OT The Politcal Brain - Confirmation bias
- From: BottleBob <bottlbob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2006 12:30:54 GMT
To All:
There is an article in the July issue of Scientific American called the
"Political Brain" where partisanship is shown to be related to
unconscious confirmation bias.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000CE155-1061-1493-906183414B7F0162&sc=I100322
Here are some excerpts from the above article (actually closer to most
of the article):
===========================================================================
I have close friends in both camps, in which I have observed the
following: no matter the issue under discussion, both sides are equally
convinced that the evidence overwhelmingly supports their position.
This surety is called the confirmation bias, whereby we seek and find
confirmatory evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignore
or reinterpret disconfirmatory evidence. Now a functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) study shows where in the brain the confirmation
bias arises and how it is unconscious and driven by emotions.
Psychologist Drew Westen led the study, conducted at Emory University,
and the team presented the results at the 2006 annual conference of the
Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
During the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, while undergoing
an fMRI bran scan, 30 men--half self-described as "strong" Republicans
and half as "strong" Democrats--were tasked with assessing statements by
both George W. Bush and John Kerry in which the candidates clearly
contradicted themselves. Not surprisingly, in their assessments
Republican subjects were as critical of Kerry as Democratic subjects
were of Bush, yet both let their own candidate off the hook.
The neuroimaging results, however, revealed that the part of the brain
most associated with reasoning--the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex--was
quiescent. Most active were the orbital frontal cortex, which is
involved in the processing of emotions; the anterior cingulate, which is
associated with conflict resolution; the posterior cingulate, which is
concerned with making judgments about moral accountability; and--once
subjects had arrived at a conclusion that made them emotionally
comfortable--the ventral striatum, which is related to reward and
pleasure.
Politicians need a peer-review system.
"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain
normally engaged during reasoning," Westen is quoted as saying in an
Emory University press release. "What we saw instead was a network of
emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be
involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in
resolving conflicts." Interestingly, neural circuits engaged in
rewarding selective behaviors were activated. "Essentially, it appears
as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the
conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it,
with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of
positive ones," Westen said.
In science we have built-in self-correcting machinery. Strict
double-blind controls are required in experiments, in which neither the
subjects nor the experimenters know the experimental conditions during
the data-collection phase. Results are vetted at professional
conferences and in peer-reviewed journals. Research must be replicated
in other laboratories unaffiliated with the original researcher.
Disconfirmatory evidence, as well as contradictory interpretations of
the data, must be included in the paper. Colleagues are rewarded for
being skeptical. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
We need similar controls for the confirmation bias in the arenas of
law, business and politics. Judges and lawyers should call one another
on the practice of mining data selectively to bolster an argument and
warn juries about the confirmation bias. CEOs should assess critically
the enthusiastic recommendations of their VPs and demand to see
contradictory evidence and alternative evaluations of the same plan.
Politicians need a stronger peer-review system that goes beyond the
churlish opprobrium of the campaign trail, and I would love to see a
political debate in which the candidates were required to make the
opposite case.
Skepticism is the antidote for the confirmation bias.
===========================================================================
--
BottleBob
http://home.earthlink.net/~bottlbob
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Prev by Date: Re: The dangers of wearing shorts in a machine shop
- Next by Date: Re: The dangers of wearing shorts in a machine shop
- Previous by thread: Re: stealth cuts in tne American stndard of living
- Next by thread: Re: OT The Politcal Brain - Confirmation bias
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
