Motivated reasoning and cognitive bias are terms used by psychosocial researchers to describe a tendency among people to filter information, turn off eyes and ears, and consider only the evidence they want to hear.
Everyday in our local newspaper, I read letters to the editor. Letters from shills and hotheads. Letters from bigots who rationalize their bigotry even as they deny it. Most remarkable is the inventiveness of people who go to extraordinary lengths to rationalize the irrational and engage in willful self-deception.
Bogus conspiracies, straw man arguments, exaggerated and embellished claims, errors of attribution, errors of reasoning, denial, projection … all are examples of cognitive bias.
One letter writer claims: “The left absolutely hates Donald Trump. They hate him with every fiber of their being, every cell in their bodies, but they don't precisely know why they hate him.”
Does this letter writer see what we see? Does he see the bullying of a disabled man? Has he seen news accounts of handcuffed children, or a deportation order that sends a hospitalized girl with a brain tumor to a detention center? With eyes wide shut, he ignores Trump's defects of character. Partisan bias is cognitive bias when we fail to see the insanity and inhumanity.
Alarm bells are ringing across the entire political spectrum. Conservative columnist George Will quits the GOP on account of Donald Trump. Conservative commentator Kathleen Parker condemns his reckless rhetoric. Trump loyalists denounce Parker. President #45 bashes the press as “an enemy of the people.” Republican Senator John McCain defends a free press as a constitutionally protected right. Trump loyalists denounce McCain.
There will always be an angry rabble who cast a blind eye on gross misuses of power. Never dismiss an angry lynch mob whose hunger for red meat is insatiable. If you fail to feed them, they will assail you as assuredly as flies drawn to carrion.
Galloping hissy fits, boorish misuses of words, ad hominem character assassinations, misquotes, harping, carping, nitpicking, accusations, fabrications, deceptions, insults, and angry outbursts — hardly a week goes by without uncouth examples of cognitive bias leaping off page.
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