It’s no secret that American politics is an incredibly divisive subject that has long been a cause of anger, disdain and, sadly, violence in our country. Perhaps less well-known is just how tangible our collective errors in thinking — our biases — have been in distorting our political beliefs. Good intentions or not, almost every single political actor, from 16-year-olds arguing with their friends, to nationally syndicated political pundits, will regularly fall victim to the grip of cognitive biases and logical fallacies.

Some of these biases are detectable just beneath the surface of our arguments, but others are systemically entrenched and encoded into laws and party platforms. Hopefully, taking a look at some of the more concerning errors and biases in action will allow for greater political awareness and the cognitive rewiring of a broken country.

Forming opinions

Not all opinions are created equally. Some are evidence-based. Some aren’t. When we promote the ones that aren’t, we ignore reality and create more problems than we solve.

At the center of our biases lies the essential decision-making process through which we understand the basics of policies, and quickly decide to what extent we can see them working and to what degree we support them. Let’s start with the all-too-common driving fallacy in decision making: confirmation bias. Confirmation bias appears when people seek to confirm their existing beliefs before considering alternate sides; it’s wide-reaching in the realm of politics, especially in discussions on controversial topics, since it allows a debater to arm themselves with false confidence in the face of opposing views. A passionate anti-vaccination advocate may fail to acknowledge, for example, the credible research that refutes the supposed correlation between vaccines and autism. They may consciously — or subconsciously — choose to disengage with whatever evidence does exist. Confirmation bias has roots in the emotional complex of “being right,” which makes it extremely durable.

Whether they lean right or left on the political spectrum, people often disregard the opinions of their political opposition, especially on hot-button issues. The faulty process which confirmation bias incites is called reactive devaluation: we “devalue” information contrary to what we expect and desire, not because it’s faulty, but simply because it challenges our beliefs and in turn our confidence in ourselves.

Another related bias that affects opinion formation — or in this case, opinion revision — is conservatism bias, a phenomenon in which people are only willing to alter their beliefs when given information that overwhelmingly contradicts their own opinions. In this case, conservatism refers to an insufficient and small perspective shift, not to be confused with the political ideology. Conservatism bias is slightly less damaging than confirmation bias, allowing for some, albeit minor, changes in opinion based on evidence.

In everyday life, we project confidence even to ourselves and often think we know everything, when, in actuality, we may know very little about a subject — barely enough to get by. The Dunning-Kruger effect, a staple of introductory psychology courses, is the phenomenon in which those who gain more knowledge in a subject might actually lose confidence in their abilities as a result of coming to terms with how little, it turned out, they actually knew. The opposite is also true with the Dunning-Kruger effect; too often, the person with the least knowhow in the room believes themselves to be the smartest and most knowledgeable.

Bias in political media

Research shows that excessive media coverage causes the average person to believe that significant, recent and highly covered events are more common than they really are — this is the availability heuristic in action. After the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the media covered the events, almost exclusively, for weeks. Of course, the attacks deserved significant coverage. However, during that period of shock, legislators passed the Patriot Act, which significantly curbed civil liberties, and the president initiated the “War on Terror,” a military campaign that we now know has had a multitude of negative consequences on the lives of American soldiers and the political stability of the Middle East. Those who were transfixed by the repeating images of the smoking towers and media commentary on terrorism could easily assume that the most “available” example of news — the events on 9/11 — were an accurate representation of the religion of Islam.

The availability heuristic is not only relevant to saturated news, but out-and-out false news as well. According to a 2018 MIT-affiliated research paper, “The spread of true and false news online,” misinformation travels over six times as fast as legitimate news does on Twitter. The distance it travels and its speed are important, as the frequency of coverage affects how we differentiate between what news is somewhat important and what news is the most important to us. This differentiation is altogether independent of logical metrics for importance, like potential impact on our own lives or our children’s lives, and is instead based simply on what’s front-and-center in our attention. 

Similarly sounding is the availability cascade, a self-reinforcing cycle in which an idea or thought seems to gain credibility and validity as it echoes over social media and television. Days before the insurrection, for example, some politicians used statistics on “citizens’ distrust of the election” to justify their hesitancy to approve the electoral vote count that would confirm Joe Biden as the 46th president. Yet it was those same politicians who conjured such buzz in the first place: Their constant rhetoric about Americans’ distrust of the election results made even more people less confident in their validity, only to then cite how many people weren’t confident as new evidence for their stance.

