(Audio Version here)
Recently, a writer I subscribe to wrote a note asking why it seemed that most of the right-wing men she encountered were belligerent, ignorant, trashy and repugnant. She acknowledged that it is not reasonable to write off half the political spectrum in this way but also noted a trend. She called for men on the right to become more thoughtful, well-informed and respect-worthy thinkers. It is unlikely to be true that most right-wing men are so personally objectionable and I responded to this suggesting that a negativity bias might be in play. On thinking further, I think several common cognitive biases are in play when we regard an entire political tribe as defined by deeply malevolent qualities. These include the outgroup homogeneity bias, subtyping, confirmation bias and motivated reasoning.
While this was a self-aware post by someone taking issue with a political tribe she felt had some genuinely sound principles and could do better, it is more typical for people to regard a political group as populated by unambiguously bad actors when it is one whose principles they do not have sympathies with and whose worst manifestations are the ones that most concern them.
It has been particularly common to attribute such absolute and blanket condemnation to the political left in recent years and for good reason. Principled conservatives have rightly objected to having criticisms of issues like immigration policy, gender identity and Critical Social Justice (woke) identity activism around issues like race written off with accusations of white supremacy, misogyny, transphobia, extremism and fascism. Less principled individuals on the right have used this as justification for vice signalling in which they play up to these accusations.
This is not unique to the left however, and we frequently hear people on the right decry ‘the left’ as ubiquitously holding the most extreme beliefs to be found on that side, accompanied by claims that they are characterised by deeply dogmatic and intolerant beliefs, a refusal to engage in reasoned argument, a disregard for the truth and a personally abusive communication style. The same personal qualities are also commonly ascribed to those on the right by partisans on the left. Yet surveys like Hidden Tribes show us that only a minority of people have extreme views and regard these as central to their identity.
Of course, social media plays a huge role in amplifying the worst voices. A provocative post expressing extreme political views on X is likely to be shared thousands of times with accompanying outrage by people on the other side of the political spectrum, while a reasonable comment making a thoughtful point is liable to be seen by a handful of people. Echo chambers form and algorithms feed them until the perception that ‘the other side’ is utterly unhinged and deeply malevolent can seem like an evidenced position to those who spend too much time online and do not actively seek out politically diverse media sources.
I do not think this entirely explains the problem, however. Social media is driven, in the first place, by human drives and inclinations. Why do so many choose to pay much more attention to extreme provocateurs than thoughtful commenters in the first place? Why do we form ourselves into political tribes online despite having the opportunity to access the widest range of views? And why do we feed algorithms in ways that make them feed us back a constant stream of the political narratives we already believe in? I would argue that a number of very common and deeply hardwired cognitive biases are going on here and that we would all do well to be aware of them and try to mitigate them in ourselves.
Negativity Bias
Negativity bias describes the human tendency to give greater weight and attention to negative information than to that which is positive or neutral.
Negativity bias refers to the psychological tendency of individuals to prioritize negative information and experiences over positive ones. This phenomenon is supported by various studies across psychology and social sciences, indicating that it affects people of all ages and backgrounds, including infants, though it may diminish with age. The bias can significantly influence emotions, mood, relationships, and even societal dynamics, leading individuals to remember negative events more vividly than positive ones.
It is hypothesised that humans developed this bias because it has benefited our survival to be more aware of potential threats than of things that are going well. In our daily lives, this could look like being more aware of a single member of a group who is unfriendly than a far greater number who are friendly and concluding that the group is hostile. It could present itself as remembering one social event that went badly much more vividly than ten that went well and concluding that we do badly at social events. Writers might well notice this bias in themselves when they find themselves dwelling upon a single critical comment on a piece to the extent that they overlook the reality that the vast majority were positive!
