Motivated reasoning in politics

“We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.” Chris Mooney, science journalist referring to unconscious defense reflexes to unpleasant or disagreeable information

Motivated reasoning is an unconscious bias that’s associated with people who hold strong personal or ideological beliefs. According to one source, “motivated reasoning leads people to confirm what they already believe, while ignoring contrary data. But it also drives people to develop elaborate rationalizations to justify holding beliefs that logic and evidence have shown to be wrong. Motivated reasoning responds defensively to contrary evidence, actively discrediting such evidence or its source without logical or evidentiary justification. Clearly, motivated reasoning is emotion driven.”

fMRI Brain scans - speaking, finger tapping, listening

One observer notes that scientists have found that “one insidious aspect of motivated reasoning is that political sophisticates are prone to be more biased than those who know less about the issues. . . . . when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. We may think we're being scientists, but we're actually being lawyers. Our ‘reasoning’ is a means to a predetermined end—winning our ‘case’—and is shot through with biases.”

What’s the evidence?: It’s fair to ask if there’s any tangible evidence that unconscious motivated reasoning bias is real. There is. In 2006, researcher Drew Westin and colleagues published a paper showing brain activity in committed political partisans during the 2004 presidential election (Bush’s re-election). The paper, Neural Bases of Motivated Reasoning: An fMRI Study of Emotional Constraints on Partisan Political Judgment in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 18, issue 11, pages 1947-1958, looked at implicit (unconscious) brain activity for information that was threatening to their own candidate, the opposing candidate or an individual who was neutral to the partisan.

The researchers summarized their results like this: “Research on political judgment and decision-making has converged with decades of research in clinical and social psychology suggesting the ubiquity of emotion-biased motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning is a form of implicit emotion regulation in which the brain converges on judgments that minimize negative and maximize positive affect states associated with threat to or attainment of motives. . . . As predicted, motivated reasoning was not associated with neural activity in regions previously linked to cold reasoning tasks and conscious (explicit) emotion regulation.”

fMRI brain scanner (functional magnetic resonance imaging)

That was the first neuroimaging evidence for motivated reasoning, implicit emotion regulation, and psychological defense. The brain imaging data suggested that “motivated reasoning is qualitatively distinct from reasoning* when people do not have a strong emotional stake in the conclusions reached.” In other words, when partisans were presented with threatening information, they unconsciously reacted emotionally, not consciously.

* Meaning conscious thought or thinking about information that was positive or neutral for the partisan’s candidate – “cold reasoning tasks” and conscious emotion control.

Despite motivated reasoning’s power to distort perceptions of reality or facts and how we apply common sense to what we think we perceive, simply knowing about its existence can help the conscious mind reduce the distortions. Of course, doing that requires a will or mind set that’s motivated to reduce unconscious distortions.

It all boils down to one’s personal mind set. One libertarian partisan became aware of the distorting influence his own strongly held political ideology had on his perceptions of facts and his common sense in thinking about the facts. He described his experience like this: “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. Knowing about the existence of motivated reasoning, however, can help us overcome it when it is at odds with evidence.”

Questions: Does being a responsible citizen come with a moral obligation to be aware of human biases and their tendency to distort reality and common sense so that they can try to reduce the distortion? Or, because facing unbiased reality is psychologically uncomfortable and threatening to personal self-image and self-esteem, there is no obligation for citizens to care about their own unconscious biases and to operate on the false belief that they in fact do not bias facts or common sense?

B&B orig: 10/27/16

The biology of subjective facts

In politics, finding objective facts is usually hard. In addition to being inundated in an ocean of spin and lies, another barrier is being subjective creatures from a biological point of view. The power of our inherently subjective minds cannot be understated. We are humans. Humans are inherently subjective and our minds evolved to work that way. The laws of the universe require that out minds work that way. It is both biologically and mathematically impossible for humans to operate in politics on the basis of pure conscious reason and objective fact or truth.

Given human biology and the laws of the universe, we have to operate on the basis of mental rules or shortcuts that our minds actually can work with. Those rules simplify and distort reality, including facts, and conscious reason. None of that is a criticism of anyone, any group or the human species. Those are objective fact statements based on human biology and the laws that govern the universe.

Because of those truths, finding objective fact in politics isn't nearly as easy as one might envision. The human mind operates mostly on the basis of unconscious thinking. That thought mode is heavily influenced by (i) biases all of us got from evolution* (nature), and (ii) biases from personal morals we grew into or learned (nurture). In seeing and hearing the world, we first become unconsciously aware of what we see and hear, that input is then filtered through our unconscious biases and then after that unconscious filtering of what we see or hear, we become consciously aware of maybe 0.001% of what our unconscious minds was aware of.