The proportionality bias causes people to believe that large events have equally large causes, when often, reality is much more varied. This bias has shown its colors in the recent, and not so recent, proliferation of conspiracy theories and the spread of absurd conclusions to explain them. Blood libel, the satanic panic and the Jewish occupational government conspiracy theory all rely on absurd conclusions to back their absurd premises. Recently, far-right conspiracies like Pizzagate and QAnon have gained popularity among those who fall prey to this bias. Conspiracists expect big, awful, coordinated institutions of child-trafficking politicians to be behind tragic, real cases of rape, murder and death.

A striking similarity between so many cases of unconscious bias is how the slightest change in the handling of a topic can lead to drastically different conclusions. Media outlets and most politicians use the framing effect, the manipulation of the wording or “framing” of an event, to elicit a desired response from their viewers. As stories begin to appear in the news cycle, the media — consciously or subconsciously — begins to frame. Some framing may be accurate, some less so. Which sounds better, being “anti-abortion” or being “pro-life”? What about the terms “human life” or “clump of cells”? These editorialized phrases are everywhere. Even subtler are the different focuses of headlines: Consider The New York Times’ “Democrats win, flip control of the Senate” versus The Wall Street Journal’s “Trump loses the Senate.” After former President Donald Trump announced the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a leader of ISIS, The Washington Post referred to him as “an austere religious scholar,” sparking criticism for the framing of his attribution. Was this an attempt to diminish Trump’s accomplishment or a fair characterization of a religious man? Framing can make or break a policy’s viability and implicitly direct readers towards a particular emotion and, ultimately, a particular vote.

Cognitive errors surrounding COVID-19

Amidst the pandemic, numerous biases have risen in full force. Anti-maskers tend to cite their personal freedoms as the primary reason for not wearing masks, while ignoring the possible health risks to themselves and those around them. In the study of biases, this skepticism of expert advice and guidelines may be a form of reactance. Reactance occurs when people have an urge to defy those in authority from encroaching on their liberties, even if the encroachment may be to their benefit.

Additionally, the sunk cost fallacy is a cognitive pattern that describes a continued investment of time, energy and money, into something that will likely fail, out of a refusal to accept that the initial investment was a poor choice. Out of this fallacy, the plan-continuation bias appears, which describes a desire for one to press on with their original plans even if that course of action may no longer be sound. This type of misthinking has occurred often throughout the pandemic, as many continue with their routines of a pre-pandemic world, plans intact and unaffected by new health risks and guidelines.

The core bias of the center

Centrism may seem appealing to people who love nuance and diplomacy. Beware, though, of the “argumentum ad temperantiam”: The phrase is Latin for “false compromise,” better known to cognitive researchers as the middle ground fallacy. This error occurs when people look for the truth to be exactly in between two opposing ideas, even if evidence is imbalanced to heavily favor one side or another. While almost no issue is black and white, little is perfectly in between, either. If you’re centrist, look for gradation in your stances; expect shades of gray to be more accurate, and evidence-based, than perfect gray.

The core bias of libertarianism

Libertarianism offers an interesting case study in biased thinking, since it doesn’t engage in the same types of misthinkings that appear on the typical liberal-conservative spectrum. While libertarian positions can be fairly nuanced, they also tend to exhibit what cognitive researchers call the status quo bias. The status quo bias describes libertarians’ economic position, laissez-faire capitalism, perfectly. This bias causes people to prefer the current state of affairs over changes, which are seen as overreaching or overly complicated. The laissez-faire economic model is based on the belief that businesses should be effectively unregulated by the government in order to facilitate a healthy economy. The bias seeps into their hands-off approach to government-sponsored poverty relief, as well. Yet, leaving things completely to the “invisible hand” has seldom been the most effective solution to complex issues, according to the majority of sociologists and economists. By oversimplifying our economics into a theoretically pure model, we overlook very real issues such as irrational behavior, the consolidation of power and market inefficiencies in the system.

