The psychoanalysts could only try to explain him. The world had seen its share of psychopathic tyrants come and go – but the weirder, possibly more disturbing bag of worms belonged to the relatively young field of social psychology. They needed an answer to the question the whole world was asking: How did an entire swath of ostensibly rational human beings collectively and thoroughly lose their fucking minds?

At Swarthmore College, a professor named Solomon Asch was tackling the problem. A Jewish émigré who had left Poland with his family in 1920, Asch had designed an elegantly simple demonstration of human malleability. As philosopher and evolutionary game theorist Cailin O’Connor1 breaks down for us in the video above, Asch proved he could make ordinary, everyday people lie directly through their teeth.2 All he needed were seven other people to go along with the gag. The setup didn’t have a perfect success rate, but he could – via the power of peer pressure and our penchant for conformity – reliably manipulate subjects to go along with obviously wrong bullshit roughly a third of the time.3

Asch’s findings have become a cornerstone of social science, and the experiments have been revisited dozens of times over the decades. A 2023 replication found a 33% baseline error rate, right in line with the 1950s original.4 Variation across cultures has been documented – conformity tends to run higher in more collectivist societies – but the basic effect has proved remarkably stable, if not cringeworthy.5 Some of us, it seems, would rather be liars than turncoats.

Sims in a Casino

In her 2019 book with James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread,6 O’Connor describes computer simulations in which groups of people, represented as “agents,” gather evidence, share it across a network, and update their beliefs as they go. The agents are given a simple problem to solve: figure out which of two simulated slot machines has a higher payout.

In each round, agents choose to play either machine A or B, based on their current belief, or “credence,” about which machine is better. They record their results, then interact with the other agents they’re connected to in the network.

An interaction is just the transparent sharing of relevant data. The agents update their credences after each interaction, then continue experimenting on the slots - tiny, soulless high rollers. In this version of the model, agents update their credences strictly according to Bayes’ rule.7 This is the standard mathematical formula for revising a belief in light of new evidence. The updates account for things like how many trials another agent has run, and the raw win count per machine. From a statistical point of view the agents behave with perfect rationality.8

A terribly non-scientific, anthropomorphized account of an interaction might go something like this:

[Agent X]: Hi Agent Y. I currently assign a 74.6% probability to Slot Machine B being the better machine. I’ve played that one 91 times and I speed-mingle with other agents between sessions. I update my credence every time I learn something new, because I’m a wee little Bayesian slots-addict with no Theory of Mind.

In this version of the model, the policy is to trust other agents and their data completely. More on this later, but it’s helpful to chalk this up as a form of social influence. Agents don’t verify other agents’ data, and they don’t discount it in any way, even though it’s secondhand knowledge. They just take group evidence as gospel, allowing it to inform their beliefs and actions as if it were their own.

So, what happens when we press go and let the simulation run? Like us humans, the agents sometimes zero in on the correct belief. And they actually get things right more often than not.9 Eventually a complete consensus forms, and the agents rest comfortably in their shared conclusion, no naysaying agents left to come around and cast doubt. Case closed.

Here’s what that convergence looks like:

But of course there’s a catch. Agents sometimes converge completely and irreversibly on the wrong answer. Remember, this is without introducing any cognitive bias, mishandling of evidence, or other such fuckery. It’s just basic rules of network shape and information sharing.

Press go, and sometimes a misleading string of evidence takes hold, tricking the entire lot. For example, a few agents testing machine B, the actual winner, might get a string of unlucky losses early on. As news of that losing streak spreads, more and more agents become convinced machine A is better. Soon everyone believes this, and they don’t even bother testing B anymore. The wrong answer has become locked in. It’s just mathematically inevitable that such things happen from time to time. O’Connor and Weatherall explain:

Notice that this happens in the models only because the [agents] share evidence. There is no psychology here. No one is imitating anyone else, no one is trying to conform, no one is smarter or dumber than the others. There are no thought leaders or sheeple.10

Now consider one small adjustment to the rules. To acknowledge humans’ often messy (or sometimes intentionally deceptive) sharing of evidence, we can imagine injecting agents with skepticism of a sort. O’Connor and Weatherall:

Usually, when we encounter evidence, it is not perfectly certain. In such cases, there is a different rule that can be used to update your beliefs, called “Jeffrey’s rule,” after Princeton philosopher Dick Jeffrey, who proposed it. Jeffrey’s rule takes into account an agent’s degree of uncertainty about some piece of evidence when determining what the agent’s new credence should be.11

In the model, the farther apart two agents’ credences are, the less they trust each other’s evidence. Think of this as a policy of ignoring the quacks and trusting credible experts. It seems like a minor and reasonable adjustment – surely we should be skeptical of those who seem like they’re objectively wrong about the world.

But this single tweak rewrites the result substantially. Instead of the network drifting toward one harmonious consensus, two camps emerge. One settles on the correct belief and the other on a false one. Polarization is now the outcome.12 Once divided, agents only trust evidence from those they already agree with, forever stuck in their comfortable echo chambers.

The polarization does not depend on individuals not seeing the evidence of those with different beliefs. They receive this evidence just as before. They simply do not believe it.13

Conceptually this mirrors biased assimilation, a form of confirmation bias where evidence is accepted or dismissed not based on its merit, but on how well it fits what someone already believes.14

For more on confirmation bias, biased assimilation, and adjacent ideas see my 4-part series here (this article continues after the jump):

Homophily and Friendly Argument Sharing

O’Connor and Weatherall aren’t the only researchers finding that social influence can yield polarization. The pattern recurs across the literature: different teams, different disciplines, different paradigms, all reaching strikingly similar conclusions.1516

As one example, consider Michael Mäs and Andreas Flache’s “Argument Communication Theory of Bi-polarization”. Here, opinions are modeled on a spectrum, rather than a binary as in A-or-B.17 Something like: “Vaccines work and should be encouraged by public health agencies, but not required by law.” As opposed to: “Vaccines bad.”

Mäs and Flache endowed their digital agents with two behaviors that approximate our own. First, they gave them a large dose of homophily.18 In short, agents did their interacting in echo chambers, hanging out with like-minded friends instead of ideological enemies. More technically,

[Homophilic] individuals have a so-called ‘bounded confidence’ in others who hold very different opinions and, thus, interact only with members of the population whose opinions are sufficiently similar to their own.19

To be imaginative: if one of these agents wound up haplessly steeped in MAGA bullshit as the simulation progressed, you wouldn’t find them chatting at the granola store. You’d find them at the church softball game, the red hat shop, or possibly the tiki-torch aisle of Home Depot. That would be homophily.

Second, Mäs and Flache prescribed the mechanics of information exchange. During interactions, agents would swap “arguments” (pieces of evidence pro or con a given stance). They were programmed to share arguments that were most similar to each other’s, and an agent’s set of arguments determined its opinion.

More imagining: suppose a die-hard MAGA agent runs into a moderately MAGA agent. They’re roughly like-minded, so they can interact. They wouldn’t talk about the positive influence immigrants have on the economy; they’d talk about the dangers of Tren de Aragua and a porous border – sharing sympathetic talking points. This is the argument part of the Argument Communication Theory of Bi-polarization.

It’s easy to see how agents come away from these interactions with more confidence in their opinion than before – and with fresh ammunition to back it up. Here’s the outcome of such a simulation, with these homophily and argument rules dialed in:

Again, the result is near-complete polarity, with no centrists whatsoever as the simulation matures. Note that every agent started dead center, with an equal split of pro and con arguments in their little agent heads. Mäs and Flache describe the mechanism:

[I]nteraction partners with similar opinions can provide each other with new arguments which reinforce their initial opinion and, thus, leads to intensified views that may be more extreme than those of any of the participants were prior to the interaction.20

So, once more, get opinions swirling and nudge the agents to agree or conform via some type of social influence, and the result is polarization or even extremism.

