Quake3World

Liberals are no strangers to confirmation bias after all

A study shows they would give up the chance to win money to avoid hearing ideas they disagree with. So much for the champions of enlightenment

By Alex Berezow

Touting slogans such as “Facts have a well-known liberal bias”, people on the Left have made clear they see themselves as the true heirs and defenders of the Enlightenment. New research, however, shows that they’re just as deluded as everybody else.

One study, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, concluded that conservatives and liberals were equally averse to listening to opposing viewpoints on hot-button issues, such as same-sex marriage. In fact, they were willing to give up the chance to win money just to avoid the unpleasantness of hearing an opinion they disliked.

A meta-analysis of 41 studies recently published on the Social Science Research Network reached a similar conclusion: there was no difference in partisanship between liberals and conservatives. As it turns out, “open-minded” liberals are plagued by confirmation bias to the same extent as “closed-minded” conservatives.

Consider Seattle, a city that voted 87 per cent for Hillary Clinton and is proudly one of the most progressive – and well educated – in the US. A warm embrace of scientific reality doesn’t come with the territory: Seattle isn’t terribly fond of biotechnology, rejecting GMOs and even vaccines. Rwanda’s childhood polio vaccination rate is higher than Seattle’s. As for other vaccines, including MMR, only five US states have higher exemption rates than Washington State. If liberalism translated into embracing science, we would expect places like Seattle to have vaccination rates of 100 per cent. Blame for “alternative facts” and “fake news” therefore, can’t be pinned solely on the Left or Right. Both are culpable.

Alternative realities
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has followed politics in recent years. Society, fuelled by hyperpartisan news outlets and social media echo chambers, has created alternative realities for us to inhabit, full of self-reinforcing platitudes and free of any pesky information that might upset fragile world views.

That may explain the current US phenomenon of the “Regressive Left”, as University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne called them, believing that – as he put it – “some positions aren’t just wrong, but [are] taboo to mention”.

The resulting absence of intellectual diversity has contributed to a toxic and intolerant American university culture. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, has documented how few conservatives there are in academia. In 1990, liberal academic psychologists outnumbered conservatives 4 to 1; today, the ratio is roughly 14 to 1.

Similar ideological exclusion was on display during the recent March for Science. Some protesters held signs that read, “Science is not a liberal conspiracy.”

That’s absolutely true. It is equally true, however, that science is for everybody – liberals and conservatives, atheists and believers. Twisting science into a bludgeon for political opponents is a gross perversion of humanity’s best attempt at secular knowledge. Worse, it does grievous damage to the institution of science. Trust in science has been falling among conservatives for decades.

As it turns out, turning science into a political weapon has backfired spectacularly. The good news is that the first step toward solving any problem is to admit that we have one. These new studies are a good first step.

Transient wrote:Probably the 'ooh'

Transient wrote:Probably the 'ooh'

Transient wrote:Personally I interpreted it as more akin to the 'ooh' from 'ooh eeh ooh ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang'.

Transient wrote:Personally I interpreted it as more akin to the 'ooh' from 'ooh eeh ooh ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang'.

As reported by CTV, the new guide would divide [Canadian] citizenship into “voluntary” and “mandatory” obligations. Shockingly, while paying taxes, filling out the census, and respecting treaties are all considered “mandatory,” the new guide plans to say that “respecting the human rights of others is voluntary.”

Eraser wrote:cherry picking words to make a point.