It turns out that conservative-minded people are quite a lot better at spotting false syllogisms when they have liberal conclusions, and vice versa. It wasn’t an enormous effect, but it was significant – in one of the experiments, conservatives spotted unsound arguments about 80% of the time when they had liberal conclusions, but only 60% when they had conservative ones, and the effect was almost exactly reversed for liberals. The effect was somewhat smaller in the other experiments, but it was seen in all three, which were carried on different groups of subjects. [...]
It’s interesting to note as well that this is a very bipartisan arrangement. Both Left-wingers and Right-wingers find it harder, to roughly the same degree, to make accurate judgments in the face of an ideological headwind. This, incidentally, is also what another study – an upcoming meta-analysis to be published in Perspectives on Psychological Science – finds: a modest but consistent bias preventing us from reliably understanding arguments that undermine our beliefs, present almost equally in liberals and conservatives. [...]
He suggests we could do something similar. If you think some policy is good or bad – raising taxes, say – then say in advance what effect you think it will have, in explicit terms. I think a no-deal Brexit will be followed by at least two quarters of negative economic growth, for example. If, then, you don’t see what you were expecting, then it should give you some pause to think that your reasoning was influenced by your political beliefs.
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