“Confirmation bias and motivated reasoning have been widely researched and explored in both political and nonpolitical contexts,” write the RAND Corporation’s Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich in their 2018 report, Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life. The research would not please Socrates, who teaches us to be humble about our beliefs, to assume we are often wrong, and to seek out challenging information and opinions. Unfortunately, those are usually the last things we want to do. Instead, we seek out congenial beliefs, then look for evidence and arguments to defend them. The British psychologist Peter Wason, who coined the term “confirmation bias,” found in experiments in the 1960s that people who were asked to guess the rule which was used to generate a string of numbers (such as 2, 4, 6) by proposing additional numbers would come up with a rule easily, but then test it only by offering additional numbers that confirmed their guess (such as 8, 10, 12). They hardly ever tested their guess by offering numbers which would disconfirm their theory, such as 7, 8, 9 — which would have worked, because the rule was “increasing integers.” Neglecting to seek disconfirmation is like seeing three black cats, hypothesizing that all cats are black, and then not bothering to look around for any non-black cats.
Other studies since then have confirmed the same tendency. Kavanagh and Rich, of RAND, cite research finding that “people will choose search and decision methods that are most likely to lead to desired outcomes or conclusion, not to the best-informed ones.” Confirming partisan beliefs delivers a dose of satisfaction by triggering a little hit of dopamine in the brain, according to Haidt. “Like rats that cannot stop pressing the button, partisans may be simply unable to stop believing weird things,” he writes. “Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive.” By the same token, studies find that people are strongly averse toward seeking out, listening to, or even noticing information which challenges their beliefs. One study in 2017 found that two-thirds of subjects would pay money to avoid the discomfort of exposing themselves to the other side’s political views. “Over a third of Obama voters and more than half of Romney voters,” reported The Economist, in its account of these experiments, “compared the experience of listening to the other side’s voters to having a tooth pulled.”
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