Arnold Kling examines how people avoid truth in politics:
I am going to suggest that democratic politics is a very poor information-processing mechanism. The great mass of people form their political beliefs with little regard for facts or logic. However, the elites also have a strategy for avoiding truth. Elites form their political beliefs dogmatically, using their cleverness to organize facts to fit preconceived prejudices. The masses' strategy for avoiding truth is to make a low investment in understanding; the elites' strategy is to make a large investment in selectively choosing which facts and arguments to emphasize or ignore.
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The general public follows what I would call a "low-investment" strategy for avoiding the truth. They do not know the names of their representatives. They do not know the difference between a Sunni and a Shia. They do not know the approximate size of the Budget deficit or its outlook. And so on.
Kling cites research finding public opinion changes randomly, reflecting no coherent ideology. However, having a coherent ideology might not lead to better outcomes:
Rush Limbaugh and Paul Krugman clearly fall within the elite, according to the standards set by Converse and other opinion researchers. They know the facts about the structure of the American political system and the identities of major office-holders. They understand the connections between various beliefs. They maintain consistent positions, and their opinions are highly predictable, unlike the unstable, random positions that show up in polling of the mass public.Limbaugh and Krugman may not necessarily be wrong (although it is hard for both of them to be right). However, both follow strategies that are designed to reinforce prior beliefs of conservatives and liberals, respectively. They highlight information and arguments that support their prior beliefs. When they encounter contrary evidence, they engage in "motivated skepticism," seeking to undermine the credibility or minimize the significance of the adverse information.
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One of my strongly-held beliefs, for which I tend to attract supporting evidence and repel contrary arguments, is that markets process information more effectively than does the political process. Perhaps it as an exaggeration to refer to the market as the "world of truth," as Tim Harford does in The Undercover Economist. However, it strikes me that it is easier for market forces to drive a bad firm out of business than it is for political forces to extinguish a policy that fails to meet the objectives that purportedly drive its enactment.Those who believe in the wisdom of the political process might argue that the competition between political elites--between Democrats and Republicans or between Krugman and Limbaugh--promotes reasonable outcomes. However, I suspect that the net result of this competition is to lead to greater accretion of government power, giving the elites more to fight over. Politics ultimately becomes a competition to promise the undeliverable, whether it be better public education, inexpensive health care, or government suppression of drug abuse or sexual immorality.
How do you fight your biases? Kling's article implies you could do so by reading your political opposites' opinions more sympathetically, but not many have that capacity.
Posted by Walter at January 5, 2007 11:05 AMIt seems to me the only way to remove partiality from belief is to allow yourself to believe what you think is false. This is hard to do (perhaps impossible), but in my own experience as a former Christian, now agnostic/atheist, if you won't allow yourself to accept the consequences of a contrary idea, you'll never give the idea a fair chance. Such was the case for me as a Christian examining arguments against faith - I couldn't accept the consequences, so good arguments were left undecided - as if I'd get some later revelation that would disprove them. Now that I'm on "the other side" (if that's what it is), when I make fairly bulletproof arguments to believers who are friends, they'll say things like "Hmm ... that's interesting. I've never thought of it that way. I don't know ..." and the discussion ends.
I think bias is only removed if you're willing to concede. Thus, the way to fight bias is to allow yourself to concede when you are proven incorrect.
Posted by: Neal at January 9, 2007 11:09 AMReligion is a bit different than public policy as far as biases go, or at least it should be.
In the public policy realm I think you don't have to allow yourself to believe what you know to be false, only to not automatically disbelieve data which contradicts your biases.
Posted by: Walter at January 10, 2007 06:51 PM