Why we can’t admit being wrong about politics

US President Donald Trump. Picture: AFP

I’ve spent much of the past 18 months waiting hopefully for other people to change their minds. On Brexit, on Donald Trump. So that they agree with me, and so the world can return to being a slightly better place. That is, after all, what we feel about our opinions. That we’re the ones who are seeing clearly, while those who disagree with us are confused. If there was a conjugation, it would be: I’m right, you’re misguided, he’s preaching lies. And each of us expects that as more evidence emerges to back us, we’re going to see a lot of converts to our cause.

Well, we could be a long time waiting. We’re educated to think we live in a fact-based society, that argument and proofs count, that rationality is the route to the best decisions. Most of us believe it, at least of ourselves if not of everybody else. But as soon as researchers start examining why we think as we do, it turns out that weighing evidence and searching for truth isn’t our priority at all.

We didn’t evolve to be disinterested evaluators of facts. We are more complicated than that, and the world is too complicated a place for us to be able to do it effectively. Our priority has always been psychological and social survival. We need to fit in with our groups and once we have a set of beliefs that lets us do that, we have strong incentives to defend them.

Enjoying the camaraderie of shared views is a pleasure because it strengthens our ties with others and protects us from exclusion. Expressing them strongly can win us higher status and approval. Scientists have found that reading political opinions we agree with gives us a dopamine hit. The essential need for this social bonding is infinitely more important to our existence than some tedious nit-picking demurral over whether what the group thinks is correct. That just alienates the people whose support we depend on. It’s akin to telling your partner that he laughs like a hyena or your boss that he talks too much. There would be a high price and no rewards for telling such truths.

Our desire to keep in with our groups works on multiple levels, conscious and unconscious. Research shows we instinctively believe and remember information that supports us, distrust or dismiss that which challenges us, and sometimes claim things that we must know to be untrue purely to display our loyalty.

In January there was an egregious example of the last when The Washington Post showed Trump and Clinton supporters photographs of Trump’s relatively thinly attended inauguration and asked whether his crowds had been larger than the packed ranks at Obama’s ceremony. One in seven Trump supporters, denying the clear visual evidence, said Trump’s crowd was bigger. This could not have been a literal interpretation of the picture. It was more important to Trump’s base to reinforce their allegiance to him than to admit a disconcerting fact.

Last year University of Southern California researchers took 40 liberals and used brain imaging to map their reactions when they were presented with arguments that strongly challenged their views, either on politics or on subjects like the importance of sleep, or fluoride. They found the areas of the brain that are thought to deal with self-identity, threat and anxiety lit up for the political questions, and that the subjects were far readier to change their minds on heart disease or the importance of early reading than on anything political, like abortion or immigration. On those topics they scarcely budged.

Lead author Jonas Kaplan observed “political beliefs are like religious beliefs, in that both are part of who you are and important for the social circle to which you belong ... To consider an alternate view, you would have to consider an alternative view of yourself”. Political challenges were interpreted by the mind much as if they were personal attacks. He concluded the brain feels compelled to protect the psychological self just as it is compelled to protect it physically.

This preference for groupthink over dialogue or alternative ideas is dangerous. Certainties are invigorating but they are likely to lead to confrontation or crisis as they collide with equally intractable political opponents or implacable economic realities.

It is depressing reading for those like me who were hoping that a whole raft of people would suddenly absorb the news on Brexit-­induced inflation, or Robert Mueller’s charges against Trump allies, and switch their support. Individual, fact-based persuasion won’t have much impact against the much more fundamental forces of belonging and identity. Arguments for or against any cause serve a powerful purpose but they are much less likely to change minds than to provide a gratifying reinforcement of pre-existing opinions for those who already share them. This tells us any political identity that springs out of a powerful experience of emotional bonding — Trumpism, Brexiteers, the Catalans — cannot be easily undermined by appeals to cool rationality. Those voters are responding to a different set of rules. The leaders or causes may implode, resign or prove so disappointing their supporters abandon them, but trying to combat them with factual analysis is to ignore fundamental human needs.

The Times