Humans think irrationally.
This post looks at how psychology influences all our social and political views, positions and discourse.
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Humans are emotional animals with limited knowledge
Human beings are emotional animals in part driven by innate biological urges and unconscious biases, unprovable assumptions, and irrational psychology. We have a limited knowledge of the world and ourselves. Everyone’s perceptions, values and political and social judgments are subjective, formed by one’s culture, upbringing and personal experiences, education, and personality.
There is no objectively correct or single way to organize society and govern people. Every political ideology and governance model is limited, imperfect and involves trade-offs. Many differences of opinions involve different priorities and value-judgements, none that are objectively better than the other. Even when there is agreement on the desired ends, there often is heated disagreement about the ways to get there.
All political views and persuasions are opinions.
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How people make decisions
We all make judgements in areas where we are not experts. Many from both the political left and right express strong opinions about critical race theory (CRT) when they do not know what it really is. People from both sides of the debate make decisions about vaccines and climate change without being scientists, much less immunologists or climatologists. University of Oxford scientist and science literacy expert Catarina Amorim said that it’s not just people within the religious right who don’t understand what is the theory of evolution. She says that many people within the left who say they believe in evolution also have significant misconceptions about it.
Economics Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and Stanford psychologist Amos Tversky studied how humans have two methods of making decisions. One is a slow, logical method, and the other a quick intuitive-emotional method. Most decisions, including many that we think are come to logically, are made with the unconscious intuitive-emotional method that is riddled with mistakes and cognitive biases.
Further, after making an emotional decision the slow, logical method will then often come up with a false cover story, giving logical but false reasons why one made the decisions. We think we have gone through a logical thought process when we have not.
Kahneman wrote, “If we think that we have reasons for what we believe, that is often a mistake. Our beliefs and our wishes and our hopes are not always anchored in reasons.” Behavior psychologist Susan Weinschenk wrote, “What people tell you is the reason for why they do what they do may not be the actual reason.”
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Cognitive biases and heuristics
Humans use cognitive biases and heuristics, or mental shortcuts, to make decisions. While essential for human function, these automatic guesses have margins of error and often lead to mistakes.
Visual illusions show how these internal methods can produce bizarre misperceptions.
The following are some standard cognitive biases that distort our judgments.
Confirmation bias: The tendency to search for or interpret information that confirms one’s preconceptions, and to discredit information that does not.
Affinity bias: The tendency to be favorably biased towards people most like ourselves.
Occam’s razor bias: The tendency to assume the most obvious or simplest decision or explanation is the best decision.
Apophenia: The tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.
Pareidolia: Seeing patterns in random information, such as seeing animals or faces in clouds.
Dunning-Kruger effect: The tendency for unskilled individuals to overestimate their own ability and the tendency for experts to underestimate their own ability.
Belief bias: Where someone’s evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusions.
The illusory truth effect: The tendency to believe that a statement is true if it is easier to understand or if it has been stated multiple times.
Bandwagon effect: Related to groupthink and herd behavior, this is the tendency to do or believe things because many others do or believe things.
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Logical Fallacies
Commonly used in political debates and other attempts at persuasion, a logical fallacy is a flawed, deceptive or false argument that can be proven wrong with reasoning.
The following are some common logical fallacies:
Ad hominem argument. This involves arguing against the person making the argument rather than addressing the person’s argument itself. This can include personal insults, such as criticizing the person’s physical appearance or the way they talk, the organization they belong to or past personal mistakes. In politics it’s called mudslinging.
Strawman argument: When someone attacks a distortion of the original argument that they created themselves (the “strawman”).
False dichotomy argument: This is when limited options are presented, often two extreme cases, when there are more possibilities. This is a manipulative tool, promoting one side while demonizing the other.
Slippery slope argument: This involves taking an argument from the first, sensible premise to a highly unlikely and extreme conclusion via a number of hastily constructed steps.
Hasty generalization: This is a broad claim based on a few examples rather than substantial proof. An example is stereotyping a group based on just a few members.
Red herring: This involves bringing up an irrelevant issue in order to redirect or confuse the discussion to avoid the original topic.
Bandwagon fallacy: This is where something is assumed is true or good because others agree with it.
Causal fallacy: This is when an argument incorrectly concludes that a cause is related to an effect.
Appeal to pity: An appeal to pity relies on provoking emotions instead of using factual evidence to win an argument.
Appeal to nature: This occurs when something is claimed to be good because it's perceived as natural, or bad because it's perceived as unnatural. Whether or not something is natural does not determine if it is good or bad. Cancer and polio are natural.
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Why do people make logical fallacy arguments?
One reason people use logical fallacies is because they use poor reasoning. Another reason is because logical fallacies work! We all at times use logical fallacies to try to persuade people, and at times fall prey to faulty arguments.
Emotions are an essential part of our learning concepts and even acceptance of facts. Storytelling, playacting and metaphors are standard teaching tools. The truth is often counterintuitive, and falsehoods can make sense. Propaganda, commercial advertising and persuasion can lead us to false conclusions and beliefs.
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Social influences
Humans are social animals and tribal. We all form our views by the groups we belong to, and hone our speech and behavior to be able to fit in. We are all suseptable to peer pressure, groupthink and echo chambers.
In areas where we know little, such as legislation or policies about medicine, science or society, we often support an idea or policy because that’s what our like-minded groups or political party support. We often reject an idea because it is proposed by a party or person we disagree with.