* For example, humans do not think in terms of statistics. That kind of conscious thinking has to be learned. To survive, humans did not need to think in terms of statistics, otherwise we either would not exist, or we would already innately think in terms of statistics. Our innate failure to properly account for numbers explains, for example, why most Americans grossly overestimate the danger of personal harm or attack from terrorists on American soil. That's just one bias we got from evolution, but the distortions of reality that that bias generates can be overcome to some extent by learning and conscious effort. Other evolutionary biases can be harder to somewhat or mostly counteract. I'm not sure if any evolutionary bias can be fully overcome.

Our feeble conscious minds: The little dribble of information we do become consciously aware of has been filtered through our unconscious biases. Those biases distort both the facts or reality we think we see and hear and the common sense we apply to what we think we see and hear. Being more objective (less biased) is tricky. It requires self-awareness and a will to be more objective. Being completely unbiased is impossible. Being less biased is possible.

In other words, our conscious minds are often fooled right from the get go. That makes finding objective facts significantly more complicated than one might think. That's why when liberals and conservatives disagree on something, it is the norm for them to significantly or completely disagree on what the facts are. Their different unconscious biases (morals, political ideology) often lead most (>95% ?) people to see things that fit their biases or fail to see things that contradict their biases. This vignette explains how that works for one political ideologue (a self-aware libertarian) who woke up to understand how his ideology had been distorting both facts and the common sense he applied to the facts he thought he did see:

"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 [an unconscious bias], in which our brain reasons our way to supporting what we want to be true. . . . Take gun control. I always accepted the libertarian position of minimum regulation in the sale and use of firearms because I placed guns under the beneficial rubric of minimal restrictions on individuals. Then I read the science on guns and homicides, suicides and accidental shootings . . . . . Although the data to convince me that we need some gun-control measures were there all along, I had ignored them because they didn't fit my creed."

If one accepts the reality of how the human mind usually or always operates in a subjective, reality distorting mode, it is easy to see the basis for profound disagreements over facts between liberals, conservatives and populists in the current presidential election.

If Americans were truly interested in being less biased, their differences of opinion and perceived facts would not disappear. However, they would narrow. The problem is getting past our innate human subjectivity and the massive difficulty in changing one's personal mind set.

B&B orig: 10/13/16

Empathy, conflict and war

Context: Among other aspects of human cognitive biology, social and cognitive science is intensely probing into the biological roots of conflict and war within societies and between nations. Given the disturbing human propensity for sectarian conflict and war in the nuclear bomb age, that is arguably one of the most important topics that science can explore.

After carefully listening to the Clinton-Trump debate last night and people's reactions to it, it now seems undeniable that relative to recent history, American politics is on a new and very dangerous path. Two major factors that underpin America's new direction are Donald Trump's caustic personality and public discontent, fear, anger and distrust. Given the biology of human cognition, that combination is toxic.

The science of empathy: This discussion is an attempt to describe some of the human cognitive biology that is driving a significant portion of the America mind set into treacherous territory. The following is based on a February 2016 interview with the cognitive scientist Emile Bruneau, an empathy researcher at MIT, and other sources including the book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Religion and Politics, by social psychologist Johnathan Haidt.

Bruneau observes that humans have biases that we may not always be willing or able to admit to. A large portion of our brain is implicit (operates unconsciously) and what happens we don't have conscious control over, including our biases or prejudices. This aspect of how our brain works allows humans to respond to the world and guide behavior without our knowledge or ability to control the process.

A decrease in empathy often arises when people in a group or society encounters opinions or arguments that run counter to the group's beliefs. Even well-reasoned counter opinions and objective facts are not persuasive for most people faced with contrary logic or fact. That isn't surprising. Human biases operate to inhibit people from reasoning objectively. Instead, we normally apply subjective reasoning to the world we think we see and the facts we believe are true. This is routine in politics.

In disagreements, e.g., liberal vs. conservative vs. populist, people in each group generally are uncritically in accepting arguments and interpretations of events that favor their opinions while critically examining or rejecting opposing interpretations and arguments. These biases are endemic and part of human biology. It isn't inevitable that biases always dominate, but our brains are potentiated or sensitized to think and act in accord with personal biases.

Overcoming those biases to some extent is difficult and doing it requires a will do to so and significant cognitive effort. It's hard work but, for better or worse, humans are usually lazy and easily distracted. Some people who can overcome their group's prejudices but what drives that is not understood and is now under study.

The second Clinton-Trump debate: By his explicit language and on-stage demeanor, Trump has divided people into groups. He and his group relentlessly attacks the opposition. Clinton is now responding in kind. Public reactions to the debate make it clear that the two sides profoundly detest and distrust each other. That drains empathy and dehumanizes the opposition. Dehumanizing the opposition makes the door to sectarian conflict easier to open. In terms of international relations, Trump's fury-driven attitude and words opens the door to international conflict, which can lead to war.

