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Some applied behavioral science for your Saturday morning. (First thread...Hope this works.) One thing I do to fight #twitterbubble culture: If I get annoyed by someone& #39;s political posts, I am MUCH likelier to un-follow if I disagree rather than agree with that person THREAD 1/14
This is rooted in cognitive psychology research on confirmation bias. Lots of studies have found that people are prone to believe what they want to believe – that& #39;s CONFIRMATION BIAS – we use *new* information to *confirm* what we already believe. 2/14
How does this work? There are several mechanisms – we SEARCH for information that fits our views; we have better MEMORY for information that fits our views. 3/14
That& #39;s not the battle I& #39;m fighting here. What I& #39;m fighting is a third mechanism – we apply SCRUTINY to new evidence in ways that confirms what we already believe. 4/14
Let& #39;s say (hypothetically) you don& #39;t like the President. The SEARCH and MEMORY mechanisms say that you& #39;ll choose to watch news sources that also dislike the President and you& #39;ll remember information about bad things he did. What the SCRUTINY mechanism does is more subtle. 5/14
It says that you& #39;ll apply a much higher standard of evidence to information that contradicts your view rather than supporting it. 6/14
The President made a spelling error on Twitter? What a fool! (Low scrutiny; no search for alt explanations) The President signed an executive order you agree with? He just did it for the votes; he doesn& #39;t believe in it. (High scrutiny; lots of search for alt explanations) 7/14
This is really hard to notice that you& #39;re doing. You can kinda tell when you& #39;re in a bubble, but what you can& #39;t tell so well is whether you& #39;re taking arguments seriously. If you don& #39;t like the President, there& #39;s probably a reason for that, so it& #39;s not crazy to apply 8/14
higher scrutiny to arguments saying that he& #39;s great. There could very well be an alternative explanation! And yes, there is corroborating evidence that he may very well be a fool. (This is not a partisan comment; politics is filled with fools.) 9/14
But this is tricky because there are also millions of people who believe exactly the opposite of what you do. Dialogue is impossible if we don& #39;t have remotely similar standards of evidence. 10/14
I& #39;m highly imperfect at this, but I try to take all arguments seriously. And a first step is by trying to correct this bias. In full disclosure, I don& #39;t think there& #39;s actually good evidence this works (de-biasing is hard and can backfire), but I think it& #39;s worth trying. 11/14
So I try to take arguments especially seriously from people I disagree with often. Yes, that includes people who support the President, and also people like hard-left socialists who I disagree with just as much. But many of these people are smart and worth taking seriously. 12/14
So try to SEARCH out some people you disagree with and actually try to learn from what they say. Of course you can scrutinize their arguments and you don& #39;t have to agree. If you& #39;re so right, what are you afraid of? 13/14
And that brings me to the people I do agree with, but who post things on Twitter that drive me nuts. The obnoxious, the repetitive, the over-the-top drama. I just unfollow them. No loss except my time and headspace. 14/END
(Inspired by un-following a super-annoying person I often agree with.) I feel @PsychRabble (who is not annoying at all whether I agree or not!) might like this thread?
