It’s long been my pet opinion that the ability to quickly produce and disseminate simple graphs is one of the huge gains of the digital media era. And now from Brendan Nyhan & Jason Reifler comes some empirical research (PDF) to confirm my pre-existing biases:

People often resist information that contradicts their preexisting beliefs. This disconfirmation bias is a particular problem in the context of political misperceptions, which are widespread and frequently difficult to correct. In this paper, we examine two different hypotheses about the prevalence of misinformation. First, people tend to resist unwelcome information because it is threatening to their worldview or self-concept. Drawing from social psychology research, we test whether affirming individuals’ selfworth and thereby buttressing them against this threat can make them more willing to acknowledge uncomfortable facts. Second, corrective information is often presented in an ineffective manner. We therefore also examine whether graphical corrections may be more effective than text at reducing counter-arguing by individuals inclined to resist counter-attitudinal information. Results from three experiments show that selfaffirmation substantially reduces reported misperceptions among those most likely to hold them, suggesting that people cling to false beliefs in part because giving them up would threaten their sense of self. Graphical corrections are also found to successfully reduce incorrect beliefs among potentially resistant subjects and to perform better than an equivalent textual correction. However, contrary to previous research, affirmed subjects rarely differ from unaffirmed subjects in their willingness to accept new counterattitudinal information.

In other words, if someone’s wrong about something, it’s easier to persuade them to change their mind with a graphical presentation than a textual one.

Via Erik Voeten, Darren Schreiber, Alan Simmons, Christopher Dawes, Taru Flagan, James Fowler, and Martin Paulus of UCSD report on the neurological correlates of political partisanship (PDF):

We matched public voter records to 54 subjects who performed a risk-taking task during functional imaging. We find that Democrats and Republicans had significantly different patterns of brain activation during processing of risky decisions. Amygdala activations, associated with externally directed reactions to risk, are stronger in Republicans, while insula activations, associated with internally directed reactions to affective perceptions, are stronger in Democrats. These results suggest an internal vs. external difference in evaluative process that illuminates and resolves a discrepancy in the existing literature. This process-based approach to political partisanship is distinct from the policy-based approach that has dominated research for at least the past half century. In fact, a two parameter model of partisanship based on amygdala and insula activations achieves better accuracy in predicting whether someone is a Democrat or a Republican than a well established model in political science based on parental socialization of party identification.

We’re seeing more and more of this kind of effort to approach political science through a life science lens, and I think it would be interesting to see more integration of this kind of work with some of the crude stylized demographic facts about American politics. A married 60 year-old regular churchgoing man is overwhelmingly likely to be a Republican if he’s white, but a Democrat if he’s black. Do you see this same neurological divergence within that kind of sub-sample?

Daniel B. Klein and Zeljka Buturovic did a study about a year ago that you may have heard about which purported to show that self-identified liberals and progressives had lower levels of understanding about economics. One response that occurred to me at the time was that the survey’s questions seemed to have been selected so as to ensure that the left-wing answer was also the wrong one. Now they’ve run a new study with different questions and the results appear to indicate that the gap is, indeed, all about which questions you ask:

Basically when you ask questions where the left-wing answer is also the one supported by economics, suddenly left-wing people have a better understanding of economics. But when you ask the other set of questions, it comes out the other way. Basically, there’s a lot of confirmation bias out there. This is why I think people who teach economics ought to think harder about their choice of examples when teaching.

Chris Mooney has a great piece in Mother Jones on why people aren’t persuaded by evidence:

In Kahan’s research (PDF), individuals are classified, based on their cultural values, as either “individualists” or “communitarians,” and as either “hierarchical” or “egalitarian” in outlook. (Somewhat oversimplifying, you can think of hierarchical individualists as akin to conservative Republicans, and egalitarian communitarians as liberal Democrats.) In one study, subjects in the different groups were asked to help a close friend determine the risks associated with climate change, sequestering nuclear waste, or concealed carry laws: “The friend tells you that he or she is planning to read a book about the issue but would like to get your opinion on whether the author seems like a knowledgeable and trustworthy expert.” A subject was then presented with the résumé of a fake expert “depicted as a member of the National Academy of Sciences who had earned a Ph.D. in a pertinent field from one elite university and who was now on the faculty of another.” The subject was then shown a book excerpt by that “expert,” in which the risk of the issue at hand was portrayed as high or low, well-founded or speculative. The results were stark: When the scientist’s position stated that global warming is real and human-caused, for instance, only 23 percent of hierarchical individualists agreed the person was a “trustworthy and knowledgeable expert.” Yet 88 percent of egalitarian communitarians accepted the same scientist’s expertise. Similar divides were observed on whether nuclear waste can be safely stored underground and whether letting people carry guns deters crime. (The alliances did not always hold. In another study (PDF), hierarchs and communitarians were in favor of laws that would compel the mentally ill to accept treatment, whereas individualists and egalitarians were opposed.)

There are a lot of bad policy consequences associated with humanity’s tendency to reason like this, and I don’t really know how to solve them. But it’s worth trying to fight confirmation bias in your own life by making sure to make an effort to seek out strong arguments against your own point of view. The world is full of bad arguments, and it’s easy to become obsessed with how bad the arguments being made by “the other side” are. And at times this is an important fact about the world. But it’s worth making sure you’re up-to-date on what the strongest arguments for the other side are.

