Examples of what I mean:
A staunch liberal who goes to Micheal Moore documentaries and has determined (before seeing it) that he will agree with the documentaries mesage.
A staunch conservative who listens to conservative talk-radio all day and just sits there nodding his head and muttering, “yeah, he’s got it right.”
Why do people do this? Whenever I read/watch/listen to something with a serious political agenda in it, it generally is expressing views contrary to what I think, or at least somewhat different from what I think. I do this so I can see what arguements the other side is making and deconstruct them so I can rebuff them (rarely do these things change my mind).
I just don’t understand why people like to read/watch/listen to things that they already agree with. Is it because they want to have some arguements to back up their beliefs, or do they think “I’m a (insert ideology here) so I should listen to what an important (insert ideology here) has to say so I know what to think”? Or do they just need to be comforted by having people agree with them? Is there a good psycological reason why thaeters showing Micheal Moore films are populated mostly by lefties and conservative talk-radio audiences are almost always righties?
I’m sure there’s an element of affirmation to it; no-one likes to feel like they’re all alone in a belief, so hearing someone else expound on your views makes it patently obvious that you were correct all along.
See also, “Preaching to the Converted.”
We all created our view of reality in our minds. This is the way we understand the world works. We form ‘rules’ in our mind. The liberal and conservative view of reality is not the same. When a liberal mentions ‘X’, it can not exist in the world view of the conservative.
i.e. use the example that liberals beleive that increasing taxes will increase gov’t revenue, while conservatives believe decreasing taxes spurs growth so more revenue is collected.
When noted Lib says that the Gov’t needs to raise taxes to get more revenue, it sounds right on to a lib, but to a conservative it sounds utterly stupid.
For this example I have used, what I beleive to be a basic right/left issue, but even if I’m mistaken about it, it really doesn’t matter to demostrate different views of how the world works.
Daithi Lacha has it. Once people latch onto a belief system, it’s human nature to seek out messages that validate it and reject messages that conflict.
Another reason is most people are intellectually lazy. They don’t want to consider multiple viewpoints and mull over the best one. They want to be on the “right” side. Once they have picked a side, groupthink takes over and actively excludes dissention.
Only if said conservative has isolated himself in an intellectual bubble so that he’s never heard the arguments on the other side. And same goes for liberals who don’t understand why conservatives are leery of taxation and regulation. You should thoroughly understand the arguments of the other side and understand that usually these are issues that reasonable people can differ on, even if you’re sure of your position.
“… reasonable people…” Ah – therein lies the rub. When you starting getting into the issues of politics, religions, life creedos, etc, rationale tends to fall away in favor of impressions, tradition and socio-economic inertia. If you’ve been raised in an all-blue family, so you will grow up blue … and it will tend to color your perceptions of reds throughout your life. And if you hear a blue speak, because you’re a blue, too – and even if you don’t agree 100% with what he’s saying – you’ll still back him to the hilt, because that’s just the way you are, blue through-and-through, and that’s that. To admit that maybe a red has a valid point … well, that shakes up the status quo, and that’s a dangerous thing, isn’t it? Easier to toe the party line and lead a peaceful life.
It’s simple. The people who disagree with me are wrong, which means they’re probably either stupid/ignorant, if they actually believe the stuff they’re saying, or evil, if they don’t believe it and are just saying it for some selfish purpose, and why should I listen to people who are stupid and/or evil? All it’s going to do is piss me off.
I think this tendency is best understood once one accepts a theory of how awareness of the outside world is internalized, i.e. a theory of learning.
Piaget, for example, noted that new information must butt-up against an internalized vision of the world–you don’t just simply accept all data presented to you. He identified two ways in which this can happen: assimilation and accomodation. It is relatively easy to assimilate data into an already-developed model, either because it fits or can be sufficiently modified to fit. Accomodation, on the other hand, requires the learner to re-evaluate past knowledge and adapt it to a potentially un-ignorable truth, a more difficult and time-consuming process. But Piaget asserted that real learning occurs only when a student can be confronted with enough data to abandon or modify a personal knowledge schema.
In adults, accomodation becomes increasingly difficult with age, since personal schemata have been honed by a lifetime of personal experience. This is especially true of schemata developed to explain social ideaology since (1) these have been developing since a very early age, and (2) they rely heavily on subjective experience, quite unlike the facts of science that can be repreatedly tested in an objective reality. Moreover, it is difficult to conduct experiments showing the true effects of social policy; the best you can often do is interpret historical data, and even here the skills for doing this well–comparative study of contemporary accounts, surveying economic/census data, etc.–are not widespread.
