10/6/16

Living in the bubble

Part I

I watched Donald Trump today practicing his town hall skills. He was going through some recent polls that were very favorable to his candidacy.  While he was doing that, I was comparing what he was saying to what Nate Silver was saying over at FiveThirtyEight and wondering what the Trump folks were smoking.

And then I remembered. 

There’s a really excellent three-part documentary on entertainer Clay Aiken’s unsuccessful run for Congress in North Carolina’s extremely Republican 2^nd district. In The Runner-Up, he talks, as others have, about living in the bubble. He says people would come up to him and say they were voting for him. He ran some polls that showed him getting closer to incumbent Renee Elmers. People around him were encouraging and supportive. And then on election night, the bubble burst when he lost by 17 percentage points. What he thought and hoped and experienced ran smack into reality.

An even better example was caught on FOX News on Election Day, 2012.  Karl Rove had been convinced that Romney would win. Had to win.  Other FOX pundits also predicted Republican success, some by a landslide.  When it didn’t happen, Rove couldn’t believe it.  Here’s what the video looked like on FOX News.

It’s a great example of cognitive dissonance, which occurs when what we believe comes crashing into what is real. It’s painful and distressing and almost never this public. What led Rove and the others astray is the confirmation bias, a human tendency to seek out and remember information that confirms ideas we already have. That puts them in a bubble. When confronted with contradictory evidence, we suffer from cognitive dissonance . That leads us to try very hard to explain away reality or to search for new data that confirms our beliefs. It’s no surprise, then, that there’s a sizable fraction of the GOP who believes that Obama’s election was the result of massive voter fraud.  That’s an easier resolution to the dissonance than the notion that so many other American’s disagreed with them. Not when everyone they knew and everything they saw in their carefully selected media believed that Romney would win.

Don't get me wrong: This is not a Republican thing; it’s a human thing.  Contradictory evidence is very uncomfortable, but living with it brings us closer to the reality in our lives.