Myside Bias

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Keith E. Stanovich writes,

one particular bias—myside bias—sets a trap for the cognitively sophisticated. Regarding most biases, they are used to thinking—rightly—that they are less biased. However, myside thinking about your political beliefs represents an outlier bias where this is not true. This may lead to a particularly intense bias blind spot among certain cognitive elites. If you are a person of high intelligence, if you are highly educated, and if you are strongly committed to an ideological viewpoint, you will be highly likely to think you have thought your way to your viewpoint. And you will be even less likely than the average person to realize that you have derived your beliefs from the social groups you belong to and because they fit with your temperament and your innate psychological propensities.

Interesting essay throughout. It was difficult to excerpt.

14 thoughts on “Myside Bias”

  1. Thy mother, it is she who brings thee forth, and to her thou owest all thy glory. Thou wouldst vanish into thyself, thou wouldst dissipate in boundless space, if she did not hold thee fast, if she swaddled thee not, so that thou grewest warm, and, flaming, gavest birth to the universe.
    – Novalis

  2. Gosh! Take that with your “Widespread statistical malpractice” link and I’m starting to get the impression that maybe I shouldn’t believe something I read just because it was published by a PhD.

    We should label this behavior so we can more easily warn people about the (just spitballing here) Fallacy of Appealing to Authority.

    (Sarcasm not directed to you, Prof. Kling, but rather at the continued need to point out the basics of critical thinking.)

  3. It would be much less of a concern for me if the deck wasn’t so stacked in the favor of one team…

    Team A: all of the major media outlets (sans one) + the nearly all of academia

    Team B: Fox News + a few small mom-and-pop media outlets (e.g. Quillette).

    Process the following scenarios through this reality. What does the equilibrium look like from a bias perspective?

    “In early May 2020, demonstrations took place in several state capitols in the United States to protest mandated stay-at-home policies, ordered in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Responses to these demonstrations fell strongly along partisan lines—one side deploring the societal health risks of the demonstrations and the other supporting the demonstrations. Only a few weeks later, these partisan lines on large public gatherings completely reversed polarity when new mass demonstrations occurred for a different set of reasons.”

    • One of the strange parts: given the massive intellectual discrepancy between Team A and Team B, why does Team A always coming out looking like a bunch of naive losers?

      My bet: they always always overplay their hand. Are you really going to come out in tacit support of rioters and criminals? Yes!

    • Team B
      The Presidency
      The Senate
      Majority of State legislators and governors
      The SC
      Most business leaders
      Most professionals

      Who has the power again?

      • You’ve completely missed the point. Please re-read and respond.

        Given the equilibrium that we have, how can it be that Team B is currently winning vs. Team A? Why does team A always come out like a bunch of naive losers even though they’ve got everything going for them from an intellectual thought perspective?

        Here is where we start to diverge:

        “Most business leaders
        Most professionals”

        Gonna need to see seem evidence for this. I’m guessing that most of these folks are on Team A.

      • It’s a complicated question as, in our system, power is distributed. But ultimately it’s SCOTUS and the hierarchy of influence over the elite consensus, so mostly the media and prestigious academics.

        Ask: who has the power to decide the exception? Who moves fashions? Who has the power to make your life hell without any ability to appeal to someone else to stop them? Everyone else is working in the shadow of those deciders and influencers, with surprisingly little room for maneuver despite their official titles and formally textual grants of authority.

          • The wreck of the Batavia and the Maoist disaster visited upon China both demonstrate that it takes a confluence of factors to turn a society upside down. There is a shock that triggers an upheaval—a shipwreck, a war, a depression, a famine, or political chaos. Authorities are discredited or absent and unable to mount an effective response. There also needs to be an organized authoritarian movement operating according to transformative, even apocalyptic beliefs, that can take advantage of the void. Finally, bad luck and the psychology of the society’s leaders both play a role.

            See, when I read this I dont think of women in pussyhats etc. I read this I think Trump and the Proud Boys – standing by. I think of Bill Barr. I think of gunmen in tactical – no ID – sweeping people up. Thats where the power resides. Quite frankly I am concerned for this country and it has nothing to do with which bathroom to use or whether to kneel for the national anthem.

          • @moo cow

            “I think of gunmen in tactical – no ID – sweeping people up”

            Um yeah, I’m thinking that this probably doesn’t exist, except perhaps in your imagination. Care to provide some evidence?

          • “Where the power resides” changes every 2-4 years; it’s probably going to change dramatically in a month (well ~3.5 months technically), and it’s disingenuous to pretend that illiberal tendencies on the left in the US are limited to bathroom laws. You’re being the mirror image of someone who says things like, ‘the left wants to get me fired, outlaw dissident speech, make me pay a white tax, and impose permanent lockdowns because global warming, but I’m supposed to be more concerned about Trump’s tweets?’

      • “Most business leaders” is debatable at best. “Most professionals” is probably false. The SC is demonstrably not partisan toward Republicans, and is just as willing to stand in their way as in Democrats’ way; 55% of the population lives under Democratic governors (for state legistlatures it’s ~37% blue, 41% red, and 22% purple).

        I wonder, will your concern invert if, in 3 months, Democrats control the presidency, the senate, and the house?

      • It’s also worth noting that non-political influence matters. For many people, more than political influence does. You’re more likely to get fired, expelled, denied tenure, or blacklisted for supporting (or taking a position shared with) the president than by opposing him or taking an opposite position. At every stage in the education system from kindergarten through college, you’re about 100x more likely to experience a left-of-center bias than a right-of-center one. Those are indications that we’re overrating the importance of political power. We’re living under a very peculiar white supremacist regime wherein it’s more socially/professionally acceptable to openly hate white people than to openly oppose discrimination against white people. How much power do they really have then?

  4. I feel the real problem is that all traditional preferences should be shunned or always rethought. I’m sorry that’s just wrong. Sometimes we fight over which preferences should be given priority. I think we shouldn’t argue that at the core, patriotism, the family, the community should be given preference. Not to the extreme of course. But the idea that policy should — for example — be biased in favor of “the world” or outsiders or those who don’t fit in with a national tradition as an often kneejerk reaction is just wrong.

    If there must be kneejerk reactions, tradition should win. If you believe you are a freethinker and this post upsets you, then this is why we will have a civil war.

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