Human Cognitive Biases in Politics

Human cognition is complex. Perceptions of reality and thinking about what is perceived can be influenced by one or more biases. Most of our thinking, about 99%, is unconscious, so what we become aware of and consciously think about is almost always influenced by thinking we cannot be aware of. Science is still sorting out all the baises, conditions where they are triggered, their interactions, their relative influence on seeing reality accurately or distorting it and consciously thinking rationally or not. Irrational conscious thinking dominates politics for most people most of the time.

This organization of biases posits four kinds of situations that trigger our biases, such as when we need to act quickly or when there is too much information to process. Although cognitive biases are usually defined as systematic patterns of deviation from rationality in judgment, they evolved to help people make sense of the world, react quickly, survive and maybe even cooperate in groups. Because of that, biases must sometimes lead to rational judgment and good decisions. It is reasonable to believe that, under normal circumstances, our biases are at least as helpful in dealing with the world as they are in fostering mistakes and misunderstandings.

For better or worse, politics isn't normal circumstances because issues are usually complex, usually significantly opaque and often lied about or distorted. Also, politics implicates powerful psychological factors that trigger biases. Those factors include our morals, beliefs, self-esteem, identity and uncontrollable unconscious emotional reactions. Existing evidence suggests most people are more irrational than rational about politics most of the time. Two researchers describe the situation like this:

“. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.”

Biases affect how we remember and mentally reconstruct things so that we believe we can manage them.

Biases that affect thinking about politics include the following:

1. Confirmation bias is a belief bias that often leads people to seek out, interpret, and recall information in a way that confirms their preconceived beliefs and ideas. People attempt to protect and defend their existing beliefs by paying attention to information that confirms then and ignoring or discounting information that could challenge their beliefs. Some biased social media and other information sources play on confirmation bias to reinforce false beliefs by not conveying contradictory information. This bias can lead to beliefs in anything that supports beliefs, even if no facts are given or the facts given are incorrect. When a politician tells supporters what they want to hear, they’re using this bias.

2. Motivated reasoning is an emotion-biased decision-making process that tends to lead to beliefs that are psychologically more comfortable than less biased or unbiased thinking would lead to. This leads to false beliefs that do not change despite convincing contrary evidence. This bias leads people to unconsciously seek out information that confirms what they already believe, not to search rationally for information that would confirm or disconfirm a belief. Motivated reasoning leads some people to cherry-pick information so they can reject the science about climate change as false.

3. Framing bias leads to decisions based on the way information is presented, instead of basing decisions on facts and logic. The same facts presented in a different ways lead to different conclusions about the information. In politics, framing is often used to presents facts in such a way that implicates a problem that is in need of a solution. Death tax vs estate tax and tax reduction vs tax relief are different ways to frame those issues to elicit different unconscious responses.

4. Narrative fallacy is based on our affinity for stories because stories help make sense of information and our ability to relate to it. It arises from limited human ability to absorb at sequences of facts without creating an explanation for them. Our minds want to create a non-existent link or relationship among facts because ambiguity is uncomfortable for many or most people. This also helps us remember the facts and make more sense of them, even though our understanding is at least partly false. The narrative fallacy is related to, or overlapping with, framing bias.

5. Conjunction fallacy arises when occurs when a person assumes that specific conditions are more likely than a single general one. This is used in politics to make an unlikely event more credible for voters by adding certain facts. The president's claim that that millions voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election and that caused him to lose the popular vote is a conjunction fallacy.

6. Illusory truth effect arises because humans are more favorable toward familiar things that are easy to understand. The brain is wired to tend to accept what is familiar, which often comes from repeated exposure to false information. Repeated false assertions that president Obama was a Muslim in view of his middle name, Hussein, and his time living in Indonesia, a Muslim country, led many people to falsely believe Obama was a Muslim.

7. Halo effect arises from the weight of the first impression of something or someone and that transfers to false beliefs about other things that are unrelated. Many people believed that because the president was good at business (a false belief due to the illusory truth effect?), he would also be good at least with economic policy, if not all aspects of governing.

One political ideologue candidly described how his political ideology triggered unconscious bias in him:

“Ever since college I have been a libertarian—socially liberal and fiscally conservative. I believe in individual liberty and personal responsibility. I also believe in science as the greatest instrument ever devised for understanding the world. So what happens when these two principles are in conflict? My libertarian beliefs have not always served me well. Like most people who hold strong ideological convictions, I find that, too often, my beliefs trump the scientific facts. This is called motivated reasoning, in which our brain reasons our way to supporting what we want to be true. 

My libertarianism also once clouded my analysis of climate change. I was a longtime skeptic, mainly because it seemed to me that liberals were exaggerating the case for global warming as a kind of secular millenarianism—an environmental apocalypse requiring drastic government action to save us from doomsday through countless regulations that would handcuff the economy and restrain capitalism, which I hold to be the greatest enemy of poverty. Then I went to the primary scientific literature on climate and discovered that there is convergent evidence from multiple lines of inquiry that global warming is real and human-caused: temperatures increasing, glaciers melting, Arctic ice vanishing, Antarctic ice cap shrinking, sea-level rise corresponding with the amount of melting ice and thermal expansion . . . . .”