Mäs and Flache designed the simulation alongside a human version, run with real, fleshy subjects in their lab. First, the subjects were given pro and con arguments to seed their opinions. The topic was deliberately low-stakes: where to build a leisure center in a fictitious town. They were then paired homophilically and instructed to share sympathetic arguments. As predicted, this produced substantial polarization.

But there was a second phase to the human study, the real punchline to the whole project. After the homophilic (and polarizing) segment, subjects were paired with those who disagreed – heterophilic pairings in the parlance of this study. In these interactions subjects naturally shared arguments that were contradictory or conflicting. Rather than create more ideological distance, these pairings led to a convergence of belief.

In both the sim and human variants of the Mäs and Flache research, the conclusion was that the observed polarization wasn’t driven by disagreement between sides. It was driven by agreement within each side.

So it seems that polarization and conformity (or at least social influence cut from the same cloth) are extremely similar mechanisms, just at different scales. The tendency to conform with our local group strengthens cohesiveness, making it comfortable to dig in our collective heels, right or wrong. But then scale things up to the group level. Now when that local in-group encounters an out-group (who has been similarly digging their heels into different soil), some degree of ideological distancing is inevitable. Iterate and try again: more heel-digging, more ideological distance, more polarization. And so it goes, until it’s difficult to imagine either side being more at odds with one another. Sound familiar?

Frictionless, Profitable Bullshit

If social influence is a necessary ingredient for all of this, it makes sense to look at the most efficient conformity machine ever built: social media.21 In some sense, we should be living in an age of unprecedented consensus. All the information we need to form rational, evidence-based opinions is a click away. All we need to add is a shared objective reality and agreement on basic facts.

But we don’t do that! If Asch showed us anything, it’s that we absolutely can disagree on unambiguous facts, and we will deny reality if the social cost is too high.

To make matters worse, we show up to the social media party already vulnerable to its influence – primed to conform to the expectations of our peers, dismiss any evidence that doesn’t fit our narrative, and confirm what we already believe without scrutiny.

This makes us easy for social media algorithms to exploit: feed us evidence that aligns with what we (and our tribe) already think, and we’ll respond with a thumbs-up or a repost to signal our conformity publicly. The business result is habitually returning customers, the holy grail of any capitalist enterprise. The mental health result is some users engaged so ravenously that it looks an awful lot like clinical addiction (even if psychologists are still arguing about the label). And the societal result is two warring factions, looking at the same verifiable facts and coming to opposite conclusions.

But don’t mistake this for both-sides-ism. Notice none of the research above implies that both camps are “halfway wrong.” One side could be totally wrong and the other totally right, and these models would paint the same picture of polarization. Which brings us back to MAGA…

This is the usual place in an essay on polarization where we start to hum kumbaya, reach across the aisle, learn to listen to each other once again, maybe even kiss a little. The gesture gets raised in good faith by reasonable people, and it’s the default position in most polite company. How could we hold someone morally accountable for these invisible network dynamics? Doesn’t this let MAGAs off the hook for their shitty behavior?

No, it does not.

“It’s just human nature” is an excuse creeps reach for when they get caught being naughty and want to slither away from the consequences. But, to be pithy and alliterative, explanation is not exoneration. We don’t treat “human nature” as a get-out-of-jail-free card anywhere else. We can use science to explain what’s driving racism, war, rape, genocide, and torture, but science doesn’t grant passes on those things either.

For the record, I don’t claim to be immune to conformity. And I love my soothing little echo chamber. There’s some satisfaction to be had about being on the right side of history. Of course I’m subject to all the biases I’ve just written about. So is every researcher in this piece. So is my mom, and so were Mother Teresa and Mr. Rogers. Plenty of people are targets of propaganda but don’t salivate over cruelty, pettiness, scapegoating, or kleptocracy. So, no, nothing about this excuses Trumpism.

Brittle Hive Minds

In the Asch experiments, recall that subjects went along with the group rather than the evidence on roughly a third of trials. And when the experiment was replicated in 2023, but reframed as political opinion instead of line lengths, the conformity rate jumped to 38%.22 These findings shed a little daylight on how we got here – how anyone can believe the obvious bullshit peddled by MAGA.

But Asch also ran a variant that might give us a clue as to what we can do about all of this. He added a single confederate instructed to give the correct answer out loud, thus breaking the unanimity of the group. The experimental subject always responded after this dissenter, so they knew they wouldn’t be the lone holdout. The presence of this dissenting voice dropped the group’s error rate from an unsettling 32% to a tolerable 5.5% – bullshit levels undoubtedly easier to manage. Asch put it this way:

It is clear that the presence in the field of one other individual who responded correctly was sufficient to deplete the power of the majority, and in some cases to destroy it.23

The Anatomy of a Bamboozle (and an Emperor)

Hans Christian Andersen wrote The Emperor’s New Clothes in 1837 Copenhagen, a subject of King Frederik VI, who was a dick. Under his rule Denmark went bankrupt, surrendered Norway to Sweden after a 400-year run, and lost its entire naval fleet to the British.24

Frederik also presided over a fierce censorship regime backed by the 1683 Danish Code governing speech crimes. King-insulters would have their right hand cut off while alive, then be graciously put out of their misery via quartering and beheading. Blasphemers were spared their hand but at the expense of their tongue. The law mandated that these leftover heads, tongues, and hands be publicly displayed on sticks, sure to befuddle any passerby who hadn’t heard the backstory.25

Understandably, Andersen had no particular appetite for pissing off Frederik, but he did have some real social commentary to get off his chest. So, he disguised his royal critique as a kids’ story, a fairy tale with a nameless emperor of a nameless land. In it, grifting weavers had convinced the emperor his new clothes would be invisible to anyone who was a simpleton or unfit for office.

Andersen had adapted the story from a 1335 Spanish source, Juan Manuel’s El Conde Lucanor. In that version the clothes were invisible to anyone of illegitimate birth, a sneaky way to suss out adulterers. But Andersen was more concerned with cowardly mass complacency. So, he added the lone dissenting voice of a child, which broke the façade wide open. It had to be a child, too naïve to know it’s rude to point and laugh when you see a guy in a funny hat parading down the street with his nuts hanging out.

A little more than a century later, Asch backed up Andersen’s intuition with data, giving the story some actual diagnostic credibility. The mechanism is worth noting: a small but loud minority can have an outsized effect on conformity. But understanding the mechanism and breaking the spell are two different things. Carl Sagan, always uncannily prescient, laid out the challenge about a year before his death:

The word to dwell on is “almost.” Sagan was a scientist who chose his words with precision. He knew that the odds of escaping cultism are depressingly slim. And he knew that the fear of embarrassment for being a sucker is a nearly impossible nut to crack. But not totally impossible.

Perhaps we should apply folk wisdom that’s gone unheeded for centuries and codified by science for decades. You don’t need to convert that smug coworker or obnoxious neighbor regurgitating Fox News talking points to a reflexively nodding audience. They’re too deep in the Kool-Aid. But remaining quiet, politely staying in your lane, just reinforces the presumption of unanimity. You need to break the silence for the crowd.

