MAGA and FOX are using confirmation bias to build their audience and to radicalize their voters.
The latest example is a high profile Fox anchor's despicable lie about registering to vote at the DMV
A recent example, this time from Fox’s Maria Bartiromo, shows the power of confirmation bias. She posted this entirely false claim:
Over here in the real world, we have been calling this stuff lies. And, for sure, there is no truth in her story. Only US citizens vote. In Texas, citizens can opt to register to vote when they renew their drivers’ licenses. Anyone who has talked to our recent immigrants will tell you that if they are lining up for anything, it’s probably for a chance to find housing or work. There is simply no evidence that any are attempting to vote. And no government agency, in Texas or elsewhere is going around trying to commit this kind of vote fraud.
Bartiromo was fooled by what psychologists call confirmation bias. That’s the tendency to seek out information that reinforces our existing beliefs and biases. Everyone does this, in part because confirmation brings with it a rush of neurotransmitters like dopamine that induce feelings of well-being. Reporters are supposed to know better, and I’m guessing there was a time when Ms. Bartiromo did know better.
The problem for her, and for America more generally, is that FOX cable and the GOP have used confirmation bias as a strategy for decades. They chose to feed people stories that triggered those feelings of well-being as a strategy to create a loyal audience and a radicalized voter base. To keep this up over time, the “confirming” stories had to get more and more outlandish, until they broke entirely from any tether to reality.
Journalists are meant to be truth seekers. The best of them know the discomfort of wrestling with facts that don’t fit their preconceived categories. But after years of feeding confirmation bias, Ms. Bartiromo herself has become unable to see the world as it is
Folks caught in this trap now go out of their way to find facts that seems to confirm their underlying belief. And because FOX and the GOP joined together to feed this bias, it is all political. Democrats are, fill in the blank [cheats, child groomers, losing, ruining America…]. See a line of people going to a movie? They must be “illegals” registering to vote. See a large crowd at a Democratic rally? Must be AI generated, or folks were paid to show up. It’s now a reflex. And it’s unrelated to the real world.
Democrats, independents, and folks who pay no attention to politics are all subject to confirmation bias. But only the GOP and FOX have used it as a tool to build their audience and to radicalize their voters. The rest of us remain committed to the realities of our world, and the hard work of making it a better place.
Part of making it better is making it safe for folks like Ms. Bartiromo to let go of her bias. It will not be easy.
Just after the fall of the Berlin Wall I visited the concentration camp Buchenwald in what, until very recently, had been East Germany. The women who took me around the camp wept as she talked about the history of the camp. Initially, I assumed the tears were for the tragedies that happened there during the war. I was wrong. She told me that she was shaken and angry because she had unknowingly been lying to visitors for many years. She said that after the reunification, she was finally allowed to see the documents that revealed the true purpose of the camp. Until then, she had been telling visitors the lies that the communists had authorized- that the camp existed primarily to punish communist partisans. Her tears were a combination of relief and reconciliation as she worked through the shame and the anger she now felt. She was brave and honest. And her journey to a new understanding- one based in reality- was a painful one.
We need to talk with our neighbors and our relatives, the ones addicted to the lies and help them recover. That’s going to be especially hard, as the forces that have weaponized our very own neurotransmitters are only upping their supply of bias-affirming nonsense. But our recovery nation’s healing depends upon it.