In our currently politically polarised times which are characterised by a high degree of anxiety about the future and the state of society, we are perhaps particularly likely to be most aware of those on the other side of the political spectrum epitomising the very things we fear most and much less so of those being generally normal and decent people with many of the same concerns we have. This kind of selective noticing tends to make the irrational, illiberal people on the other side seem a much larger proportion of the group than they really are while the more moderate and reasonable people stay beneath our radar and become largely invisible.
Out-Group Homogeneity Bias
This bias manifests in a form of stereotyping where we recognise considerable variation in our own group but attribute a collective ‘character’ to other groups.
The out-group homogeneity bias, often referred to as the out-group homogeneity effect, constitutes a significant cognitive distortion in social psychology where an individual perceives members of an out-group as being substantially more similar to one another than are members of their own in-group. This effect can be succinctly summarized by the colloquial phrase, “They are all alike; we are diverse.” This psychological phenomenon suggests that while we recognize and appreciate the nuanced differences, varied personalities, and individual complexities within our own social circles or groups, we tend to lump members of external groups into a generalized, undifferentiated category.
This is surely not difficult to understand when we think about how this would work in practice. In order to thrive as social mammals living within groups that also encounter other groups, we need heuristics to guide our dealings with other groups but a much greater awareness of distinctions, factions, currents and individuals within our own. A problem arises when we are not aware that we are doing this and assume that our own group really is much more varied and members of it should consequently be evaluated by subgroup and individuality while another really is comprised of a solid homogeneous block of opinions, attitudes and behaviours and it is rational and ethical to evaluate members of it accordingly.
A devout Christian, for example, will certainly be aware of the different denominations of Christianity and which one he belongs to and of the varied theological interpretations and disputes about their application that exist even within that denomination and of distinct ideas and behaviours of individuals within that. He may not feel the need to have the same fine-grained understanding of Islam, but be satisfied with a general, accurate idea of the overarching beliefs and values of Islam. A Muslim might well feel similarly about Christianity. But if an Anglican is held complicit in a particular narrative arising in a Catholic quarter or a Sufi is assumed to approve attitudes exhibited by a branch of Salafis, they will likely respond indignantly that these are nothing to do with them. They may or may not recognise a parallel error when applied to the other group and consequently generalise negatively, resulting in tensions between the groups.
We are also likely to do this when it comes to political positions. Communists, socialists, social democrats, the labour tradition, the Critical Social Justice (woke) movement and left-liberals are all currents on the left which may overlap in places but be utterly opposed in more. The same is true of ethnonationalists, Christian Nationalists, social conservatives, traditional conservatives, liberal conservatives, libertarians and classical liberals on the right. When people on the left recognise themselves as diverse but characterise those on the right as ethnonationalists and Christian nationalists while people on the right see their own distinctions clearly but see everybody on the left as communists and woke (influenced by a negativity bias), political discourse is likely to get very fraught indeed and resolving differences and finding common ground extremely difficult.
Subtyping
Subtyping is a way of explaining away divergent ideas within a group so they need not trouble totalising narratives about the group.
Subtyping refers to a process whereby people come to view individuals who don't fit a stereotype as exceptions or as poor members of a group. The concept is important because it explains why people often do not change their stereotypes in the face of disconfirming information. Subtyping involves psychologically fencing off deviant group members so that perceivers need not consider information about those individuals when thinking about the group as a whole.
This quite clearly works both internally and externally.
Internally, it allows people to distance themselves from and/or invalidate factions or members of their group who are being inconvenient to the group’s self-conception and sense of cohesiveness. Illiberal identitarians on the right can be dismissed by mainstream conservatives as fringe lunatics to whom nobody listens while those on the left can be minimised as an inevitable few daffy academics and overzealous students by left-wing moderates. Alternatively, Never Trumpers on the right can be invalidated by diagnosis with Trump Derangement Syndrome and those critical of woke conceptions of anti-racism as suffering from White Fragility or being inauthentically black. Islamic extremism can be declared Nothing To Do with Islam to preserve the Religion of Peace narrative, and liberal and reforming Muslims critiquing illiberal aspects of Islam declared not to be true Muslims and suffering from Islamophobia.
