Reason’s Ron Bailey has an article I found fascinating:
Study Shows Smart Liberals, Conservatives, and Libertarians Are Easiest to Fool
We reason to persuade, not to find truth.
The above problem has long vexed me.
….both liberals and conservatives displayed ideological bias when assessing the validity of the cognitive reflection test. When climate change skeptics were characterized as open-minded, Republicans thought the test was nifty. When skeptics were branded as close-minded, more Democrats found the test results convincing. Thus, the study finds that the experimental “results were more consistent with a finding of symmetry than one of asymmetry with respect to ideologically motivated reasoning.” Ideology distorts both left-wing and right-wing thinking.
How true that rings with me. Of course, it confirms my own skeptical bias, and I am delighted to see my bias confirmed!
Do higher scores on the reflective cognition test temper political polarization? To get at this question, the study compared both liberals and conservatives who scored low on the reflective cognition test (the 62 percent of subjects who got no answers right) with liberals and conservatives scored higher (those who got an average of 1.6 answers right putting them in between the 80th and 90th percentile of the sample). In short, the researchers found that the higher either conservatives or liberals scored on the cognitive reflection test the more likely they were to judge the test as valid when its results supposedly confirmed their ideological views about climate change skeptics and vice versa. People skilled at systematic reasoning use that capacity to justify their beliefs rather seek out truth.
I’ve been seeing that for years, and complaining about it on this blog, by God!
Of course, comrades, we libertarians are cut from a different cloth, and made of stronger stuff, aren’t we?
Uh, maybe not:
Kahan notes in passing that social psychological research has found that political independents and libertarians score better on the cognitive reflection than do liberals or conservatives (check your answers below). But before we libertarians and independents start patting ourselves on our collective backs for being the better systematic reasoners, could this simply mean that we are especially good at justifying our beliefs to ourselves?
Much as I strive for cognitive reflection, I have my biases as much as anyone else, and no doubt they cloud my judgment. I don’t think I will ever be bias-free, and while I cannot claim absolutely that no bias-free person exists in the world, I have yet to meet one. I try to admit my biases, although I don’t always succeed.
The people who worry me the most are not so much the biased ones, but the ones who claim to be unbiased and actually believe it.
Comments
2 responses to “My bias is the truth and you’d better believe it!”
A simple test is how do you feel when challenged?
Can you give up a cherished assumption?
The goal of science is to be purely fact based, but even there we *know* that people will go to great lengths to avoid giving up a cherished assumption.
I generally judge a person’s flexibility by how they justify their positions rather than the positions themselves for that reason.
I thought it was interesting that the second question assumes they are identical machines operating in parallel. The answer they give as correct seems the more likely one, but one might also read the situation as “each machine adds a minute of processing time to the process of producing a widget.”