Have you ever wondered why some people simply cannot see the sense in your political views? They may be intelligent and fairly well-informed, yet they appear immune to facts, evidence and common sense. They seem to make increasingly bizarre claims about what is happening as the argument develops. Their saying the same of you simply proves their disconnection from reality.
These debates almost never reach a point of persuasion, where someone changes their mind in the way they would if the debate were about why the car won’t start. Belittling each other and exchanging extremist slogans do nothing to persuade, and even friends end up further apart.
Evidently some arguments are not about the truth. At least one side must be wrong. Nonetheless they seem to hold life-and-death-like significance to the combatants.
Even when we do try to learn about an issue, we deliberately avoid contrary information and stay in a bubble that confirms our beliefs. We often regard this as a virtue. If we do look at the opposition’s case and evidence, we do so while holding our nose, purely in order to enhance our ability to attack it, or to confirm how bad they are. We act like opposing lawyers rather than scientists or philosophers. This undermines the view that the primary purpose of thinking is to apprehend the truth.
If we are not after the truth or are not trying to persuade, and we risk paying a price for being wrong, what are we doing and why?
Silly beliefs must have some kind of incentive behind them. Arguments often seem more about winning to achieve status than being right. Perhaps political arguments serve that sort of function. We know that group membership and cohesion are vital for the prospects of social animals like ourselves. The group helps find resources and fight off predators or other groups competing for those resources.
It would be strange if social animals didn’t evolve to belong to groups. However, evolution is about maximising overall fitness, which is as much about reproduction as survival. When it comes to breeding, social connections outweigh practically relevant truths. Furthermore, achieving high status within a group increases both the social and survival benefits of membership. We evolved to become hardwired to belong to groups and seek high status within them.
Benefits of belonging
The benefits of belonging to a group will attract freeloaders, and the otherwise disloyal. Disloyalty could result in anything from parasitism to the death of many. So social animals are also prone to look for and punish offenders. That in turn makes it essential to reliably signal loyalty to each other, showing how much more you are ‘for us’ than ‘for anyone else.’
The alienating nature of political arguments communicates the ‘us versus them’ sorting aspect of the signal so well it looks designed for the purpose.
The signal still needs to be convincing, however. Signals that cost nothing to make are more doubtful. Signals must be costly. What kind of cost does an alienating political clash entail? We could point to the risk of going down with a losing team.
While in modern times it is easier to change teams than ever before, it is still not straightforward.
Firstly, you will lose everything you had in your original team, even if they don’t succeed in punishing you in other ways. The new team members will be suspicious. After all, in changing, you will have demonstrated the capacity to be disloyal. Signalling convincing loyalty to a new team will involve more extreme costs. Furthermore, faking a signal is tough.
Maintaining a lie can be more costly in effort than a genuine signal, and the group’s vigilance and BS detecting skills make getting away with it a long shot. You are likely to think the other team is nasty and not want to change anyway. You are largely stuck with your original team. One price you do pay is the opportunity cost of any beneficial interactions with the team you have alienated.
Consistency is not the barrier to beliefs among ordinary folk as it is among scientists and philosophers.
We can compartmentalise inconsistent beliefs, while science and philosophy are institutions that prioritise and enforce consistency. Different types of belief receive different kinds of feedback.
Empirical outcomes
Ideological beliefs are much more removed from immediate empirical outcomes than practical beliefs so don’t face the same practical costs. Plus, ideological beliefs have far greater social consequences than practical beliefs. We are quite capable of believing implausible things when socially rewarded. The costs and benefits of each manifest in different contexts and are mostly quite easy to separate in both your mind and in practice.
Even if you know a belief will result in bad consequences for your group, so long as the vast majority of them endorse it it’s in your social interests to signal that you do too. It’s like the prisoner’s dilemma in that a sub-optimal outcome is the rational choice. When the marginal effect of the signal is low and the status benefit is high, it is rational to signal agreement.
In large groups the probability that your individual opinion will affect anything is vanishingly low. The fact that more extremist signals receive more attention is a plus when there is no individual downside.
Asking how to discover the truth and putting more weight on it than on tribal loyalty is more important than simply asking how we come to hold false beliefs. We could teach people the value of acting more like a scientist or philosopher by relentlessly teaching, in schools, universities and media, that consistency and accurate empirical evidence matter, and that simple extreme and unqualified opinions are less likely to be true, in spite of being more convincing.
We could deliberately make open honest rational enquiries into the virtues and downsides of our own and other tribe’s ways, such as, for example, the pros and cons of individualism and collectivism.
Films or TV dramas can be a useful vehicle. That may soften mistrust and open us up to adopting elements of one another’s cultures for our own benefit. We could learn from places that have tried to get different cultures to cooperate, or at least stop fighting, like Switzerland, Singapore and Lebanon. Perhaps we should re-evaluate the South African experience – by asking, for example, whether the reconciliation process worked, or what is causing division or cooperation now?
Heavy commitment
Signalling that is less extreme, in the sense of not directly confronting the opposition, is always possible. For example, you could display a thorough knowledge of your side’s views, particularly if that knowledge required a heavy commitment to acquire. However, it depends on context and incentives. Anything online tends to make moderate signals difficult and rewards extremism in multiple ways. This takes away the need to compromise, and creates and reinforces echo chambers, making it difficult to challenge factual claims.
Regulating how online platforms tackle those issues may be necessary.
[Image: Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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