Regarding problems with ideology/point of view

 Political, religious, and economic ideologies powerfully shape how people think. That often happens without people realizing it. When we hold strong ideological beliefs, the beliefs silently influence what we notice, how we think about it, what we remember, and what we believe to be true. Researchers across social sciences, politics, and psychology recognize this as a fundamental challenge to clear thinking and democratic decision-making. Despite that, most people are unaware it affects them.

This isn't about intelligence. Research suggests that people who score highest on cognitive reflection tests are actually the most prone to ideological bias. They're simply better at constructing justifications for what they already believe. Instead, ideological reasoning reflects basic features of human cognition, shaped by evolution. Our brains are wired to make sense of the world through frameworks we already accept, and ideology provides those frameworks.

Much of this operates unconsciously. People genuinely believe they're thinking rationally while ideology invisibly guides their reasoning. Researchers call this an illusion of objectivity. Under this illusion, a person believes their reasoning is impartial, but their conclusions were shaped by ideology.

Strong ideological commitment or belief tends to cause certain problems.

Selective attention to information: Ideological reasoning is dominated by unconscious processes that make you pay attention to information confirming your ideology while dismissing contradictory evidence. People don't consciously decide to ignore inconvenient facts. That just happens automatically.

Cognitive rigidity: Individuals strongly committed to ideology tend to show reduced flexibility in thinking. They accumulate evidence more slowly when evaluating decisions, resist updating beliefs when presented with new information, and tend toward impulsive reasoning rather than careful deliberation.

Resistance to inconvenient evidence: Ideologues characteristically downplay or reject information that contradicts their ideology, often dismissing it as false or propaganda. This isn't conscious dishonesty—it reflects how ideologically motivated reasoning actually works at the cognitive level.

Together, selective attention, cognitive rigidity, and resistance to evidence amount to significant problems for how democracies function. When large portions of the electorate think this way, the system tends to move toward gridlock, function more for special interests than for the public interest, or both.

The Democratic Damage

These cognitive effects directly harm democratic governance because elections and legislatures depend on people updating their beliefs based on evidence and new circumstances. When ideology distorts evidence or reasoning, voters often can't hold leaders reasonably accountable. Their ideology tends to distort what they believe about their leader's performance regardless of actual results, often including bad results. In that scenario, elections don't function so much as an accountability mechanism. Instead, elections work more to reinforce even the status quo even when it is bad.

In addition to that, rigid ideological belief tends to make compromise hard or impossible. Ideological reasoning turns policy disagreements into tests of moral judgment or acceptability. Voters become unwilling to accept or compromise with positions associated with opposing ideologies. That makes usually legislative problem-solving quite difficult at best.

Another adverse impact is that ideologues tend to lose their ability to adapt to new problems. Processes and events such as climate change, economic recessions, demographic shifts, and technological disruption require updating beliefs based on new evidence. Ideological rigidity impairs or even prevents the learning process needed to adapt.

What is arguably needed is a fundamentally different kind of ideology that could operate alongside existing ideologies. What exists now cannot be replaced. It is simply impossible to make the innate human trait of ideological influence go away. That stays with us because we are human. What that different ideology might be is the topic for another post.