The good news is that you need only state the obvious, because reality is on your side. There might be an exhausted member in the crowd who needs a signal that reality is still available to them. Your dissent will dramatically bring down the social cost of defection for them. And it might give them permission to finally leave the cult.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist. — Hannah Arendt

Fomenting distrust in media is textbook Firehose of Falsehood, the Russian propaganda doctrine identified by RAND researchers in 2016.1 It's a modern evolution of Soviet-era dezinformatsiya (disinformation) and a pillar of active measures in general. Steve Bannon brags of “flooding the zone”, as if he invented it, but Hannah Arendt had them pegged way back in the 50s when she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism: "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of though) no longer exist."2

In Parts 1 through 3 we saw how confirmation bias works, committing us to our tribes and turning us into better liars and litigators. In this final installment, we’ll look at the intellectual backlash to invincible claims and how the refusal to think can underwrite some of humanity’s most rotten behavior.

Unfalsifiability: A Guarantee of Confirmation Bias

We know that falsification is often a more powerful tool than confirmation when it comes to uncovering truth. It’s counterintuitive, but falsification keeps us honest, and we tend to be led astray by our instinct to confirm what we’re already thinking.

But what about unfalsifiable belief systems, where encountering contradictory evidence is fundamentally impossible? In these scenarios confirmation bias is not only likely, but inevitable.

Popper and the eclipse

Karl Popper’s beef with unfalsifiability crystallized in 1919 Vienna, and it coincided with a solar eclipse. He dissected some fashionable theories of the day to make his point: Einstein’s, which got things right, and Freud’s and Adler’s, which got things wrong. In the case of Einstein, an eclipse in May of that year provided the perfect opportunity to falsify his general theory of relativity. The theory predicted something weird, precise, and most importantly testable. During this eclipse the sun would be obscured by the moon, revealing stars just next to it, no longer overpowered by the sun’s brightness. That starlight would follow the curvature of spacetime, warped by the sun’s mass, thus making the stars appear to be in the wrong spot. Einstein himself encouraged astronomers to travel to far reaches of the earth to observe the eclipse, for the chance to prove him wrong. The results were announced in November, and reported rather dramatically by the New York Times:1

“This risky business,” Popper might well have thought, “is how science should be done.” Einstein’s theory stuck its neck out and might have been killed, but it survived.

On the other end of the spectrum we had Freudian and Adlerian theories, also all the rage at the time, and much bigger hits at parties. For some reason, Popper chose a man optionally rescuing or drowning a boy as his example. Man saves boy? Textbook case of sublimation, according to Freud. Adler would point out the man’s obvious inferiority complex. Man drowns boy? Classic Oedipal-induced repression, according to Freud. Adler, the less imaginative of the two, would point out the man’s obvious inferiority complex.

I could not think of any human behaviour which could not be interpreted in terms of either theory. It was precisely this fact – that they always fitted, that they were always confirmed – which in the eyes of their admirers constituted the strongest argument in favour of these theories. It began to dawn on me that this apparent strength was in fact their weakness.2

It was this irrefutability he pinpointed as the hallmark of intellectual fraud. For science to be worth a damn, it needs to be testable, falsifiable. Not only were these sorts of untestable theories bullshit, they were sneaky bullshit. “A typical soothsayer’s trick,” he wrote, “to predict things so vaguely that the predictions can hardly fail: that they become irrefutable.”

Russell and the teapot

Over in England, in a decisive take-down of the unfalsifiable, philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell devised his now famous celestial teapot thought experiment. It was to be part of an essay commissioned by Illustrated magazine in 1952, just on the heels of Russell’s win of the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature. When Russell submitted “Is There a God?”, the magazine chose not to run the piece, without any official explanation.

Here is Russell’s famous mic-drop:

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.3

Russell obviously had religious zealots in his sights, perpetually annoyed by their lack of good sense. When challenged with proving the existence of God, a believer might counter, as if in a schoolyard: “Yeah, well you can’t prove God doesn’t exist!” Or, as Russell put it, more surgically and with just a hint of mock diplomacy: “Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake.”

It’s the same strategy that Popper had exposed, distilled down to its most frustrating form: make a claim that cannot be tested, then demand respect because it cannot be disproved.

God settles a bet

The God of fundamentalist Christianity (He who tends to animate the MAGA coalition most vigorously) isn’t silent when it comes to His own disprovability. That troll of the Old Testament tests the faithful precisely by withholding evidence of His existence. The Book of Job is basically a warning that even speculating about His mysterious methods is a bad, bad, very bad idea. As the story goes, up in heaven some adversary (Satan?) is taking the piss out of God by claiming His followers only fall in line because He does good things for them, typical fair-weather friends. Take away their good fortune and they’ll turn their back on You, says the provocateur. So, basically to win a bet, God decides to screw with one of his most devout followers, Job. First He sends some ruffians to steal all of Job’s donkeys and kill all his servants (ahem, slaves). Then He sets his sheep and shepherds on fire with lightning. Then He dispatches bandits to steal Job’s camels and kill more servants. Then He blows his house down with all his children inside, killing them. Finally, He infects Job with a “loathsome sores” disease, leading him to sit in the dirt, scraping his skin off with a broken piece of pottery, as one does in such circumstances. Job’s wife, who had had it up to here, is all, “God’s a real prick. Tell him to fuck off, then go ahead and die peacefully.” But Job refuses! And, just like that, God won his divine bet.

But the story wasn’t completely over. After all his tribulations, Job just wants to know why God was treating him like shit. He spends 35 chapters demanding an answer, and God does not appreciate this. To finally shut him up, God shows up disguised as a whirlwind (obviously), reminds Job how mysterious He is (got it!), and tells him to stop asking questions. In other words, don’t probe, don’t bother with evidence, don’t try to rationalize Me, and don’t you dare try to disprove Me, silly mortal. It was a divine endorsement of confirmation bias. And, to this day, people still pray to this bullshit.

The Grand Wizard Donald

And this brings us back to the Grand Wizard of Unfalsifiability: Donald Trump. If a story praises him, of course it is true. The existence of negative information is proof of Trump Derangement Syndrome, just noise from the hippies.

There is no possible evidence that could count against Trump, because every institution capable of producing such evidence has been delegitimized or dismantled. The courts are corrupt. The media is the enemy of the people. The scientists are Soros-funded Marxists. See something otherwise? Your eyes are lying to you. This creates a scrutiny-immune world for Mom and her MAGA cohorts. They don’t have to do the work of weighing conflicting evidence because the Fake News label preemptively disqualifies anything that might challenge their tribal standing, threaten their identity, or hurt their feelings.

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Metacognition and moral obligation

So if confirmation bias is baked and beaten into us, should we just resign ourselves to it and to all the bullshit it brings along for the ride? In other words, how fucked are we here? One answer seems to be: maybe not completely, at least when we look at ultra-reduced forms of the problem, using simulations, AI agents, and computational models of decision-making.

In straightforward cases of reinforcement learning, some confirmation bias makes sense. It’s inefficient to verify everything that’s already been confirmed to a high degree of confidence. Sometimes it is smart to go ahead and have faith in your priors. A 2021 study found that when several million simulations were run with artificial agents, confirmation bias was indeed a reward-maximizing strategy. But there was a catch: this was true “only if disconfirming feedback is not completely ignored.”4 Similarly, a 2022 paper from Oxford researchers found that confirmation bias was optimal in certain conditions, but its benefits disappear or become detrimental as environments stabilize and information becomes more reliable.5

So, what’s the best policy for confirmation bias overall? It really just depends. An obvious improvement would be a system that adjusts its bias level based on context. In other words, such systems might need metacognition.

