If You Think Politics Make People Illogical, You're Right

Why tribe makes it hard to figure out what's true

Photo by Ran Berkovich on Unsplash

Doesn’t it feel like politics just make people unreasonable? Well, a new study shows that this isn’t just a feeling.

It shouldn’t be surprising that political beliefs wreak havoc. A consistent finding of cognitive psychology is that the things we believe to be true interfere with our ability to reason objectively about the world. Confirmation bias, probably the most well-known of the biases, is after all an error born of reasoning in a way that confirms the things we already believe.

Simply put, we want to be right about the world. We don’t want to think we made a mistake. This makes it really hard to change our minds, even when confronted with clear evidence that we are wrong.

But beliefs interfere in a way that goes beyond confirmation bias. The beliefs we hold also make it hard, fundamentally, to figure out what’s true and what isn’t.