unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [32]
A closely related effect is what researchers call the hostile media phenomenon. Three Stanford University researchers demonstrated this in 1985 by showing pro-Arab and pro-Israeli audiences identical news accounts of the massacre of several hundred persons in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps near Beirut, Lebanon, in 1982. Each side detected more negative than positive references to their side, and each side thought the coverage was likely to sway neutral observers in a direction hostile to them. Why? Probably because content that agrees with our own views simply seems true and thus not very noteworthy, while material that counters our biases stands out in our minds and makes us look for a reason to reject it. So, to a conservative, news with a conservative slant is fair; to a liberal, news with a liberal slant is fair; and to both, there is something unfair somewhere in any news program that tries to balance alternative points of view.
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This Is Your Brain on Politics
During the 2004 presidential campaign, the Emory University psychologist Drew Westen and his colleagues conducted brain scans of fifteen Bush supporters and fifteen Kerry supporters, who were asked to evaluate statements attributed to each candidate. The researchers told the subjects that Kerry had reversed his position on overhauling Social Security, and they said Bush flip-flopped on his support for the former chief executive of Enron, Ken Lay.
Not surprisingly, each group judged the other’s candidate harshly but let its own candidate off fairly easy—clear evidence of bias. More interesting was what the brain scans showed. “We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,” Westen said in announcing his results. “What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up.”
Fig. 1: Emotional centers active when processing information unfavorable to the partisan’s preferred candidate
Furthermore, after the partisans had come to conclusions favorable to their candidates, their brain scans showed activity in circuits associated with reward, rather as the brains of addicts do when they get a fix. “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,” Westen said.
Fig. 2. Reward centers active when processing information that gets the partisan’s preferred candidate off the hook
Westen’s experiment supplies physical evidence that emotionally biased thinking may be hardwired into our brains.
Images from Drew Westen, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience(2006), MIT Press Journals, © by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Psychologists call this phenomenon confirmation bias, and it not only colors how we see things, but how we reason as well. David Perkins, a professor of education at Harvard, has aptly called it “myside bias.” In studies of how people reason when asked to think about a controversial issue, Perkins observed a strong tendency for people to come up with reasons favoring their own side, and not even to think about reasons favoring the other. His test subjects offered three times more considerations on their own side of an issue as they did against their position, and that count included arguments they brought up just for the sake of shooting them down.
The University of Pennsylvania psychologist Jonathan Baron found a classic example of myside bias in a Daily Pennsylvanian student article in favor of abortion rights, which said: “If government rules against abortion, it will be acting contrary to one of the basic rights of Americans,…the right to make decisions for oneself.” The author of that sentence was oblivious to