As this political season heats up, and all the arguments, indignation and accusations that go with it come to a rolling boil, I thought it would be worth having a look at some of the deeper biases that we all can get immersed in, regardless of ideology or political sentiments.
I write this, not because I think you should be apathetic about politics, or choose a particular side that I might like. I write this because the bombardment of manipulations we are subject to can cause us to lose focus on the meaningful details of our own lives; and the biases which politics are teeming with can throw off our judgment about what’s most important.
By politics, I mean the process by which we – politicians and media most strongly, but individuals as well – persuade, cajole, manipulate, trick, argue, deceive, and otherwise do everything we can to empower those we want to empower, and disempower those we want to disempower.
This is an equal opportunity inquiry. We all have our personal beliefs, and, regardless of what they are, every single one of us gets seduced by our biases.
Emotional Bias:
First of all, politics, and the media hype around it, creates an emphasis on emotion. From the regal music of the Sunday news shows, to the passionate oration of the politicians, to the choreographed sneers and eye rolls of the political commentators, politics feeds into our emotional system much more than our rational, intellectual assessments, no matter how much a given speaker may insist that they offer the “True Facts.”
Tribal Bias:
Human beings are by far the most caring, empathetic creatures on earth. We have unique wiring in our brain that makes this possible. If a chimpanzee in the wild is injured, he will not be taken care of by the troop – they will let him suffer and starve; but when current day members of human hunter gatherer bands were questioned, fully half of the members had been in just such a situation, and the band nursed them back to health.
This is significant, because the exceptions stand out in stark relief. When we see or hear about examples of people doing monstrous things to other people, it horrifies us – because this is not how almost all of us behave toward our fellow human beings. (There are examples of other animals, dogs, elephants, etc. showing deep caring; but these are moving because they seem so human – they are also, almost always, toward direct relations.)
But politics feeds into a tribal bias. That level of compassion and empathy mostly disappears when we think of people as outside of our group. These days, more than any time in history, the whole world is our group, which is a very good thing. But when we judge a politician from an opposing party, we lose that empathy and compassion. Our bias is strongly for our party, and against the other.
Which means we’ll tend to see only or mostly the good in members of our team, and only or mostly the bad in the other. Regardless of what the actual truth may be.
Immediacy Bias:
We also have a bias toward our immediate experience. This means that when politicians or the media emphasize how horrible or wonderful some current feature of world circumstances are, it’s easy to lose context completely for history.
“This is the worst economy ever!” “The world has never seen a more dangerous time!” “This is the most important election in American History!” “This is the greatest recovery ever!”
None of those statements are true historically, yet those, and many like them are trotted out commonly every four years.
A worse economy than the Great Depression? A more dangerous time than World War 2? A more important election than of Washington? Jefferson? Lincoln? FDR? A greater recovery than after WW2?
Without the perspective of history, and with the manipulation of a politician, these statements can feel true… even though they are not.
Confirmation Bias:
Politics is all about confirmation bias: Every politician tells a story of how great their side is and how awful the other side is; how great their vision will be if it’s implemented, and how awful the other side’s vision will be if it’s implemented. We favor the story that favors our beliefs. Politics is about persuasion and manipulation to accept a certain story.
In contrast, the scientific method is a strategy for countering and limiting confirmation bias. We actively create experiments to disprove what we believe will happen (our hypothesis), and it’s only when our hypothesis survives many iterations of this process that we can have some confidence that we’re on to a piece of the truth.
This means also that politics and science are incompatible and contradictory. They do not support each other, they undermine each other.
If you take a glass of the finest wine, and add a drop of something vile to it, you no longer have a glass of fine wine, you have a glass of something vile. When we combine science with politics, we no longer have science, we have politics.
Negativity Bias:
We have a built-in, predictable bias toward the negative. Negative events and experiences are about four times as impactful on us as positive ones. We naturally orient toward negative stories and events, because throughout most of our history life was so dangerous that we needed to in order to survive.
Those early humans that thought it would be fun and safe to play with the saber-toothed tiger kittens… well, they never became our ancestors. Our ancestors were the ones who were constantly vigilant for danger.
But current day life is orders of magnitude safer than the world our ancestors lived in. Still, we orient to the negative (notice your response even to my saying how much safer it is now. But you can judge for yourself by going to https://ourworldindata.org/ and looking around a bit). And politicians and the media know this, and use it continuously to frighten us.
Politicians use it to frighten us into voting for their side.
News media uses it to frighten us into continually tuning in and getting an update on how awful things are.
Countering this takes a deliberate practice of establishing a kind of emotional distance from the stories we’re told by these people. We can do this by deliberately looking for the good people and opportunities in our lives – the people and things about which we can feel grateful.
We also do this by turning off the media beyond what we absolutely need to stay reasonably informed. I’ve had clients with severe anxiety and panic, whose symptoms lifted completely when they turned off the TV, Radio, and internet stories for a week.
Their absence from the media had zero effect on the political world; but it had a life-changing effect on their personal world.
Keep Perspective.
I’ve chosen these five biases to keep this concise, but there are more.
Embrace your political beliefs, put energy toward what you value. But keep in mind how powerful these biases are, and do your best to keep perspective on this. Be careful not to make big decisions based on what politicians or the media say they’ll do. Don’t get caught up in the emotional frenzy that these biases can foster.
And don’t lose sight of what matters most: Most of the impact we have in our lives is in relation to the real people we are in relationships with. They are the primary source of our meaning and happiness. Make sure you’re not sacrificing those relationships to the turbulent passions of political biases.
PS: I’m currently expanding my life coaching practice. Go to my website to sign up for a free 30-minute initial conversation.
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