In a 2021 experiment, Max Rollwage and Stephen Fleming used simulation-based modeling with agents of varying levels of “metacognitive insight”. Some agents were perfectly objective with no confirmation bias whatsoever, adapting to be statistically optimal as new evidence arrives - Bayesian belief updaters.6 Other agents adjusted how selectively they processed information according to their metacognition efficiency, which researchers could dial up or down:

We find that the behavioural consequences of selective information processing are systematically affected by agents’ introspective abilities. Strikingly, we find that selective information processing can even improve decision-making when compared with unbiased evidence accumulation, as long as it is accompanied by good metacognition.7

In other words, agents with some confirmation bias combined with strong self-monitoring outperformed the more objective, neutral agents. Nuance matters, and nuance is one of the few things Trump has never been accused of.

So can these simulations, which tend to rely on extremely simple perceptual tasks (e.g., “Is the grid on the left or the right?”) really teach us anything about the rational and political sensibilities of humans? Rollwage and Fleming looked at that too. In a 2018 study, they (along with Raymond Dolan) found that subjects with radical political views were also less competent at these basic perceptual tasks:

We show that individuals holding radical beliefs (as measured by questionnaires about political attitudes) display a specific impairment in metacognitive sensitivity about low-level perceptual discrimination judgments.8

Some people are not only overzealously confident in their conclusions, they are functionally blind to the possibility that they even could be wrong. This is true in 100%-neutral, as-basic-as-it gets, thoroughly apolitical tasks. There is no tribe watching, no ideology to defend. These folks have an error-detection problem.

We can’t just count on ourselves to naturally do what’s right. If something feels right, so natural that we don’t even have to think about it, that is not only a poor measure of its moral worth, it’s a good sign that things need a bit more scrutiny. Doing the right thing might get us into trouble with our pals, embarrass us, or brand us as disloyal. But overcoming some of our most primal human instincts is, ironically, what makes us most human. The good news is the cure isn’t that complicated; all we need to do is think about our thinking. We need to acknowledge evidence that doesn’t fit neatly into our agenda, and give it a fair hearing anyway. Our inability to stop and calibrate our own programming is the kind of cognitive deficit that can scale up from simple error to catastrophic moral failure.

When Hannah Arendt encountered Adolf Eichmann at his 1961 trial in Jerusalem, she noted,

He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. [There was no] diabolical or demonic profundity […] He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness - something by no means identical with stupidity - that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period […] That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man - that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.9

Consider the failure to stop and think about what you’re doing, and to whom. It makes perfect evolutionary sense to hate the tribe across the river. After all, resources are not infinite, and if anyone’s getting prioritized, it’s friends and family, not strangers. And if they look, dress, eat, talk, and pray differently than us… perfect! They can be singled out or lumped together at will, depending on your mission. And what a blessing for the wannabe dictator, whose most rehearsed trick is whipping the masses – convinced they’re victims with a vague perpetrator – into a focused frenzy. Nothing brings out the desire for a strong leader with a loose consideration for the rules like an imagined boogeyman.

In the mid-1990s Carl Sagan wrote, with his trademark uncanny prescience:

Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves. I worry that, especially as the millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.10

So here is the question that confirmation bias ultimately forces us to confront: What would it take to change your mind? If the answer is nothing – if every counterexample has a ready-made explanation, if every contrary source is compromised, if the absence of proof is treated as proof – then you are no longer acting rationally. And the tragedy is that this feels, from the inside, like the most rigorous thinking of all. The believer experiences their wall of explanations as evidence of how carefully they’ve considered the issues. They have an answer for everything. It never occurs to them that this is precisely their problem. And maybe that’s what it’s like to be a MAGA.

Epilogue: A unicorn chaser by Tim Minchin

If you’ve made it this far and want a funnier, faster take on everything I’ve spent four articles trying to say, see this riff on confirmation bias by the excellent Tim Minchin.

Take good care out there.

Jonathan

Series Table of Contents:

✓ Part 1: Inconvenient Truths and the Mechanics of Being Sure (My MAGA-ed Mom and a history of confirmation bias)

✓ Part 2: Tribal Loyalty and Con(fidence) Artistry (The naive view of information and two ways confirmation bias secures your seat at the table)

✓ Part 3: Self-Deception and the Argumentative Mind (Deep delusion and our instinct to persuade)

✓ Part 4: Unfalsifiable Bullshit and Moral Obligations (MAGA’s invincibility cheat code and the danger of thoughtlessness)

In Part 1 we covered the history and mechanics of confirmation bias and in Part 2 we saw how it signals tribal loyalty and projects unearned confidence. Now, in Part 3: how self-deception makes us better liars, and why our brains may have evolved less for uncovering truth than for winning the argument.

Confirmation bias as a means of self-deception

So if grandstanding loyalty and confidence are winning tactics, what’s the best policy for staying in character? Integrity has already been compromised with confirmation bias, so why not jump all the way in with some self-deception?

In their 2011 paper The Evolution and Psychology of Self-Deception1, William von Hippel and Robert Trivers argue that self-deception solves a handful of problems at once:

First, it makes you a better liar. It’s hard to give off liar vibes if you don’t really think you are one. Sketchy tics, microexpressions, stammering – all those leaky tells disappear when you believe your own bullshit. As the authors put it,

Self-deception evolved to facilitate interpersonal deception by allowing people to avoid the cues to conscious deception that might reveal deceptive intent.

Second, it reduces cognitive load. Remember the lazy brain concept from the Dual-Process article? Our brains love automaticity and effortlessness. But maintaining a lie means keeping track of who knows what, updating an inventory of all the little details, monitoring your own behavior for inconsistencies, and so on. By fully surrendering to the delusion one can drift around on autopilot, bullshit in tow. Again, the authors:

Self-deception eliminates the costly cognitive load that is typically associated with deceiving.

Third, it creates plausible deniability. It’s better to be accused of accidental misinformation than malicious bullshitting.

Since the person is not being intentionally deceitful, there is less risk of retaliation for misrepresentation. Liars are punished more than the mistaken.

Finally, it can make you feel better about yourself. A 2004 study looked at how we handle uncontrollable events, using a dating game scenario. Subjects made to believe they were likely to be chosen for a date spent more time looking at positive information about the potential partner. When led to believe they were unlikely to be chosen by that person, they spent more time looking at negative information about the tasteless prick.2

Another study shows how we go out of our way to avoid learning unpleasant things about ourselves, even if it leaves us less informed. When subjects were given a saliva test for a (unbeknownst to them, fictional) disease, they spent about 40% less time scrutinizing the test strip results if they were told a color change indicated a bad outcome, as opposed to a good one.3

Now, back to my MAGA-ed mom. I refuse to believe she’s incapable of comprehending basic information that undermines her delusions. She demonstrates complex logic and problem solving in other domains. But she’s settled in an ecosystem of media that feeds her with a steady stream of confirmatory evidence. Von Hippel and Trivers coincidentally use Mom-approved Fox News as an exemplar of selective information gathering:

People can be relatively confident that the brunt of the information they gather will be consistent with their worldview, even if they do not know what tomorrow’s headlines will bring.

In other words, her environment does the confirmation for her, and self-deception does the rest. She just needs to show up to church on Sunday, check Facebook from time to time, and turn on the television – no additional work required. Mom doesn’t have to constantly decide to believe that immigrants are destroying America. She’s just told that repeatedly, so she gets to feel like an honest person the whole time. Scrutinizing such things would come at a great cost: it could jeopardize her relationship with God, her friends, her identity, and the sense that she’s been right all along. So why would she bother?

