Paradigm Shift: Are You Hearing All the Facts?

Posted by Greg Allen on 07.17.2007

It's a experimentally validated fact, you watch the news in the wrong way. Thankfully, there's a cure.

Foreign Policy is ungodly complex and not just because the various desires of all parties are often mutually exclusive. The real problem is that everyone at the negotiating table has thinking organ ill suited to the task of negotiating.

Sound a little bit crazy? I assure you I am, but that has nothing to do with the validity of my assertion, which is of course entirely true. Don't take my word for it though; listen to the evidence:

"In one experiment, Israeli Jews evaluated an actual Israeli-authored peace plan less favorably when it was attributed to the Palestinians than when it was attributed to their own government. Pro-Israel Americans saw a hypothetical peace proposal as biased in favor of Palestinians when authorship was attributed to Palestinians, but as "evenhanded" when they were told it was authored by Israelis."

Source: Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Renshon at Foreign Policy Magazine. February 2007 Read the whole article (it's awesome) here

If you think that experiment only sheds light on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict you're an idiot. If you're starting to realize that experiment has relevance to every argument you've ever had, congratulations! There's hope for you yet. That experiment is just one tiny drop in the ocean of evidence proving that the default setting for a human being is irrationality. To progress past that setting means defying one's very nature, no small task, and unfortunately, it's a task those in power have yet to address openly.

Ever wonder how Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis and one of very few celebrity scholars in history, got so famous? He made his reputation off a patient called woman with a paralyzed arm that no doctor (until Freud) had been able to find the cause of. Freud's big insight was that there was no cause—no physical cause anyway. The paralysis was a mental affliction due to emotional trauma in the woman's past. His discovery, that it is possible for the mind of a person to affect that person without their conscious knowledge, was revolutionary. Even today we still use his term, subconscious, to denote such activity.
Well Freud didn't end his research into the subconscious with paralysis. Later he came up with all sorts of ways that subconscious thoughts and feelings can influence everyday actions. Plenty of the stuff he came up with was garbage, but much of it has been confirmed by contemporary psychologists. The most relevant to our discussion is the concept of rationalization.

It seems odd that "rationalization" would come up as an issue in psychology. After all, rationality is supposed to be the part of the human condition that lifts humans above all other animals. Unfortunately, even this supposed foundation of civilization is easily corrupted by the subconscious. After one has formed an opinion, it is exceedingly hard to be persuaded away from it. Psychologists have already discovered that evidence contradicting our previously held beliefs is given far less credence than evidence supporting those beliefs. It's the exact paradigm scientists fear most: we look for evidence that we're right, and discard (or discount) evidence that we're wrong. Can you imagine if Einstein had followed that formula? Methinks less of the world would be relative.

Thankfully, Einstein and most other scientists (tragically, not all) have moved past the inherent errors present in the human computer, but they are the exception and not the rule. I've already said we wouldn't have the theory of relativity if Einstein hadn't entertained the notion that everything he'd always believed might be wrong; think of all we might gain in other human endeavors if we all might again entertain that motion. Since this is supposed to be a political column, I'll move in that direction.

Here's a question I love to ask people: how different are your political beliefs from those of your parents? From your closest friends? If you answered "not very," then chances are you believe the way you do for reasons other than a rational evaluation of all the evidence. I guess theoretically it is possible that you and your parents just so happen to know every important detail of every issue, but it's more likely that you feel the way you do because your brain automatically assigns a greater significance to people you're familiar with and like than some old crone with a Ph. D on TV, even if the crone does happen to be an expert and your buddy is just talking out of his ass.

That's why it's so important that we all constantly challenge your beliefs and assumptions and entertain the notion that all your favorite notions might not be so intuitive after all. I don't think you're going to find a great deal of help from current political candidates (probably not until after the primaries when they start showing their true colors) or from the talking heads on TV (who seem to have no use for rationality anyway), but there are a few good syndicated columnists who write in the big newspapers (Paul Krugman and Thomas Friedman are usually pretty good on the Left, Charles Krauthammer and John Tierney do well for more rightward thinking (though Krauthammer's record has been blemished from time to time). Even better arguments lie in the more intellectual magazines and policy journals (hooray for The Economist , and the above link is to Foreign Policy). Last, if you know where to look, you can find well reasoned arguments on the internet (411 for instance).

Wherever you go to start yourself down the path freeing yourself from irrationality, always make sure that you're questioning evidence, whether it supports your view or not.

Though he has a million other faults, the worst in Bush's collection has to be his exaggeration of this natural malady. He surrounds himself with "diehard believers" and doesn't even bother listening opinions that differ from his own. He doesn't read newspapers; he has people screen the news for him. The result is a man with no basis for an accurate picture of the world, all he's been able to hear for the past seven years has been filtered to fit within his paradigm. I assure you. You can do better. Start.