Externally, the same reasoning emerges but to protect a narrative of that group being cohesively bad. If one wishes the whole group to be characterised by irrational, illiberal extremists, one can find ways to invalidate members of that group offering disconfirming evidence. They will be regarded as exceptions to the rule and then, most commonly, simply ignored. Alternatively, reasons will be found for why they are not really a member of that group including circular reasoning that they do not fit the negative stereotype and are despised by those who do. They may also be asserted to hold the radical and alarming views really but be concealing them or to be complicit in enabling them simply by continuing to identify themselves as on that side of the political spectrum. Often the exceptions to the negative stereotype rule can produce more anger and hostility precisely because they do not conform to the stereotype and thus trouble the narrative.
Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias is the problem we all have where we are prone to finding evidence and arguments more convincing when they support what we already believe to be true or right while being much more critical thinkers able to spot flaws in those we disagree with.
Confirmation bias is a cognitive tendency to prioritize information that reinforces existing beliefs while ignoring contradictory evidence. This bias can lead you to cherry-pick facts that support your views, making it challenging to perceive an unbiased reality. Recognizing and overcoming confirmation bias involves actively considering all evidence, not just the data that aligns with your preconceived notions.
It is impossible to entirely overcome confirmation bias. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist who has written about this extensively and found that even when people try very conscientiously to think critically about their own views and be open to evidence supporting those of others, they are still much better at detecting evidentiary weaknesses in the arguments of those with whom they disagree. I certainly found this when editing Areo in which I aimed to publish good arguments from across the political spectrum including those with which I strongly disagreed. I became aware of having higher standards of evidence for pieces from a political standpoint I did not agree with and had to be very conscientious and also use reviewers with a range of political stances. Viewpoint diversity is, ultimately, the most effective way to mitigate this problem. As Haidt writes:
[E]ach individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds, usually for intuitive reasons. We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.
This compounds the problem of negativity bias, outgroup homogeneity bias and subtyping. If you already believe that everybody on the other side of the political spectrum is an irrational, illiberal lunatic, you will be prone to noticing particularly those who are and using this to confirm your existing view while ignoring those who disconfirm it. You will also be likely to detect the poorly evidenced and reasoned claims of that group while overlooking any good points they might make.
Motivated Reasoning
Motivated reasoning is the close companion of confirmation bias and overlaps with it. It helps explain why we are invested in arriving at or defending particular conclusions and how that influences our reasoning.
Motivated reasoning is a form of reasoning in which people assess, construct, and evaluate arguments in a biased fashion to arrive at or endorse a preferred conclusion. The term motivated in motivated reasoning refers to the fact that people use reasoning strategies that allow them to draw the conclusions they want to draw (i.e., are motivated to draw).
We see this very clearly when people argue well for freedom of speech and refute claims that equate speech with harm in some cases but start making those same arguments in a different scenario. If you find that you believe it is illiberal and wrong to try to get people fired or have them arrested for expressing political views or making off-colour jokes on social media when the targets of those statements are left-wing ideas or identity groups defended by the identitarian left but that a principled case can be made for it when it is right-wing ideas or groups defended by the right, or the other way round, you might be engaging in motivated reasoning. Likewise, if you completely see the problem with ‘lived experience’ being used as authoritative evidence to support a truth claim when it is “Black people are being lynched daily by police” but think it is a sound epistemology when the claim is “Violent crime has skyrocketed in London due to immigration,” despite both those claims being demonstrably false, again, you might be engaging in motivated reasoning.
