Hello There, Guest! (LoginRegister)

Post Reply 
The science behind political behavior
Author Message
At Ease Offline
Banned

Posts: 17,134
Joined: Jun 2005
I Root For: The Rice Owls
Location:
Post: #1
The science behind political behavior
Quote:Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

Something is rotten in the state of American political life. The U.S. (among other nations) is increasingly characterized by highly polarized, informationally insulated ideological communities occupying their own factual universes.

....

The reality of human-caused global warming is settled science. The alleged link between vaccines and autism has been debunked as conclusively as anything in the history of epidemiology. It’s easy to find authoritative refutations of Donald Trump’s self-exculpatory claims regarding Ukraine and many other issues.

Yet many well-educated people sincerely deny evidence-based conclusions on these matters.

...

“Motivated reasoning” is what social scientists call the process of deciding what evidence to accept based on the conclusion one prefers.

...

Denial doesn’t stem from ignorance

The interdisciplinary study of this phenomenon has exploded over just the last six or seven years. One thing has become clear: The failure of various groups to acknowledge the truth about, say, climate change, is not explained by a lack of information about the scientific consensus on the subject.

Instead, what strongly predicts denial of expertise on many controversial topics is simply one’s political persuasion.

A 2015 metastudy showed that ideological polarization over the reality of climate change actually increases with respondents’ knowledge of politics, science, and/or energy policy. The chances that a conservative is a climate-change denier is significantly higher if he or she is college-educated. Conservatives scoring highest on tests for cognitive sophistication or quantitative reasoning skills are most susceptible to motivated reasoning about climate science.

This is not just a problem for conservatives. As researcher Dan Kahan has demonstrated, liberals are less likely to accept expert consensus on the possibility of safe storage of nuclear waste, or on the effects of concealed-carry gun laws.

Denial is natural

Our ancestors evolved in small groups, where cooperation and persuasion had at least as much to do with reproductive success as holding accurate factual beliefs about the world. Assimilation into one’s tribe required assimilation into the group’s ideological belief system. An instinctive bias in favor of one’s in-group” and its worldview is deeply ingrained in human psychology.

A human being’s very sense of self is intimately tied up with his or her identity group’s status and beliefs. Unsurprisingly, then, people respond automatically and defensively to information that threatens their ideological worldview. We respond with rationalization and selective assessment of evidence—that is, we engage in “confirmation bias,” giving credit to expert testimony we like and finding reasons to reject the rest.

....

Denial is everywhere

This kind of affect-laden, motivated thinking explains a wide range of examples of an extreme, evidence-resistant rejection of historical fact and scientific consensus.

Have tax cuts been shown to pay for themselves in terms of economic growth? Do communities with high numbers of immigrants have higher rates of violent crime? Did Russia interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election? Predictably, expert opinion regarding such matters is treated by partisan media as though evidence is itself inherently partisan.

Denialist phenomena are many and varied, but the story behind them is, ultimately, quite simple. Human cognition is inseparable from the unconscious emotional responses that go with it. Under the right conditions, universal human traits such as in-group favoritism, existential anxiety, and a desire for stability and control combine into a toxic, system-justifying identity politics.

When group interests, creeds, or dogmas are threatened by unwelcome factual information, biased thinking becomes denial. And unfortunately these facts about human nature can be manipulated for political ends.

This picture is a bit grim, because it suggests that facts alone have limited power to resolve politicized issues such as climate change or immigration policy. But properly understanding the phenomenon of denial is surely a crucial first step to addressing it.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90458795/hum...-worldview
(This post was last modified: 06-04-2020 05:10 PM by At Ease.)
02-03-2020 10:47 PM
Find all posts by this user Quote this message in a reply
Advertisement