Confirmation bias as a persuasion optimizer

Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (20114 and 20175) argue that the function of rationality, at least in social contexts, isn’t to be correct – it’s to “devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade.” In this sense, participating in confirmation bias is no different than a methodical lawyer preparing to convince an uncertain jury. Our brains do two things really well, they say:

• Generating reasons that justify what we believe or how we’ve behaved

• Finding faults in arguments that clash with our theses

Our most cringeworthy moments of cognitive bias appear, they say, when people are doing solitary tasks, stripped of any social or persuasive relevance. Consider the following 1966 experiment by P.C. Wason, in another canonical study of confirmation bias, the four-card task.6

If you want to try this one yourself, click the button below (again, it links out to a GitHub page with an interactive widget). If not, just read on for the explanation.

Try Wason's Four-Card Task

In this experiment subjects are asked to verify a card-gamified version of the statement “If P, then Q”. Like in the 2-4-6 task, subjects consistently sought confirmation rather than falsification, failing accordingly. Only about 10% of people get this one correct on their own… but that jumps to around 80% when repeated in a group setting.7

So, groups of humans can actually be more rational than the sum of their parts. A 2021 meta-analysis of 22 studies involving over 5,000 individuals confirmed that “collective intelligence” is a robust, measurable phenomenon.8 When it comes to such studies, Mercier and Sperber note that,

In many cases, no single participant had the correct answer to begin with. Several participants may be partly wrong and partly right, but the group will collectively be able to retain only the correct parts and thus converge on the right answer. This leads to the assembly bonus effect, in which the performance of the group is better than that of its best member.9

Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind (2012), makes a similar argument, comparing individual humans to neurons (dumb on their own), but groups of humans to brains (capable of amazing rationality).

If you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.10

So, is this the silver lining to all of this mess? Is my MAGA-ed mom an unwitting node in some greater good that I’m just not seeing? Is MAGA some virtuous emergent property of a bunch of gullible, proudly ignorant Fox News fans, ushering us into a new era of enlightenment? No, definitely not. After all, Nazis were a group of folks with a “common bond and shared fate”, and they got together and reasoned themselves up a Holocaust.

The optimism here has two worrisome preconditions that Haidt was careful to include: civility and openness to disconfirmation. When it comes to civility, the entire MAGA brand is built on trolling the libs, owning the cucks, salivating at cruelty. A dickish “You’re fired!” was the original catchphrase, the public humiliation irresistible to early fans.

As for disconfirmation, any disagreement with Trump is apostasy, earning one exile, criminal indictment, or at the very least a childish nickname. Which leads us to the secret behind every invincible MAGA delusion, an old but effective trick: the inability to be disproven. More on that in Part 4.

Series Table of Contents:

✓ Part 1: Inconvenient Truths and the Mechanics of Being Sure (My MAGA-ed Mom and a history of confirmation bias)

✓ Part 2: Tribal Loyalty and Con(fidence) Artistry (The naive view of information and two ways confirmation bias secures your seat at the table)

✓ Part 3: Self-Deception and the Argumentative Mind (Deep delusion and our instinct to persuade) ← [YOU ARE HERE]

○ Part 4: Unfalsifiable Bullshit and Moral Obligations (MAGA’s invincibility cheat code and the danger of thoughtlessness)

In Part 1 we looked at what confirmation bias is and how it works. The takeaway was that we love confirming what we already think, even if evidence says otherwise. Now we turn to the evolutionary logic behind the bias.

Why do we do this?

If it’s settled that humans do this, the next natural question is why. Wouldn’t an ideal society have people predisposed to zeroing in on the truth? Wouldn’t confirmation bias leave us vulnerable to grifters who could exploit us over and over, sometimes dragging us towards things like tyranny or genocide? Well, we don’t live in a truth-maximizing society, and all that bad shit happens, kind of a lot. This optimistic view assumes that truth, noble and fit, is destined to rise to the surface in a kind of Darwinian karma. Historian Yuval Noah Harari refers to this as the naïve view of information.1 And such a view is, well, naïve.

Consider the Bible as Exhibit A. It’s arguably one of the most influential texts of all time, and it’s absolutely, unambiguously chock-full of bullshit. One of the biblical claims Harari singles out is that all humans are descended from a single Middle Eastern family that repopulated the Earth after a great flood (Genesis 9:19), a story many literalists date to a few thousand years ago.2 This is easily falsifiable by modern genetics; but it’s alive and well, right there in the Bible, treated as sacred gospel by millions. If the naïve view were correct, these narratives would have gone extinct long ago.

But back to the point. Accounts of why tend to be squishy - it’s easier to demonstrate that something happened than to demonstrate meaningfully why it happened. Why can be true on multiple levels at once. Why did you scroll down your screen a moment ago? Maybe because the language this article is written in reads top-to-bottom, and you wanted to keep reading? Or maybe because your motor cortex kicked off a neural signal, sending it all the way down to your hand, which did the scrolling? Both are correct, neither more than the other.3

With that in mind, I’ve picked four why explanations I find most intriguing.4 This installment covers the first two.

Confirmation bias as a badge of tribal loyalty

In his 2022 paper A Tribal Mind5, Eric Funkhouser borrows from signalling theory, a framework most often seen in the realm of evolutionary biology. Belief systems, he says, aren’t the soberly scrutinized, carefully curated buckets of truth we like to imagine. Instead, they’re the building blocks for our “impression management” signals - essentially advertisements of tribal membership. These signals serve as the identification badges we’re eager to display to our family at Thanksgiving, to our online followers, or to our church softball team. We know the kind of signals our tribe respects and likes to broadcast, so we shape our beliefs to fit. The signal comes first, the belief follows. And if confirmation bias helps get us across the finish line, so be it. According to Funkhouser,

Beliefs function so as to be detected by others and manipulate their behavior, primarily for the benefits that accrue from favorable tribal self-presentation.

Confirmation bias is the evidence-processing routine that keeps that public badge shiny and presentable. Consider the following hypothetical: To stay in good MAGA graces, you might one day find it strategic to endorse masked, trigger-happy goons as the only reasonable response to a terrified Guatemalan child that doesn’t have their paperwork in order. And it might require wading deep into some mean-spirited bullshit to justify that endorsement. So if you have to perform some confirmation bias gymnastics, by all means, go right ahead; the louder and more sanctimonious the better. Why update your priors when they already prove you’re a branded member of the winning team?

In a follow-up paper (the aptly-titled Dangerous Beliefs, Effective Signals6), Funkhouser digs deeper into signalling theory, adding its handicap principle to our tribal signalling playbook. Most often explained in high school biology or David Attenborough documentaries by invoking a peacock’s tail, the handicap principle says that that fabulous tail makes Mr. Peacock sexier precisely because he’s willing to stand out to prey like a clumsy bullseye in the name of romance.7

In human signalling games, costly signals can be more credible because the cost itself proves commitment. The payoff is social currency: status, belonging, or dominance. If the signal delivers those, the risk is worth it. As Funkhouser explains,

Danger efficiently communicates social identities and, most significantly, has value as a handicap in a signaling game.

Burning bridges with the out-group is a common dangerous signal. Being aggressively MAGA might just seem reckless to the uninitiated, making one look like a shitty, racist asshole to polite society… but that’s the point. In the paper Funkhouser relates seeing a person during the height of COVID, wearing a shirt reading “Unmasked. Unmuzzled. Unvaccinated. Unafraid.” Now that’s one brave badge of loyalty – its proud, fashion-forward owner reveling in danger like a pig in shit. “It is good to trigger the ‘libtards,’” Funkhouser writes, “and this belief signals partisanship. The shirt also conveys a more personal message – that they are the type of person who is strong and courageous.”

