And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [70]
Worse, the traffic did not translate into blog posts: by the end of the first month I had gotten only six. The experimental design had failed, I feared, and so I returned to the laboratory for more tests.
THE LONG TAIL OF TRUTH
In the months leading up to the 2004 presidential election, a team of neuroscientists at Emory University used a brain scanner to illuminate a dismal truth about the political mind. They recruited thirty strongly partisan subjects, half Democrats and half Republicans, and studied their reactions to political statements; specifically, to apparent contradictions on the part of political figures. Each subject was placed in an MRI scanner so that brain activity could be monitored while he or she was shown slides.
In each set of slides, the first showed an alleged quotation by a political figure; for example this quote, attributed to George W. Bush in 2000: “Ken Lay is a supporter of mine. . . . I plan to run the government like a CEO runs a company. Ken Lay and Enron are a model of how I’ll do that.” (In fact, Bush said no such thing: the quotes were all at least partially fabricated.) The second slide then showed a statement of supposed fact that contradicted the quote: e.g., “Mr. Bush now avoids any mention of Ken Lay and is critical of Enron when asked.”
At this point, the subjects were asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 4, how inconsistent the political figure’s words were with the truth. After entering this rating, the subjects were then shown an ameliorating fact about the apparent inconsistency—e.g., “People who know the president report that he feels betrayed by Ken Lay, and was genuinely shocked to find that Enron’s leadership had been corrupt”—and then asked again to rate, from 1 to 4, how inconsistent the figure’s words and actions were.
The survey results were predictable: the subjects were far more likely to ascribe inconsistency to their opponents’ candidate than to their own, even after considering the exculpatory evidence:
FIG. 5-3—PARTISAN RATINGS OF INCONSISTENCY, 2004
Far more striking, though, was what the Emory researchers saw on the brain scans. When these partisan subjects were “considering” whether the statements contradicted each other, the part of the brain associated with reasoning—the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex—was not being employed at all. Instead, a large region of activation was seen in the ventral stratum, indicating that the subjects’ responses were essentially emotional—in fact, they were getting a tremendous psychological reward, as if they had solved a puzzle or won a bet. “None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged,” the lead researcher, Drew Westen, told Newsweek in 2006 on announcing the findings. “Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones.”
What the Emory researchers had documented was simply the neurological correlate of a psychological phenomenon that has been observed for centuries. “The human understanding,” wrote the philosopher Francis Bacon in his 1620 treatise Novum Organum,
when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects; in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.
In the psychological literature, the tendency to disregard data that runs against held opinions is called confirmation bias, and its existence has been corroborated by study after study. This bias is not merely a political phenomenon, of course. Test-takers asked to give only supporting reasons for their conclusions will become more overconfident