These two impediments to accomodation–the difficulty of altering a heavily-entrenched ideology and the lack of skills allowing one to change it personally–explain why a person would not normally seek out divergent ideological viewpoints. But why then would it lead one to seek out daily affirmation? The answer is that people realize the world is changing daily; new information is presented continuously, and as such must be fit into this personal ideology. One strategy is of course to ignore all new information, but that leads to social impotence. Thus, the adult learner adopts assimilation over accomodation since it is easier to personally achieve, but even here (just from their sheer volume) some facts can still be at apparent odds with an internal schema. The learner will then need some help in deforming it to a point where it will fit the schema, a gap neatly filled by most talk radio on the left and right (deforming here also includes the subtle ability to ignore or at least marginalize facts which simply cannot be brought in line with a schema; since a person often realizes the subjective component in their own schema, they naturally assume all data impacting their ideaology has a subjective quality, and so justify brushing aside inconvenient data).
To summarize, the affirmation in hearing and reading arguments you already agree with comes from the need to assimilate new facts into a personal knowledge schema that is highly resistant to change. The resistance comes from the highly personal commitment made in developing this schema from an early age. It is different from the typical way we learn–where an internal schema is forced to accomodate facts that cannot be ignored–but it is often adopted because it is an easier way to deal with new knowledge.
It’s tribalism. It is a fear that if we do not have a group to cling to the monsters of the jungle will eat us. We fear social ostracism so we cling to the party lines as the imperative to be part of the group is greater than the ideology, because in the end, it is belonging to a group that keeps us safe, and not adhering to a particular ideology.
If you go to a group of staunch republicans and start voicing support for Kerry, they will look at you leery like you’re the enemy. If you go into a group of liberals and voice support for Bush you’ll get the same reaction. So while you might diverge from the group on particular points, you don’t want to alienate yourself by voicing this too strenuously, before you will be exiled from one tribe, but not assimilated by the other, because you are not of the other. At least this is how the fear goes.
Add into this mix rote learning. The way we are taught to learn things is through memorization. We do not know if these things are true, we are taught that they are by people we trust, so we accept them as though they actually are true. So when presented by facts we do not know how to verify, we accept them as true based upon a trusted source, ie someone who is of our tribal affiliation, rather than critical analysis, because this is the method of learning we have been taught. So absent the ability to critically examine the issue being presented, we go with our built in trust factors, because we all know deep down that “us” is the people that live here and “them” is the people that live over there, and no amount of ideology is going to change that. In otherwords, we know which side our bread is buttered on, so what is “true” becomes secondary to a need to be a respected member of your tribe.
I think tribalism is a factor in active support for a particular candidate/cause, but much of our adult political identity (at least in the US) is reinforced on an anonymous, personal level (talk radio, political books, etc.; ways that requires adherents to seek them out, where one must tune-in a radio or buy the book his/herself). This, in my opinion, is only done to reinforce a personal ideaology in the face of daily news (also something received on an anonymous, personal level).
I think it’s worth noting the two examples in the OP: Right-leaning radio & Michael Moore. Neither has a reputation for sane, rational discourse, so can you really expect their viewers/listeners to truly want the same?
I’m in general agreement with the sentiment that it’s parochialism, intellectual laziness, etc. But with that agreement in mind, I will add an idea to the mix.
There are different kinds of disagreement. There is a difference between disagreeing with someone on an issue, and having basic fundamental worldview differences. There are some issues on which I can be persuaded, and which I am comfortable hearing divergent viewpoints. But my fundamental worldview is pretty much fixed, as is most peoples’; and while I can listen respectfully to someone operating from fundamentally different premises, I often end up feeling that a conversation will be pointless.
To be concrete: if someone wants to debate US military policy, I’ll listen to an argument that says we should have a larger, or smaller, or differently-configured military. But if I hear something like “we shouldn’t have a military at all; we just need the peace corps” (or alternatively “The US should nuke countries who veto our UN resolutions”), I suspect I’m dealing with someone who is operating from a set of basic premises so different from mine as to make them not worth listening to, at least on that subject. If I know we’re operating from different premises, I don’t need to stick around for the conclusion.
For me, that’s why I’m more inclined to listen to conservative talk radio; I often disagree with them, but at least we’re speaking the same language. If Air America were to come on in my area, I suspect I’d conclude that Randi Rhodes and I were from seperate realities.
There’s a good quality conservative newspaper in France that I never read. That’s because each time I did, half the articles irritated me to no end. At least, on message boards, you can post an answer when you strongly disagree with a statement or when you think the poster is presenting biased information. That’s not possible with a newspaper. So, I’m not going to pay and lose my sanity just to be exposed to a contrary point of view.