Confirmation bias to preserve unwavering confidence

In terms of sexy tribal signals, right next door to loyalty lives confidence. Evidence suggests that confidence alone pays: Judges and juries are more likely to believe and excuse inaccuracies of witnesses who appear very confident.8 Confident people dominate group decisions, regardless of competence.9 And we trust the wisdom of confident advisors, even when they’re wrong.10

So, what happens if you overplay that confidence hand, and just bullshit how great you are? In 2012 researchers ran a two-part experiment to investigate this.11 In phase one, groups of subjects played a game answering run-of-the-mill trivia questions. They wrote down their answers privately, but were allowed to discuss amongst themselves, forming opinions of each other, as people do. They then anonymously rated each other based on various status metrics; how influential others were in the group’s discussions, how much respect they appeared to earn, their potential for leadership, and so on. As expected, higher-confidence subjects (as measured by things like voice tone, lack of hesitation, eye contact, posture, etc.) got higher status rankings.

But in phase two, each member’s objective performance – their ranking in the trivia game – was unexpectedly revealed to the group. (“Fuck!”, said the blowhards.) This clearly blew the cover of these overconfident bullshitters. They continued to play the game a bit more, then ranked each other again. The penalty for being overconfident? Not much at all. The bullshitters continued to enjoy their high status rankings, remaining even higher than their more humble, equally-talented counterparts. So at least in competitive group scenarios, it pays to be overconfident. The big gains in status perception far outweigh any punitive downgrade if you get busted.

So where does confirmation bias fit into all of this? If your status depends on pretending to be certain, then disconfirming evidence is a reputational threat (even if a punishment isn’t always meted out, per above). Confirmation bias becomes a way of legitimizing your performance. A 2020 MEG neuroimaging study makes essentially the same point at the mechanistic level: i.e., confidence begets confirmation bias neurologically.12 When subjects had high confidence in a decision, their brains effectively rendered themselves incapable of “honestly” processing downstream evidence, selectively strengthening or dampening signals to ensure their host remained certain of themselves. In a way, our brains rig their own elections. According to the researchers,

Holding high confidence in a decision leads to a striking modulation of post-decision neural processing, such that integration of confirmatory evidence is amplified while dis-confirmatory evidence processing is abolished.

Exactly. If you’re up to speed on Drift Diffusion Models and Support Vector Machines you can read the paper here.

So what happens on the other side of the coin, when, for example, you update your priors in light of new information? Well, on March 16, 2004, at a Marshall University town hall event, presidential hopeful John Kerry nonchalantly noted, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it.” W’s campaign shit kittens, uncorked some champagne, then went all-in on labeling Kerry a flip-flopper. The accusations were relentless, and of course Kerry lost. The electorate doesn’t seem to care that updating beliefs in light of new information is exactly what a rational agent should do. The Center for Media and Public Affairs ranked "flip-flopping" as one of the most influential topics in their analysis of 2004 campaign news coverage.13 Two months before the election, Damien Cave wrote in The New York Times:

The mildly ridiculous term has somehow become a potent weapon, an 11-letter dig suggesting that Mr. Kerry has shifted policy positions frequently and is therefore weak, indecisive and more ambitious than principled.14

The weekend after W’s win, a positively glowing Karl Rove told Meet the Press that the $87 billion quote was “the gift that kept on giving.”15 Later, a pair of Kerry Flip Flops that had been sold at the 2004 Republican National Convention were added to a collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History:

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So, what happens when you bullshit so effectively that you start believing yourself and convincing others? That’s in Part 3.

Series Table of Contents:

✓ Part 1: Inconvenient Truths and the Mechanics of Being Sure (My MAGA-ed Mom and a history of confirmation bias)

✓ Part 2: Tribal Loyalty and Con(fidence) Artistry (The naive view of information and two ways confirmation bias secures your seat at the table) ← [YOU ARE HERE]

○ Part 3: Self-Deception and the Argumentative Mind (Deep delusion and our instinct to persuade)

○ Part 4: Unfalsifiable Bullshit and Moral Obligations (MAGA’s invincibility cheat code and the danger of thoughtlessness)

If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. – Karl Popper

Comparing my MAGA-ed mother to Memento killer Leonard Shelby isn’t something I’m proud of, but there’s an unmistakable thread of dishonesty that connects them: when reality clashes with their worldview, it’s reality that gets edited to conform.

Leonard has a manufactured narrative that keeps him afloat: someone bonked him on the head, killed his wife, and now bloody revenge is his animating force. It grants him a semblance of coherence that his fragmented existence can’t accommodate. So when an unexpected fact gets in the way (he’s already avenged his wife’s attacker), he literally sets that inconvenient truth on fire.

After a year of no contact I decided to reach out to Mom, fingers crossed, to see if MAGA had lost any of its grip on her mind. A few minutes into our FaceTime, she tried to justify Trump and his ICE troopers by saying somebody has to do something about the gangs overrunning our country. Trump is boisterous, she’ll give me that, but at least he’s trying to stop all those child-trafficking rings.

Earlier, before our no contact days, before she helped Trump get reelected, her argument wasn’t much different: rape-y Mexicans are coming over the border in droves, shredding the fabric of America, and bringing their awful drugs and freeloading families with them. I was the delusional one for disputing these plain-to-see facts.

And it’s true, if I had been seeing the same stories my mom has been mainlining for years, absent a shred of scrutiny or skepticism, we probably would be on the same MAGA page. She’s fed a constant stream of boogeyman anecdotes on Facebook. Every Sunday she treats herself to a sermon by Heritage Foundation-aligned white nationalists, who remind her that Trump is God’s chosen vessel, mysterious though it may be. And – as long as the power is on and the cable works – the living room, dining room, bedrooms, kitchen, and breakfast nook will have Fox News in the air.

Below is one kind of distortion she sees all the time: Fox on the left, presenting “new” footage; the original on the right, from five years earlier.

There’s a lot of propaganda and fuckery aimed at Mom and those like her, to advance this immigrants-as-criminals story. But she still deserves a co-author credit for manufacturing her narrative, not unlike Leonard. One of the primary mechanisms keeping my mom MAGA is self-generated. It’s called confirmation bias. Essentially, we really like our priors and we do our best to keep them sticky. Those things that confirm our theories stand out as the shiniest of objects, and we latch onto them, keeping our priors right where they started, thank you very much. Those things that dis-confirm our story, if we’re unlucky enough to encounter them, are brushed aside, “debunked” with critiques unburdened by logic, or just flat-out treated as nonexistent.

As we’ll see, we’re remarkably good at tolerating pure bullshit if it tells us we’ve been right all along. Of course actual truths can feed confirmation bias too, which keeps the waters particularly muddy. For example, this guy didn’t help:

Of course the Mad Max-ian gentleman above in no way proves that immigrants are burning down the country… but I can guarantee this scene plays on an infinite loop in the nationalist MAGA mind when they imagine what’s going on out there.

Confirmation Bias /// Nothing New

Confirmation bias is a fundamental quirk of the human mind, written about since at least the ancient Greeks. In History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides described the tendency like this:

It is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire.1 (c. 460–400 BCE)

Nietzsche gets straight to the point, no fat to trim:

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.2 (1878)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes was smugly aware of this fallacy of the common dunce:

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.3 (1891)

And then there’s the contemporary specimen of Rudy Giuliani, a kind of anti-Holmes, adopting the policy of a true fucking moron:

Confirmation Bias /// The Seminal Study

In 1960 P.C. Wason, a professor at University College, London, published a paper that challenged some of the dominant intellectual currents of the day. Game theory, introduced in the 1940s by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern4, had a solid academic foothold by then. Perfect rationality was assumed, with human preferences neatly mapped onto utility functions. Homo economicus had been refined to mathematical precision.

