Smart People are Biased Too
As we wander toward an election in the United States, the silly season is fully upon us. Opening Twitter leads almost immediately to a headache, and all kinds of madness is spreading across Facebook. One article has been making the rounds recently. While I agree with many of its general principles, as a progressive I hate articles like this. It’s guilty of the exact kind of smug elitism conservatives often accuse us of, while peddling some ideas that are simply incorrect.
The article claims that, “Uneducated people are generally not as good as educated people at determining when they are being lied to, because they are not as good at distinguishing between the credibility of different sources…People (bad ones) make fun of baristas with college degrees, but every good citizen should have enough of a post-secondary education to vote competently, to determine fact from fiction to some meaningful degree.” There are many issues with this sentiment, one of which is that it’s completely unclear that education makes people less biased, or more likely to select unbiased sources.
I was talking with Celeste Headlee about this on a recent episode of Being Well. The bias blind spot is the general human tendency to believe that other people are more biased than we are. It’s a form of illusory superiority. To give an example of how strong this tendency is, in one study only one adult out of 661 sampled said that they were “more biased than the average person.”
Although we tend to assume that intelligence can serve as a buffer against bias, it doesn’t appear that being intelligent makes people any more aware of their biases. The authors of that study suggested that, if anything, a larger blind spot was associated with higher cognitive ability. While some people are more susceptible to bias than others, it doesn’t appear that intelligence, decision-making ability, self-esteem, self-presentation or general personality traits have any correlation to who is more biased and who is less.
Particularly important with regards to this article, intelligent people are also no more likely to gather unbiased information when testing their beliefs. Strangely enough, they’re actually more likely to fall for certain kinds of logical fallacy. High intelligence, high-extroversion people also tend to be more focused on persuasion than being persuaded themselves, which makes it easy to overlook the basis for someone else’s view and focus narrowly on what you already believe - even if it’s biased. The worst part is that even if you’re educated enough to know about bias, and wise enough to know that you too may be prone to bias, being aware of your biases doesn’t seem to make people any better at overcoming them.
Then there’s equating the development of critical thinking with obtaining an advanced degree, which seems iffy at best. In 1989 over 99% of college students in one study expressed belief in at least one of the following: channeling, clairvoyance, precognition, telepathy, psychic surgery, psychic healing, healing crystals, psychokinesis, astral travel, levitation, the Bermuda triangle mystery, UFOs, plant consciousness, auras, or ghosts; and 65% of those people said that they had personal experience with one. That number’s likely inflated, but there’s some evidence that making it through college actually increases belief in the paranormal.
We can argue over whether those kinds of belief represent a lack of critical thinking. but it at least suggests that obtaining a Bachelor's degree doesn’t automatically give someone the ability to “determine fact from fiction to some meaningful degree.” There are all kinds of examples out there of highly educated people who retain their beliefs in the face of enormous evidence to the contrary.
Part of the problem here comes back to social rank. In order to navigate our complex social ecosystem, we need to understand where each person stands in the social hierarchy relative to others. Across a wide variety of species, social groups rapidly self-organize into hierarchies. Members of these groups vary in their level of power, influence, skill, or dominance, and we tend to perceive higher-ranking members of groups very differently from how we perceive lower-ranking ones. Many of the associations we hold about different groups are implicit, which means that they’re subconscious in nature and automatically activated when we come into contact with a situation or individual that we hold an implicit bias about.
Common markers of social rank include income, occupation, intelligence, popularity, and prestige. People at the top of the hierarchy are viewed as having more of those things, and receive more of our limited social resources than people at the bottom. High-status people are seen as better fits for the jobs that they apply to, are viewed as more competent, and are even awarded higher starting salaries and signing bonuses. We also pay more attention to high status individuals, particularly if they’re male.
Social rank, and the incredible speed with which we’re able to judge the rank of other people, comes with a wide variety of consequences – particularly for the people at the bottom of the hierarchy. Low social rank leads to direct consequences for health among primates, and there’s evidence that it does the same for humans. There’s some fascinating research over very large sample sizes that suggests that group- and self-perception of low social rank is one of the primary reasons why having little income predicts psychological distress.
It’s easy for educated people to view themselves as being of a higher social rank than less educated people, and we tend to dismiss those we view as lower rank than ourselves. This is the very definition of bias.
I absolutely believe that critical thinking, and education more broadly, plays an enormous role in helping people make good decisions in their lives and informed ones in the world – including selecting who might make the best president. I’d advocate on behalf of some form of higher-education to most people who have the opportunity to take advantage of it.
But pretending that educated people are somehow immune to bias, or completely clear-eyed in their selection of sourcing, is just wrong. And that’s before we get into how sighing about “those people’s” lack of education, and about “how the world would be a better place if everyone spent $80K to go to college,” is the absolute height of elitist, classist bullshit.