CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 152Decision-Making and Behavioral EconomicsSocial and Intergroup PsychologyMisinformation and Its Impacts

The Bias That Divides Us: The Science and Politics of Myside Thinking

Open access
Stanovich, Keith E.·2021·The MIT Press eBooks
DOI 10.7551/mitpress/13367.001.0001
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

Why we don't live in a post-truth society but rather a myside society: what science tells us about the bias that poisons our politics. In The Bias That Divides Us, psychologist Keith Stanovich argues provocatively that we don't live in a post-truth society, as has been claimed, but rather a myside society. Our problem is not that we are unable to value and respect truth and facts, but that we are unable to agree on commonly accepted truth and facts. We believe that our side knows the truth. Post-truth? That describes the other side. The inevitable result is political polarization. Stanovich shows what science can tell us about myside bias: how common it is, how to avoid it, and what purposes it serves. Stanovich explains that although myside bias is ubiquitous, it is an outlier among cognitive biases. It is unpredictable. Intelligence does not inoculate against it, and myside bias in one domain is not a good indicator of bias shown in any other domain. Stanovich argues that because of its outlier status, myside bias creates a true blind spot among the cognitive elite—those who are high in intelligence, executive functioning, or other valued psychological dispositions. They may consider themselves unbiased and purely rational in their thinking, but in fact they are just as biased as everyone else. Stanovich investigates how this bias blind spot contributes to our current ideologically polarized politics, connecting it to another recent trend: the decline of trust in university research as a disinterested arbiter.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.7551/mitpress/13367.001.0001

Cites

520 of 521 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • All of these mechanisms, sometimes grouped under 'myside bias', can contribute to issue polarization, insofar as individuals often become more extreme in their opinions after selectively processing the evidence on specific topics such as capital punishment, immigration, healthcare policy or climate change.

    “All of these mechanisms, which are sometimes grouped under the general rubric of ‘myside bias’111–113, can contribute to issue polarization, insofar as individuals often become more extreme in their opinions after selectively processing the evidence on specific topics such as capital punishment, immigration, healthcare policy or climate change114,115.”

    From Cognitive–motivational mechanisms of political polarization in social-communicative contexts (2022) · cites this paper as [113]

    Split into 2 atoms — 1 confirmed, 1 partially supported, 0 disputed, 0 misattributed, 0 unverifiable. Expand the claim to see per-atom verdicts.

