The deep and unavoidable roots of political bias

Your political worldview is inevitably simplistic, selective, and distorted.

Photo by Carrie Borden on Unsplash

Of all the strange forms of criticism I’ve encountered in my intellectual life, the most peculiar is the accusation I’m a “postmodernist”. For example, in a recent review of Renee Di Resta’s book on disinformation and social media, leading misinformation researcher Sander van der Linden observes that DiResta’s classification of bad people involved in modern disinformation campaigns misses the role of their intellectual apologists, including

“philosophers who weaponize postmodern principles to question whether an identifiable category called ‘misinformation’ even exists. DiResta overlooks them, but academics who are congenial to the messages promoted by influencers can provide troubling intellectual cover for anti-scientific claims.”

Given that (1) I’m a philosopher who has written about challenges in defining and applying concepts like ‘misinformation’, and (2) van der Linden and other leading misinformation researchers have repeatedly called me a “postmodernist” (in fact, “full-on postmodernist”) in response to those writings, I’m assuming I’m a primary target of this characterisation.

It’s an odd accusation on multiple levels. I’m a philosophical naturalist. I think there is a real world, the natural world, which includes human beings, and that the best way to learn about it is through science and rational thought. That’s not “postmodernism” on any conceivable interpretation.

Moreover, I’ve never denied that an identifiable category called ‘misinformation’ exists, whatever that would mean. I’ve argued that on expansive definitions of terms like ‘misinformation’, it’s doubtful that misinformation researchers—or anyone else—can achieve the degree of objectivity required to reliably and impartially identify which information satisfies the definition.

Part of my argument for this view involves pointing out specific ways such research is clearly biased by the establishment-liberal ideology underlying it. The chief evidence for this bias includes cases in which reasonable ideas have been misclassified as “misinformation” or “disinformation” and—more importantly—the manifest partiality of the liberal establishment’s obsession with the topic.

How much research or attention is there on false and misleading information disseminated by, say, public health authorities, mainstream liberal media, or progressive movements associated with mainstream feminism, LGBQT activism, anti-racism, climate activism, or any number of other progressive causes? Terms like “misinformation” and “disinformation” are overwhelmingly reserved for counter-establishment, right-wing content. If Trump and the MAGA movement launch a propaganda campaign, that’s “disinformation”. If Biden and the liberal establishment launch one of history’s most bizarre propaganda campaigns to convince America he has retained his cognitive health and abilities? Well, God bless—and if you think any different that’s just because you’ve been duped by misinformation yourself.

Nevertheless, my point in raising such critiques is not to argue that “misinformation” would be easy to identify if only people had my ideological outlook or if the research were more centrist or bi-partisan. Instead, I think that achieving objectivity in politics is simply extremely challenging, much more so than people instinctively realise. There’s a deep and important sense in which bias is inevitable when we attempt to understand the political universe.

This doesn’t mean everyone is equally biased or that knowledge is impossible. But I do think most people are blind to the many invisible sources of error and partiality that shape and distort our political judgements and broader ideological commitments.

This belief is not distinctive of “postmodernism”. The existence of bias, so understood, does not undermine the concept or ideal of objectivity; it simply highlights how we inevitably fall short of it to some degree. That is, bias presupposes the existence of a mind-independent reality—we are biased insofar as factors distort our apprehension of that reality—which is the opposite of what many people have in mind when they think of “postmodernism”.

I think the first person to grasp the unavoidability of political bias fully is the American journalist Walter Lippmann. In my vote for the most insightful paragraph ever written on the epistemological challenges confronted by citizens in large, complex, modern societies, he wrote,

“There is a bias in all opinion, even in opinion purged of desire, for the man who holds the opinion must stand at some point in space and time and can see not the whole world but only the world as seen from that point. So men learned that they saw a little through their own eyes, and much more through reports of what other men had seen. They were made to understand that all human eyes have habits of vision, which are often stereotyped, which always throw facts into a perspective; and that the whole of experience is more sophisticated than the naïve mind suspects.”

