Tag Archives: confirmation bias

The Real Problem

Bingo!

That was my reaction when I read the title of this opinion essay in the Washington Post: “Can we find common ground without a shared reality?” The author, Kate Cohen, identified the fallacy at the heart of multiple liberal admonitions to “listen to” and “try to understand” the grievances motivating MAGA Trump supporters. She began by reporting on one such well-meaning example, in a recent book, Kurt Gray’s “Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground.”

According to Gray,

Liberals and conservatives arrive at different moral conclusions because we weigh harms differently based on whom we believe to be vulnerable. Take the issue of abortion: I am more concerned for the pregnant person; a pro-lifer is more concerned for the fetus. But we both want to prevent harm.
 
Gray calls harm “the master key of morality”; it unlocks our understanding of moral judgments. “When someone has an opinion we find immoral, we can ask ourselves, ‘What harm do they see?’”

Cohen says she can try to understand that her neighbor isn’t purposely voting to harm her gay son and teenage daughter, but rather to prevent harms that the neighbor believes are posed by acceptance of LGBTQ+ folks and a woman’s right to make her own reproductive decisions. But then she asks the “bingo” question: “what if the harm she sees … isn’t real?”

Thus Gray points out that antigay crusader Anita Bryant “saw gay rights as a threat to her children” — he’s not saying she was right, just that she was acting from sincere concern. His research similarly refrains from privileging what I would call “fact.” One study he designed flip-flopped gun control statistics to see if people were worse at math when they didn’t like the answer; another, measuring how online outrage is built, included tweets about “the dangers of critical race theory.” It’s the perception of harm that matters…

I think we’re in this mess because one side’s perception of harm is increasingly disconnected from reality. I’d happily live in a world where my neighbor and I could discuss which harms concerned us more: the suffering of refugee children or the burdens on border-town citizens. The livelihood of coal miners or the warming of the globe. But in the world we live in — the world that reelected President Donald Trump — there’s a strong chance she believes that immigrants are eating pets and that climate change is a hoax.

And that –the refusal of millions of people to accept facts, evidence and demonstrable reality and opting to reside in a fantasy universe–is the crux of our current problem. 

On this blog, I have repeatedly argued that the information environment we inhabit enables a large percentage of the population to indulge in confirmation bias. Granted, there have always been sources of disinformation, but never before in history has it been so easy to access “evidence” that confirms one’s desired beliefs and prejudices.

Has your life failed to unfold as you hoped? Are you convinced that some “other” is to blame for your disappointments? There are literally hundreds–probably thousands–of websites that explain that the Black person or woman got the promotion because of “wokism,” and why the elevation of that non-Christian is evidence that “DEI hires” have replaced merit.

Is your livelihood or comfort level connected to the prospects of fossil fuels? There are plenty of “sources” that will confirm the perfidy of scientists who are “in on” the “global warming hoax.” 

Are you suspicious of all science–especially when it is based on empirical data that conflicts with your “biblical” understandings? “Bible-believing” websites will explain why the doctors trying to explain why abortion bans threaten women’s health and lives are just anti-religious liberals intent on killing babies and allowing women to ignore their God-ordained submissive roles.

Are you uncomfortable around gay folks? Lots of “religious” sites will confirm that they are “ungodly groomers,” (and that all those mainstream media reports implicating youth pastors and other pious church folks are exaggerated).

I could go on. And on.

We live in a world where technology–and yes, free speech–facilitates the construction of fantasy realities. And as Cohen accurately notes, finding “common ground” with folks who live in alternate universes simply isn’t possible.

Thanks to well-meaning liberals trying to reach that “common ground,” we are now inhabiting a country that–as Paul Krugman recently wrote– is being ruled by a mad king living in an alternate reality and a erratic, ketamine-fueled oligarch — and it’s not clear which is the other’s sidekick.

Finding “common ground” with madmen is suicidal.

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How Today’s Media Fails Us

As I have frequently noted, at the very root of America’s–and the world’s–current dysfunctions are the failures of today’s information environment.

How we behave–as friends, as parents, as voters, as humans–ultimately depends upon our understanding of the world we inhabit. And that understanding, that view of what constitutes reality, is a product of the information we access and trust. In the United States–the society with which I am most familiar–the human family confronts two massive informational challenges: bias (both intentional and not) and fragmentation.

