested in briefly investigating the relationship between narrative control, an individual’s locus of control (how in control of our own outcomes we feel that we are), and what psychologists call metacognition. Metacognition, also called second order thought, is variously defined in different contexts (Efklides, 2008). However, in general and basic terms it is about our cognition about our cognition, or our thinking about our thinking.

First order thinking is the usual kind of thinking that we do about objects, other people, situations, and events: ‘That’s a nice red rose’ and ‘I hope they like me’. Metacognition, or second order thinking, is thought about how we are thinking: ‘Am I perceiving the relationship the right way?’ and ‘I wonder if I like the rose more because I feel happy and euphoric’. As we will see below, it is also about the detailed mechanisms involved in monitoring our own mental processes of committing information to memory, and retrieving knowledge from memory, and our ability to assess broadly how effective we are at using such processes.

Metacognition is critical to our ability to coherently, and successfully, manage our knowledge and navigate our circumstances. Superior metacognition is associated with greater cognitive and coping abilities and with higher emotional and general intelligence. Deficient metacognition has been linked to psychological dysfunction and various psychopathologies. Anxiety also accompanies poor metacognition. So does the belief that we are not in control of our own outcomes, a disposition which is called external locus of control.

In order to briefly investigate how narratives can impact an individual’s locus of control, specifically by inducing stress and anxiety, I will later refer to the impact of control narratives and hierarchical group dynamics in academia as a specific example of control narratives at work in a specific social microcosm.

Metacognition is often defined as ‘knowledge about knowledge’, or, sometimes the seemingly more appropriate “thinking about thinking”, or “cognition about cognition”. It’s our own awareness, monitoring, and control of our own memory based thinking and learning processes. The astute reader may immediately notice that cognition (use of conscious mental processes) and knowledge, although related, are not the same thing. Part of the reason for the varying definitions of metacognition is the close relationship between thinking or cognition defined as processing information using memory, and the role of memory in knowing.

Researchers often note that metacognition is variously defined (Arslan & Akin, 2014; Spada et al., 2008). Studies of metacognition, and associated studies of metacognitive efficacy, differ in their emphasis on an individual’s subjective confidence ratings of their long term knowledge, versus confidence ratings for more immediate processing of information into knowledge (involving coding of new mental representations). Other studies have other emphases.

To make matters more confusing, metacognitive knowledge has been defined as the knowledge and awareness of one’s own cognitive information processing and its outcomes. Moreover, there are multiple kinds of awareness involved in metacognitive knowledge (Arslan & Akin, 2014). Philosopher of metacognition Joëlle Proust provides a helpful general technical definition of metacognition:

‘[A] set of capacities through which an operational cognitive subsystem is evaluated or represented by another in a context sensitive way’. (Proust, 2014)

(It is informative to note that philosophers of a scientific discipline usually get involved when there is definitional and conceptual ambiguity, instability, or variation afoot.)

Metacognition involves self-monitoring, awareness, and control of both our remembering of new information, and of our recall and processing of information stored in existing memories. Metacognition is also defined in terms of a theory called signal theory. According to signal theory, meaningful information sources to be remembered – such as faces or study materials – are signals. Everything else in the environment of the information source is noise. Metacognition involves subjective evaluation of when we have accurately identified and remembered, or encoded a mental representation of, a signal among noise. The accuracy and reliability of this metacognitive self-evaluation is referred to as metacognitive efficacy.

Metacognitive efficacy (or, sometimes, metacognitive efficiency) is measured by the abovementioned subjective confidence ratings of metacognition. Depending upon the environment and prevailing situation, individuals will adjust their confidence ratings about their metacognitive accuracy in identifying signals. Eyewitnesses in courtroom and police interview settings are known to deploy more conservative confidence ratings due to perceived risk and increased costs associated with legal outcomes. Metacognitive confidence ratings also have a potentially high cost in the context of research and learning.

Metacognitive Efficacy in Academic Research

Metacognition and metacognitive efficacy are both important in academic performance. Long term academic metacognition involves goal setting, monitoring of comprehension, and selection of appropriate strategies for learning given one’s awareness of one’s learning strengths and weaknesses. Studies often refer to these under the head of self-regulated learning. According to Kazuhiro Ohtani and Tetsuya Hisasaka “[m]etacognition is higher order cognition and one of the most significant predictors of academic performance” (2018).

However, often self-regulated learning is not accompanied by metacognitive efficacy. Anything that diminishes metacognition and self regulated learning in an academic setting is likely to negatively impact academic performance.

In tertiary research and learning environments, as in any other professional setting, stress and associated anxiety are potential sources of distracting cognitive noise. Several studies have shown metacognition to be variously disrupted by anxiety induced by environmental stressors. These and other studies also demonstrate that disturbed metacognition produces stress and anxiety. These two causal pathways can thus result in a vicious cycle affecting academic performance. One way in which they impact academic performance is by affecting the individual’s locus of control.

