Why Do We Fall for Political Sabotage?
We're used to political media having bias. But why do we always fall for it?
Living in Washington DC for four years may have been one of the biggest blessings of my young adult life.
Among a sea of political operatives, journalists, and hawk-eyed civic savants, it was impossible to have a lack of interest in the world.
You were forced to have an opinion. You devoured twitter.
You spent afternoons sipping gin and tonic in the glow of heat lamps on U Street talking about whether political impeachment was an illusory reality while a part staffer, part stoner intervened with thoughts on the beauty of bicameral legislatures.
We were all nerds. We all had strong convictions.
We were also huge targets for deceptive political marketing.
In a week where Joe Biden has finally picked his vice presidential candidate, Senator Kamala Harris has finally given an old SNL star some extended LTV, and the world is preparing for a Democratic convention, political media is gearing up with new takes to ride the momentum of a re-engaged populace.
You can certainly expect a lot of spins.
Why do we believe political spin? If there’s anything political media knows, it’s that we are piñatas of loose biases just waiting to be shattered.
Anyone writing a piece on cognitive biases that impact political perspectives could write an essay on each one - but for now, I’ll talk about two that come up time and time again, regularly swaying our views.
Conjuction Fallacy
The Conjuction fallacy is best explained by the famous “Linda problem” from a study by psychologists Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahneman in 1983:
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.
Which is more probable?
1. Linda is a bank teller.
2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
According to research, almost 85% of people choose 2, even though, in this case, belonging to class 2 cannot logically be more probable than belong to class 1. We are naturally programmed to go with an image that is more concrete and conveys a picture that is more vivid than another.
It happens progressively in political marketing. Imagine seeing the following statement: “I lost the popular vote in 2016 because 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally.”
As a macro-statement, this seems to be quite ludicrous. But it was when the President started adding in names of specific states that the statement begin to gain credibility in certain circles. “I lost the popular vote in 2016 because people voted illegally and were bused in from California, Virginia, or New Hampshire.”
Neither are that probable, but it boils down to a fault that propagandists can run with - the more detail that’s added, the more we think that conjunctions exist. It’s the master stroke of those who want to make unlikely events credible.
Illusory Truth Effect
“Repeat a lie often enough and people will eventually come to believe it.”
The adage — often attributed to the infamous Nazi Joseph Goebbels — is true and has been validated by decades of research on what psychology calls the Illusory Truth Effect.
Most commonly propagated recently through the Birther movement or the persistent discovery of whether President Obama was a muslim, the impact through political marketing came through just similar repetition.
Why is repetition so effective? Cognitive ease makes us feel more favorable toward things that are familiar and easy to understand.
Our brain is wired to accept what is familiar. That can make us resistant to new assessments, even when presented with reliable facts.
The illusory truth effect is a consequence of this cognitive bias. Our minds need to make quick judgments, so we take shortcuts. It doesn’t help when the shortcut you take is simply relying on how often you’ve heard something to judge its truth.