book review

The Bias That Divides Us: The Science and Politics of Myside Thinking
Keith E. Stanovich
MIT Press, 2021, 241 pages

Reviewed by T. Nelson

“Myside thinking”, according to Keith Stanovich, is reasoning motivated by pre-existing ‘protected’ or ‘sacred’ beliefs. That is, arguments are given higher priority if they support one's value system than if they challenge it. This disting­uishes it from confirmation bias, in which someone dismisses evidence because it conflicts with a prior factual opinion.

Unlike almost all other cognitive biases, says Stanovich, myside bias doesn't correlate with cognitive ability. Higher IQ and numeracy don't bring people together in their beliefs, but actually increase polarization between groups. Thus, he concludes that we can't look to education, empathy training, or intelligence as a way out of the conflict.

Why should myside bias be unique? Some explanations spring to mind. One possibility is that it doesn't really exist and his tests are measuring something else. Psychology has a long history of researchers drawing broad conclusions based on tests that turned out not to be measuring psychological traits at all. For instance, we now know:

• Conservatives are not resistant to change. Both sides favor change in directions they approve and resist it in ones they don't.

• Conservatives are not less tolerant, open, warm, or intelligent than liberals. Both groups are only tolerant of those doing what the group approves of.

• So-called ‘racism’ scales were not capturing resentment of blacks among conservatives, but something in liberals, possibly the fact that approval of blacks provided a higher payoff in terms of virtue signaling than treatment of other ethnicities.

• Both sides are equivalent in terms of intolerance, out-group rejection, and conspir­atorial thinking. Only the targets are different.

All these ideas, now utterly abandoned, were firmly held as dogma for decades among psychologists on the basis of badly designed and ideologically biased tests. Claims that conservatives and Republicans are less intelligent than liberals and Democrats did not hold up; indeed, economic conservatism is positively correlated with intelligence.

This bleak history of myside bias in academia means that decades of effort have been wasted due to the lack of ideological diversity.

He gives as an example of myside bias the question of whether the government should ban AR-15s. Those who support the ban, he says, put higher priority on claims that adults who committed a mass shooting also own ‘assault weapons’, while those who don't support the ban put higher priority on claims that only a small number of owners of assault weapons commit a shooting.

But what if the belief is based on something the experimenter isn't considering? If you think AR-15s are scary and the government should ban anything that is scary, you'll favor a ban. If you believed that the government should not exist at all, and ideally should eat shit and die, you'd be opposed to a ban—regardless of the statistical arguments. Perhaps ‘myside bias’ is another word for reasoning from principles instead of facts, so our beliefs are immune to evidence because they aren't based on evidence in the first place.

Stanovich says that myside bias is unique among cognitive biases because cognitively skilled individuals have a greater ability to argue themselves into a corner. Especially in an ideological monoculture like academic psychology, everyone shares the same myside biases and hence is unable to recognize them.

People argue to convince other people, not to discover the truth. In other words, when beliefs concern ‘ought’ instead of ‘is’, arguments and statistics tend to be used for their instrumental and performative value, not because they are true. As philosophers have argued since Hume, ‘ought’ and ‘is’ are oil and water.

Myside bias isn't a fallacy at all, he says, but the way memes control us. Our beliefs have been bundled and sold to us by partisan elites on both sides, creating a glut of harmful memes designed to prevent us from thinking. He likens it to an obesity epidemic of the mind. To cure it, we must reform academia. He writes:

University research on all of the charged topics where identity politics has predetermined their conclusions—and there are many . . . —is simply not believable anymore.

He quotes Bret Weinstein, who said “The spread of oppression studies is an abdication of scientific responsibility. As universities promote ideology over inquiry, science skepticism is the inevitable result.” We're seeing that now, on both sides.

sep 11, 2021