Tapu Misa: It's all about the perception... bias is a foregone conclusion

A while back, just to torture me, my husband decided it would be entertaining to read me comments about myself from a right-wing blog, there being nothing worth watching on the telly that night.

What an exercise in sadomasochism that was. One passionate detractor got so worked up he called me a slapper. Intriguing, to say the least. What in my columns had given me away?

It's as well that I had long since come to the conclusion that most people will agree, or disagree, based not on the cogency or otherwise of my arguments, but because they were inclined to in the first place.

As many recent psychological experiments show, bias is in the eye of the beholder. This means that it's always the other guy whose arguments are devoid of intelligence or reason, never us.

Abe Lincoln said you can fool some of the people all of the time, but he didn't mention that the person you really needed to watch was yourself. Self-justification is a useful defence mechanism, but it also means most of us won't countenance anything that gets in the way of our most cherished ideals and political convictions. This is because our side must always be the right side.

This inability to see past our own noses has been well documented.

Take the phenomenon known as hostile media effect. This is not where Winston Peters gets to claim that the New Zealand media is engaged in a conspiracy to make him look bad. (I might have said that he was doing a perfectly good job of this on his own, had I not seen the unedited version of that much-reported encounter in Washington with Senator John McCain. Peters was right.)

The hostile media phenomenon is where partisans are convinced in their bones that the media is biased against their particular ideological team.

In one famous US study, pro-Palestinian students and pro-Israeli students at Stanford University, after being shown the same news clips of events in Lebanon, both came to the conclusion that the media was biased against their side. Pro-Israeli students reported seeing more anti-Israeli references and fewer favourable references to Israel in the news reports, and the pro-Palestinian students reported seeing more anti-Palestinian references.

The most worrying part was that they disagreed on objective criteria, leading to the conclusion that "the hostile media effect" goes deeper than mere difference of opinion. It suggests a difference of perception, an inability to see eye-to-eye. Which may explain why peaceful compromise in the Middle East seems nigh on impossible.

Other, recent research mapping the brain activity of Republican and Democrat subjects showed the same tendency for partisans to view the world through a different lens. When Republicans saw the Democratic challenger for the 2004 presidential race, John Kerry, or Democrats saw George W. Bush, there was increased activity in the parts of the brain involved in regulating emotions.

A psychologist at the University of California, Jonas Kaplan, told the Washington Post that partisans tended to turn up their negative emotional response when they saw a photo of the opposing candidate. My feeling is, in the political process, people come to decisions early on and then spend the rest of the time making themselves feel good about their decision.

Partisans, added Kaplan, had a strong interest in nursing their negative feelings about someone they're not going to vote for, because it cements their belief that they're doing the right thing.

It seems people routinely discount information that threatens their beliefs, as another psychologist, Drew Westen, told the Post. His experiments show that partisans are quick to spot hypocrisy and inconsistencies but only in opposing candidates. When presented with evidence showing the flaws of their own candidate, they unconsciously turn down feelings of aversion and unpleasantness.

Helen Clark's much-admired intellect does not seem to have made her immune from confirmation bias, which according to Wikipedia is when decision-makers actively seek out and assign more weight to evidence that confirms their hypothesis, and ignore the inconvenient details which might shoot it down.

Take Labour's election over-spending. The Auditor-General, who's paid to know these things, has ruled that Labour broke the rules when it used public money to fund its pledge card. This is in line with the thinking of both the Electoral Commission and Crown Law. So it doesn't really matter whether the party knew this before (it knows now), or how much the PM argues that the Auditor-General has changed the rules, or how many lawyers might agree with Labour.

The only opinions that should count are against Labour. (Only the most partisan would argue that the pledge card wasn't material of the promotional, electioneering kind.)

But then politicians are particular masters of the fine art of self-justification.

Don Brash may well bask in the glow of his party's magnanimity in repaying, without unseemly protest, its own relatively small overspend, but his claim to the moral high ground looks about as shaky as Phillip Field's claim to exoneration from the neutered Ingram report when considered alongside the help National got from the Exclusive Brethren.

Still, it's not only politicians. Recently published research from the University of Southampton says scientists are just as prone to bias.

A study found that fingerprint experts could be easily swayed in their analysis of fingerprint evidence by background information. After being given biased information, the experts unwittingly saw what they wanted to see when looking at scene-of-crime prints, resulting in wrong decisions. Four of six experts changed their minds on a set of prints they'd analysed, and one changed his mind three times.

It's enough to make one lose faith in scientists - but that's another column.