Bi-Partisan Prejudice: On the Universality of Confirmation Bias

Over at the Black, White and Grey blog, they refer to a recent study which shows that, in George Yancy’s words, “researchers found that both conservatives and progressives tend to have less faith in scientific findings that go against their political presuppositions.”

I’ve been recently reading the provocative and entertaining book, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), by social psychologists Carol Tarvis and Elliot Aronson. The book unfolds a not-so-pretty-picture of the remarkably ingenious and universally innate ways that human beings have of confirming our own biases and alleviating the tensions of cognitive dissonance. Dissonance theory says that human beings will maximize the status of evidence and arguments that favor what they already think and believe, whereas they will minimize (undercut, overlook, undervalue , etc.) evidence and arguments that counters what they already think and believe. Rather than live with the cognitive dissonance of counter-evidence, which would require either the hard work of reconsideration of one’s beliefs, we prefer to simply elide the source of dissonance. We have a tendency and an ability–ironed out through decades or centuries of evolutionary practice–to convince ourselves that our beliefs, actions, memories, etc. are right, good, honorable, and that they easily trump alternative views, arguments, or assessments. To paraphrase moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, human brains are not only our best PR managers, but our most ardent supporters and public defendants.

The following section of the book, detailing a psychological study by Lee Ross, stood out to me as particularly relevant to the Yancy blog-post:

Ross took peace proposals created by Israeli negotiators, labeled them as Palestinian proposals, and asked Israeli citizens to judge them. “The Israelis liked the Palestinian proposal attributed to Israel more than they liked the Israeli proposal attributed to the Palestinians,” he says. “If your own proposal isn’t going to be attractive to you when it comes from the other side, what chance is there that the other side’s proposal is going to be attractive when it actually comes from the other side?” Closer to home, social psychologist Geoffrey Cohen found that Democrats will endorse an extremely restrictive welfare proposal, one usually associated with Republicans, if they think it has been proposed by the Democratic Party, and Republicans will support a generous welfare policy if they think it comes from the Republican Party. Label the same proposal as coming from the other side, and you might as well be asking people if they favor a policy proposed by Osama bin Laden. No one in Cohen’s study was aware of their blind spot–that they were being influenced by their party’s position. Instead, they all claimed that their beliefs followed logically from their own careful study of the policy at hand, guided by their general philosophy of government.

Bi-partisan confirmation bias, indeed. Tarvis and Aronson explain the bias of judgment this way:

…we believe our own judgments are less biased and more independent than those of others partly because we rely on introspection to tell us what we are thinking and feeling, but we have no way of knowing what others are really thinking. And when we introspect, looking into our souls and hearts, the need to avoid dissonance assures us that we have only the best and most honorable of motives. We take our own involvement in an issue as a source of accuracy and enlightement–“I’ve felt strongly about gun control for years; therefore, I know what I’m talking about”–but we regard such personal feelings on the part of others who hold different views as a source of bias–“She can’t possibly be impartial about gun control because she’s felt strongly about it for years.”

If this is really our human situation, we are sledding uphill anytime we want to enter into genuine dialogue with others for the purpose of mutual understanding and working towards solutions on difficult problems. It is not just the realm of politics that is implicated by this problem, but theology, ethics (social policies), medicine, and so on. Perhaps the best first thing we can do is simply to become aware of our propensity to self-justification, confirmation of biases and prejudices, and denigration of the ideological opposite. Awareness itself will not solve the problem, but at least we know what animal we are dealing with–ourselves.