(cc photo by John Pannell)

Initially I was puzzled by Stephanie Clifford’s article about how retailers are finding they can boost sales by packing more crap into the aisles. Maybe I’m a weirdo, I thought, but I greatly prefer to shop in sparser places. It turns out, however, that I’m not a weirdo and people are just huge hypocrites about this stuff:

“They loved the experience,” William S. Simon, the chief executive of Wal-Mart’s United States division, said at a recent conference. “They just bought less. And that generally is not a good long-term strategy.”

So after remodeling a large percentage of its stores, Wal-Mart is now re-remodeling them, adding back inventory, plopping stacks of stuff into aisles and stacking shelves with a dizzying array of merchandise.

As it turns out, the messier and more confusing a store looks, the better the deals it projects.

“Historically, the more a store is packed, the more people think of it as value — just as when you walk into a store and there are fewer things on the floor, you tend to think they’re expensive,” said Paco Underhill, founder and chief executive of Envirosell, who studies shopper behavior.

There’s a related and more serious issue, it seems to me, in the health care market. People naturally say that they want good health outcomes at a reasonable price, but there’s precious little evidence from action that this is really what folks are after. Lawsuits are more determined by bedside manner than by health results, people want to have a sense of agency and control, people want to demonstrate care and concern for loved ones, etc.

Human beings are famously bad at doing probability calculations, so it’s not surprising to learn that people often have ideas about risk that don’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny. But according to the Mechanisms of Cultural Cognition Project from National Science Foundation and the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund at Yale Law School, there’s a systematic valence to how we disagree about risk:

Individuals of diverse cultural outlooks–hierarchical and egalitarian, individualistic and communitarian–hold sharply opposed beliefs about a range of societal risks, including those associated with climate change, gun ownership, public health, and national security. Differences in these basic values exert substantially more influence over risk perceptions than does any other individual characteristic, including gender, race, socioeconomic status, education, and political ideology and party affiliation.

This is part of what makes politics so difficult. A hierarchical versus an egalitarian outlook have plenty of obvious political implications. Then layer different risk perceptions on top of that and it’s extremely difficult to get agreement on anything. There’s a ton of interesting stuff up on the website, including “Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White Male Effect”.

Kevin Drum and Joe Klein blog about a Washington Post poll question on how worried people are about making their mortgage payments:

I find data like this almost impossible to interpret. What’s the baseline? Back in 2005 when the media wasn’t interested in housing problems and nobody was polling this issue, how many people would have said they were worried about mortgage payments? How much do people say they’re worried about things in general? How much more do people start worrying about their mortgage when you specifically start pestering them about it. I bet most Americans between the ages of 25 and 40, in practice, rarely worry about saving for retirement. But if you ask them about it then they’ll start worrying. Right?

(cc photo by moira)

The political science literature about what drives election outcomes is kind of at odds with the conventional wisdom among campaign operatives and reporters. But the emerging research on the psychological foundations of individual political belief is downright weird. Peter Liberman and David Pizarro, for example, have a good piece in the NYT about the link between disgust and conservatism:

Subtle cues about disgust and cleanliness can affect social and political judgments as well. In an experiment conducted recently by Erik Helzer, a Cornell Ph.D. student, and one of us (David Pizarro), merely standing near a hand-sanitizing dispenser led people to report more conservative political beliefs. Participants who were randomly positioned in front of a hand sanitizer gave more conservative responses to a survey about their moral, social and fiscal attitudes than those individuals assigned to complete the questionnaire at the other end of the hallway.

In another experiment one of us (Dr. Pizarro) was involved in, a foul ambient smell — emitted, unbeknownst to test subjects, by a novelty spray — caused people answering a questionnaire to report more negative attitudes toward gay men than did people who responded in the absence of the stench. Apparently, the slightest signal that germs might be present is enough to shift political attitudes toward the right.

I think it remains to be seen how these kind of dynamics play into macro-scale political phenomena, but suffice it to say that people aren’t making up their minds about political issues based purely on judicious consideration of the evidence.

(cc photo by adiything)

It’s pretty clear that most bias happens at an unconscious level and that things like racial and gender bias are much more pervasive than we’d like to believe. Check out some of the implicit association tests available online if you don’t believe me. But some of the details of how this plays out are downright scary. Consider the medical example cited in Shankar Vendatam’s column on unconscious bias:

If you ask people whether men and women should be paid the same for doing the same work, everyone says yes. But if you ask volunteers how much a storekeeper who runs a hardware store ought to earn and how much a storekeeper who sells antique china ought to earn, you will see that the work of the storekeeper whom volunteers unconsciously believe to be a man is valued more highly than the work of the storekeeper whom volunteers unconsciously assume is a woman. If you ask physicians whether all patients should be treated equally regardless of race, everyone says yes. But if you ask doctors how they will treat patients with chest pains who are named Michael Smith and Tyrone Smith, the doctors tend to be less aggressive in treating the patient with the black-sounding name. Such disparities in treatment are not predicted by the conscious attitudes that doctors profess, but by their unconscious attitudes—their hidden brains.

There are a lot of quality issues in our health care system beyond the basic access issues, and in an increasingly diverse society this sort of thing is not helping to resolve them.