Very liberal and conservative people find it much harder to admit they’re wrong about anything, even when it’s got nothing to do with politics, a new study has found.
Those with radical or more extreme political views resisted admitting they were wrong or changing their minds even during experiments where they counted the number of flashing dots on a computer screen, according to two studies conducted by scientists from University College at London University.
Extreme conservatives were just as likely as extreme liberals to think they were right when they were actually wrong, researchers found. And both groups were about the same when it came to refusing to admit new evidence or change their minds.
The research, just published by the journal Current Biology, may not come as a shock to anyone who has ever attempted to reason with a highly partisan friend, relative or co-worker — or to anyone witnessing political debates on Twitter or Facebook.
The new study helps explain the growing polarization of politics in the US and other open societies and what University of Virginia politics professor Larry Sabato recently called the collapse of “fair play” in the political sphere.
The study also casts light on the way “cognitive errors” — or, for the purposes of this study, mistaken thinking — can hurt other aspects of our lives, such as how we handle our investments in turbulent markets.
Researchers Max Rollwage, Raymond Dolan and Stephen Fleming at University College London’s Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging conducted two separate sets of experiments, one involving 381 people drawn from the general population, the other involving 417. In both cases, they first studied each person’s political views in some depth. Then they subjected participants to long series of tests in which they had to compare two boxes of flickering dots on computer screens and try to gauge which one contained more.
“More radical participants displayed less insight into the correctness of their choices and reduced updating of their confidence when presented with post-decision evidence,” the researchers found.
Those with more “radical” left- or right-wing opinions were less likely to admit they might be wrong, or to change their minds when confronted with new evidence, they wrote.
There was very little difference between the two political sides. “This deficit in recognizing and revising [one’s] own mistakes seems to be the same at both ends of the political spectrum,” Rollwage told MarketWatch.
And the researchers pointed out that, critically, the experiments involved issues that had nothing to do with politics, economics, values or the great issues of the day.
The refusal to admit error, or consider new evidence, is closely linked to measures of “dogmatic intolerance” and “authoritarianism,” the researchers concluded. Both in turn are linked with holding very left-wing or very right-wing political opinions.
With studies like these, behavioral scientists are developing a deeper understanding of the ways our brains fool us.
Nobody needs to understand these issues more urgently than someone trying to manage his or her own investments. While political extremists may be especially bad at admitting they’ve made a mistake, or changing their minds, nobody likes to do it.
As a result, all investors are prone to the same damaging, subconscious techniques embraced by your dogmatic brother-in-law during a political argument. These include sticking to a decision just because you’ve made it, dismissing data because it goes against your opinions and surrounding yourself with people who agree with you.
Political extremists can stay wrong all their lives without suffering any individual consequences. Investors do not have that luxury. They’ll go bust.