Unfortunately, there is little we can do about the Internet’s fragmentation of media sources, which allows citizens to occupy distinctly different realities. When the voting public accesses “alternative facts,” the incoherence of public opinion is understandable.

The failures of traditional media sources are especially troubling, both because they add to the incoherence and because they are the result of mistaken notions of journalism’s most important function–which is to provide an accurate description of the subject matter, irrespective of who or what that accuracy benefits.

Jennifer Rubin is one of the pundits who has been clear-eyed about the persistence of a journalistic worldview that prevents otherwise reputable news sources from avoiding a distorted equivalency.

After missing the significance of the MAGA movement in 2016, innumerable mainstream outlets spent thousands of hours, gallons of ink and billions of pixels trying to understand “the Trump voter.” How had democracy failed them? What did the rest of us miss about these Americans? The journey to Rust Belt diners became a cliché amid the newfound fascination with aggrieved White working-class Americans. But the theory that such voters were economic casualties of globalization turned out to be false. Surveys and analyses generally found that racial resentment and cultural panic, not economic distress, fueled their affinity for a would-be strongman.

Unfortunately, patronizing excuses (e.g., “they feel disrespected”) for their cultlike attachment to a figure increasingly divorced from reality largely took the place of exacting reporting on the right-wing cult that swallowed a large part of the Republican Party. In an effort to maintain false equivalence and normalize Trump, many media outlets seemed to ignore that the much of the GOP left the universe of democratic (small-d) politics and was no longer a traditional democratic (again, small-d) party with an agenda, a governing philosophy, a set of beliefs. The result: Trump was normalized and a false equivalence between the parties was created.

There was a reason Fox News chose “fair and balanced” as its (highly misleading) slogan: most Americans–including too many students of journalism–have been acculturated to believe that “balance” is fairness, that exhibiting similar respect for all sides of an argument is an essential element of reporting. This has led–as one wag put it–to a reportorial stenography that faithfully reports person A’s assertion that it’s raining and person B’s that it isn’t, when what the reporter ought to be doing is looking out the window to see who’s right.

As Rubin noted,

Even as Trump shows his authoritarian colors and his rants become angrier, more unhinged and more incoherent, his followers still meekly accept inane assertions (e.g., convicted Jan. 6, 2021, rioters are “hostages,” magnets dissolve in water, wind turbines drive whales insane). More of the media should be covering this phenomenon as it would any right-wing authoritarian movement in a foreign country.

The proliferation of propaganda sites facilitating confirmation bias is troubling enough, but as Rubin writes, the problem with disinformation is compounded when mainstream outlets spend “far too little attention on why and how MAGA members cling to demonstrably false beliefs, excuse what should be inexcusable conduct and ignore Trump’s obvious and growing mental illness and decline.

Outlets should routinely consult psychologists and historians to ask the vital questions: How do people abandon rationality? What drives their fury and anxiety? How does an authoritarian figure maintain his hold on followers? How do ideas of racial purity play into it? Media outlets fail news consumers when they do not explain the authoritarian playbook that Trump employs. Americans need media outlets to spell out what is happening….

The race between an ordinary democratic candidate and an unhinged fascist is not a normal American election. At stake is whether a democracy can protect itself from a malicious candidate with narcissistic tendencies or a rational electorate can beat back a dangerous, lawless cult of personality. Unfortunately, too many media outlets have not caught on or, worse, simply feign ignorance to avoid coming down on the side of democracy, rationality and truth.

Humans can only form opinions and base behaviors on the information they rely upon. When that information is unreliable– or simply wrong– “do the right thing” becomes meaningless.

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It Isn’t Just In MAGA-World

Let’s be honest: believing the people who tell you what you want to hear is a trait shared by all humans–Left, Right and Center. There’s a reason researchers study  confirmation bias–the current terminology for what we used to call “cherry-picking the facts.”

Just one recent example: MAGA folks who are frantic to believe that Joe Biden is just as corrupt as Donald Trump (okay, maybe not quite that corrupt…) have latched onto a report issued by James Comer, a Republican House member determined to find something to support that accusation. Unfortunately, as TNR (among many other media outlets) has reported, there just isn’t anything that we might call “evidence” to support that desired belief.

The House GOP accused Joe Biden and his family on Wednesday of engaging in business with foreign entities—but were unable to provide any actual evidence linking the president to any wrongdoing.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer released a 65-page memo detailing a sprawling investigation into Biden and some of his relatives, particularly his son Hunter Biden. Nowhere in the massive document was there a specific allegation of a crime committed by Biden or any of his relatives.