It can be useful to use as a guide a group or party that shares our general values. However, our group can have both good and bad ideas, just as an opposing group can have both good and bad ideas.
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Ends justifying the means
We all have desired ends, such as wanting a political, social or economic worldview enacted, or a political party or a particular political candidate voted in or rejected.
For some the ends are so essential that the are willing to act authoritarian, censor, imprison and even kill those who express other ideas. Totalitarian states such as Stalin’a Soviet Union and Pol Pot’s Cambodia are examples of this.
However, we all can corrupt the means and act dishonestly to get our desired ends. Our deceptive, one-sided political arguments sometimes use logical fallacies and play on peoples’ emotions.
Is it okay to bend the rules, lie and censor others in to gain what we believe are essential ends? To save the environment? To prevent war? To preserve the rights and dignity of a traditionally oppressed group? To save the life of a loved one? Many people would say yes.
It is in the means where things get messed up: Wholesale cheating and corruption, censorship, cancel culture, distorting facts, and undermining democratic processes.
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Humans hold strong beliefs that they cling to even when proven wrong
Data scientist Prof. Imed Bourchika writes, “When some people have already formed beliefs in their minds, these tend to stick and it goes for various topics. Even when faced with facts and logical reasoning, they would persistently push on with their beliefs. In fact, social media was weaponized due to this behavior, with a number of PR firms driving narratives that highlight propaganda rather than facts.”
Evolutionary biology professor Jerry Coyne says that many humans don’t want the truth, as its often discomforting. He says presenting facts doesn’t convince many people to give up their false, but strongly held beliefs.
Anti-science, or rejection of science, exists in within the far left and far right. This commonly happens when scientific facts oppose people’s closely held beliefs. Anti-science in the far right is commonly associated with creationism and climate change denial. Areas of anti-science in the far left include being anti-GMO or anti-nuclear and rejecting scientific knowledge that conflicts with postmodernist social justice ideologies.
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Misperceptions and misrepresentations of population demographics
A common problem is misunderstanding and misrepresenting demographics. The British research and data analysis YouGov showed that Americans tend to greatly overestimate the size of minority groups and underestimate the size of majority groups. Many of the estimates are amazingly off. For example, Jews make up 2 percent of the United States population, while those polled estimated it was 30 percent. Four percent of Americans belong to a union, but those polled guessed it was 36 percent. Three percent of Americans are gay or lesbian, but people estimated it was 30 percent.
These great misperceptions come from people both within and without the group. In fact, people outside the group often have a more accurate perception of the size than those within the group.
Whether race, gender, religion, ethnicity or nationality, any demographic is made up of a diversity of viewpoints, philosophies, experiences, positions, and perspectives. There is a range of views even within each major political party. However, a small and sometimes extreme portion of the group is often misperceived or misrepresented as representing the majority or the whole of the group.
For example, progressives make up only 11 percent of the Democratic Party, yet are often painted as representing the views of the entire party. This can be because the small group is assertive and presents itself as the “authentic voice” of the group. It is also because the Republicans falsely portray the fringe as representing the views of the entire party.
Media and entertainment influence public and cultural perceptions, for various reasons misreporting, stereotyping or focusing on specific areas. Science journalist Karen L. Rudd writes, “Flattened discourse, unfortunately, is often an outcome of certain traditions in journalism. I don’t like ‘blaming the journalists’ but there are limits to the medium and over-simplification is one of them.” Twitter and social media often paint a false portrait of a demographic, with most Twitter posts made by a small percentage of users. People often get into political and ideological echo chambers where they are exposed to only one point of view.
Conventional wisdom and widespread ideas about all sorts of subjects can be incorrect, including about science, medicine, and society. A Pew research poll showed that the general public continues to debate ideas where most scientists agree.
The spiral of silence
Contributing to these misperceptions is a phenomenon called the spiral of silence. Studied by German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neuman, the spiral of silence is where people are afraid of social ostracization so don’t express views that they feel are in the minority. They sometimes publicly say they agree with majority views that they don’t agree with.
Ostracization is a legitimate fear, including with today’s Twitter mobs and call-out and cancel culture. Illiberalism and censorship don’t always come in the form of edicts or rules from authority. They can come via groupthink and crowd following, peer pressure and going along to get along. Self-censorship is censorship.
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All these misrepresentations, biases and faulty reasoning make for bad public policies
Government and private policies are often based on misperceptions, cognitive distortions, and sometimes flat-out wrong beliefs. This has led to policies that are not only ineffective but counterproductive.
Policies about crime prevention, diversity, homelessness and medicine that are driven by ideology or intuition over facts and science have proven counterproductive. Pseudoscientific ideologies about diseases or agriculture have lead to widespread preventable deaths. Wars have started over misperceptions and logical fallacies.
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What to do?
Be aware that there are no objectively correct answers in political and social topics, and we are all expressing opinions.
Educate yourself on your and everyone’s cognitive and other biases. Work to identify your biases, but also know they cannot be entirely overcome and that we have biases we are not even aware of.
Study and promote critical thinking and scientific literacy.
Learn about other groups, what they really think and their diversity of thought.
Organize discussion groups where everyone is there to both express their views and to listen to others. A friend and I organized such a group, and the first rule we made was “No logical fallacies.”