Locus of Control

As mentioned briefly at the beginning of this post: locus of control involves one’s belief about how much they are in control of their own outcomes. It also involves the belief that one can perform a task, which is also a metacognitive belief. Locus of control is particularly relevant in professional and academic settings. Research psychologists Serhat Arslan and Ahmet Akin define academic locus of control as a scholar’s belief about how, and to what extent, their academic outcomes are controlled by their abilities, learning behaviour, and knowledge.

Narratives affect locus of control in an academic setting. Such narratives are often set by the academic hierarchy in which a scholar or researcher is operating. They might be constructed numerously: by way of ethics standards, academic policy, cultural biases, inferred and imputed roles and expectations, and by the competing wishes and standards of various agents interacting in the academic social and professional space. The way that narratives are constructed and deployed in this microcosm of wider society is a significant reflection of their formation and deployment in larger social settings. The same goes for their effects on the metacognition and locus of control of individuals.

There is some data that supports the idea that more mentally robust and intelligent individuals are better able to maintain a sound locus of control under difficult circumstances. However, there is also strong evidence that even psychologically healthy and mentally robust individuals can have their metacognition affected by anxiety due to stress induced by bad control narratives, or by the misapplication of narrative control.

Metacognition, Stress, and Anxiety

Leaf blowers can really blow one’s train of thought off track. This is testified to by a recent social media post – a Tweet – by a postdoctoral scholar marking the papers of her students. The tweet expressed (humorously) her dismay at the presence of a leaf blower outside of her office window. The noise of the machine was making it hard for her to focus and concentrate.

One specific cognitive process that gets momentarily blown off the rails by leaf blower noise is metacognition. Dad-joke metaphors aside, there are real, and potentially expensive (in both fiscal, social, and psychological terms), problems associated with noisy, and with otherwise with difficult and stressful, learning and research environments. A wide variety of stressful distractions interfere with our concentration and metacognition. Not all do so the way leaf blowers do.

Some cognitive noise sources have larger more complex environmental causes. These metacognition-defeating inputs are not singular and simple like the noise-polluting garden tool. Instead they exist inside of our heads, affecting our emotional and cognitive states. They are frequently the result of complex stress-inducing stimuli in our environment. This in turn can affect both our metacognition and our confidence in our metacognitive processes. Anxiety caused by overarching stressful events and circumstances is one significant example.

Although our tweeting scholar did not report it; other larger, overriding environmental factors and noise sources may well have been imposing cognitive distraction and noise upon her. Anxiety based upon stress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is one currently relevant possibility. Another known long-term source of such environmental stress is financial stress, and yet another is social stress. Both are associated with both the pandemic, and academic research. COVID-19 has affected academic and professional job market security and increased social isolation. Social isolation alone is a significant stressor already familiar to postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers.

Even disciplined, highly intelligent, and calm, individuals find it harder to concentrate if dealing with pressing worries. Leading and recent research demonstrates how environmental stress-induced anxiety can interfere with self-learners/researchers’ ability to monitor, control, and accurately assess, their ability to learn. This research reveals the interplay between internal and external sources of anxiety, and metacognition.

A 2008 study by Marcantonio M. Spada and collegues investigated the relationships between metacognition, perceived stress, and negative emotions such as anxiety. They found metacognition was significantly positively correlated with both perceived stress and with anxiety. The study begins with premises based upon the appraisal theory of Richard Lazarus (Lazarus, 2001; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984).

According to appraisal theory, an individual’s emotional response to a stressful event is based upon their appraisal of how it will affect them in terms of their life goals (called primary appraisal), and their subsequent appraisal of how well equipped they are to deal with those stressors or stressful events (secondary appraisal). Academic self-regulated learning tasks are, or course, naturally and prominently tied to overall and overarching personal life goals in terms of intellectual achievement. They are related to, and driven by, important career, family, and social objectives.

The study by Spada and colleagues shows that increased anxiety is associated with perceived lack of control over such outcomes. As we have seen from the above study by Arslan and Akin, there is a significant interdependence between a scholar’s academic locus of control and metacognition. An external locus of control, or feeling of a lack of control, is linked to diminished metacognition and poorer academic performance.

A different 2019 study conducted by Lora Capobianco and colleagues also demonstrates that metacognition and anxiety causally affect each other. The study found that symptoms of anxiety causally impact, and predict, later metacognition. Several studies have revealed that metacognitive beliefs contribute causally to psychological distress. Adrian Wells and Gerald Matthews Self-regulatory executive function model (S-REF), commonly used in such studies, proposes that:

Specific metacognitions increase emotional dysfunction by…interacting with environmental factors and giving rise to a pattern of extended negative thinking in response to stress (Capobianco et al., 2019)

Importantly, although the model is designed to track the effect of long term metacognitive habits on emotion, it “also allows for reciprocal causation”. Capobianco and colleagues tested this and found that anxiety also has a significant effect on metacognitive processes and metacognitive efficacy.

Metacognition and Locus of Control In Academic Research

A scholar with an internal academic locus of control believes that they are in control of their own academic outcomes, commensurate with their effort, ability, and their understanding of both. An external academic locus of control is characterised by a belief on the part of the scholar that their academic “circumstances are controlled by external forces” (Arslan & Akin, 2014).

