1) Motivated reasoning: rooting for a team changes your perception of the world
The key psychological concept for understanding politics, and one of the oldest, is motivated cognition, or motivated reasoning. It often means that rooting for a team alters our perception of reality.
[…]Our teams are lenses through which we interpret the world.
[…]One crucial thing to know about motivated reasoning is that you often don’t realize you’re doing it. We’re quicker to recognize information that confirms what we already know, which makes us blind to facts that discount it.
Which is perhaps why being on a team makes us more susceptible to believing in and remembering false news stories.
[…]And it can cause us to rationalize the logically absurd.
[…]When the status of our teams changes, so do our opinions.
2) Evolution has likely left us with an ideological immune system that fights off uncomfortable thoughts
Avoiding facts inconvenient to our worldview isn’t just some passive, unconscious habit we engage in. We do it because we find these facts to be genuinely unpleasant. They insult our groups and, by extension, us. So we reject these facts, like our immune system would reject a pathogen. […] It’s often not the facts themselves that people fear and avoid. It’s where they lead. This is called “solution aversion.”
3) Leaders like Trump have enormous power to sway public opinion
The truth is that many people don’t think all that often, or all that deeply, about policy. When we’re confronted with a hard question like, “What do I think about tax policy,” we often substitute it for an easier question: “What might leaders of my party say about tax policy?”
4) People can understand inconvenient facts. But it’s very hard to make them matter.
Studies find that people who know more facts about politics are more likely to be stubborn and partisan. We don’t use our smarts to get at the truth. Instead, “people are using their reason to be socially competent actors,” says Dan Kahan, a psychologist at Yale. Put another way: We have a lot of pressure to live up to our groups’ expectations. And the smarter we are, the more we put our brain power to use for that end. […] “The smarter the person is, the dumber politics can make them,” Ezra Klein explained in a profile of Kahan’s work. […] The pattern is consistent: The more information we have, the more we bend it to serve our political aims. This is another point where the debate over “fake news” is misguided: It’s not the case that if only people had perfectly true information, everyone would suddenly agree.
5) It’s really hard to change political opponents’ minds by arguing with them
The answer to polarization and political division is not simply exposing people to another point of view.
[…]A psychological theory called “moral foundations” can help explain why our arguments often fail spectacularly at changing minds.
Moral foundations is the idea that people have stable, gut-level morals that influence their worldview. The liberal moral foundations include equality, fairness, and protection of the vulnerable. Conservative moral foundations favor in-group loyalty, moral purity, and respect for authority.
Moral foundations explain why messages highlighting equality and fairness resonate with liberals and why more patriotic messages like “make America great again” get some conservative hearts pumping.
[…]The thing is, we often don’t realize that people have moral foundations different from our own. When we engage in political debates, we all tend to overrate the power of arguments we find personally convincing — and wrongly think the other side will be swayed.
6) White people’s fear of being replaced is a powerful motivator
It’s easy to think these fears are abhorrent and confined to just people on the fringe. But they also do exist, to a smaller degree, among the mainstream, and among people who might not consider themselves to be racist.
[…]When people hear of one group rising in numbers, “a sense of a zero-sum competition between groups is activated,” Maureen Craig, who has collaborated with Richeson, says. When people hear about the rise of one group, they automatically fear it will mean a decline in their own. This happens even in well-intentioned people.
What this doesn’t mean is that all white people harbor extreme racial animus. It means fear is an all-too-easy button for politicians to press. We fear unthinkingly. It directs our actions. And it nudges us to believe the person who says he will vanquish our fears.
7) It’s shockingly easy to grow numb to the suffering of others
As the number of victims in a tragedy increases, our empathy, our willingness to do something, reliably decreases. This tendency is called psychic numbing. It describes how tragedies turn into abstractions in our minds, and how abstractions are easily attenuated and even ignored. “There is no constant value for a human life,” University of Oregon psychologist Paul Slovic, the leading expert on psychic numbing, said in an interview. “The value of a single life diminishes against the backdrop of a larger tragedy.” The feeling system doesn’t really add,” Slovic explains. “It can’t multiply; it doesn’t handle numbers very well.”
8) Fake news preys on our biases — and will be incredibly hard to stamp out
Fake news is so pernicious because it preys on our biases. “Fake news is perfect for spreadability: It’s going to be shocking, it’s going to be surprising, and it’s going to be playing on people’s emotions, and that’s a recipe for how to spread misinformation,” Miriam Metzger, a UC Santa Barbara communications researcher, says.
[…]False stories are often more surprising than real stories.
What’s frustrating is that algorithms like YouTube’s recommended video feed, or Facebook’s newsfeed, or Google News, often promote false stories (perhaps in part because we tend to find this content engaging).
But each time a reader encounters one of these stories on Facebook, Google, or really anywhere, it makes a subtle impression. Each time, the story grows more familiar. And that familiarity casts the illusion of truth.
Psychologists call this the illusory truth effect. It’s the simple finding that the more often a lie is repeated, the more likely it is to be believed.
When you’re hearing something for the second or third time, your brain becomes faster to respond to it. “And your brain misattributes that fluency as a signal for it being true,” says Lisa Fazio, a psychologist who studies learning and memory at Vanderbilt University. The more you hear something, the more “you’ll have this gut-level feeling that maybe it’s true.”
9) Conspiracy theories may be rampant — but they’re a specific reaction to a dark, uncertain world
Conspiracy theories are a type of motivated reasoning. […] But there’s also a more empathetic way to view conspiracy theorists: “It’s a self-protective mechanism people have,” Jan-Willem van Prooijen, a psychologist who studies conspiracy theories, told me. The theories are a tool by which people can feel more in control and find explanations in a scary and turbulent world.
People who feel powerless and who are more pessimistic are also more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, van Prooijen finds. And this is where education and outreach can help. Achieving higher levels of education correlates to feeling more secure about the world, and this, in turn, seems to protect against a conspiratorial mindset.
Source: Vox (October 23, 2018)
Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior
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