Voter Certainty

VOTER CERTAINTY

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To avoiding the swirling slime posing as political discourse, my thoughts turn to how the mind works, or does not work, to evaluate all of the sludge.  Splattered with so much spun-reality, how can any of us receive, decipher, sort, and choose the factoids that represent truth?  Yet, we make those assessments confident that all our opponents must be wrong.  With the minutiae and scant firsthand knowledge available to any of us, how is it that we feel our grasp on truth and our conclusions are superior to all others? 

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November of last year, when the primary elections spun into shape, I consulted several articles describing how the mind molds its sense of certainty.  A dictionary definition of the mind says, “The mind is the part of a person that thinks, reasons, feels, and remembers.”  Most dictionaries also mention that the mind has both conscious and unconscious mental capacities.

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UNCONSCIOUS MIND

“Certainty” registers in the conscious mind but forms in the unconscious mind.  John A. Baragh, researcher at Yale University studying the unconscious mind reported its influence on judgments and decisions in 2006.  His work dealt with the unconscious mind’s “pervasive, powerful influence over immediate and unintended evaluation processes.”  His work on reflex actions showed that, “The unconscious mind is a behavioral guidance system and a source of adaptive and appropriate behavioral impulses.”  It is an, unconscious guidance system and responsible for the confidence we feel about the decisions we make, despite insufficient or contrary information.  

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CONFIRMATION BIAS

David McRaney, a prominent author, lecturer, media producer in the field of psychology and the cognitive sciences, dealing with unconscious certainty and conformational bias, cautions that, “Confirmation bias (or confirmatory bias) is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, leading to statistical errors.”  He further warns that cognitive bias “represents an error of inductive inference toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study.”

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As a media producer, McRaney points to broadcasting as a major contributor to our conscious certainties, “Punditry is a whole industry built on confirmation bias.  Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann, Glenn Beck and Arianna Huffington, Rachel Maddow and Ann Coulter – these people provide fuel for beliefs, they pre-filter the world to match existing world-views.  If their filter is like your filter, you love them.  If it isn’t, you hate them.”  His reminder demonstrates, “Whether or not pundits are telling the truth, or vetting their opinions, or thoroughly researching their topics is all beside the point.  You watch them not for information, but for confirmation.”  The application of his point is, “In science, you move closer to the truth by seeking evidence to the contrary.  Perhaps the same method should inform your opinions as well.”

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EMOTIONAL BIAS

One of the most interesting aspects of our unconscious bias system is the way we avoid the scientific method, which sets out to test a conclusion by finding contrary evidence.  We do the opposite.  Those who study this dynamic the closest are sales professionals, like Geoffry James of Sales Source.  In his study of tactics that change people’s minds, Geoffry says, “Presenting the evidence is a huge mistake.  People tend to make decisions emotionally and only then evaluate the evidence.  Once they've made a decision, people tend to either disbelieve contrary evidence or mentally manipulate the evidence so that it supports their decision.  In other words, when people are wrong about something, the more evidence you present that they are wrong, the less likely they are to change their minds.  Decision makers have been shown to actively seek out and assign more weight to evidence that confirms their hypothesis, and ignore or under-weigh evidence that could 'disconfirm' their hypothesis.” 