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

1 retracted

Flagged first, then by citations

40 of the 561 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 82

  1. Atran, S., and Henrich, J. 2010. The evolution of religion: How cognitive by- products, adaptive learning heuristics, ritual displays, and group competition gener- ate deep commitments to prosocial religions. Biological Theory 5 (1): 18-30.
  2. Aunger, R., ed. 2000. Darwinizing culture: The status of memetics as a science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  3. Baron, J. 1988. Thinking and deciding. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  4. Baron, J. 2008. Thinking and deciding. 4th ed. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
  5. Baron, J. 2015. Supplement to Deppe and colleagues (2015). Judgment and Decision Making 10 (4): 1-2.
  6. Bartels, L. M. 2002. Beyond the running tally: Partisan bias in political perceptions. Political Behavior 24 (2): 117-150.
  7. Beyth-Marom, R., and Fischhoff, B. 1983. Diagnosticity and pseudodiagnositicity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45 (6): 1185-1195.
  8. Blackmore, S. 1999. The meme machine. New York: Oxford University Press.
  9. In W. Thompson, ed., Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Politics. doi:10.1093/acrefore /9780190228637.013.923. https:// oxfordre . com / politics / politics / view / 10 . 1093 / acrefore / 9780190228637 . 001 . 0001 / acrefore -9780190228637 -e -923 · DOI
  10. Brandt, M. J., Reyna, C., Chambers, J. R., Crawford, J. T., and Wetherell, G. 2014. The ideological-conflict hypothesis: Intolerance among both liberals and conserva- tives. Current Directions in Psychological Science 23 (1): 27-34.
  11. Carney, R. K., and Enos, R. 2019. Conservatism, just world belief, and racism: An experimental investigation of the attitudes measured by modern racism scales. 2017 NYU CESS Experiments Conference. Working paper under review. http:// www Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/5183/bookpreview-pdf/2242801 by guest on 27 April 2024 . rileycarney . com / research; or https:// pdfs . semanticscholar . org / ad3f / 1d704c09d5a80 c9b3af6b8abb8013881c4a3 . pdf .
  12. Chambers, J. R., Schlenker, B. R., and Collisson, B. 2013. Ideology and prejudice: The role of value conflicts. Psychological Science 24 (2): 140-149.
  13. Chua, A. 2018. Political tribes. New York: Penguin.
  14. Crawford, J. T., Kay, S. A., and Duke, K. E. 2015. Speaking out of both sides of their mouths: Biased political judgments within (and between) individuals. Social Psycho- logical and Personality Science 6 (4): 422-430.
  15. Crawford, J. T., and Pilanski, J. M. 2014. Political intolerance, right and left. Political Psychology 35 (6): 841-851.
  16. Dawkins, R. 1976/1989. The selfish gene. New York: Oxford University Press.
  17. Dawkins, R. 1993. Viruses of the mind. In B. Dahlbom, ed., Dennett and his critics: Demystifying mind, 13-27. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
  18. Dawson, E., Gilovich, T., and Regan, D. T. 2002. Motivated reasoning and perfor- mance on the Wason selection task. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28 (10): 1379-1387.
  19. Deary, I. J. 2013. Intelligence. Current Biology 23 (16): R673-R676.
  20. De Finetti, B. 1989. Probabilism: A critical essay on the theory of probability and on the value of science. Erkenntnis 31 (2-3): 169-223.
  21. De Neys, W., ed. 2018. Dual process theory 2.0. London: Routledge.
  22. Distin, K. 2005. The selfish meme. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  23. Earman, J. 1992. Bayes or bust. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  24. Evans, J. St. B. T. 2007. Hypothetical thinking: Dual processes in reasoning and judgment. New York: Psychology Press.
  25. Evans, J. St. B. T., and Stanovich, K. E. 2013. Dual-process theories of higher cogni- tion: Advancing the debate. Perspectives on Psychological Science 8 (3): 223-241.
  26. Fodor, J. A. 1983. The modularity of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  27. Fraley, R. C., Griffin, B. N., Belsky, J., and Roisman, G. I. 2012. Developmental ante- cedents of political ideology: A longitudinal investigation from birth to age 18 years. Psychological Science 23 (11): 1425-1431.
  28. French, D. 2018. Let's talk about "tolerance." National Review, April 6. https:// www . nationalreview . com / 2018 / 04 / lets -talk -about -tolerance / .
  29. Frost, A. A'L. 2019. Why the left can't stand the New York Times. Columbia Journalism Review, winter. https:// www . cjr . org / special_report / why -the -left -cant -stand -the -new -york -times . php .
  30. Gul, P., and Kupfer, T. R. 2019. Benevolent sexism and mate preferences. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 45 (1): 146-161.
  31. Hankins, J. 2020. Hyperpartisanship: A barbarous term for a barbarous age. Clare- mont Review of Books 20 (1): 8-17.
  32. Hardin, G. 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Science 162 (3859): 1243-1248.
  33. Hargreaves Heap, S. P. 1992. Rationality. In S. P. Hargreaves Heap, M. Hollis, B. Lyons, R. Sugden, and A. Weale, eds., The theory of choice: A critical guide, 3-25. Oxford: Blackwell. References 203
