Believing is Seeing

The documentarian Errol Morris released a book Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mystery of Photography back in 2011 that had an interesting premise – we don’t so much believe what we see as see through the lens of what we already believe. In other words, related to the concept of confirmation bias, we tend to view the world based on the beliefs, values and ideals we already hold. We don’t look at the world innocently, or even scientifically, as much as we look at the world to confirm what we already believe. Now taking this premise to its ultimate conclusion, things would never change – and this is, of course, the problem with any deterministic theory of the world. Yet as an important starting point for any analysis of viewing practices, it is quite informative.

And it turns out that that this is also often the case when it comes to political decision-making and analysis. Most people don’t look for evidence to determine whether what they believe is true or not, nor evidence that supports their position – they instead look at all evidence through the lenses of what they already believe. Ezra Klein wrote an interesting article on this topic in his new vehicle vox.com, How Politics Makes Us Stupid. The article starts with the “More Information Hypothesis,” that exists across the political landscape in America – claiming that people would change their beliefs and political affiliation is only they had access to different information. This is, of course, a popular premise among liberals and leftists (I remember Bill Clinton once saying on Jon Stewart that everyone would be democrats if they just thought) who believe that their ethical position is somehow always supported by empirical facts, but equally by the right – where they constantly decry the “fact” that the mainstream media ignores their voice (an absurd claim, as I’ve argued on numerous occassions in the past) in lieu of its “liberal bias.”

However, recent research suggests that the more information hypothesis is actually backwards, and that the more information we have, the more likely we are to disagree. Dan Kahan at Yale in concert with his coauthors conducted a series of experiments that provided evidence that our inherent biases lead us toward particular conclusions, no matter what the facts or experts tell us. This is most obviously the case with global warming, where those who don’t believe in it simply ignore all the inconvenient facts and consensus around them in the hopes of “winning the argument.” But the authors also found this to be true among liberals, when confronted with data that suggested gun control laws did not lower crime rates in some cities.

Klein then engages in a provacative thought experiment – what if Sean Hannity announced tomorrow on his show that global warming is the greatest threat confronting the world today. Would his viewers simply change their position and thank him for his honest reappraisal of the facts? Of course not. Hate mail and calls would flood into Fox and he might soon find himself on the outside looking in. Liberals would congralute him for finally coming to his senses and he would be embraced in their fold, forgiven for all his past wrongs. And someone else would take his place to fill the void of repeating the same “facts” he had since abandoned. And, to be fair, this is the case across the political spectrum, with many of those hated neocons old socialists of the 50s and 60s who turned against a movement they saw as backing the wrong horse. The point is that we live an increasingly narrow and insular political world, where people hold steadfast to their beliefs no matter what the facts may tell us, no matter how the world is changing and no matter how absurd their position might seem to others. And all this is made easier by the ready availability of conforting and confirming voices across the wondrous spectacle new technology provides.

One thought I would add to this debate is about what happens when confronted with confounding information in general, paricularly when it relates to deeply held beliefs. If we don’t care much about an issue, then we might say “really?” and “I need to check on that,” or simply accept that we have been wrong about something that doesn’t matter to us anyway. But when we are confronted with a compelling argument against our deeply-held beliefs, say about racism, sexism, capitalism, climate change or abortion, we often become defensive as an immediate response. I have experienced that for years in my classrooms, where students can respond rather violently to having their beliefs challenged. But what I have also found is a tendency to later consider those alternative arguments and sometimes completely change their minds. Sure there are the ideologues among these students, whose ideas couldn’t be change even on threat of death; but I have found them to be in the minority. More often, the presumed authority of a professor can disrupt the echo chambers that dominate political discourse today.

And this ability to question ones deeply held beliefs is really at the center of the march of history. Democracy was not a commonly held notion when it first sprouted anew in America and France. Yet it was quickly embraced by many and led to a sea change that slowly spread across Europe and later, much of the world. The idea that slavery was wrong certainly occurred to many right from the start, but over time the ideas of many changed and the necessary evil argument had to be supplanted by the God’s will, benign institution and innate inferiority and danger arguments. Ultimately, the faulty reasoning behind each came into glaring repose and historical circumstances converged in a way that engineered its final death knell. The same can be said of colonialism, women’s rights, birth control and hundreds of other ideas we take as conventional wisdom today (except among the retrograde conservatives attempting to push the clock back, of course.)

But the point is that it appears those defensive impulses hold firmer today and strict adherence to whatever beliefs you have received more firmly ensconced than ever before. Sure, it makes sense that we would employ our intellect (or “reason”) to attack threatening information, but it used to be the case that our intellects would sometimes get in the way and tell us we were ultimately wrong. Less of that is going on today and that holds great dangers for our collective future. For if we cannot see or perceive the world outside the specter of what we believe, then we are forever trapped in a past that recedes further and further from the truth and the future, making all that we hold to be true less relevant from day to day.