Living in Separate Realities

If I think you are highly biased (because we disagree so strongly), I won’t expect calm reasoning and an exchange of facts to be effective in influencing your position, so cooperating is likely a waste of time and effort. I might feel that an aggressive response (e.g., intimidating you or targeting your credibility) will have more of the desired effect – you thoughtless sack of stubbornness!

People are by default “naïve realists”: we believe that we see the world as it truly is in “objective reality”. A consequence of this belief is that if you don’t share my view of reality, and if I feel that yours is incompatible with mine, then you must either be ignorant, incapable, or unwilling to view things from an unbiased perspective.

This is an importantly universal and deceptive phenomenon Dr. Pronin calls the Bias Blind Spot: it’s easy and natural for us to perceive other people as biased and unreasonable, but much more difficult to identify unfair bias as such in ourselves. When we do recognize bias in ourselves, we tend to think of it as “obvious”, and in terms of “common sense” –not as an unreasonable, prejudicial, personal bias. And when our biases are pointed out, we feel threatened and respond by accusing the other party of holding a “worse” bias that somehow redeems or negates our own.

The Bias-Conflict Process is Highly Exploitable

Persuasion is the name of the game in politics. You must persuade as many people as possible that you are right and/or your opponents are wrong. If you listen carefully to political rhetoric, it is intentionally engineered to highlight and exaggerate the differences between one party and another, one candidate and another, one position and another.

Democrats are “socialists”; Republicans are “trying to tear down the government.” Democrats “want to run your whole life”, and Republicans “only care about the rich.” Corporations are “evil”, and sharing financial and occupational burdens is “communistic”. Libertarians “don’t want us to have roads or healthcare”, and just about everyone has been a “Nazi” and “un-American” (whatever that means) at one point or another in the course of a disagreement.

According to the mass media, there is a “War” on just about everything: from Christmas to Islam, from terrorism to sexuality, from poverty to traditional values, from science to faith, from homeopathy to insulin, from men to women to kids to freedom to a War on War itself.

The trick is to select abstract, extreme, and cleverly decontextualized words and phrases that in the end all communicate one thing: there’s a huge distance between our position and theirs. And the more we disagree with their positions, the more biased they must be, the less they’ll be willing to cooperate and compromise, and the more alienated we become to one another. Which makes them more threatening. So we dig our heels further into our position and attack theirs, which in turn leads them to perceive us as even more biased and unreasonable, and presto! Conflict intensifies, for reasons totally unrelated to the actual issues at hand.

Perhaps the classic example of extreme and prolonged large-scale conflict escalation is seen in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where both sides perceive the other as hopelessly wrong and biased, both and neither side is at fault, and both and neither side is “simply responding to unjust aggressions by the other”.

You can clearly see the symptoms of this psychological process in the American government today. The escalation of perceived conflict contributes to the polarization of opinions on every side, as a sense of urgency grows that something dramatic needs to be done. The recent government shutdown serves as a good example. The more urgent politicians and political analysts tell us “the situation” is, the more extreme measures that are deemed reasonable to pursue. And the more extreme measures each side puts forth, the more biased they appear and the less likely people are able to cooperate.

You may now start to get a sense for the strong psychological roots of the paralysis and disconnectedness the American government is demonstrating today.

Previously escalated conflict acts as a sort of black hole for new events and experiences. They get pulled in and distorted by the biased views of all sides of the conflict, each frantically searching for current events that either support their view or contradict someone else's. Recently the government began enacting the Affordable Care Act. There are clearly many reasonable benefits and many reasonable concerns such an act carries with it. On the one hand, it allows millions of people without health insurance to receive affordable medical treatment. On the other hand, it puts additional financial burden on taxpayers, and increases the government's reach into daily life. With the current intensified conflict between Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate, however, the ACA never really had a chance to speak for itself on its own terms. It was immediately pulled into the black hole of conflict, riding the slippery 90° slope down to either be blindly praised as a noble symbol of liberal values, or mutated into "Obamacare": an apocalyptic and fascist attack on personal and corporate freedom. It has become a tool for further polarizing people's opinions, rather than what it could be: a wonderful platform to improve our articulation and exploration of legitimate concerns with the differences in our values.

Some may complain that I'm making the same sequence of points over and over, and I am. It is notoriously difficult for people to actually identify their Bias Blind Spot and to notice when it's occurring in themselves in the course of a disagreement, as most psychological defense mechanisms exist for precisely this purpose: to defend you from ideas and facts that compromise your self concept and worldview.

Therapists often spend many, many sessions attempting to help their clients recognize when their automatic judgments about people and events are being distorted by biases in their perception of cause and effect. Clients will often recognize the bias in the session, express their insight and relief, and then show up a week later with a "new" problem that occurred in a different context, but demonstrates the same essential errors in judgment they felt they had overcome the week before. We are, not surprisingly, very attached to our beliefs -- especially when they are criticized or contradicted.

Conclusion: Disagreement is Valuable; Conflict is Toxic

There are few psychological phenomena that are so universally destructive as the escalation of conflict that occurs through the brewing of confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, and us vs. them thinking. It unnecessarily strains and destroys relationships between friends and lovers, between governments and nations, and between groups and organizations. If people were better able to identify their own biases and values, and recognize them as inherent to every human being, we might see more patience and understanding between groups of people who would love nothing more than to free themselves of the poison of hate and violence.

I feel that deep down, most people recognize their biases as irrational and exclusionary, but there is definitely a real pleasure in finding that your biases are shared by others. You help each other to rationalize the biases in new ways, thus validating and strengthening them. You don't only see this with ideologies or political orientations, but with sports team fans and school pride as well. Anything that increases your sense of belonging to something, and feeling valued by the members of a group you try to identify with.

Perhaps conflict is something innate to the evolution of our world and our species, and isn’t something we can eliminate. Disagreements are in fact an important part of the development of our values and collective problem solving abilities. Differences of opinion serve to protect a person, group and culture from stagnating in dogmatism and outdated, maladaptive coping mechanisms. It keeps a mind, a business, and a culture alive. In essence: disagreement tends to be healthy and constructive, conflict tends to be unhealthy and destructive.

It is a problematic balance of historic proportions: we must strive to encourage an atmosphere that permits the free expression of authentic disagreement, while valuing our demand for peace by preventing valuable disagreement from escalating to unnecessarily damaging conflict wherever possible. Where we fail in this, we all suffer.

So the next time you feel your position is being attacked and misrepresented by a friend or politician, take a moment and ask yourself, "Am I doing the same thing to them?"

References:

Kennedy, Pronin (2008). When disagreement gets ugly: perceptions of bias and the escalation of conflict. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 34(6): 833-48.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18469154