It is, again, impossible to entirely overcome motivated reasoning. It is natural to us to feel that something is true or right and then construct reasoning to justify that conclusion. Again Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind is excellent for understanding this and considers evolutionary explanations of why humans did not evolve an “inner scientist” which motivates us to always seek unbiased truth (which would seemingly be useful), but instead an ‘inner lawyer’ which motivates us to make the best case for what we already believe or want to be true. He hypothesises that it has been more beneficial to our survival to cohere around tribal narratives than seek cold, unvarnished truth. It’s not invariably useful now and is a major cause of political polarisation. Our inner lawyers incline us to seeing our own tribes as defined by their best and most defensible positions and factions and the opposing ones as defined by their worst and least defensible.
The Problem With This
Of course, the term for the overarching problem within our societies of anxious, tribal apes right now is “political polarisation” with its self-reinforcing impact of increasing dogmatism, hostility and justification of political violence, radicalism and the escalation of an anxiety that incentivises the creation of political platforms and leaders with deeply illiberal ideas.
However, it is difficult for us as individuals to see ourselves as equipped for taking on such a monumental problem as ‘political polarisation.’ It’s just too big and can feel like a colossal force threatening to overwhelm us and making us feel a need to take refuge with whichever side feels less immediately threatening.
What we can do, however, is address our own thinking and be aware of the cognitive biases we are prone to and the way this impacts our engagement with other people. From this perspective, the core of the problem is that we are engaging increasingly in totalising thinking and these polarising stereotypes make the reasonable people who contradict these stereotypes disappear.
I want to break down the thinking that occurs here, using my own experience of being made to disappear from the left by both right-wing and left-wing totalising thinkers in political discussions. It is up to you to form your own judgements about whether I count as a reasonable person, but it is demonstrably true that I am on the left and also am neither ‘woke’ nor a communist.
I am made to disappear from the left by identitarian leftists using the standard ‘purity spiral’ reasoning that looks like this:
1) All true leftists support the good and noble values of the Critical Social Justice (woke) movement.
2) Helen is on the left.
3) Helen does not support the values of the Critical Social Justice movement or think them good.
These cannot all be true and because they are so deeply invested in 1) they decide that 2) is false, despite my lifelong membership of the Labour Party, my economic stances and my open support of policies that prioritise class issues like workers’ rights, affordable housing and welfare programmes and my progressive views that oppose racism, sexism, homophobia etc. This is a fairly simple process that we are all likely familiar with. It differs from arguments more commonly made by socialists and liberals on the left that argue that another branch of the left is failing to uphold certain important values that should predominate on the left, but still accepts this as the left’s problem to fix. This is my attitude towards the Critical Social Justice movement. Instead, I am referred to as being on the right and even far-right or fascist.
However, the vanishing of me from the left can also come from those on the right. I am frequently told by people on the right who know my stances and appreciate my work that the entirety of the left are illiberal, irrational, identitarian lunatics. This has puzzled me because my own position on the left is not at all ambiguous. They typically know this but have not mentally categorised me as on the left in the context of protecting their totalising political resentments. The following process has happened with regard to three premises:
1) The left are all irrational, illiberal, identitarian loons.
2) Helen is on the left.
3) Helen is reasonable and cares about individual liberty and treating people as individuals.
Again, these cannot all be true at the same time. One of them has to go. They are not willing to relinquish 1). Those who don’t particularly appreciate me or my work may well dispense with 3) and inform me I hold all kinds of irrational and illiberal views I demonstrably do not hold. But those who have been with me for a while and feel some respect and warmth for me will make things work by removing 2) from the equation. It becomes:
The left are all irrational, illiberal, identitarian loons.
Helen is not an irrational, illiberal, identitarian loon.
Therefore, Helen is not on the left.
Repeat this (largely intuitive) reasoning with every reasonable left-wing individual and the entirety of the left is necessarily defined by irrational, illiberal lunatics. This protects the simple black and white narrative of good vs evil which feels necessary when people are experiencing existential anxiety.
