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Cognitive dissonance Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable feeling we all get when trying to hold two opposing or clashing ideas in our brains at the same time.
For example, let’s say there exists a politician you hold in great esteem. You’ve actually met him, and he’s a warm, friendly charismatic guy, who embodies everything you and your party hold dear. Then a credible news report surfaces, fingering the guy as a pedophile.
If this accusation were made against a much-despised politician from the other party, you would have no trouble swallowing it whole. But since it is against your guy, you refuse to believe it. Even as more evidence stacks up, you just can’t bring yourself believe this wonderful person could do such a thing. The uncomfortable feeling you are experiencing is cognitive dissonance. You cannot hold the idea of this warm wonderful guy who exemplifies your beliefs dandling little boys.
The example above is a bit over the top, but similar, though less extreme, events happen constantly in politics and elsewhere. It is illuminating to see how they are dealt with. How those in power use the resolution of cognitive dissonance to get out of a jam.
Politicians seem to be incapable of staying out of trouble. Of course, they live under the magnifying glasses focused on them by the press and the opposing party, so there is little room for error. When one does screw up, a little drama unfolds that always follows the same script.
A news report pops up pointing out a political snafu. The opposing party and its news organs make hay. The offending party is rattled, confused, and lies low until it gets a few plausible talking points put together either denying or minimizing guilt. In rare cases – John Edwards’ impregnating his mistress while his wife, dying of breast cancer, was campaigning at his side springs to mind – the party will sacrifice one of its own. But most of the time, the creation of talking points is the common course of action.
The press and other politicians, of course, all see through this smoke screen. But the smoke screen wasn’t created for them – it was created for us, the great unwashed masses of voters.
When we hear of one of our own screwing up, we instantly are overwhelmed with cognitive dissonance. It’s an uncomfortable feeling. We like this guy, he is in our party, yet it appears he did bad. How can we hold those opposing thoughts in our brains? We cannot, at least not without considerable discomfort.
But, we don’t have to endure for long because our leaders’ talking points come to our rescue. Our cognitive dissonance dissolves in the solvent of these soothing words. We don’t have to think. Our man is blameless after all. Life is once again good.
Confirmation bias The confirmation bias is what allows us to uncritically accept these soothing words as the truth. We’re being told what we want to hear. And, thus, we believe it blindly, willingly, because it confirms whatever we already believed.
To show how the confirmation bias is built brick by brick, let us turn to politics once again.
Assuming we come to politics a tabula rasa (a major assumption because most of us follow in our parents footsteps or openly rebel against our parents), we start at zero.
Imagine yourself at the very top of the pyramid of knowledge and belief. Right at the apex, there is no knowledge or belief. You are a political newborn, so to speak.
At the base of the pyramid, the knowledge level is deep and wide. On the right side of the base is where all the conservative ideals, knowledge, and insights lie. On the left side live the liberal ones.
When you start at the top, you get tipped down one side or another. Maybe it’s a column you read, or a talking head on TV, or a parent, teacher, or friend. Doesn’t really matter, but somehow you get tipped to one side or the other and start rolling down that side of the pyramid, gathering ideology as you go.
You establish your rudimentary political views, and, as you start rolling down, you read more, you engage in discussion, you watch cable channels that mirror your views, and you, in general, become more entrenched in your ideology. All the way down you continue to confirm your ever-growing bias. Once you have reached the bottom, you have marinated so long in your particular political sauce that you can’t possibly understand how anyone could not believe the same way you do. In fact, you are certain that anyone who doesn’t is a completely misguided idiot.
It never occurs to you that others may have tipped and rolled down the other side of the pyramid. They, too, have reached their side of the bottom and are completely infused with the righteousness of their own beliefs and cannot imagine how someone could be so stupid as to believe any differently.
What is even worse is that many of us who have rolled down our own side of the pyramid refuse to even read anything written by one who has rolled down the other side. You don’t want to learn anything that might throw you into cognitive dissonance, so you renounce it as trash, unworthy of your reading, and move on. We’ve all done this at some time or other.
We work hard never to let opposing views penetrate our consciousness in an effort to avoid the unpleasant sensation of cognitive dissonance. The confirmation bias is the tool we use.
Conservatives don’t watch MSNBC; liberals don’t watch Fox. We always subscribe to magazines and newsletters that reflect our own underlying views. We read blogs that confirm our biases. If we stumble on one that doesn’t, we often leave snide comments and never return. The wide variety of material available on the internet and cable TV today is, in my view, why politics is so vicious. Not all that long ago, most of us had access to a daily newspaper or two and three TV channels, all of which were moderately liberal. People could argue with one another and drift toward the extremes, but were almost invariably brought back toward the middle by the staid mainstream media. Now people can indulge their confirmation biases 24/7, which doubtless leads to more edging toward the fringes and less trust of those on the other side of the debate.
Whenever someone comments for the first time on this blog and has a website (which can be discerned by their name being hyperlinked), I will often click on to take a look. If the commenter turns out to be a liberal, his/her website will be crawling with countless links to other liberal blogs, newsletters, articles, etc. Same if a commenter is conservative. I never find a blog – of a political nature (save one, see below) – that has links to both conservative and liberal sources.
You can test your own confirmation bias by going to one of my favorite sites, RealClearPolitics.com (RCP), the blog mentioned above that does link to both liberal and conservative sites. Go to the site and read down the list of hyperlinked articles. Some days it’s a little more conservative than liberal, and other days it is just the opposite. But on any given day, the site serves up a pretty even mix.
As you let your eye run down the list, notice which ones you want to open and read versus the ones you want to avoid. If you are a liberal, you will doubtless be drawn to those articles that confirm your liberal bias, and you will avoid opening and reading the obviously conservative ones. Same thing if you are a conservative.
And, God forbid, if you are a liberal (or conservative) and you happen to click on a link you think will confirm your bias only to discover it does not; chances are you will call BS and back out of that turkey in a heartbeat.
As an exercise in exorcizing my own political confirmation bias, I several years ago made the commitment that if I went to RCP, I would read every article. Not pick and choose. It has been quite enlightening.
We should all do this, not just with politics but with everything. Many aspects of life plunge us into cognitive dissonance, and our good friend and enabler, the confirmation bias, always stands ready to help us out of it. It takes real work to hold the confirmation bias at bay and think critically. Critical thinking efforts are difficult and do not always provide us with the answer we want or sometimes even the correct answer, but they are, as Freud said of women, “the best thing of their kind that we have.”
The confirmation bias is everywhere Sadly, our tendency to succumb to the confirmation bias is not limited to politics. Even scientists are all too prone to fall victim.
I would say at least half, if not three fourths, of papers published in academic journals are exercises in employment of the confirmation bias. It’s even worse with non-academicians, bloggers and the like, who truly (if sometimes mistakenly) believe they are practicing good science and indulging in heavy duty critical thinking.
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