  34. Henry, P. J., and Sears, D. O. 2002. The Symbolic Racism 2000 Scale. Political Psychol- ogy 23 (2): 253-283. References
  35. Hollis, M. 1992. Ethical preferences. In S. Hargreaves Heap, M. Hollis, B. Lyons, R. Sugden, and A. Weale, eds., The theory of choice: A critical guide, 308-310. Oxford:
  36. Horwitz, J. 2020. Facebook delivers long-awaited trove of data to outside research- ers. Wall Street Journal, February 13. https:// www . wsj . com / articles / facebook -delivers -long -awaited -trove -of -data -to -outside -researchers -11581602403 .
  37. Huemer, M. 2015. Why people are irrational about politics. In J. Anomaly, G. Bren- nan, M. Munger, and G. Sayre-McCord, eds., Philosophy, politics, and economics: An anthology, 456-467. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  38. Iyengar, S., Sood, G., and Lelkes, Y. 2012. Affect, not ideology: A social identity per- spective on polarization. Public Opinion Quarterly 76 (3): 405-431.
  39. Kaufmann, E. 2019. Whiteshift. New York: Abrams Press.
  40. Klaczynski, P. A., and Lavallee, K. L. 2005. Domain-specific identity, epistemic regu- lation, and intellectual ability as predictors of belief-based reasoning: A dual-process perspective. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 92 (1): 1-24.
  41. Klaczynski, P. A., and Robinson, B. 2000. Personal theories, intellectual ability, and epistemological beliefs: Adult age differences in everyday reasoning tasks. Psychology and Aging 15 (3): 400-416.
  42. Kokis, J., Macpherson, R., Toplak, M., West, R. F., and Stanovich, K. E. 2002. Heuris- tic and analytic processing: Age trends a:nd associations with cognitive ability and cognitive styles. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 83 (1): 26-52. References 209
  43. Komorita, S. S., and Parks, C. D. 1994. Social dilemmas. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
  44. Kraft, P. W., Lodge, M., and Taber, C. S. 2015. Why people "don't trust the evi- dence": Motivated reasoning and scientific beliefs. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 658 (1): 121-133.
  45. Kronman, A. 2019. The assault on American excellence. New York: Free Press.
  46. Kurzban, R., and Aktipis, C. 2007. Modularity and the social mind: Are psychologists too self-ish? Personality and Social Psychology Review 11 (2): 131-149.
  47. Langbert, M., and Stevens, S. 2020. Partisan registration and contributions of faculty in flagship colleges. National Association of Scholars. January 17. https:// www . nas . org / blogs / article / partisan -registration -and -contributions -of -faculty -in -flagship -colleges . Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/5183/bookpreview-pdf/2242801 by guest on 27 April 2024 References
  48. Lilienfeld, S. O. 2017. Microaggressions: Strong claims, inadequate evidence. Perspec- tives on Psychological Science 12 (1): 138-169.
  49. Lind, M. 2020. The new class war: Saving democracy from the managerial elite. New York: Penguin. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/5183/bookpreview-pdf/2242801 by guest on 27 April 2024
  50. Lipman, M. 1991. Thinking in education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  51. Lott, J., and Moody, C. 2016. Do white police officers unfairly target black suspects? SSRN. November 15. https:// ssrn . com / abstract=2870189 .
  52. Lumsden, C. J., and Wilson, E. O. 1981. Genes, mind and culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  53. Mac Donald, H. 2018. The diversity delusion: How race and gender pandering corrupt the university and undermine our culture. New York: St. Martin's Press. References
  54. Malka, A., and Soto, C. J. 2015. Rigidity of the economic right? Menu-independent and menu-dependent influences of psychological dispositions on political attitude. Current Directions in Psychological Science 24 (2): 137-142.
  55. Manktelow, K. I. 2004. Reasoning and rationality: The pure and the practical. In K. I. Manktelow and M. C. Chung, eds., Psychology of reasoning: Theoretical and historical perspectives, 157-177. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
  56. Margolis, H. 1987. Patterns, thinking, and cognition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  57. McNamee, R. 2019. Zucked: Waking up to the Facebook catastrophe. New York: Penguin.
  58. Mercier, H., and Sperber, D. 2017. The enigma of reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  59. Nagel, T. 1986. The view from nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press.
  60. Nichols, S., and Stich, S. P. 2003. Mindreading: An integrated account of pretence, self- awareness, and understanding other minds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  61. Nisbet, M. 2020. Against climate change tribalism: We gamble with the future by dehumanizing our opponents. Skeptical Inquirer 44 (1): 26-28.
  62. O'Neill, J., and O'Neill, D. 2012. The declining importance of race and gender in the labor market: The role of federal anti-discrimination policies and other factors. Washington, DC: AEI Press.
  63. Paresky, P., Haidt, J., Strossen, N., and Pinker, S. 2020. The New York Times surren- dered to an outrage mob. Journalism will suffer for it. Politico, May 14. https:// www Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/5183/bookpreview-pdf/2242801 by guest on 27 April 2024 References . politico . com / news / magazine / 2020 / 05 / 14 / bret -stephens -new -york -times -outrage -backlash -256494 .
