Asymmetrical tribal blindness

Paul Krugman writes:

[P]eople understand the world in ways that suit their tribal identities: in controlled experiments both conservatives and liberals systematically misread facts in a way that confirms their biases. And more information doesn't help: people screen out or discount facts that don’t fit their worldview. Politics, as he says, makes us stupid. But here’s the thing: the lived experience is that this effect is not, in fact, symmetric between liberals and conservatives. Yes, liberals are sometimes subject to bouts of wishful thinking. But can anyone point to a liberal equivalent of conservative denial of climate change, or the “unskewing” mania late in the 2012 campaign, or the frantic efforts to deny that Obamacare is in fact covering a lot of previously uninsured Americans? I don’t mean liberals taking positions you personally disagree with — I mean examples of overwhelming rejection of something that shouldn't even be in dispute.

At this point, I tend to agree with Krugman that more conservatives go way off the charts, but I also know many liberals that go way off the charts. Confirmation bias strikes people of all political stripes. When Obama engages in illegal wars, spies on Americans, prosecutes more people under the Espionage Act than all prior presidents combined, most liberals are silent, and even pissed to hear the criticism. I've also heard things like the following from liberals, with my own ears:
  • Extending benefits for the unemployed don't disincentivize looking for work.
  • The fact that many women make less than many men is SOLELY because of gender discrimination.
  • People have "free will," and the standard social science model (SSSM) is proven true.
  • That people NEVER choose homosexuality, that it is ALWAYS inborn.
  • That Jesus was born of a virgin.
  • That sentient beings from outer space are living on Earth.
  • That it presents no risk to the U.S. economy to borrow or print massive amounts of money.
  • That Hillary Clinton is without any faults.
  • That taking vacations on public transit (planes and trains) is not contributing to global warming.
  • That ALL men are at risk to commit rape.
  • That homeopathy and other health fads and supposed cures that have not passed double-blinds studies are "proven effective."
You get the idea. I don't hear these (and similar liberal silliness) as much as I hear conservative silliness, but I hear a lot of silliness out of the mouths people from all political persuasions. I will agree with Krugman, that conservatives are more prone to certain types of false statements, and his suggestions for why are intriguing:
One possible answer would be that liberals and conservatives are very different kinds of people — that liberalism goes along with a skeptical, doubting — even self-doubting — frame of mind; “a liberal is someone who won’t take his own side in an argument.” Another possible answer is that it’s institutional, that liberals don’t have the same kind of monolithic, oligarch-financed network of media organizations and think tanks as the right.

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The potentially overwhelming magic of internal representations

I have two delightful daughters, now aged eight and 10. Just for fun, we have been trying to see how many digits of pi we can memorize. Our efforts are pathetic compared to the real pros out there, who can memorize tens of thousands of digits. We are just starting out, however, and I'm only able to recite about 80 digits by memory. I've been employing several mnemonic tricks, and this experiment has helped me to see how it might be possible to eventually memorize several hundred digits if I worked at it hard enough (I doubt that I will). So far, my main trick has been arranging the digits of pi in chunks of five on a grid containing lines of four chunks each. This allows me to assign a physical coordinate for each chunk. From there, I've been mentally walking through my grid, trying to memorize the chunks by associating a story with each chunk or setting up a simple " song" for each chunk. As I've been working on this memorization game, I've appreciated, even in light of my meager memorization skills, the power of the human mind to internally represent the external world. I physically set forth my 5-digit chunks on a physical grid on a piece of paper, but while I'm reciting the chunks, I am doing all of the "work" in my head on an imaginary grid of imaginary numbers mentally footnoted with imaginary stories or songs to trigger each chunk to spill out. This mental ability (not just mine, but this human capacity generally) is well worth stopping to contemplate. The human mind is able to replicate (to greater and lesser degrees) the external world and to make it available to us so that we can silently and internally manipulate its component parts, sometimes with great effectiveness. We employ our representational abilities in many other ways other than memorizing the digits of pi, of course. It's probably happened that you've lost your keys but gave up looking for them. Then, only while you were away from the house, you employed your representational powers to re-create your house and imagined where you last had the keys, or where you might have placed them. Perhaps you've successfully "located" your keys using only the representations in your own mind, mentally looking in the pocket of a mentally represented coat. This is truly a phenomenal capacity. When it works well, there is nothing more impressive than this human ability to re-create external reality and to manipulate its component parts in one's head. The fact that it works so well so often perhaps explains why many people fall prey to believing that their representational capacity is infallible. There are many people who have convinced themselves that the representations in their heads completely and accurately duplicate the external world. These are the smug people who have little use for real world evidence. Here's what I am suggesting: when they are not careful and humble, many people make the mistake of thinking that anything that they perceive in their heads is an absolutely true copy from the external world and, in fact, that their mental representations of the world might even be more accurate than the external world itself. Is this the move that gives credence to supernatural worlds for so many people? Are they so dazzled by the representational powers of their minds that they overlook the frailties of their representational powers? I suspect that some people combine the confirmation bias with their admiration for their own mental powers. Many people (those who are mentally fatigued or simply not careful) tend to filter out evidence that conflicts with their own representational systems. They begin to make their permanent homes within their representational capacities rather than making sure that they stay anchored by the real world. I realize that this is vague food for thought, but this problem is a real one: How is it that so many people who are so certain (but so very wrong) about basic facts have no use for evidence?

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Iraq and cognitive dissonance

NPR recently interviewed psychologist Elliot Aronson, co-author, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me).   Aronson worked closely with Leon Festinger back in the 1950’s “designing experiments to test and expand dissonance theory.”  Here is NPR’s plug for the interview:

We all have a hard time admitting that we’re wrong, but according to a new book about human psychology, it’s not entirely our fault. Social psychologist Elliot Aronson says our brains work hard to make us think we are doing the right thing, even in the face of sometimes overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

I listened closely to the interview (you can listen on-line too by visiting the above link) because this was yet another serious attempt to apply psychology to a critical real-life situations.   Exhibit A during this interview was the President’s dysfunctional attitude toward to continued U.S. occupation of Iraq.  

According to Aronson, cognitive dissonance “is a drive, like hunger or thirst.”  It is directed toward the human need to define who we are in a good light in order to reduce dissonance, so that we can “sleep well at night.”  It is “a powerful and unconscious motor” that smoothes out our mental “rough edges.” 

We commonly refer to cognitive dissonance as “justification.” Regarding many simple mistakes, it’s no big deal to spin the incident in a way that deflects blame and embarrassment from one’s self.  If you spill wine on the carpet, you justify that that it was only white wine, or that the damage wasn’t noticeable, …

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