Our crisis of reasoning

We don’t have a constitutional crisis, or a crisis of civility. We have a crisis of motivated reasoning.

I am a scholar of train wrecks in public deliberation—times when communities decided, after much deliberation, and with many policy opportunities, to pursue a course of action they had plenty of evidence was a bad one. And then, usually, when they got evidence that it was a bad course of action, they recommitted to the clearly bad policy, but with more will—such as the Athenians’ decisions about whether and how to invade Sicily, the US commitment to slavery and then segregation, Hitler’s decisions regarding Stalingrad (and lots of others).

These aren’t just decisions I think are bad, but ones that the communities themselves regretted (sometimes, as with the commitment to slavery, by pretending they never made that decision).

It’s conventional for academics to say, “It’s more complicated than that,” but in this case it really isn’t complicated at all, and the ways people reason badly are well known.

Communities talk themselves into disastrous decisions, while ignoring all the reasonable criticisms of their position, when one position gets associated with loyalty to “us” (the in-group). When we are presented with complicated situations, and especially uncertainty (and, let’s be clear, every important political decision has a lot of uncertainty) we all have a tendency to manage our anxiety about the uncertainty by relying more on reasoning from in-group, and to be more defensive about our in-group. We are motivated to reason in a way that confirms our in-group is good, and all of our problems are caused by the out-group.

Imagine that you are watching your favorite team play, and there is an ambiguous situation, and the ref calls against your team, you will feel outrage on behalf of your team. The rational response (that is, one grounded in a sense that the data about the decision should be the same regardless of in- or out-group) would be to think, “Well, maybe that’s right.” But, if you are motivated to reason about the evidence on the basis of your in-group loyalties, then you’ll be outraged.

And, and this is important, your expressing outrage is also a way of performing in-group loyalty. Having a rational response (that is, one that assesses the call regardless of in- or out-group affiliation) would, especially in the case of a disputed call, show you to be not loyal to the in-group.

We are in a world of evading policy argumentation in favor of framing all policy issues as opportunities of performing in-group loyalty, which means that any argument or policy that makes Them mad is good for us. Political theorists talk about the fallacy of the “fixed pie” model—it’s the sense that the “goods” of our political world (police protection, health care, educational opportunities, infrastructure ranging from clean water to reliable bridges, being able to get political figures to take our concerns seriously) are a fixed amount, so anyone not like you getting a good must hurt you somehow. And, if you can’t get the good, then keeping them from getting a good is a kind of win.

The fixed pie model is part of making every issue an issue of in- or out-group identity. Democrats are framed as pro-immigrant and pro-government, and Republicans as anti-immigrant and anti-government, so, oddly enough, many people will vote Republican because they’re mad about a policy that Republicans enacted.

And that way of thinking about politics hurts everyone. Take, for instance, the issue of immigrants taking the jobs of “Americans” because they’re willing to work for less. The mainstream media (by which I mean Fox, which is the major source of information for a plurality of Americans) is used as an argument for being restrictive at our borders, in a way that means most of us could never have come to the US (and, no, not all the people who show up at our borders are illegal).

If the problem is that employers hire “illegal immigrants” rather than Americans, then a stricter policy at the border is not the sensible solution. If the problem is that Americans can’t get decent wages because “illegals” take the jobs, then the most obvious solution is to have high penalties for employers who hire “illegals.”

But, Trump, who hires a lot of “illegals,” isn’t arguing this point. He isn’t advocating a policy that would solve the problem he claims to care about (he never does). That’s because we aren’t in the realm of rational policy argumentation. We’re in the realm of politics as really about whether good or bad people will get their way, and simply making Them unhappy is as good as getting our way.

Middle income people caring that open borders will hurt their ability to earn a living wage is a legitimate concern. That concern is not solved by separating children at the borders. It’s better solved through various policies, including making it unprofitable for employers to exploit undocumented workers. Why aren’t we arguing about that?