In psychology, Inhelder and Piaget’s The Growth of Logical Thinking5 (1958) described fully developed humans as formal operational thinkers, excelling at systematic experimentation. And the English edition of Karl Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery6 (1959) prescribed falsification (i.e. testing hypotheses by seeking disconfirming evidence) as the hallmark of scientific thinking. Wason, on the other hand, demonstrated that we were actually pretty terrible at all of this rationality stuff.7

If you want to try Wason’s famous experiment yourself, click the button below. It links out to a GitHub page with an interactive version of the 2-4-6 task. If not, just read on for the explanation.

Try Wason's 2-4-6 Task

In Wason’s experiment, subjects were given the following instructions (paraphrased):

The triplet of numbers [2,4,6] follows a rule that I have in mind. Your goal is to find my rule using trial and error. Propose a triplet and I’ll tell you if it follows the rule or not. Carry on testing until you’re pretty certain you have the rule figured out, then make your guess.

Only about one in five subjects got it right on their first guess, though they could submit as many rule-checks as they wanted before guessing. Most people locked onto their first theory and proposed triplets that backed up that hunch. For example, one popular candidate for the rule is “sequential even numbers.” So submissions might accordingly be [8,10,12], [48,50,52], or [1002,1004,1006]. Each of those earns a “Yes, fits the rule.” In general, after hoarding enough Yeses, once they felt their theory was sufficiently verified, subjects guessed the rule. But that’s entirely the wrong way to go about it.

Wason’s hidden rule governing [2,4,6] was simple and sneaky: “any three ascending numbers.” So [1,100,391] and [0,4,5] were fine, but [1,3,2] was not. The best way to make progress in this task was to try to disprove your prevailing theory by getting a No (e.g. [6,4,2]), or at least an out-of-place Yes (e.g. [8,10,14]). Getting a Yes that you already expect just leaves you where you started. In some sense, a single No is much more informative than dozens of Yeses. Final verdict: humans were biased toward confirming their theory, nowhere close to rationally optimal agents. Hence, confirmation bias.8

Confirmation Bias 2.0 /// Realistic Scenarios

So we would rather look for evidence that flatters our current theory than put our ego on the line for a little more truth. Being wrong while you’re still working things out just does not feel good… even if it’s leading you to the right destination. And that’s just when people are solving a reward-less math riddle, their only audience a (likely bored, possibly hungover) TA in Psych Lab… the stakes couldn’t be lower.

Now imagine what happens when the context is a little more realistic and ideological temperatures run a bit higher. In 1979, Stanford researchers Charles Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark Lepper investigated exactly that, in their landmark paper Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization.9

First, the researchers recruited subjects who were either pro- or anti-death penalty, having identified crime deterrence (its effectiveness or ineffectiveness) as a primary rationale for their stance.

Participants were asked to review several experimental findings. Some of the findings concluded that the death penalty was an effective crime deterrent. Others concluded it was not. Here’s an example of an anti-death penalty “study” used in the experiment (they were all secretly fictional, of course):

Palmer and Crandall (1977) compared murder rates in 10 pairs of neighboring states with different capital punishment laws. In 8 of the 10 pairs, murder rates were higher in the state with capital punishment. This research opposes the deterrent effect of the death penalty.

Subjects were given additional information about the methods and procedures used in each of the studies, then asked about their updated feelings, and why or why not they agreed or disagreed with the findings of each. As you might have already guessed, subjects judged studies that aligned with their original beliefs as more credible, and they discounted those that didn’t.

So, how did they justify themselves? Across the board subjects took sympathetic studies at face value, using fairly vague and benign language to describe them:

“The experiment was well thought out.” Or, “[The researchers] were careful in interpreting their results.”

But they inevitably found problems with dis-confirming research:

“The evidence given is relatively meaningless without data about how the overall crime rate went up in those years.” Or, “The murder rates should be expressed as percentages, not as straight figures.”

The punchline was that the studies were carefully and completely counterbalanced, “offering equivalent levels of support and disconfirmation,” according to the authors. In other words, subjects were given functionally identical sets of evidence – and yet each group wound up more entrenched in their original position than when they started.

It was clear that the pro- and anti- camps were not learning in any meaningful way from the evidence. Rather, they were co-opting what they needed to make their priors feel correct, and they had two different assimilation tactics. A friendly study was treated as self-evident, possibly triggering an “I fucking knew it!” under one’s breath. But when a study threatened their position, subjects became armchair statisticians – scrutinizing sample sizes, criticizing methodology, ferreting out confounding variables, and so on. The authors concluded that subjects made their hypotheses effectively “unfalsifiable” through this sort of selective skepticism. They labeled this specific form of confirmation bias biased assimilation.10

To recap, according to the Wason study: we don’t even look for evidence that undermines our theory. Per the Lord et al. study: when forced to confront contradictory evidence, we always find something wrong with it.

So, we’ve seen what confirmation bias looks like in both sterile and ideological settings. But why would we evolve a brain that actively rejects the truth? That’s in Part 2.

Series Table of Contents:

✓ Part 1: Inconvenient Truths and the Mechanics of Being Sure (My MAGA-ed Mom and a history of confirmation bias) ← [YOU ARE HERE]

○ Part 2: Tribal Loyalty and Con(fidence) Artistry (The naive view of information and two ways confirmation bias secures your seat at the table)

○ Part 3: Self-Deception and the Argumentative Mind (The deep delusion and our instinct to persuade)

○ Part 4: Unfalsifiable Bullshit and Moral Obligations (MAGA’s invincibility cheat code and the danger of thoughtlessness)

Seventy-seven million Americans, my own mother included, pulled the lever to endorse Trump’s bullshit in 2024.1 And if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you have a MAGA in your family too. According to a TIME / Harris poll conducted just after the election half of Americans are estranged from at least one close relation, and one in five cite politics as the reason.2

As for Mom, I made the gut-wrenching decision to go “no contact” shortly after her second-favorite savior was anointed.3 I haven’t spoken to her since January 22, 2025, and don’t plan to until she expresses some modicum of remorse. My therapist sanctions the move, and he’s confirmed that I’m not the only one of his clientele losing nightly sleep over this nonsense. It’s maddening and terrifying to watch MAGA burn the world down — but it’s a real kick in the tender humanities to watch a loved one cheering on the whole affair.

So, how did we get here? Why have so many otherwise functional citizens been charmed by this pathologically lying carnival barker?

This newsletter is my attempt to dissect the forces that make truth optional for millions of sweaty, slogan-chanting Americans.

We’re just dumb apes, it’s true. But at least some of us dummies have looked into the matter. And so we have science to help explain what’s gone wrong with us. We’re all guilty of these bugs to some degree, of course, and maybe understanding them will help us all behave a little nicer. Let’s start with the mother of all biases, good old-fashioned laziness:

1. Cognitive Miserliness (aka Dual-Process Theory)

Our ancestors survived by making snap judgments with minimal information. Hear a critter scurrying in a bush? No time to do a cost-benefit analysis or calculate the odds that it’s a squirrel… better assume it’s a lion and just run. In the hand-me-down circuitry of our brains we have two major modes of thinking, and they’re in a constant tug-of-war for dominance (hence, Dual-Process):

• System 1 is swift, intuitive, and automatic. It’s what allows us to recognize a friend's face in a crowd, jerk the wheel away from a pothole, or gag at a curious hair in our salad.

• System 2 is plodding, deliberate, and analytical. It requires conscious attention and mental work; it's at work when we calculate complex math problems, actively listen during a lecture, or weigh the pros and cons of a major life decision.