1. “There is a bias in all opinion, even in opinion purged of desire… “

When most people think of political bias, they think of cases in which people’s motivations or interests (their “desires” in Lippmann’s vocabulary) distort their judgement. This might involve pushing intentional deception and propaganda (“disinformation campaigns” in the modern terminology). However, it might also simply involve self-deception or what psychologists call “motivated reasoning”, the tendency for people’s practical goals—for example, their desires for status, power, sex, social approval, and resources—to bias how they seek out, interpret, evaluate, and process information.

Much of my own research explores this phenomenon of politically motivated reasoning. Humans are tribal. We often form political alliances that advance our perceived interests and status, advocate for conclusions and narratives that cast ourselves and our preferred communities in a positive light, denigrate and demonise our rivals and enemies, and affirm whatever identity-defining orthodoxies are socially rewarded within our social milieu.

Lippmann does not deny these sources of bias. Nevertheless, he observes, correctly, that the absence of motivated reasoning would not itself imply a lack of bias.

2. “… for the man who holds the opinion must stand at some point in space and time and can see not the whole world but only the world as seen from that point.“

We inevitably perceive the political universe from a specific vantage point. Our opinions, then, are determined by the scraps of information and experience we can acquire from this vantage point. We do not exist outside of history but within it, and within any given period we make contact with a tiny fraction of a vast world. Of course, it rarely feels this way. When we compare our beliefs against the facts, we always notice a comforting correspondence between the two. When we think of the world, we rarely notice it is only our mental model of the world—our inner reconstruction of it (what Lippmann called the “pictures in our heads” or our mental “pseudo-environments”)—that we engage with.

3. “So men learned that they saw a little through their own eyes, and much more through reports of what other men had seen.”

In constructing this inner model throughout our lives, we can never compare it directly against “the facts”. Except for the tiny fraction of the world of which we have first-hand experience, our access to the political universe is entirely mediated by the information we acquire from others—from our cultures, subcultures, and communities, and from the journalists, pundits, politicians, commentators, and so on that share information about that world for us.

Contrary to the views of some, the truth or falsity of such information does not announce itself. It does not come with alarm bells. In some places (e.g., North Korea), “The election was stolen” is true; in others (e.g., the US), it’s false. The difference is not in the statement but in its relationship to reality, a reality we cannot access except through the reports we acquire from others. These reports also do not wear their truth or falsity on their sleeve. And of course those other reporters are in the same situation we are: except for a tiny fraction of their beliefs, their model of the world was constructed based on the testimony of others.

“Where all the facts are out of sight,” wrote Lippmann, “a true report and a plausible error read alike, sound alike, feel alike. Except on a few subjects where our own knowledge is great, we cannot choose between true and fake accounts. So we choose between trustworthy and untrustworthy reporters.”

And how do we decide which reports are trustworthy? Not by comparing their reports against reality. If we could that—if we were in a position to verify their reports—there would be no need to trust them. So, we draw on our pre-existing beliefs to evaluate their plausibility and the reporter's trustworthiness, which were acquired from similar processes, or we cross-check what people tell us against what others tell us, which simply raises the same issue.

For these reasons, there’s a deep sense in which you can never present people with “the facts”. At best, you can present them with statements and other representations (e.g., graphs, models, equations, images, videos, artworks, etc.) alleged to represent the facts. You might be correct in such a claim, but the correctness is not a feature of the representations themselves.

Many people misunderstand this. They assume, as Popper put it, that “truth is manifest—that it is there for everyone to see, if only he wants to see it.” If people don’t see the truth, then—if they don’t accept “the facts”—they are either lying, crazy, or “post-truth”.

In response to such observations, Sander van der Linden called them “full-on postmodernism” and argued that “there are facts”. Stephan Lewandowksy, an even more influential misinformation researcher, responded with,

“Pity we wasted thousands of years researching argumentation, logic, and epistemology. But at least I am now proudly entitled to spell dawg any way I want, and the Earth can be flat while it is also round, and shame on the epistemic elites to tell me otherwise.”