B&B orig: 10/10/16

The rationally irrational citizen

In his book, The Myth Of The Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, economist Bryan Caplan posits that most people operate in economic and other areas largely on the basis of rational irrationality. Caplan observes that although the private cost of an irrational personal action can be negligible, the social cost can be very high and vice versa. Like economic models for most any product, forces at play in shaping personal rational irrationality include preferences (personal demand) for an irrational behavior and the price the irrational actor pays for acting irrationally.

The implication is that as the personal price for an irrational act increases, the person is increasingly incentivized to consume less irrationality, i.e., they tend to act more rationally. All other things being equal, a high personal preference for a given irrational act tends to lead to more irrational behavior. When viewed like this, there is logic in irrationality, hence the label rational irrationality. And, it becomes clear that rational irrationality is not quite the same as rational ignorance, where voters stop searching for truth when the cost in effort to find truth is too high. By contrast, rational irrationality posits that people actively, but mostly unconsciously, avoid the truth.

This line of thinking gets even stranger when it’s applied to politics. It is well-known to social and political science that people’s beliefs and behaviors are often contradictory under varying circumstances. For example, people who assert strong protectionist beliefs about trade policy, usually don’t give much weight to a product’s national origin relative to the more important factors of the product’s price and quality.

That’s an example of people responding to fluctuating incentives, which unconsciously causes consumers to change viewpoints depending on the circumstances. One can stand back and level an accusation of hypocrisy, but this kind of behavior reflects a natural working of the human mind. So, if a politically protectionist consumer has a choice of buying a pair of jeans made in China for $40.00 or an equivalent pair made in the US for $60.00, it’s not unusual for the consumer to pick the imported product. In this example, the high cost of being politically rational or ideologically consistent is $20.00 per pair of jeans. That’s enough of an incentive to increase the politically irrational act of buying the import from the buyer’s point of view (but it’s a rational choice from the buyer’s economic point of view). If the price differential was lower, say only $8.00 per pair of jeans, maybe most protectionists would opt for the US product over the import to vindicate their ideological belief.

The point is that fluctuating incentives lead to different behaviors.

Caplan goes on to point out the psychological plausibility of rational irrationality, which he asserts “appears to map an odd route to delusion” in three steps. First, a person tries to find the truth (real or imagined), second they weigh the psychological cost of rejecting truth vs. the material (real world) costs, and third, if the psychological benefits of being wrong outweigh the material costs, the person will often “purge the truth from their mind and embrace error.” That self-delusion process may sound implausible, but it’s not. The mental process is mostly tacit or unconscious.

Looked at another way, people psychologically can afford to be irrational on topics where they have little or no emotional or psychological attachment to a given choice or answer, e.g., buying the cheap jeans from China for people who aren’t politically protectionist imposes no psychological cost. However, when there is an emotional or psychological attachment to a given choice or answer, but there’s little or no material cost of error, people will tend to believe whatever makes them feel best, even if they are wrong. On the other hand if there’s a significant material cost of error, people will tend to become more objective and they more critically and consciously weigh the psychological cost of breaking “comforting illusions” against the material cost of error.

Caplan takes care to point out that rational irrationality does not mean that all political views are always senseless or in error. Instead, it casts doubt on everyone’s political beliefs. The problem with rational irrationality is that it fosters both mistaken beliefs about how the world works and support for counterproductive political policies. Unlike shoppers for consumer goods, voters do not have clear incentives to be rational. Voting is not a slight variation on shopping. However, there are major psychological incentives for voters to set objectivity aside and be irrational.

As Caplan puts it: “Political behavior seems weird because the incentives that voters face are weird.” Maybe weird political behavior isn't weird. Weird politics is normal from the point of view of human cognitive biology.

B&B orig: 10/6/16

Church-state separation

Donald Trump recently promised anti-abortion groups that he would nominate anti-abortion judges to the supreme court. Although past republican candidates likely would have done so without saying it in public, this may be the first time a presidential candidate has publicly promised to do this.

Other Trump promises include a vow to made the Hyde Amendment permanent law and to eliminate the Johnson Amendment and funding for Planned Parenthood. The former amendment blocks use of tax dollars for abortions and the latter keeps religious organization from openly endorsing or opposing political candidates if they want to retain their tax exempt status. Anti-abortion and evangelical groups are ecstatic.

