This political season is heating up…
Along with all the arguments, indignation, and accusations that go with it.
And the bombardment of manipulations we are subjected to during this time can cause us to lose focus of the important details of our own lives.
So I thought it would be worth looking at some of the deeper biases that can throw off our judgment – financially and otherwise.
Let’s break it down…
Emotional Bias
First, politics and the media hype around it creates an emphasis on emotion.
From the regal music of the Sunday news shows, to the passionate oration of the politicians, to the choreographed sneers and eye rolls of the political commentators…
Politics feeds into our emotional system much more than our rational and intellectual assessments, no matter how much a given speaker may insist that they offer the “truth.”
Tribal Bias
Human beings are by far the most caring, empathetic creatures on earth.
We have unique wiring in our brain that makes this possible. If a chimpanzee in the wild is injured, he will not be taken care of by the troop. They will let him suffer and starve; but when current day members of human hunter gatherer bands were questioned, 50% had been in just such a situation and the band nursed them back to health.
This is significant because the exceptions stand out in stark relief. When we see or hear about examples of people doing monstrous things to other people, it horrifies us because this is not how almost all of us behave toward our fellow human beings.
But politics feeds into a tribal bias. That level of compassion and empathy disappears when we think of people as outside of our group. These days, more than any time in history, the whole world is our group (which is a very good thing). But when we judge a politician from an opposing party, we lose that empathy and compassion. Our bias is strongly for our party, and against the other.
Which means we’ll tend to only see the good in members of our team, and mostly the bad in the other.
Immediacy Bias
We also have a bias toward our immediate experience. This means that when politicians or the media emphasize how horrible or wonderful some current feature of world circumstances are, it’s easy to lose context of history.
“This is the worst economy ever!”
“The world has never seen a more dangerous time!”
“This is the most important election in American history!”
“This is the greatest recovery ever!”
None of those statements are true historically, yet those and many like them, are trotted out commonly every four years.
A worse economy than the Great Depression? A more dangerous time than World War II? A more important election than Washington? Jefferson? Lincoln? Roosevelt?
Without the perspective of history, coupled with the manipulation of a politician, these statements can feel true even though they are not.
Confirmation Bias
Politics is all about confirmation bias.
Every politician tells a story of how great their side is, and how awful the other side is; how great their vision will be if it’s implemented, and how awful the other side’s vision will be. We favor the story that is in line with our beliefs. Politics is about persuasion and manipulation to accept a certain story.
In contrast, the scientific method is a strategy for countering and limiting confirmation bias. We actively create experiments to disprove what we believe will happen (our hypothesis), and it’s only when our hypothesis survives many iterations of this process that we can have some confidence that we’re on to a piece of the truth.
This also means that politics and science are incompatible and contradictory. They do not support each other; they undermine each other.
If you take a glass of the finest wine and add a drop of something vile to it, you no longer have a glass of fine wine.
When we combine science with politics, we no longer have science, we have politics.
Negativity Bias
We have a built-in, predictable bias toward the negative.
Negative events and experiences are about four times as impactful on us as positive ones. We naturally orient toward negative stories and events, because life for early humans was so dangerous that they needed to be constantly vigilant in order to survive.
But current day life is orders of magnitude safer than the world our ancestors lived in. Still, we orient to the negative. Politicians and the media know this and use it to continuously frighten us to vote for them.
News media uses it to frighten us into continually tuning in and getting an update on how awful things are.
Countering this takes a deliberate practice of establishing a kind of emotional distance from the stories we’re told by these people. We can do this by deliberately looking for the good people and opportunities in our lives – the people and things about which we can feel grateful.
We also do this by turning off the media beyond what we absolutely need to stay informed. I’ve had clients with severe anxiety and panic whose symptoms lifted completely when they turned off the TV, radio, and internet stories for a week.
Their absence had zero effect on the political world; but it had a life-changing effect on their personal world.
Bottom line: Embrace your political beliefs and put energy toward what you value. But keep in mind how powerful these biases are and do your best to keep perspective on this. Be careful not to make big financial decisions based on what politicians or the media say they’ll do. Don’t get caught up in the emotional frenzy that these biases can foster.
And don’t lose sight of what matters most.
Most of the impact we have in our lives is in relation to the real people we are in relationships with. They are the primary source of our meaning and happiness. Make sure you’re not sacrificing those relationships to the turbulent passions of political biases.