At Ease Offline
Banned

Posts: 17,134
Joined: Jun 2005
I Root For: The Rice Owls
Location:
Post: #2
RE: The science behind political behavior
Quote:Supporters of the Republican Party have become much more skeptical of the science of climate change since the 1990s. This article argues that out-group cues from Democratic elites caused a backlash that resulted in greater climate skepticism. The authors construct aggregate measures of climate skepticism from nearly 200 public opinion polls at the quarterly level from 2001 to 2014 and at the annual level from 1986 to 2014. They also build time-series measures of possible contributors to climate skepticism using an automated media content analysis. The analyses provide evidence that cues from party elites – especially from Democrats – are associated with aggregate dynamics in climate change skepticism, including among supporters of the Republican Party. The study also involves a party cue survey experiment administered to a sample of 3,000 Americans through Amazon Mechanical Turk to provide more evidence of causality. Together, these results highlight the importance of out-group cue taking and suggest that climate change skepticism should be examined through the lens of elite-led opinion formation.

Unfortunately I don't have access to evaluate or share the primary data.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/...51C456A343
07-08-2020 04:26 PM
Find all posts by this user Quote this message in a reply
At Ease Offline
Banned

Posts: 17,134
Joined: Jun 2005
I Root For: The Rice Owls
Location:
Post: #3
RE: The science behind political behavior
Quote:Closed-minded cognition: Right-wing authoritarianism is negatively related to belief updating following prediction error


Quote:When confronted with information that challenges our beliefs, we must often learn from error in order to successfully navigate the world. Past studies in reinforcement learning and educational psychology have linked prediction error, a measure of surprise, to successful learning from feedback. However, there are substantial individual differences in belief-updating success, and the psychological factors that influence belief updating remain unclear. Here, we identify a novel factor that may predict belief updating: right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), which is characterized by a desire for order, structure, and preservation of social norms. We hypothesized that because people who score high on RWA are motivated to preserve entrenched beliefs, they may often fail to successfully update their beliefs when confronted with new information. Using a novel paradigm, we challenged participants’ false beliefs and misconceptions to elicit prediction error. In two studies, we found consistent evidence that high-RWA individuals were less successful at correcting their false beliefs. Relative to low-RWA individuals, high-RWA individuals were less likely to revise beliefs in response to prediction error. We argue that RWA is associated with a relatively closed-minded cognitive style that negatively influences belief updating.

Quote:It is important to note that belief updating and motivated cognition likely reflect underlying cognitive tendencies that can span political boundaries. Radical beliefs have been linked to impaired belief updating and lower metacognitive sensitivity; on both ends of the political spectrum, radicals tend to be less sensitive to evidence that corrects mistakes (Rollwage, Dolan, & Fleming, 2018). Likewise, political liberals and conservatives appear to be equally likely to reject evidence that contradicts prior beliefs (Kraft, Lodge, & Taber, 2015; Nisbet, Cooper, & Garrett, 2015; Washburn & Skitka, 2018). In the present study, we found that neither conservatism nor SDO scores were related to belief updating. RWA measures may therefore capture a cognitive style that is uniquely related to belief updating

https://link.springer.com/article/10.375...20-01767-y

Note that RWA does not necessarily refer to someone's political beliefs. Left-wing vs. right-wing authoritarianism refer to those who espouse social equality vs. social hierarchy, respectively.
08-16-2020 01:38 PM
Find all posts by this user Quote this message in a reply
Post Reply 




User(s) browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)


Copyright © 2002-2024 Collegiate Sports Nation Bulletin Board System (CSNbbs), All Rights Reserved.
CSNbbs is an independent fan site and is in no way affiliated to the NCAA or any of the schools and conferences it represents.
This site monetizes links. FTC Disclosure.
We allow third-party companies to serve ads and/or collect certain anonymous information when you visit our web site. These companies may use non-personally identifiable information (e.g., click stream information, browser type, time and date, subject of advertisements clicked or scrolled over) during your visits to this and other Web sites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services likely to be of greater interest to you. These companies typically use a cookie or third party web beacon to collect this information. To learn more about this behavioral advertising practice or to opt-out of this type of advertising, you can visit http://www.networkadvertising.org.
Powered By MyBB, © 2002-2024 MyBB Group.