Motivated Reasoning

I haven’t written a blog for more than three months now; the last one that I published was just after the death of the Queen. It means that 2022 was my least productive year in terms of blogs with just 13 published, the lowest since 2018.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, I’ve been busy writing other stuff. You may know that I write for Romford FC’s programme, which entails three pieces (two of 800 words each, and one of about 500) for every home game, and between August and Christmas, there have been twenty-two programmes to write for; in the same period last season, it was ten. On top of that, I’ve been writing articles and match reports for the football club’s website, which amounts to about 2,500 words a week, so time available to write blogs has shrunk.

Secondly, and probably more pertinently, I’ve run out of inspiration. More than once I’ve written an opening paragraph and then not even bothered saving it because I got bored, or because I’ve written something similar in the past. Then there are some subjects that, no matter how I feel about them, I have consciously decided to avoid, politics in general and Brexit in particular, and Covid (especially the conspiracy theories and again, the politics of it all).

When it comes to these subjects (among others), it seems that views, once set and entrenched, are difficult to change. The tribalism that exists in say, which football team you support, is equally evident in politics and recently, in views on the industrial action being taken by nurses, postal workers, and railway workers. Look at people like Kelvin McKenzie, former editor of The Sun, who I’m certain was among the cheerleaders of the NHS staff during the pandemic, but who recently described some of them as ‘vile shitbags,’ or Isabel Oakeshott (journalist) who seems to believe that nurses don’t deserve a pay rise because she believes that they spend all their time standing around and drinking tea, but who would have been leading the Thursday night clapping back in 2020.

There are people – and McKenzie and Oakeshott may well be among them – who don’t accept the lived experience of others if they don’t conform to their own beliefs. And it’s no use countering prejudice and opinion with facts because these people have formed an opinion, found one fact (or more likely, factoid), that supports their position and stick rigidly to it, despite a veritable cornucopia of evidence against. This is particularly applicable to the outcome of Brexit. On TV programmes such as the BBC’s Question Time it’s possible to find an audience member bemoaning the negative impact that Brexit has had on their business only to be told by a member of the panel (usually a Tory MP, often Jacob Rees Mogg) that they are wrong, that their perception of their lived experience is wrong.

Politicians are at the head of the queue of people with limited expertise or knowledge of a given subject who will pontificate and pronounce with absolute certainty, even though they are completely wrong.

Some nurses may earn £30,000 a year, some nurses may use food banks, and some may not be good at managing their finances, but Anderson confidently asserts that the majority of nurses fall into all three categories, even though it is highly improbable he could find any evidence to support the statement.

People who will not be swayed, or are unwilling to change their minds when faced with facts that discredit, debunk, or disprove their position are usually displaying motivated reasoning, where emotional biases lead to justifications or decisions based on their desirability rather than an accurate reflection of the evidence. This commonly manifests itself when someone who denies that something like Anthropogenic Climate Change exists, and rejects all facts and research that support it, homing in on anything that supports their view. Climate change is an interesting subject in that many people without any scientific qualifications (nor it seems, any significant knowledge of any science whatever) feel able to express opinions on the subject and be taken seriously, purely because they aren’t convinced or believe that it’s all part of some conspiracy.

A lot of this becomes evident through the BBC and it’s aims of impartiality, balance and objectivity. To quote Emily Maitlis, the former Newsnight presenter when speaking at the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival last August, “It might take our producers five minutes to find 60 economists who feared Brexit and five hours to find a sole voice who espoused it. But by the time we went on air we simply had one of each; we presented this unequal effort to our audience as balance. It wasn’t.”

As a result, it’s not unusual to find an expert in a particular subject, be it climate change, Brexit, Covid, or whatever, debating their specialism with someone who holds a contrary view based on limited understanding of the topic, but whose voice is given equal weight, even if their sole argument is “I’m not convinced.”  There’s an element of Dunning Kruger at play here, with being unconvinced shorthand for “I’m a clever person, but I don’t understand this, therefore it cannot be true.”

In this way, the BBC have pitted climate scientists with decades of experience in the field against the likes of Nigel Farage or Nigel Lawson in their quest for ‘balance’ on the subject, despite the fact that the broadcaster had to admit that in 2017, they had allowed Lawson to lie, unchecked, about the subject in an interview on the Today programme on Radio 4.

It’s very rare to find anyone changing their mind in TV or radio debates, or on social media. You’ll be hard pressed to find someone whose opinion, which may be based on prejudice and little knowledge, change their standpoint because a well marshalled argument, backed up with evidence, is presented to them. In the same way, once we form an opinion of a media figure, we are unlikely to change that either.

Nigel Farage and Piers Morgan are probably the ultimate Marmite men of British broadcasting. If you disagree with Farage’s views on Brexit and immigration, you will probably be hard pressed to agree with him on other topics, so when he recently expressed the perfectly reasonable view that travellers from China arriving in the UK should be tested for Covid, his critics’ knee-jerk reaction was to disagree, even if they fundamentally would have agreed with the idea had it been espoused by someone they admired.

Piers Morgan has so many opinions on so many topics, that I imagine many people simply expect to disagree with everything he says and do so on principle. The problem with that is that when he says something sensible (it happens, honestly) it can be hard to agree because of who he is and not for what he said.

If 70% of what someone says (or a newspaper publishes, or is broadcast on TV or radio) is offensive or we simply disagree with it, reasonable views and content that they promote get lost in the noise. We may feel unable to agree with one position that actually chimes with our own standpoint because we may feel tainted by association with someone whose views on other matters we find abhorrent.

Too few people change their minds, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Personally, I've never had a problem admitting that I'm wrong - and I've had plenty of opportunities!