One of the most difficult problems facing all of us in an age where information is becoming increasingly available and proliferating exponentially is how to determine the quality of all that information. At one time it was fairly easy to draw conclusions. If the "news" made it into the New York Times, there was a high degree of confidence that the story reflected a reasonably accurate picture of the reality it was describing. That was probably never particularly true but until the advent of talk radio, the Internet, Fox News, and especially the blogosphere, where real time fact checking is the norm, there was no way for the typical consumer of news to know how slanted the MSM could be.
There are several types of slanting, of course, ranging from subtle propaganda (as in how Israel is routinely depicted as advancing a "cycle of violence" while Palestinians are typically depicted as resisting occupation) to overt confabulation (the Koran flushing incident at Guantanamo.) Many times the MSM, out of laziness and incompetence, oversimplifies complex interactions, settles upon a convenient and useful meme (Anthropogenic Global Warming), and then doggedly maintains that meme well past the point where it is viable.
Correcting errors can be a full time job and the amount of labor involved in clarifying one single episode of journalistic malpractice has been sufficient to have earned the international MSM the appellation of an Augean Stable. I was once again struck by this point while reading a piece by Nicholas D. Kristof. The esteemed journalist purports to discuss confirmation bias in our perceptions and includes an old, reliable meme:
This resistance to information that doesn’t mesh with our preconceived beliefs afflicts both liberals and conservatives, but a raft of studies shows that it is a particular problem with conservatives. [Emphasis mine-SW] For example, when voters receive mailings offering them free pamphlets on various political topics, liberals show some interest in getting conservative views. In contrast, conservatives seek only those pamphlets that echo their own views.
Likewise, liberal blogs overwhelmingly link to other liberal blogs or news sources. But with conservative blogs, the tendency is much more pronounced; it is almost a sealed universe.
It seems likely that Kristof is falling into the exact confirmation bias he deplores.
I suspect that a naive view of the various studies Kristof assumes might support his contention. After all, the authors of such studies typically describe their results as supporting the notion that conservatives are more rigid, close minded, and incurious. While I have not made a comprehensive study of such studies, and I doubt Kristof has either, the few that I have looked at carefully have so many methodological problems and are so slanted themselves as to render them useless for actually reaching conclusions. Social Science is notoriously fuzzy and when the authors define conservative to mean rigid and close minded, it is not that difficult to find evidence to support the contention.
Last year, the Iron Shrink, with his grounding in research methodology at hand, did a wonderful deconstruction of the methodological flaws, and yes, biases, in the social science research on conservatives.
A Methodology Critique in Defense of Those Wascally Wepublicans
You may have heard the news by now. People who hold conservative political opinions are suffering from a syndrome in need of a cure. How do we know this? Because a professor of psychology has demonstrated it to be so. The news has been getting a lot of press lately.
Since his graduate school days, John T. Jost, who currently holds position as an Associate Professor of Psychology at New York University, has been studying the reasons by which people adopt conservative political ideology. His most publicized achievement is a 2003 article titled Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition (from here on out, I’ll refer to it as “the study.”) It was touted in the February issue of Psychology Today (Dixit, 2007) as, “the most comprehensive review of personality and political orientation to date.”
Don’t confuse comprehensiveness with integrity. The study maligns half of the U.S. population and much of the population of the world. Research resulting in mass vilification always causes the Iron Shrink to raise an eyebrow, so I examined the methodology that the authors used to arrive at their conclusion. Regular readers will know that I have little tolerance for intellectual sloppiness.
While not an exact refutation of the studies Kristof mentions without linking or citations, the Iron Shrinks post is directed toward the biases that inform the very research that Kristof rests his argument upon.
In a 2006 study out of Berkeley,which I commented upon in Social Science Mis-Reporting and the Value of Skepticism, to no one's surprise, the authors determined that anxious, whiny children grew up to be more resistant to change that secure children. From there, they deduced that anxious children grew up to be Conservatives. In my experience, the most rigid and doctrinaire people in the blogosphere, the most resistant to change and eager to turn the clock back, are left wing liberals. In my post, I made that point explicitly:
First I would suggest we be careful about accepting a reporter's view of a research study that does not include a link to the original. This should be an absolute minimal expectation of any on-line article, and URLs should be included even in old media reports. The absence of a URL is instructive.
Even more significant is the possibility that the Social Scientist may well have gathered some evidence that anxious children grow up to be rigid, perhaps authoritarian, adults. That does not preclude the delicious possibility that Block, without any conscious awareness, has described a situation in which he unknowingly inverted the meaning of "liberal" and "conservative."
[As an aside, my position received some significant support, to which I linked in the original post, after I had written the post.]
Anyone who doubts such a statement should spend some time on liberal and conservative blogs and perform a simple naturalistic experiment:
1) Post a comment respectfully disagreeing with the host's opinion.
2) Wait to see the response.
I am willing to wager that your views, if expressed appropriately, will find a much more congenial response on any Sanity Squad member's blog than at any Daily Kos diarist's blog.
I have done the experiment. The level of vitriol that is spewed at those who stray off the reservation on the liberal blogs is quite impressive. I have yet to see that level of animus expressed on conservative blogs. I realize that using ShrinkWrapped as an index case reflects bias, but I spend ~1/3 of my time in the blogosphere reading liberal blogs and news sources and while there are noxious attacks on liberals from the right, the intensity and passion of the attacks on the right from the left, is several orders of magnitude greater.
Many conservative bloggers I know no longer link to liberal sites primarily because when they do, the amount of trolls who infest their comments becomes problematic. As with today, I link to the New York Times on a regular basis; I doubt Nicholas Kristof notices the small number of clicks I generate for him, but perhaps in his perusal of the conservative blogosphere he will stop by and engage in some conversation. I am fairly certain my readers will treat him respectfully.
Despite my annoyance at the continued vitality of what should be a dead meme, Kristof's conclusion is well worth repeating:
The only solutions I see are personal ones, to work out daily to build our mental muscles. Just as we force ourselves to nibble on greens and decline cheesecake, we should seek an information diet that includes a salad bar of information sources — with a special focus on unpalatable rubbish from fools. The worse it tastes, the better it may be for us.
If that’s why you’re reading this, congratulations! And thanks!
Recent Comments