During a press conference explaining the investigation, Comer was asked if he had evidence directly linking Biden to corruption. The Kentucky Republican hemmed and hawed but ultimately admitted he didn’t.

It’s easy enough to see confirmation bias at work when a commenter to this blog “cites” to Comer, a lawmaker who has publicly admitted that he “intuited” misbehavior by the Biden family, despite the fact that even Fox “News” personalities have admitted that there’s no there there. But it isn’t only folks on the Right who engage in confirmation bias–and the strength of that human impulse to cherry-pick is about to get a test on steroids.

Researchers have recently warned about the likely misuse of AI--artificial intelligence–in producing misleading and dishonest political campaigns

Computer engineers and tech-inclined political scientists have warned for years that cheap, powerful artificial intelligence tools would soon allow anyone to create fake images, video and audio that was realistic enough to fool voters and perhaps sway an election.

The synthetic images that emerged were often crude, unconvincing and costly to produce, especially when other kinds of misinformation were so inexpensive and easy to spread on social media. The threat posed by AI and so-called deepfakes always seemed a year or two away.

No more.

Sophisticated generative AI tools can now create cloned human voices and hyper-realistic images, videos and audio in seconds, at minimal cost. When strapped to powerful social media algorithms, this fake and digitally created content can spread far and fast and target highly specific audiences, potentially taking campaign dirty tricks to a new low.

The implications for the 2024 campaigns and elections are as large as they are troubling: Generative AI can not only rapidly produce targeted campaign emails, texts or videos, it also could be used to mislead voters, impersonate candidates and undermine elections on a scale and at a speed not yet seen.

“We’re not prepared for this,” warned A.J. Nash, vice president of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm ZeroFox. “To me, the big leap forward is the audio and video capabilities that have emerged. When you can do that on a large scale, and distribute it on social platforms, well, it’s going to have a major impact.”

Some of the ways in which AI can mislead voters include the production of automated robocall messages that use a (simulated) candidate’s voice and instruct voters to cast their ballots on the wrong date, or phony audio recordings that sound as if a candidate was expressing racist views– AI can easily produce video footage showing someone giving a speech or interview that they never gave. It would be especially simple for AI to fake images designed to look like local news reports making a variety of false claims….The possibilities are endless. And what happens if an international entity — a cybercriminal or a nation state — impersonates someone?

AI-generated political disinformation already has gone viral online ahead of the 2024 election, from a doctored video of Biden appearing to give a speech attacking transgender people to AI-generated images of children supposedly learning satanism in libraries.

If we have trouble now knowing who or what to believe, today’s confusion over what constitutes “fact” and what doesn’t is about to be eclipsed by the coming creation of a world largely invented by digital liars employing tools we’ve never before encountered.

If regulators can’t figure out how to address the dangers inherent in this new technology–and quickly!– artificial intelligence plus confirmation bias may just put the end to whatever remains of America’s rational self-government.

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When–And Why–Facts Don’t Matter

One of the abiding frustrations of contemporary life is the widespread resistance to facts–people’s rejection of probative evidence that X is true and Y (no matter how desirable) is not.

Perhaps I’ve just been paying closer attention as I’ve aged, but it certainly seems to me that the prevalence of disinformation and outright lies characterizing American political life has become a bigger problem ever since the appearance of Fox News and MAGA Republicanism.

We’re about to enter a two-year period where GOP whack jobs like Jim Jordan conduct fact-free (or at least, fact-distorted) Congressional “investigations” into everything from Hunter Biden’s laptop to Anthony Fauci.  Reports from this year’s Climate Summit remind us that we have yet to make many of the changes necessary to combat climate change–a delay attributable in part to the climate deniers who for years refused to accept what science (and the evidence of their eyes) was telling them. Anti-vaccine lunacy has been responsible for thousands of deaths.

Other examples are too numerous to list.

The problem is, our form of government owes its philosophical basis to the Enlightenment–and if the Enlightenment prioritized anything, it was empiricism–the search for and analysis of falsifiable evidence–as a critical method to understand the world we inhabit.

When public officials occupy different realities, governance becomes impossible.For that matter, if people resist believing what their senses  and investigations are telling them, the entire edifice of civilization crumbles.