In a 2014 study, Arslan and Akin investigated the relationship between metacognition and academic locus of control. They found that learners with an external locus of control were less likely to engage long term and short-term metacognition in optimising their learning outcomes. More immediate metacognitive actions are thus also neglected.

It stands to reason that a threatening external environment, or one that is stressful and causes anxiety, can therefore disturb a scholar’s internal academic locus of control, shifting it to an external academic locus of control. According to Aslan and Arkin’s study, such a shift is strongly correlated with poorer academic outcomes, as metacognition and metacognitive efficacy both reduce with external locus of control.

In the case of external academic locus of control, the scholar fails to attend to metacognitive activities because of the belief that they will be ineffectual. This can be associated with stressful circumstances, and there is also significant evidence in the research literature that perceived stress and anxiety impairs general metacognition (Ahmed et al., 2013, p. 152).

Implications for Learning and Research

What is indicated by these studies is the existence for a kind of damaging feedback loop, or vicious cycle, between anxiety and lower quality metacognition. It occurs, under the right circumstances, even in individuals without any pathological anxiety disorder. The effects of anxiety upon metacognition are more prevalent over longer timescales. However, most research and learning happens over comparatively long timescales.

Confidence ratings become less accurate, and academic performance suffers, in the presence of external stressors that cause anxiety. This suggests that a high overarching cost of stress inducing environmental circumstances such as the COVID-19 epidemic. The anxiety-inducing narratives of control that exist within academic environments are also inherently unconducive to healthy metacognition and good acaemic performance. A significant impact is associated with the degradation of the individual’s internal locus of control.

Narratives and environmental stressors are often interdependent. For example, if the narratives about the COVID-19 pandemic deployed in an academic work environment, with the expectation of complicity, are inherently flawed and therefore stressful, then metacognition and locus of control are both very likely to suffer even in highly intelligent and mentally robust individuals. This kind of outcome applies outside of academic settings too.

Metacognition and Narrative Control

There is currently significant interest in the psychological effects of social media use. Some of the most alarming negative consequences of social media use involve youth suicide and on line sexual abuse. However, there is also work being done to understand the psychological effects of the overall cascade of information that is able to be consumed on the Internet: the mass of encoded narratives that impact the metacognition and social perception of individuals (Bamberg, 2012; Boswell, 2013; Georgakopoulou, 2006). In everyday parlance: information overload. It is not just information overload. It is also that the narratives packaged and presented on the internet can be chaotic, multipart, contradictory, conflagratory, and in many cases emotionally upsetting and alarming.

The situation is further complicated by the rapid development of technologies for digital psychology, which claim such capabilities as being able to read a person’s mood, and even diagnose depression and anxiety, just based upon data about the pattern of their keystrokes and overall interactions with their smart phone social media apps. These technologies are increasingly used by marketing psychologists in large tech companies to deliver and implant the narratives that they want consumers in their target audience to consume and internalise.

The vicious cycle of disturbed or suppressed metacognition and anxiety, coupled with the vicious cycle between degraded metacognition and loss of internal locus of control, is a very real potential threat to the psychological health and happiness of individual consumers of constructed narratives on The Internet. The nature of political and ideological narratives – still important to most people – has arguably become still more stressful. Many in the West have recently struggled with the spectre of the post truth era in politics, with its philosophical and ideological underpinnings in a kind of post-postmodern nihilism about truth. Regardless of the actual status of truth and which theory of truth (how truth happens) is correct, or more correct, there is a significant social impact associated with the idea that there is no truth to be had.

Certain age groups and personalities will struggle with this kind of narrative, but more so the young, whose psychological and emotional development is in flux, and incomplete. While there is little doubt that political narratives and mistruths have had a longstanding intimate relationship with each other, the apparent normative acceptability of post-truth ideals and narratives has a disturbing effect on the affect (emotional disposition) of many. It’s been numerously noted that powerful political actors and institutions have recently deployed the concept of post-truth in their discourse and narrative construction.

The ability for large and powerful institutions and agents to construct narratives that can induce fear and anxiety in entire populations, with very little effort or ability to account for a range of outlier and aberrant effects, is probably conducive to reducing the overall psychological health of the target population. At minimum there is a strong likelihood that many individuals will feel a reduced internal locus of control, and this will likely negatively impact their overall metacognition, which is critical for both social judgement and general critical thinking (Magno, 2010).

Disarming and manipulating a population by diminishing their internal locus of control and metacognition, and their associated capacity for critical thinking, is something that can certainly be engineered with intent. It can even be weaponised by way of constructed political narratives of control. This is particularly potentially dangerous in settings where narratives are causally linked with great power conflicts that threaten the safety of entire people groups. One worrying contemporary example is the propensity of the United States administration and Department of State to continually link the narratives of the COVID-19 epidemic with narratives urging great power conflict between the United States and China, and then linking these with narratives that blame China and Chinese people for the domestic economic woes of The United States.

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