Myside Bias Quotes

“Converging with the results of studies by Kahan (2013) and Van Boven and colleagues (2017) are political science studies showing that various indices of cognitive sophistication such as educational level, knowledge level, and political awareness not only do not attenuate partisan myside bias but often increase it. For example, Mark Joslyn and Donald Haider-Markel (2014) found that highly educated partisan survey respondents were in greater disagreement about policy-relevant facts than less-educated partisan respondents were.”
― Keith E. Stanovich, The Bias That Divides Us: The Science and Politics of Myside Thinking

“The unique epistemic role of the university in our culture was to set up conditions where students could learn how to bring arguments and evidence to a question, and to teach them not to project convictions derived from tribal loyalties onto the evaluation of evidence on testable questions. The rise of identity politics should have been recognized by university faculties as a threat to their ability to teach decoupled argumentation and evidence evaluation. As a monistic ideology (Tetlock 1986), where all values come from a single perspective, identity politics entangles many testable propositions with identity-based convictions. It fosters myside bias by reversing Kahan’s (2016) prescription—by transforming positions on policy-relevant facts into badges of group-based convictions. One of the most depressing social trends of the last few decades has been universities becoming proponents of identity politics—a doctrine that attacks the heart of their intellectual mission.”
― Keith E. Stanovich, The Bias That Divides Us: The Science and Politics of Myside Thinking