The core bias of the right

Sometimes we wear examples of cognitive biases on our sleeves — or hats. Consider the conservative slogan “Make America Great Again.” The phrase sounds relatively innocent, but this slogan exhibits a fallacy cognitive researchers call declinism. Declinism is when conservatives may assume past eras were better since they are viewed through rose-colored glasses, when in reality, there were as many — if not more — issues in the past as there are now. From worse medical services, to fewer people legally allowed to vote, our past is anything but a perfect utopia to return to.

The core bias of the left

The curse of knowledge bias is a common bias that permeates among liberals. According to a Pew Research study, college educated adults are more likely to take liberal stances on issues. The curse of knowledge bias comes into play when liberal college graduates assume that others possess the same background on certain academic subjects that they do. Often, they’re incredulous that others don’t think the same way as they do. That incredulity translates into poor communication, a feeling that others should have already come to their same conclusions and ultimately, accusations of elitism from the right.

Often, just labeling yourself “liberal” translates to elitism, even if you don’t have the academic background to be considered any more knowledgeable than the average citizen — once again, the Dunning-Kruger effect. Superficial Instagram slideshows, performative activism and approval from like-minded Hollywood celebrities enables some liberal people to feel correct about their positions without knowing exactly why they are correct. Too often, liberals are content in thinking they are probably on the right side of policy when commonly, after doing more digging, they discover nuances, subtleties and weaknesses inherent to a position, according to a 2013 study by researchers from Harvard, UCLA, the University of Colorado and Brown.

General political biases

Whether we care to admit it or not, biases are ubiquitous in American politics. Our system is tainted to the point where we’ve become almost dependent on these biases. American democracy itself is perhaps inherently biased. Through our participation in the electoral process, we tacitly endorse the either-or-fallacy, in which every election seems to be a decision between only two choices. Our election structure — including the electoral college — greatly silences third-party candidates who may offer more nuanced ideas, and it expects the impossible of the two frontrunner candidates: universal expertise. There are almost never going to be only two clear sides to any given issue, yet we default to this false dichotomy daily, leaving those who do not fit into either ingroup without a voice. It seems that our current electoral system — mainly the primary and caucus systems — has calcified our political duality.

Another general bias that appears on all sides of the political spectrum is groupthink. Groupthink is the tendency to conform to a group consensus to appease others, even if, silently, one disagrees. If you’re in a group — whether it be your family or friends — and find yourself nodding along, make sure to avoid groupthink, and think first in order to voice only what you truly believe.

Lastly, in-group favoritism is a bias that rears its head often in political discussion. This is the tendency to ascribe inflated significance to America’s place on the world stage, and ignore the issues of the rest of the world. On the world stage, the United States is one out of 195 countries. Americans tend to disregard issues in other countries, due to the distance and seeming disconnect between us and other nations. There’s no denying America’s importance as a world power, but that doesn’t mean supposedly external foreign affairs aren’t just as important. In the 21st century, all economies are now tied to each other. 

International social concerns should also be on our radars: Some of us may be able to help. Presently, India is undergoing a dramatic spike in COVID-19 cases, China is “re-educating” groups of Uyghur Muslim in detention facilties and Syria has been in a civil war for a decade. These are matters of life and death, but often, many of us tend not to concern ourselves with issues beyond our borders. The world is interconnected, and solely focusing on our own exceptionalism ignores this reality.

How do we move forward?

Everyone should take a moment to recognize their own cognitive fallacies: Don’t always trust your brain.

However, common decency still counts, and can still help. When arguing with someone you disagree with, try and find a consensus on certain facts. Once you’re on the same page about some  initial truths, draw the conclusions you want, but do not discredit others’ opinions haphazardly. If they’re using some fallacy or bias, point it out if you can, but be aware that it doesn’t necessarily discredit their general position, only their specific argument. Believe it or not, if you assume a fallacy always indicates a wrong conclusion, you’re falling victim to what’s called the fallacy fallacy.

Handling an unwieldy mind is no easy task. Some of these outlined biases are easy to recognize in ourselves and others, some not so much. But they all certainly exist –– we see them in action everywhere –– and it’s our job as rational, honest citizens and humans to root out as many of them as we can.