In 2017, a New Yorker article titled “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds” explored both the importance of separating fact from fiction, and the reasons contemporary humans seem to be incapable of doing so. The article began by describing studies conducted at Stanford that attempted to understand the stubborn staying power of people’s initial impressions. In the experiments, even total refutation of the subjects’ initial beliefs was insufficient to make them change their minds.

The Stanford studies became famous. Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking. It isn’t any longer. Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?

How indeed?

In a book titled “The Enigma of Reason, ” a couple of cognitive scientists tried to answer that question. They pointed out that “reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.”

The basic argument is that human beings’ biggest advantage is our ability to coöperate.  Reason, they posit, “developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.”

Think about it. If the capacity for reason developed to allow humans to generate sound judgments, it would be hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. After all, an inaccurate view of reality is a significant threat to survival. But here we are, and here–still–is confirmation bias. The authors concluded that it must have some adaptive function related to our “hypersociability,” and that it may actually have evolved to prevent us from getting screwed by other members of our group.

Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments…

Among the many, many issues our forebears didn’t worry about were the deterrent effects of capital punishment and the ideal attributes of a firefighter. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake news, or Twitter. It’s no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us… the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.”

The article goes on to describe two other books dealing with the ways we contemporary humans encounter–and dismiss– facts. (For one thing, we all believe we understand far more than we actually do–a deficit that becomes clear when we are asked for detailed information.) It’s a fascinating, albeit somewhat depressing, read.

Bottom line: For those of us who want public policies to be based on sound evidence and facts, the literature is not reassuring.

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What Pictures Do And Don’t Tell Us

As we head into what promises (threatens?) to be a pivotal year for American democratic governance, we do so in an environment unlike any that we have previously occupied. The “disinformation” industry has really come into its own over the past several years–filling the void that has been created by the near-demise of local journalism, and taking advantage of the enormous influence of social media.

The most recent weapons against facts and accuracy are visual: “deep fakes” in which the alterations are nearly impossible to detect. The influence of those fabrications on people who have lived in a world where “seeing is believing” is difficult to predict.

In a recent article from Axios Future, philosophers considered the challenge presented by deep fakes.

One possibility they considered: Technology might “erode the evidentiary value of video and audio” with the result that we begin seeing them the way we now see drawings or paintings —  rather than as factual records. In that case, all bets are off.

As the article put it,

Normally, when you receive new information, you decide whether or not to believe it in part based on how much you trust the person telling you.

“But there are cases where evidence for something is so strong that it overrides these social effects,” says Cailin O’Connor, a philosopher at UC Irvine. For decades, those cases have included video and audio evidence.

These recordings have been “backstops,” Rini says. But we’re hurtling toward a crisis that could quickly erode our ability to rely on them, leaving us leaning only on the reputation of the messenger.

One huge implication is that people may be less likely to avoid bad behavior if they know they can later disavow a recording of their mischief.

Just think how technological advances in deep fakes can affect political campaigns.

Just in time for the presidential election, the Brookings Institution shares news about a new technique for making deep fakes, invented by Israeli researchers.  It creates highly realistic videos by substituting the face of another individual for the person who is really speaking.

Unlike previous methods, this one works on any two people without extensive, iterated focus on their faces, cutting hours or even days from previous deepfake processes without the need for expensive hardware. Because the Israeli researchers have released their model publicly—a move they justify as essential for defense against it—the proliferation of this cheap and easy deep fake technology appears inevitable.

Can videos of Joe Biden using the “n word” or Bernie Sanders vowing fidelity to communism be far behind? As the Brookings article notes,

If AI is reaching the point where it will be virtually impossible to detect audio and video representations of people saying things they never said (and even doing things they never did), seeing will no longer be believing, and we will have to decide for ourselves—without reliable evidence—whom or what to believe. Worse, candidates will be able to dismiss accurate but embarrassing representations of what they say are fakes, an evasion that will be hard to disprove.

In our incredibly polarized political environment, the temptation to “cherry pick” information–to give in to the very human impulse to engage in confirmation bias–is already strong. We are rapidly approaching a time when technology will be able to hand partisans a plausible reason to disbelieve inconvenient news about a preferred candidate, while giving others desired “evidence” about an opponent’s flaws.

We can also predict that a political party willing to employ gerrymandering, vote suppression and a wide variety of political “dirty tricks” will not hesitate to use these tools.

Uncharted territory, indeed…..

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