Based on his current rhetoric, one can argue that Trump advocates breaking down the church-state barrier at least as much as any major party nominee since the end of the second world war. Given the circumstances, Trump could get his way if he is elected in November. Although liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (83 years old) apparently has no intention of retiring any time soon, her public appearances clearly show she is very frail. How much longer she remains on the bench is not necessarily up to her formidable willpower. It is reasonable to believe that it is more likely than not that Justice Ginsberg's health will not allow her to remain on the bench until the end of the next president's term.

If Trump winds up with two of his picks on the supreme court, the door opens to remove much of what's left of the barrier between church and state. A second Trump term would no doubt give him one or two more slots to fill. That would ensure the end of any meaningful protection of the state (and taxpayers) from the church. Theocracy, first soft and quiet, then later harder, louder and more demanding, just might be in America's near future.

Every candidate for president always claims that their election is critical because the country is at a critical time in history. For this election, that just might be more true than spin for a change. Church-state separation is just one aspect of what would make it true.

Update: As of August 2019, the argument that the 2016 election was exceptionally important has turned out to be true.

B&B orig: 10/3/16

Unconscious bias in preschool

Navy Blue Angels at Miramar airshow 2012

(view from my office window)

A recent two-part study of 135 preschool teachers revealed a pervasive bias toward the children they teach. Teacher bias was reflected by their unconscious eye movements. Specifically, teachers unconsciously spent more time looking at black male children for signs of disruptive behavior than at children of other races.

Study part 1:To examine this unconscious behavior, lead researcher Walter Gilliam conducted an experiment that deceived the teachers about the study's purpose. The teachers were told "We are interested in learning about how teachers detect challenging behavior in the classroom. Sometimes this involves seeing behavior before it becomes problematic. The video segments you are about to view are of preschoolers engaging in various activities. Some clips may or may not contain challenging behaviors. Your job is to press the enter key on the external keypad every time you see a behavior that could become a potential challenge."

The real purpose of the study was to measure the teacher's eye movements as they watched the videos to see if there were any biases in how they watched children. Each video showed a black boy and girl and a white boy and girl, none of whom were engaging in any challenging behavior.

When teachers expected bad behavior, who did they watch? According to Gilliam, "what we found was exactly what we expected based on the rates at which children are expelled from preschool programs. Teachers looked more at the black children than the white children, and they looked specifically more at the African-American boy."

Statistics show that black children are 3.6 times more likely to be suspended from preschool than white children. Black children account for about 19 percent of all preschoolers, but nearly half of preschoolers who get suspended. Part of the reason for that could be that teachers spend more time focused on their black students, expecting bad behavior. According to Gilliam, "if you look for something in one place, that's the only place you can typically find it."

Asked to identify the child they believed needed the most attention, 42% of teachers identified the black boy, 34% identified the white boy, while 13% and 10% identified the white and black girls respectively.

Study part 2:Despite the bias reflected in the eye movement data, a second part of the study generated a counter intuitive result. The teachers were given a one-paragraph vignette to read, describing a child disrupting a class, including hitting, scratching, and toy-throwing. The child in the vignette was randomly assigned what researchers considered a stereotypical name (DeShawn, Latoya, Jake, Emily), and subjects were asked to rate the severity of the behavior on a scale of one to five.

White teachers consistently held black students to a lower standard, rating their behavior as less severe than the same behavior of white students. That data accords with research about how people can apply different standards and expectations of others based on stereotypes and implicit bias. If white teachers believe that black boys are more likely to behave badly, they may be less surprised by that behavior and rate it less severely. On the other hand, black teachers did the opposite and held black students to a higher standard, i.e., they rated black student behavior as consistently more severe than that of white students.

Some of the teachers were given information about the disruptive child's home life, to see if it generated empathy in the teachers. Teachers who received the background information reacted with more empathy and lowered their assessment of bad behavior's severity, but only if the teacher and student were of the same race.

According to Gilliam, "if the race of the teacher and the child were different and [the teacher] received this background information, severity rates skyrocketed. . . . [those] teachers ended up feeling that the behavioral problems were hopeless and that very little could be done to actually improve the situation."

That result is consistent with research on empathy. "When people feel some kind of shared connection to folks, when they hear more about their misfortunes, they feel more empathic to them. But if they feel that they are different from each other . . . . it may actually cause them to perceive that person in a more negative light."

Routine unconscious bias: This study is just another routine demonstration of how unconscious biases distort reality to generate false realities, false beliefs and behaviors that the misinformation inspires. Unconscious biases distort (i) what we think we see, (ii) and how we think about what we think we saw. The human mind is a two-layered distortion machine. The first layer of distortion arises in our unconscious minds and the second arises in how we apply conscious reason or common sense to the false realities we believe in.

Questions: Does the data described in this study have any real world relevance to outcomes for school children? Do unconscious biases distort reality or facts and how we think about it?

The NPR broadcast of this story is here:

B&B orig: 9/28/16