Meanwhile, the same process is happening among black-and-white thinkers on the left in relation to those on the right who do not hold the radical views which most concern them. In order to protect their own simplistic narrative of good and evil, they must either be claimed to hold them really (think ‘dog whistles’) or simply be removed from their mental category of ‘on the right.’ At the same time, the usual purity spirals are happening on the right too and conservatives with long-established right-wing principles, voting histories and policy positions are relabelled by their illiberal, radical elements as on the left, if not woke.
The Solution?
The way to address this is to make deliberate efforts to think better and engage with others in ways that facilitate this. Be aware of the cognitive biases we are all prone to, notice when they are in play in your thinking and attempt to mitigate them. This can be very rewarding and enrich all aspects of life, enabling us to reach a better understanding of our own motivations, fears, anxieties and values and have better relationships generally, both personal and intellectual.
Avoid echo chambers on social media and read a wide range of media sources. Actively look for people whose philosophical, political or religious views you do not share but whose thinking you can respect. If you are going to engage in discussion and debate, try to develop a more granular understanding of factions and currents on the other side and where they overlap and conflict. Practice being able to convey the stance of those with whom you disagree as they would present it themselves. This will not only help you to find more common ground that you thought possible, but also enable you to develop your own arguments and articulate them better and in ways that are more likely to be persuasive, if not to the people you engage with, to onlookers.
Think through your own principles and, ideally, write them down. This will help prevent them from sliding about for convenience and becoming vulnerable to accusations of inconsistency, if not hypocrisy. Remember that other people can see the flaws in our own arguments much better than we can and we are far more able to persuade other people if we develop a reputation for integrity and ethical consistency. This is also the best way to help hold one’s own political tribe steady and work against its strongest voices being purely reactive and escalating in partisan polarisation.
Try to meet people where they are when you speak to them. We humans have persistent cognitive biases but we also deeply appreciate being seen accurately and have a strong drive for reciprocity. A discussion that begins with one person accusing the other of holding all kinds of horrible views they know themselves not to hold can never convince them of the rightness of the other’s position, but it will very likely make them reciprocate by accusing them of holding all the most objectionable and least defensible views held by the fringes of their own tribe. If we can, instead, meet someone with an accurate account of their own views, framed in ways they will recognise, and agree with as much of it as we can, they are much more likely to want to come forward themselves and reciprocate by acknowledging the best in our own. This will probably not result in a resolution of all differences but they are likely to leave with a better understanding of the counterview and an impression of their political opponents as ‘not evil’ which can influence how they engage in future.
When we permit ourselves to think in lazy, biased and motivated ways that systematically make reasonable and ethical people disappear from our conception of opposing political groups, we caricature the entirety of those groups as radically illiberal and irrational threats. We then trigger our own threat responses and become more fearful and hostile towards them and more inclined to embrace the radically illiberal and irrational voices in our own groups who promise to protect us from them while also incentivising the opposing tribe to do the same. In short, indulging the cognitive biases that make reasonable and ethical people disappear also helps create cultural conditions in which unreasonable and unethical people can take power. We can all play a part in interrupting that process.
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Thank you very much for another inspiring post in your longstanding and ongoing attempt to facilitate better thinking in both yourself and others. Having finished reading it, I decided to ask ChatGPT for a comprehensive taxonomy of commonly identified critical thinking errors and received the following very thorough response: https://chatgpt.com/share/6ae0f8f6-3690-83eb-b513-e7a1e4739876
I like the title. I think that anyone trying to make Helen disappear is likely to be disappointed. I think that the greater difficulty is that arguments are made in snippets on social media, everyone is aiming at gotcha takes. It spills over into longer forms of writing and conversation as well. If is hard for people to believe that one side could actually help you figure out your own position in conversation with those who are in disagreement with you. Our bad habits have become endemic and there are few places like the old debates between John Kenneth Galbraith and William F. Buckley Jr on Firing Line. Watching the debates today is just not the same, there is a sense of seriousness in those encounters, but it is tempered by the desire to know better, not just get the better of someone else. Thanks for the post.