This distinction was famously explored by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman (and his oft-overlooked colleague Amos Tversky) beginning in the 1970s. Their work revealed that we rely heavily on System 1 during most of our day-to-day operations. And this makes sense. If you had to engage in meticulous analysis for every thought that arises (e.g. What color socks do I wear? Wouldn’t tooth vacuums be better than tooth brushes?) you’d hardly make it out the door.

We are, by default, reluctant to engage the mentally taxing System 2 unless absolutely necessary. We prefer easy, intuitive conclusions, so we skip the hard work of gathering evidence or examining nuance. In other words, System 1 doesn’t care much about truth or accuracy, and is happy to snub its nose at any elite, logical snobbery in the ivory tower of your brain.

Lazy as a Policy

So why else, aside from a desire to remain uneaten alive, are we so consistently stingy with our top-shelf thinking? Consider energy efficiency. The human brain is an energy drain, consuming roughly 20 percent of our body's calories while comprising only about 2 percent of our body weight.4 It makes sense, then, that natural selection would favor mental processes that conserve our hard-won metabolic resources — even if utter nonsense occasionally gets green-lit.

At first glance you might assume that System 2’s fancy executive logic would outgun System 1 when things get complicated (i.e. when System 2 tells System 1 to shut up, it’s thinking). Of course the ancient, error-prone portion of our lizard brain would step aside and let the adults in the room handle things, right? Not really. Try this: say aloud the color of each word below; red, orange, green or blue. Do not say the word itself, just name the color of the letters, and go as fast as you can:

This is the Stroop Effect. Try as you might, the uninvited sub-process of this task (reading) stymies your performance (saying a color). Ignoring direct orders, System 1 automatically reads the word, bungling System 2’s plan to follow the counterintuitive rules of the game. What’s extra-interesting about the Stroop Effect is that a literate, presumably educated process is the System 1 foil here. Even though it’s impatient and error-prone, System 1 can handle impressively advanced tasks — reading billboards, scrolling through Facebook, ignoring PBS, and so on. According to Kahneman:

The automatic operations of System 1 generate surprisingly complex patterns of ideas, but only the slower System 2 can construct thoughts in an orderly series of steps.5

The Stroop Effect reveals how System 1 and System 2 can get hopelessly gridlocked in their constant battle to keep you alive — all the while making you feel like you have two heads and ruining your performance on self-administered internet quizzes.6

Infected by Dumb Data

Here’s another one that cognitive scientists understandably call the anchoring effect. Imagine you’re asked if Gandhi was younger or older than age 9 at his death. Of course he was older than that, you might reason – adult Ben Kingsley played him. The anchoring effect predicts that your guess will be lower than if, say, age 107 had been thrown at you (instead of 9). The mere suggestion of a number causes one to anchor their estimates around that. Not only that, the anchor can be random, totally unrelated to the question posed, AND the subjects can know they’re being manipulated.

In one experiment, Kahneman and Tversky had subjects spin a numbered “wheel of fortune” rigged to always land on 10 for one group and 65 for the other. Then, as unrelated as it sounds, they asked subjects what percentage of UN member states were from Africa. It was obvious that the wheel added no meaningful information. But the anchor skewed guesses dramatically: Team 10’s average guess was 25%, and Team 65’s average guess was 45% (the answer at the time, in 1974, was 29.7%). Once again, System 1’s addiction to shortcuts (“heard a number, must be important”) overrides System 2’s sober, steady hand (“Let’s think rationally about countries in the UN, and definitely ignore that silly wheel thing.”). But, as Kahneman puts it:

It’s not surprising that people who are asked difficult questions clutch at straws, and the anchor is a plausible straw.7

It’s a powerful effect, holding fast even when subjects are rewarded with cash for being accurate. And to rub salt in the wound, we’re stubbornly righteous about our immunity to these malfunctions. According to Kahneman:

System 2 has no control over the effect and no knowledge of it. The participants that have been exposed to random or absurd anchors confidently deny that the obviously useless information could have influenced their estimate, and they are wrong.8

Kahneman, who spent his entire career doing this sort of thing, considered the anchoring effect “one of the most reliable and robust of experimental psychology.”

Parlor Tricks

So, what do these cognitive parlor tricks have to do with crowd size and satanic pizzeria dungeons? It could be that when a sensational headline or meme flashes before us, System 1 submits its final answer before System 2 even finishes reading the question. There’s neurophysiological evidence to back this up. EEG activity can be pretty neatly mapped onto the System 1 / System 2 framework. According to one study from 1997:

System 1 thinking is characterized by an increase in parietal alpha EEG power reflecting autonomic access to long-term memory and a release of attentional resources whereas System 2 thinking is characterized by an increase in frontal theta EEG power indicative of the engagement of cognitive control and working memory processes.9

With this in mind, scientists glued electrodes to subjects’ heads and asked them to spot fake headlines. It turns out bad performance — believing in bullshit — goes hand-in-hand with parietal alpha (System 1) EEG activity. This isn’t exactly a groundbreaking revelation. Of course people are more likely to be duped the less analytical thought they put toward the matter. But it at least suggests we’re on the right track, brain waves and all.

Then again, scientists are quite prone to bickering. They’ve thrown in the competing idea that our epidemic of bullshit can better be explained by “Motivated System 2 Reasoning,” aka MS2R. According to proponents, all those suckers that fall for bullshit aren’t really suckers at all. They come across some annoying fact that goes against their ideological grain and they put System 2 on the job. According to Dan Kahan (a present-day Yale professor, not to be confused with Daniel Kahneman), “Motivated reasoning refers to the tendency of people to conform assessments of information to some goal or end extrinsic to accuracy.”10 George Orwell wrote about pretty much the same thing nearly 80 years ago, just after World War II:

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.11

Aside from an indirect endorsement by the eerily prescient Orwell, there’s (a little bit of) evidence that backs up MS2R. One paper from Kahan and friends argues that a high level of reasoning capacity (and science literacy) in individuals is more tightly correlated to being polarized than it is to being correct, at least in the context of climate change.12 Another suggests that high-level reasoners can (and do) use their smarts to contort the truth, particularly when faced with an issue they’re passionate about, like gun control.13 I have my doubts, as Team Kahan strikes me as suspiciously apologetic to right wing causes.

The exquisitely named Gordon Pennycook wasn’t buying it either and poked some pretty convincing holes in these ideas. He and colleague David Rand decided to look directly at MAGA folks and their well-developed taste for bullshit. This was 2017 so they parsed people into Trump and Clinton supporters. They then ranked them based on their inclination to engage in analytical reasoning (Trump supporters were less inclined). Then he looked at their ability to detect bullshit.

If the believing-in-bullshit-requires-clever-mental-gymnanstics theory was right, there should be a positive correlation between being a natural reasoner and buying fake partisan bullshit. But there wasn’t. The takeaway, and subtitle of the article, aptly enough: Susceptibility to Partisan Fake News Is Better Explained by Lack of Reasoning Than by Motivated Reasoning14.

Turns out (at least some) MAGA followers aren't evil geniuses twisting logic to serve their agenda — they're just intellectually lazy. Which is somehow both less sinister and more depressing. I’ll let Orwell take it away - who similarly manages to be harrowing and comforting, with a bit of sage advice to boot:

The most intelligent people seem capable of holding schizophrenic beliefs, or disregarding plain facts, of evading serious questions with debating-society repartees, or swallowing baseless rumours and of looking on indifferently while history is falsified. […] I believe that it is possible to be more objective than most of us are, but that it involves a moral effort. One cannot get away from one’s own subjective feelings, but at least one can know what they are and make allowance for them.15