We form our beliefs based on what comes to us from the world through the window of perception, but then those beliefs act like a lens, focusing on what they want to see. In a New York University psychology laboratory earlier this year, a group of subjects watched a 45-second video clip of a violent struggle between a police officer and an unarmed civilian.3 It was ambiguous as to whether the officer, in trying to handcuff the person resisting arrest, behaved improperly. Before seeing the video, the subjects were asked to express how much identification they felt with police officers as a group. The subjects, whose eye movements were being discretely monitored, were then asked to assign culpability. Not surprisingly, people who identified less strongly with police were more likely to call for stronger punishment. But that was only for people who often looked at the police officer during the video. For those who did not look as much at the officer, their punishment decision was the same whether they identified with police or not. [...]
A recent study by Kara Federmeier and colleagues hints that something similar goes on in our formation of memories.5 They considered the example of someone with a mistaken belief about a political candidate’s policy stance, like when most people incorrectly thought Michael Dukakis, not George Bush, had declared he would be the “education president.” Studying subjects’ brain activity via EEG, they found that people’s “memory signals” were much the same toward the incorrect information as they were toward the things they correctly remembered. Their interpretation of the event had hardened into truth. [...]
None of which bodes well for the idea that policy or other debates can be solved by simply giving people accurate information. As research by Yale University law and psychology professor Dan Kahan has suggested, polarization does not happen with debates like climate change because one side is thinking more analytically, while the other wallows in unreasoned ignorance or heuristic biases.9 Rather, those subjects who tested highest on measures like “cognitive reflection” and scientific literacy were also most likely to display what he calls “ideologically motivated cognition.” They were paying the most attention, seeing the duck they knew was there.
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