as Princeton. Dartmouth students saw each team commit an equal number of infractions.
Hastorf and Cantril concluded, “We do not simply ‘react to’ a happening. . . . We behave according to what we bring to the occasion.” Our beliefs affect how we process all new things, “whether the ‘thing’ is a football game, a presidential candidate, Communism, or spinach.”
A study in the 2012 Stanford Law Review called “They Saw a Protest” (the title is a homage to the original Hastorf and Cantril experiment) by Yale professor of law and psychology Dan Kahan, a leading researcher and analyst of biased reasoning, and four colleagues reinforces this notion that our beliefs drive the way we process information.
In the study, two groups of subjects watched a video of police action halting a political demonstration. One group was told the protest occurred outside an abortion clinic, aimed at protesting legalized abortion. Another group was told it occurred at a college career-placement facility, where the military was conducting interviews and protestors were demonstrating against the then-existing ban on openly gay and lesbian soldiers. It was the same video, carefully edited to blur or avoid giving away the subject of the actual protest. Researchers, after gathering information about the worldviews of the subjects, asked them about facts and conclusions from what they saw.
The results mirrored those found by Hastorf and Cantril nearly sixty years before: “Our subjects all viewed the same video. But what they saw— earnest voicing of dissent intended only to persuade, or physical intimidation calculated to interfere with the freedom of others—depended on the congruence of the protestors’ positions with the subjects’ own cultural values.” Whether it is a football game, a protest, or just about anything else, our pre-existing beliefs influence the way we experience the world. That those beliefs aren’t formed in a particularly orderly way leads to all sorts of mischief in our decision-making.
The stubbornness of beliefs
Flaws in forming and updating beliefs have the potential to snowball. Once a belief is lodged, it becomes difficult to dislodge. It takes on a life of its own, leading us to notice and seek out evidence confirming our belief, rarely challenge the validity of confirming evidence, and ignore or work hard to actively discredit information contradicting the belief. This irrational, circular information-processing pattern is called motivated reasoning. The way we process new information is driven by the beliefs we hold, strengthening them. Those strengthened beliefs then drive how we process further information, and so on.
During a break in a poker tournament, a player approached me for my opinion about how he played one of those suited-connector hands. I didn’t witness the hand, and he gave me a very abbreviated description of how he stealthily played the six and seven of diamonds to make a flush on the second-to-last card but “had the worst luck” when the other player made a full house on the very last card.
We had only a minute or two left in the break, so I asked what I thought to be the most relevant question: “Why were you playing six-seven of diamonds in the first place?” (Even a brief explanation, I expected, would fill in details on many of the areas that determine how to play a hand like that and whether it was a profitable choice, such as table position, pot size, chip stack sizes, his opponent’s style of play, how the table perceived his style, etc.) His exasperated response was, “That’s not the point of the story!”
Motivated reasoning tells us it’s not really the point of anyone’s story.
It doesn’t take much for any of us to believe something. And once we believe it, protecting that belief guides how we treat further information relevant to the belief. This is perhaps no more evident than in the rise in prominence of “fake news” and disinformation. The concept of “fake news,” an intentionally false story planted for financial or political gain, is hundreds of years old. It has included such legendary practitioners as Orson Welles, Joseph Pulitzer, and William Randolph Hearst. Disinformation is different than fake news in that the story has some true elements, embellished to spin a particular narrative. Fake news works because people who already hold beliefs consistent with the story generally won’t question the evidence. Disinformation is even more powerful because the
confirmable facts in the story make it feel like the information has been vetted, adding to the power of the narrative being pushed.
Fake news isn’t meant to change minds. As we know, beliefs are hard to change. The potency of fake news is that it entrenches beliefs its intended audience already has, and then amplifies them. The Internet is a playground for motivated reasoning. It provides the promise of access to a greater diversity of information sources and opinions than we’ve ever had available, yet we gravitate toward sources that confirm our beliefs, that agree with us. Every flavor is out there, but we tend to stick with our favorite.
Making matters worse, many social media sites tailor our Internet experience to show us more of what we already like. Author Eli Pariser developed the term “filter bubble” in his 2011 book of the same name to describe the process of how companies like Google and Facebook use algorithms to keep pushing us in the directions we’re already headed. By collecting our search, browsing, and similar data from our friends and correspondents, they give users headlines and links that cater to what they’ve divined as our preferences. The Internet, which gives us access to a diversity of viewpoints with unimaginable ease, in fact speeds our retreat into a confirmatory bubble. No matter our political orientation, none of us is immune.
The most popular websites have been doing our motivated reasoning for us.* Even when directly confronted with facts that disconfirm our beliefs, we don’t let facts get in the way. As Daniel Kahneman pointed out, we just want to think well of ourselves and feel that the narrative of our life story is a positive one. Being wrong doesn’t fit into that narrative. If we think of beliefs as only 100% right or 100% wrong, when confronting new information that might contradict our belief, we have only two options: (a) make the massive shift in our opinion of ourselves from 100% right to 100% wrong, or (b) ignore or discredit the new information. It feels bad to be wrong, so we choose (b). Information that disagrees with us is an assault on our self-narrative. We’ll work hard to swat that threat away. On the flip side, when additional information agrees with us, we effortlessly embrace it.