  64. Paul, R. W. 1984. Critical thinking: Fundamental to education for a free society in North America. Educational Leadership 42 (1): 4-14.
  65. Pew Research Center. 2013. What the public knows-In words, pictures, maps and graphs. September 5. https:// www . people -press . org / 2013 / 09 / 05 / what -the -public -knows -in -words -pictures -maps -and -graphs / .
  66. Pew Research Center. 2015. What the public knows-In words, pictures, maps and graphs. April 28. https:// www . people -press . org / 2015 / 04 / 28 / what -the -public -knows -in -pictures -words -maps -and -graphs / .
  67. Pew Research Center. 2017. Sharp partisan divisions in views of national institu- tions. July 10. https:// www . people -press . org / 2017 / 07 / 10 / sharp -partisan -divisions -in -views -of -national -institutions / .
  68. Pew Research Center. 2019. Partisan antipathy: More intense, more personal. Octo- ber 10. https:// www . people -press . org / 2019 / 10 / 10 / partisan -antipathy -more -intense -more -personal / .
  69. Pluckrose, H., Lindsay, J., and Boghossian, P. 2018. Academic grievance studies and the corruption of scholarship. Areo, October 2. https:// areomagazine . com / 2018 / 10 / 02 / academic -grievance -studies -and -the -corruption -of -scholarship / . Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/5183/bookpreview-pdf/2242801 by guest on 27 April 2024 References
  70. Ray, J. J. 1988. Cognitive style as a predictor of authoritarianism, conservatism, and racism. Political Psychology 9 (2): 303-308.
  71. Reeves, R. V. 2017. Dream hoarders. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
  72. Reyna, C. 2018. Scale creation, use, and misuse: How politics undermines measure- ment. In J. T. Crawford and L. Jussim, eds., The politics of social psychology, 81-98. New York: Routledge.
  73. Serwer, A. 2017. The nationalist's delusion. Atlantic, November 20. https:// www . theatlantic . com / politics / archive / 2017 / 11 / the -nationalists -delusion / 546356 / . Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/5183/bookpreview-pdf/2242801 by guest on 27 April 2024 References
  74. Siegel, H. 1988. Educating reason. New York: Routledge.
  75. Stephens, B. 2016. Staring at the conservative gutter: Donald Trump gives credence to the left's caricature of bigoted conservatives. Wall Street Journal, February 29. https:// www . wsj . com / articles / staring-at -the -conservative -gutter -1456791777 .
  76. Sternberg, R. J. 2018. "If intelligence is truly important to real-world adaptation, and IQs have risen 30+ points in the past century (Flynn Effect), then why are there References 223 so many unresolved and dramatic problems in the world, and what can be done about it?". Journal of Intelligence 6 (1): 4. https:// www . mdpi . com / journal / jintelligence / special_issues / Intelligence_IQs_Problems
  77. Toner, K., Leary, M. R., Asher, M. W., and Jongman-Sereno, K. P. 2013. Feeling superior is a bipartisan issue: Extremity (not direction) of political views predicts perceived belief superiority. Psychological Science 24 (12): 2454-2462.
  78. Toplak, M. E., West, R. F., and Stanovich, K. E. 2014a. Assessing miserly process- ing: An expansion of the Cognitive Reflection Test. Thinking & Reasoning 20 (2): 147-168.
  79. Wason, P. C. 1969. Regression in reasoning? British Journal of Psychology 60 (4): 471-480.
  80. Westfall, J., Van Boven, L., Chambers, J. R., and Judd, C. M. 2015. Perceiving politi- cal polarization in the United States: Party identity strength and attitude extremity Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/5183/bookpreview-pdf/2242801 by guest on 27 April 2024 exacerbate the perceived partisan divide. Perspectives on Psychological Science 10 (2): 145-158.
  81. Wetherell, G. A., Brandt, M. J., and Reyna, C. 2013. Discrimination across the ideo- logical divide: The role of value violations and abstract values in discrimination by liberals and conservatives. Social Psychological and Personality Science 4 (6): 658-667.
  82. Zimmer, B. 2020. "Infodemic": When unreliable information spreads far and wide. Wall Street Journal, March 5. https:// www . wsj . com / articles / infodemic -when -unreliable -information -spreads -far -and -wide -11583430244 .

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Stanovich, K. E.
Corresponding author
Stanovich, Keith E.
ORCID
Stanovich, Keith E.
Venue
The MIT Press eBooks
Publisher
The MIT Press
Published
2021-08-31
DOI
10.7551/mitpress/13367.001.0001
OpenAlex
W4252880621
Cited by
152
References
561
Citations by year
2026: 39 · 2025: 42 · 2024: 34 · 2023: 21 · 2022: 15 · 2021: 1
FWCI
22.64
Type
book
Language
en
Open access
Locations
The MIT Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Intergroup Psychology
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
Keywords
myside bias, confirmation bias, political polarization, post-truth, cognitive biases, bias blind spot, public trust in science, ideological partisanship, rationality

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review