Divided We Fall

Divided We Fall is the title of Nick Kristof’s op-ed piece in the New York Times this past Thursday using the political debates as a lovely example of how we all like to view the world from our own little belltower. For those of us who have taught ladder of inference, partisan perceptions, and the general ability of people to look for data that confirms what we already think, this op-ed does a great job of putting this common conflict phenomenon into current political context.

Kristof starts off the article with “If you’re a Democrat, your candidate won in Wednesday night’s presidential debate — that was obvious, and most neutral observers would recognize that. But the other candidate issued appalling distortions, and the news commentary afterward was shamefully biased.” As Kristof explains, each candidate’s supporters used the debate to confirm their own prejudices and beliefs about the other side rather than searching for non-conforming evidence.

Kristof cites a whole host of familiar psychological research to help the reader understand this phenomenon–from the famous study of Dartmouth and Princeton fans watching the same film clip of a football game to more recent studies showing that students at Stanford who read studies about capital punishment found that the better researched and better written papers just happened to be the studies that supported their position.

Kristof’s advice on how to get over our biases is good advice for all of us: “The only solutions I see are personal ones, to work out daily to build our mental muscles. Just as we force ourselves to nibble on greens and decline cheesecake, we should seek an information diet that includes a salad bar of information sources — with a special focus on unpalatable rubbish from fools. The worse it tastes, the better it may be for us.”

3 thoughts on “Divided We Fall”

  1. OK, to be clear here, lest my blog co-editors misunderstand me, I love our blog. I love the blog editors. You are not fools. Your entries are far from rubbish and are entirely palatable. I can’t figure out if they’re salad or cheesecake, in the Kristofian sense, but I like both. So there you have it.

    I’ll refrain from efforts at pre-caffeine humor for a while.

  2. Until Kristof’s words appeared, I had been hunting unsuccessfully for just the right turn of phrase to describe our blog…
    “unpalatable rubbish from fools”

    Perhaps we should change the tagline for indisputably.org?

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