Deciphering problematic patterns of thinking

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/08/2020 (1964 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This just in: our thinking on socio-cultural matters is imperfect. It is constructed and deeply compromised by our “isms,” ideologies, cognitive biases and motivated reasoning. Being properly “sensible” is culturally conditional. Being unequivocally correct is rare. Being purely objective is impossible.

The Greek word “ismos” means the action of engaging in something, such as terrorism or patriotism, but when employed as a suffix in English, an “ism” can also mean a state of being, such as barbarism or alcoholism, or a movement in the arts, such as impressionism or realism. Yet most “isms” are philosophical or religious belief systems that have become politicized and ideological.

Philosophically, rationalism, empiricism, romanticism, fascism, humanism, Christianism or sexism are sets of (sub)conscious beliefs that function as comprehensive normative visions or systems of meaning applied to public matters, such as racism.

“Isms” incline us to critique and dismiss opposing ideas as “ideological,” as if ideology were an avoidable, culpable failing. But ideology is not merely “false belief” pertaining to socio-cultural matters, because to assess a belief as false is to presuppose, arrogantly, that we are in command of “correct belief” from which to judge all other beliefs as false.

Instead, ideology is simply a systematic body of concepts about human life or culture. Sociologically, ideology is a coherent set of interrelated ideas (about what is) and ideals (about what ought to be) that explain and justify (legitimate) the prevailing or proposed distribution of power, wealth and privilege, such as racial inequality.

Just as we all hold to one ideology or another, so too are we all prone to cognitive biases of which we may or may not be aware. Psychologically, cognitive biases are systematic errors in thinking on any topic, often due to our brain’s attempt to simplify information processing. Also known as cognitive lubricants, they are particularly active and problematic in espousing an ideology.

Wikipedia lists 188 cognitive biases categorized as a) decision-making, belief and behavioural biases, b) social biases or c) memory biases.

Here, in alphabetical order, are a dozen different types pertaining to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of colour).

1. The Bandwagon Effect: the tendency to believe and do things because other people believe and do the same, such as perceiving BIPOC to be “other” and lesser.

2. The Clustering Illusion: the tendency to see patterns where none exist, such as observing delinquency in a few BIPOC and generalizing it to all.

3. The Confirmation Bias: the tendency to select and interpret information in a way that confirms one’s assumptions and preconceived notions, such as seeing only the behaviours among BIPOC that you expect.

4. The Congruence Bias: the tendency to evaluate a possible explanation by directly testing only that explanation, rather than also considering possible alternative explanations, such as attributing poverty among BIPOC to laziness.

5. The Focusing Effect: the tendency to bias understandings by placing too much emphasis on one aspect of something rather than examining all relevant factors, such as faulting BIPOC for lower educational achievement.

6. The Framing Effect: the tendency to draw different conclusions from the same information depending on how that information is presented, such as maintaining only that “all lives matter.”

7. The Frequency Illusion: the tendency of people who have recently learned about or noticed something to begin to see it everywhere, such as casting BIPOC as naturally gifted athletic or musical entertainers.

8. The In-Group Bias: the tendency to grant greater credibility and authority to those who are members of one’s own social group, such as dismissing BIPOC spokespersons as playing identity politics.

9. The Irrational Escalation bias: the tendency to make new irrational decisions based upon previous rational decisions to justify prior commitments or actions, such as turning peaceful marches into violent protests.

10. The Just World Bias: the tendency to believe that the world is a just meritocracy, and that people get what they deserve, such as denying white privilege.

11. The Loss Aversion Effect: the tendency to require much more persuasion to abandon an idea than it would take to acquire it in the first place, such as viewing disproportional racial incarceration rates as acceptable.

12. The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Effect: the tendency to act consciously or subconsciously in ways that produce results which confirm prior expectations and beliefs, such as resisting affirmative action policies.

Furthermore, cognitive biases spur motivated reasoning, which is using reason or searching for information to confirm what we already believe or feel intuitively to be right. As a means to strategic ends, motivated reasoning serves simply as post-hoc rationalization, the justification of an idea embraced or a position taken after having done so for emotional motives, vested interests, group loyalty, religious tradition, white fragility and so on.

We then reason primarily so that we can support our judgments if called upon to do so, and secondarily to reduce our own cognitive dissonance, which is the mental discomfort we experience when confronted with contradictory information and beliefs. This is as true for all “isms,” ideologies and cognitive biases about politics, economics, religion, family and education as it is for race.

One antidote to compromised and ailing thinking of all kinds is simply a healthy dose of intellectual humility. Owning our limitations and prejudices (“pre-judgments”) is prerequisite for healthier thinking about public life.

Dennis Hiebert is a professor of sociology at Providence University College, Manitoba.