My coauthor sent me article yesterday which does a very good job of giving a real-world example of a couple of the principals we discuss in our book. In the article Daniel Klein, an economics professor at George Mason and a self-proclaimed libertarian, describes how he boldly penned an extremely controversial Wall St Journal op-ed piece based on some research he had done–only to have to retract everything he said a few months later when it became clear that he was flat-out wrong.
The short-version of the story is that Klein ran across some survey data which seemed to give a pretty strong indication that Libertarians and Republicans, on average, know significantly more about basic economics than Democrats. Based on this finding, Klein published an academic article and followed that up with a short op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. The problem, however, was that the data wasn’t collected by him or for this purpose; Klein hadn’t designed the survey to test for that hypothesis, instead the data was collected by another researcher for another purpose. To his credit, Klein went back and tested the data again with a properly designed study… and he found that his initial conclusions were clearly wrong. Republicans and Libertarians don’t know more than Democrats; it just turns out that each group gives systematically correct answers when discussing economic facts that buttress their own opinions, and are pretty likely to give wrong answers when discussing economic facts that buttress a different position.
This problem is called Confirmation Bias, and it’s a huge problem for any voter who is trying to stay informed. At its essence, confirmation bias says that we tend to hear what we want to hear, and ignore what we don’t want to hear.
Of course, most people’s first reaction to this is “well, I wouldn’t have done that–I’m much more open-minded.” But keep in mind that Klein himself was obviously open-minded enough to run the second experiment, and is fully aware of the existence of Confirmation Bias. And yet Klein himself was falling victim to a form of confirmation bias by rushing to judgement on the first article: he took the data in front of him, and jumped to the conclusion that he, as a Libertarian, wanted and ignored alternate explanations. He wasn’t being intentionally closed-minded. The problem, as we note in our book, is that “being wrong doesn’t come with a warning label.” Our biases are so pernicious that they interfere with our ability to recognize that we are falling victim to them.
This is a huge problem for voters. Moreover, it is compounded by a simple fact of the news media: provocative statements sell papers, retractions do not. The author of the op-ed issued a public mea culpa. But by that time more than 16,000 people had “liked” the Wall Street Journal article on Facebook, and another 135 had Tweeted about it, not to mention the tens of thousands of people who read about the initial article. Klein did publish a retraction in the Atlantic several months later–although I expect that very few people who read the first op-ed read the retraction. Moreover, the Wall Street Journal website still has the first op-ed up, with no mention of the retraction unless you read to the very last of the 14 pages of comments.
I firmly believe that we each have a responsibility as citizens to attempt to educate ourselves. But keep in mind that no matter how often we read the newspapers or scour the latest scientific and social scientific findings, there will always be plenty of things that we don’t know–and that we can’t educate ourselves about because we are unaware of our own ignorance.
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