Kurt Gray

It’s tabloid fodder at its most primal. But the case reflects our own natural, moral minds.

If you spend any time in our most esteemed forums for debate and civil discourse — YouTube comment sections and Twitter threads — you get the sense that the case between actor Johnny Depp and his former wife Amber Heard is black or white. Heard is either a battered victim or — the increasingly popular interpretation — a narcissistic abuser, gold-digger and pathological liar.

Though these cultural fixations are frivolous in the minds of many, 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 continue to be baffled that anyone could see the case any other way.

The details of each are unique, but the O.J. Simpson trial, the Ruby Ridge standoff, the Waco siege, and the Depp v. Heard trial 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 the blame to our chosen antagonist and none to the object of our sympathy.

My psychological research bears this out. I 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 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 — might dismiss this kind of online sensationalism as “drama.” And they’re right: Moral Typecasting is dramatic. But we deploy the same flawed mode of 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, resolutely believe that every ounce of the blame lies with the other party? You’re being dishonest with yourself if you disbelieve 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. We might even realize that 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 condemning, we can try to reserve this black-and-white morality 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.

Sometimes our suffering is unjust. There is the (very slight) possibility that either Johnny Depp or Amber Heard is the indisputable victim in their tragic relationship. But we’d all benefit from recognizing that life is messier than a storyboard. And while one side may be more to blame, this almost never means that either side is blameless.

Kurt Gray is a researcher, social psychologist and professor at the University of North Carolina. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.