On one level, the inability of some of the world’s most prestigious psychologists to understand a basic distinction between whether facts exist and how people access them is unfortunate. However, on another level, I sympathise with them: for most people, the degree to which our beliefs are not direct reflections of reality but are heavily mediated by vast, complex chains of trust and testimony is highly counter-intuitive. To acknowledge the fragility of that process can easily induce a kind of epistemological vertigo.

4. “They were made to understand that all human eyes have habits of vision, which are often stereotyped, which always throw facts into a perspective.”

“The best material model for a cat,” wrote Arturo Rosenbleuth and Norbert Wiener, “is another, or preferably the same cat.”

In forming our beliefs, we do not just depend on others. We also depend on interpretation. The political universe is vast and complex—unimaginably so. A society like the United Kingdom is a country of nearly 70 million people, each an individual with a brain featuring nearly 90 billion neurons, pursuing diverse goals in complex interactions with others in the context of complex social, economic, and political circumstances based on their own partial, distorted, and idiosyncratic mental models of reality.

To think and act within this political universe, it must be reconstructed through low-resolution systems of concepts, explanatory frameworks, and narratives. “The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance,” wrote Lippmann.

“We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it.”

For Lippmann, this process of simplification and interpretation occurs through “stereotypes”, a term he introduced and understood much more broadly than it is understood today. If you understand the world as an economically exploitative, white-supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative hellscape, you are applying a system of stereotypes to reduce the complexity of society to a simple—and manageable—story. The same is true if you view politics as a conflict between a corrupt elite and “the people”, or as a conflict between a benevolent liberal establishment concerned with truth and populist forces corrupted by disinformation and “post-truth”.

Interpretation and the selection and simplification it involves are not inherently bad. It is unavoidable. Moreover, the simplifying categories and narratives used to interpret reality often contain important grains of truth. They track genuine patterns, similarities, and forces. “The ideologies of politics”, wrote Lippmann, typically have a “foothold of realism”.

However, this is the problem: for a vast, complex political universe, there will be a vast space of possible but distinct interpretations sensitive to genuine facts and regularities. In most cases, it won’t be a simple matter of thinking all but one system of concepts and explanatory frameworks are wrong. There’s a deep sense in which they’re all wrong. More precisely, different explanatory frameworks highlight different facts, ignore or downplay others, and exhibit different explanatory virtues. In the language of the philosophy of science, they are largely incommensurate. We can—sometimes—reject interpretations on the basis that they don’t agree with the facts, but multiple different interpretations can easily co-exist with the same facts.

This is the primary why political disagreement is pervasive and persistent. It is typically not, as most of us would like to believe, because those who disagree with us are evil or crazy or stupid. They might be—if they are human, then to some degree they probably are—but then so are you. The deep reason is simply that there are many ways of interpreting unimaginably complex realities—and even more so when you remember that these interpretations are informed by countless distinct histories of experience, learning, thinking, and reasoning.

5. “The whole of experience is more sophisticated than the naïve mind suspects.”

Lippmann’s concluding observation in the quoted paragraph is simply that most people are instinctively oblivious to these social and interpretative sources of error and partiality in their political opinions. They endorse what Karl Popper called the “doctrine of manifest truth” and what psychologists call “naive realism”, endorsing the view that

“I see entities and events as they are in objective reality… [M]y social attitudes, beliefs, preferences, priorities, and the like follow from a relatively dispassionate, unbiased, and essentially “unmediated” apprehension of the information or evidence at hand.”

This attitude is wrong. Not only are we neither disinterested nor dispassionate when we form political opinions, but our access to the political universe is inevitably indirect and interpretative in ways that make error and partiality inevitable and yet often undetectable.

Acknowledging such facts results in a radical and counterintuitive model of our epistemic predicament in politics, but not a “postmodernist” one.