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In 1960, the deductive reasoning researcher, Peter C. Wason, provided salespeople like Geoffry rules of effective transactional influence.  Wason offered one of the basic means of closing a deal called the, “makes sense stopping rule.”  Sense our tendency is first to determine a conclusion and then work backwards, finding evidence to prove it.  Consumers are not looking for errors leading to their conclusions; instead, they seek only to verify their conclusion.  Rolf Dobellis offered data proving that buyers usually confuse the “results” hoped for with legitimate information to form a decision.  The idea, then, is not to sell the item itself, but confirm the purchaser’s subconscious feelings about what the purchase will do for them.  Confirming the unconscious bias makes the sail.  Raymond S. Nickerson, research professor of psychology of Tufts University agrees.  With our emotional bias confirmed, we stop considering the possibility that our bias may be flawed and accept it as true.  The way Nickerson puts it, “Once your presumptions are satisfied, you stop searching.” The makes sense stopping rule is also the underlying strategy for both presidential campaigns this year.
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PROTECTING OUR BIAS
The person we belief we are, is bound together with the cords of conscious or unconscious biases.  Nickerson says, “Whenever your opinions or beliefs are so intertwined with your self-image you couldn’t pull them away without damaging your core concepts of self, you avoid situations which may cause harm to those beliefs.  You seek out safe havens for your ideology, friends, and coworkers of like mind and attitude, media outlets guaranteed to play nice.”
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The harm he speaks of is the threat to our self-perception.  1) Our estimated value as a person, 2) our assessment of personal abilities, 3) our emotional stability, and 4) our overall sense of control (internal or external) are all under the influence of our unconscious and conscious bias.
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Americans and Europeans are more venerable to belief-system threats because we tend to have rather inflated opinion of ourselves.  “When asked to rate them-selves on virtues, skills, or other desirable traits (including ethics, intelligence, driving ability, and sexual skills), a large majority say they are above average.  Power and privilege magnify the distortion: 94% of college professors think that they do above average work.  This effect is weaker in Asian countries and in other cultures, which value the group more highly than the self.”
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Robert Wright, a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, highlights our bias self-protection when he wrote, “Humans are very good at challenging the beliefs of other people, but when it comes to their own beliefs, they tend to protect them, not challenge them.  A consistent finding of psychological research is that humans are fairly accurate in their perceptions of others, but generally inaccurate in their perceptions of themselves.  Humans tend to judge others by their behavior, but think they have special information about themselves – that they know what they are "really like" inside – and thus effortlessly find ways to explain away selfish acts, and maintain the illusion that they are better than others.”
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Acknowledging the strength, pervasiveness, and effects of unconscious biases, leads me, along with the for mentioned experts, to wonder if these biases could, “Account for a significant fraction of the disputes, altercations, and misunderstandings that occur among individuals, groups, and nations.”  However, there is no escaping it; “biases” are an unavoidably part of the mind and contribute a dominate influence in our selection process.  The question then is not will you or I overcome our biases and vote rationally.  The question is will America overcome its biases and thrive as a united nation or merely survive, splintered by our biases.
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Binna Kandola believes there is hope in the friction biases cause.  His presentation on Diffusing Bias, Reimagining Self and Others, concludes, “In an age of globalization, new ideas about identity are at once the spark for conflict and at the same time the hope for greater cooperation and tolerance.  In the last decade identity has been used as a justification for genocide, terrorism, and war.”  Kamdola expresses the hope that the human bias-structure will come-out of its hidden self-protection, where it is secretly, “…sheltering long held assumptions about the development of identities and their boundaries suggesting new narratives in the way we think about who is “us” and who is “them.’”
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In achieving that goal of cooperation and tolerance, Kandola recommends individuals take, what I call three baby steps in that direction,  
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STEP ONE- Self-awareness…Turn the mirror on your-self and tell your-self to stop

STEP TWO- Conscious effort…Instruct your-self and set fairness as a personal goal

STEP THREE – Responsible action…Take social action while leading and challenging others

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This approach is better than doing nothing and it has my endorsement.  However, I know from experience that methods based on willpower are unsustainable.  Like so many other approaches to overcoming biases, they work fine, until the practitioner wares out or becomes discouraged in the effort.  The bias system is a part of the way the mind works.  Therefore, transforming this feature of our mind requires radical alteration, beyond the mind’s rational and emotional capacities.  It takes activating a third part of human personality…the human spirit.  We usually ignore or dismiss the spiritual aspect of our personality, but if we ever bring our unconscious biases under control, the human spirit must change.  As a Christian, I am as susceptible to unconscious biases as the next person.  However, I know when I yield to God’s Spirit, He alters, not just my thoughts and feelings, but my whole personality.  Unless I am much different from the rest of humanity, I believe He will make the changes necessary within anyone who seeks Him.   

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All of these unconscious biases make it difficult to accurately evaluate and choose between normal presidential candidates.  This November’s abnormal contestants make an unbiased selection impossible…without supernatural intervention.  Despite the questionable character of the candidate and the unconscious biases that guide our selection, the real question is, can the USA rise above our irrational biases, and reunite as one nation after the election.  The world and we will see.  God help us.