“So, what’s the plan now?” came the text from one sibling to the others. It landed somewhere around 5 p.m. on Sunday, July 21. It took a few minutes for the first reply. “You mean about Biden dropping out of the race?”
Within minutes, the thread vibrated with questions about endorsements for Kamala Harris and who would be the vice presidential nominee. Then came the line, “I don’t think she has the charisma to win.”
When President Biden dropped out of the race that Sunday, it changed the discourse around the upcoming U.S. election, but not our human tendency to rely on our cognitive biases in making decisions. Listen to anyone around you or turn to the Op-Ed programs on your news network and the old lessons from high school language arts classes on logical fallacies in rhetoric and cognitive biases in decision-making may come back to you. That’s assuming most people took rhetoric classes in which teachers presented things like appeal to authority, ad hominem, appeal to celebrity, appeal to emotion, confirmation bias or the halo effect.
Humans are prone to make these errors in the face of change and pressure, especially in information overload. We default to making sense of events, people, even facts, using shortcuts from our belief systems and life experiences. Being aware of our biases doesn’t require us to change religions, political leanings or personal affiliations. It’s merely noticing when we’ve framed an experience or belief in an inaccurate or unreasonable way. Knowing the common logical fallacies and cognitive biases helps us from being manipulated by politicians, advertisers and very charismatic figures.
Everyone should be familiar with ad hominem. That’s just plain ol’ name-calling, like “childless cat ladies” or “shillbilly.” Ad hominem attacks highlight irrelevant personal characteristics that distract from the substance of policy and reveals clues about a speaker’s character, insecurities, and depth of knowledge and thought on what really matters.
“We don’t always realize that when we talk, we’re not just conveying the content of our speech, we’re also conveying a lot about who we are when we open our mouth and speak,” says Katherine Kinzer, University of Chicago professor of psychology.
“We need to pray for our country,” said a woman named Charlotte. “I heard that when a woman becomes a leader, that is the downfall of an empire.” That’s an appeal to fear, and a rather puzzling one that raises questions like, is the U.S. an empire and why would a woman be afraid of a woman leader considering the records of Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, all those European queens, Helen of Constantinople, and hundreds of other women currently or recently running their nations, the World Bank, and Fortune 500 companies. Those nations and organizations haven’t collapsed because a woman was elected or appointed to lead.
Consider the halo effect. If someone has charisma, we’re more likely to think they are believable and ethical, no matter what the evidence says. If we perceive them as stiff, stilted, and stumbling, we are more likely to find reasons to discredit them. That cognitive bias tends to make us susceptible to appeals to celebrity. When Gen Z British celeb Charli XCX labeled Kamala Harris “brat,” she was using her clout to boost young women’s perception of Harris. When George Clooney publicized why he withdrew financial support for President Biden, he used his status to impact confidence in Biden’s capabilities. (There might have been a good reason for caution, but physicians are qualified to assess and communicate that. A celebrity is not.) When Hulk Hogan tore his shirt for Donald Trump, he wanted to appeal to WWE fans’ sense of being in the “in group.”
It’s groupthink at work, looking to others in our affinity group to make sense of what’s unclear to us. If we think we’re wise to the appeals to celebrity, we still have to consider appeals to authority. What if it’s your pastor, a business leader you admire, or an academic, a writer, a speaker or a thought leader who endorses or tries to persuade you? Appeal to authority becomes a pitfall when the authority is not an expert on the topic on which they are speaking. It’s on us to evaluate what information a leader includes, what they omit, and to distinguish the facts from opinion.
There was a day, when print news was king, that newspapers labeled sections separating hard news and feature news - just the facts, ma’am - from the editorial and opinion pages. Journalists adhered to a code of ethics that aimed at the ideal of objectivity. (The code still exists, by the way. Look it up here: https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp.) But in recent decades, social scientists have argued that objectivity is impossible and bias is inevitable.
Bias can seep into how we present facts. The order of facts becomes a matter of priority and since people tend to remember the first and last items they heard in a report, story or speech, we are susceptible to coverage bias and concision bias. How often we hear an idea repeated suggests to our brains its level of importance. It’s worth developing a healthy skepticism if you hear an idea repeated often. If you have ever heard a word so many times it starts to sound funny to you, that’s the sense you’re trying to cultivate. The idea should hit you fresh, with a sense of “That is starting to sound funny to me. Why?”
Our lives are busy. Information and change come at us at the speed of nanoseconds. Most of us have a little inner skeptic asking us to slow down and ponder what is happening. We benefit if we slow down and pay attention. Often it raises uncomfortable questions if we listen to it. It requires us to do some work (not just watching YouTube or TikTok). Who has time for that? We do if we don’t want to be manipulated or exploited by catchy, surface-level content.
If we hear ourselves saying, “I feel like...” or “I (don’t) think...” that’s a pretty big cue that we may be taking a mental shortcut. Notice that leap in thinking. It signals we’ve moved from what we know, what we’ve worked hard to understand and think through to what we assume or want to believe.
When the sibling texted, “I don’t think she has the charisma” about Kamala Harris, when Charlotte said, “I heard that empires fail when...,” when Clooney wrote his op-ed about withholding contributions from Biden, when someone equates the MAGA movement as supporting their belief system, or when Kamala is Brat goes viral, all such statements fall back on how the speakers intuit the situation. Our task, as healthy skeptics trying to discern how to vote in the coming election is to be comfortable asking why did that person say that? What beliefs motivated the speakers? Are these claims supported with evidence beyond what I would prefer to believe? What evidence exists? What will I do if there isn’t a clear answer to some of these questions?