Dr. Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, authored a short analysis piece for Scientific American magazine on the psychology of political pessimism. In his article, Shermer observes that based on several objective measures, now is the best time in human history to be alive. Despite that, many or most Americans seem to believe that we are in very bad times or even on the verge of collapse and/or civil war.
As previously noted, economist Bryan Caplan pointed to irrational pessimism as one of the biases that cause systematic (not random) irrationality in the economic realm. There is “a pessimistic bias that leads to underestimation of current economic conditions, often expressed as a nostalgia for earlier times with conditions not as good as people usually imagine they were.” Something akin to that bias seems to play out about the same way for politics.
Part of this is due to the press-media usually presenting bad news ranging from car accidents and social mayhem to the brutality of war. That preference for bad news plays into an unconscious bias that social scientist Daniel Khaneman called the “what-you-see-is-all-there-is” bias. Simply put, when people see or hear mostly bad news, they tend to think that’s all there is.
Shermer points out the influence of three other unconscious biases at play. They are (i) “loss aversion”, which causes people to generally feel that “losses hurt twice as much as gains feel good”, (ii) the endowment effect, in which people put more value on something they own than what they don’t own, and (iii) the status quo effect, in which people generally prefer “existing personal, social, economic and political arrangements over proposed alternatives.”
Those three biases are grounded in human evolution. According to Shermer: “. . . . in our evolutionary past there was an asymmetry of payoffs in which the fitness cost of overreacting to a threat was less than the fitness cost of underreacting. The world was more dangerous in our evolutionary past, so it paid to be risk-averse and highly sensitive to threats, and if things were good, then the status quo was worth maintaining.” In other words, evolution has biased humans to varying degrees to resist change.
Politicians and partisans play on our pessimism biases. They argue that “once upon a time things were bad, and now they’re good thanks to our party” or “once upon a time things were good, but now they’re bad thanks to the other party.” For better or worse, “. . . . bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones.”
Finding a way to a less biased, more positive reality is the trick.
PS: For those interested in a bit of the cognitive science. Some of our unconscious biases are hard wired and acquired from evolution. Loss aversion is one example. A loss aversion curve from Daniel Khaneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, is here (scroll down to figure 10). Note its asymmetry, with the slope of response to loss in the lower left quadrant being steeper than the response to gain in the upper right quadrant. The asymmetric S shape is based on human response data to risk-reward questions. Khaneman comments on the curve: “. . . . losses loom larger than gains. This asymmetry between the power of positive and negative expectations or experiences has an evolutionary history. Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.” The asymmetry was one of the three characteristics of Prospect Theory that Khaneman, a psychologist, proposed as an alternative to the dominant Utility Theory in economics. He received a Nobel Prize in economics for his Prospect Theory contributions.
B&B orig: 11/4/16
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