I'm still working on a long essay about the probable non-existence of technologically advanced aliens. (I'm not working hard lately
) So you'll have to make do with this short post for the time being — Dave
A few years ago I told you that "politics makes you stupid," an observation which is readily available every day in every way if you're paying attention. (Most Americans now tune it all out.)
I am always delighted when research in "cognitive science" delivers a luke-warm version (the Flatland version) of what I've already told you, so let's take a look at that. Thanks to reader Brian for the heads up.
Everybody knows that our political views can sometimes get in the way of thinking clearly.
But perhaps we don’t realize how bad the problem actually is.
Chris Mooney's intuition is correct: humans don't know. In fact, humans don't have the first clue about how bad the problem actually is.
According to a new psychology paper, our political passions can even undermine our very basic reasoning skills.
More specifically, the study finds that people who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs.
That's "politics makes you stupid" in a nutshell. It's a matter of unconscious bias and unshakeable belief as opposed to actual thinking and true feeling (reason, wisdom and compassion). Humans were designed by Nature for faith & belief—they have a story and they're sticking to it. They were not designed to think, not designed to weigh and consider evidence.
Human beliefs per se are usually arbitrary (they are based on nothing at all). Beliefs function as social glue which promotes group coherence. Politics is always a group activity. Beliefs are shared (see liberals and conservatives in America). When some guy clings to some really bizarre beliefs, he is called crazy. When a large group harbors equally bizarre beliefs, that group is often called a political faction or party.
In short, and generally speaking, humans are delusional. That's why there are two sides to every argument, regardless of what Reality might be. Our informative media is thus fair and balanced when it reports both sides.
Here are the high-level details of how the study was carried out.
The study, by Yale law professor Dan Kahan and his colleagues, has an ingenious design. At the outset, 1,111 study participants were asked about their political views and also asked a series of questions designed to gauge their “numeracy,” that is, their mathematical reasoning ability. Participants were then asked to solve a fairly difficult problem that involved interpreting the results of a (fake) scientific study. But here was the trick: While the fake study data that they were supposed to assess remained the same, sometimes the study was described as measuring the effectiveness of a “new cream for treating skin rashes.” But in other cases, the study was described as involving the effectiveness of “a law banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns in public.”
The result? Survey respondents performed wildly differently on what was in essence the same basic problem, simply depending upon whether they had been told that it involved guns or whether they had been told that it involved a new skin cream.
What’s more, it turns out that highly numerate liberals and conservatives were even more – not less — susceptible to letting politics skew their reasoning than were those with less mathematical ability.
Yes, this is somewhat akin to re-discovering the wheel, but the upshot is profound for people like Grist author Chris Mooney.
But we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves — to fully grasp the Enlightenment-destroying nature of these results, we first need to explore the tricky problem that the study presented in a little bit more detail...
I like that a lot — the Enlightenment-destroying nature of these results. One guy called these results The Most Depressing Discovery About the Brain, Ever.
Mooney then goes into some detail about how the study was carried out, thus missing the point of it. Well, that's one way to avoid the Awful Truth. Humans are clever animals, so there are many ways to dance around the obvious (to deceive themselves and others)
Mooney does rally a bit at the very end.
The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume famously described reason as a “slave of the passions.” Today’s political scientists and political psychologists, like Kahan, are now affirming Hume’s statement with reams of new data. This new study is just one out of many in this respect, but it provides perhaps the most striking demonstration yet of just how motivated, just how biased, reasoning can be – especially about politics.
The basic mistake humans make with respect to politics is something I called the imputation of rationality in an older post written at a time when I was (gently?) trying to tell my enlightened readers that humans beings are fundamentally irrational (fundamentally out of touch with Reality = Crazy).
When people impose rationality on politics, they assume that politics is about policy choices — making them, implementing them, and all the rest. That's bullshit of course. Politics is about power and status, who has it, who lost it, ways to maintain it, how people can get it back if they've lost it, and so on.
In short, politics is literally monkey business (i.e., a characteristic expression of the social instincts of the human animal). An evolutionary, reductionist view of politics would say that attaining greater power and status leads inevitably to more mating opportunities, and historically that's certainly been the case. But that too-limited observation doesn't tell us much about the true scope of political behavior in human life.
Regarding power and status, in the endless discussions of politics on National Public Radio, where the really, really dumb people live, political issues are rarely discussed in terms of dysfunction, policy failure, corruption, influence peddling, revolving doors, and the other sad stuff which characterizes America's public life in 21st century. Instead, the discussion focuses almost exclusively on winners and losers. After the government shutdown and latest budget showdown, the Republicans were big losers. The Democrats were big winners. And on and on it goes.
You don't have to be a Rocket Scientist to see that the actual business of government, which in theory reflects the Public Interest, is the first thing lost in such discussions. And once lost, the Public Interest is basically gone forever. You can't close Pandora's Box once it's been opened.
The problem with politics gets much, much worse when we consider that humans tend to view every problem through a political lens, whether that problem is inherently political or not. This is most obvious in environmental science (e.g., climate change, degradation of the oceans). These are not political problems (like immigration reform) in any important sense, as I've said repeatedly. Ultimately, they are problems of life and death, problems affecting our survival on this planet. Specifically, and for the time being, these are scientific questions.
The problems accompanying misplaced political thinking are also obvious when we consider basic morality (ethics, fairness, justice) because in a social world defined by winners and losers, there are losers. In fact, almost invariably there are many, many losers and only a handful of winners. This typically lopsided distribution of winners and losers is a natural result of the way social instincts determine social outcomes (via political behaviors which determine winners and losers in this case).
My saying "politics makes you stupid" is a comment on only one aspect of Human Nature, and thus we have barely scratched the surface here. Still, it's a good place to start if you are examining the human situation for the first time, and want to understand what the fuck is going on.
If you can see politics for what it is, and not as it pretends to be, many other self-defeating or destructive human behaviors will start to make sense. On the other hand, if you can not escape the psychological jailhouse politics creates, you will never understand anything.
Dave, I try to fight my confirmation bias all the time and hope I usually succeed. Do you ever have to fight that bias or have you moved beyond that?
Posted by: Ken Barrows | 10/28/2013 at 10:28 AM