After the Giffords shooting in Phoenix last month, I posted a status update about "inflammatory rhetoric" that sparked a lively discussion among my friends that included quite a bit of inflammatory rhetoric itself. My mostly liberal friends were in agreement about one thing; the GOP and Tea Party were the main purveyors violently charged language in our national discourse. My minority of conservative friends had a very different view of reality. They saw the left as equally - or more - guilty of upping the ante on combative political dialogue.
None of these people were kooks. They all sincerely believed that their party was just as civil - or more so - than the other, and that the other party shouldered the blame for making our politics as hyper-partisan and vitriolic as it is today.
How, one has to wonder, could reasonable people see the world so radically differently?
There are at least two explanations for why we see the other party as more rhetorically irresponsible than ours.
For one, it is more likely that we are not coming across the nasty rhetoric from our own side - or at least as much as we're seeing the bombast from the other political party. In the diversified media world of today, more than ever we pick our information streams - watching the network, reading the blog and hanging with the people who share our political viewpoint. And, in a phenomenon Eli Pariser calls the Filter Bubble, more and more the information that filters up to us - from our Facebook feed or through personalization algorithms online - also conforms to our perspective. In that self-filtered and algorithm-filtered world, it comes as no surprise that you are more likely to see all the examples of the other party behaving badly. You are less likely to be served up naughty examples from your side of the political spectrum.
But even if we do come across examples of our political compadres getting incendiary we may not see those examples.
Last year I attended a left-leaning graduate program in public policy which, like many programs, had a student list-serve to announce events, group meetings, etc. One day I was taken aback by an invitation to a pro-immigration rally that suggested that "real" Americans would not support strict immigration policies. Given how many years liberals griped about suggestions they were not "real Americans" for opposing Bush policies, I would have thought there'd be an uproar to the offensive email. But not a peep. None of my liberal friends noticed its offensiveness until I pointed it out to them. My conservative classmates, however, did notice. But by that time they were used to being dissed by the culture of the school.
Both my liberal and my conservative classmates were falling victim to confirmation bias. Like its name suggests, confirmation bias says we tend to believe information that confirms our pre-existing view of the world. Information that does not fit that world view either gets molded to fit, is rejected or is just edited out. When that email came across my Democrat friends' inboxes and they saw that it was about a pro-immigration event, they would be disposed to think the opinions of the author were correct and that she would be speaking civilly. Any comment offensive to conservatives would go unnoticed. Republican students, however, would be prepped to see opinions that they would disagree with and, also likely, a dismissive attitude toward conservatives. The uncivil comment would jump out at them.
Each saw what they expected to see.
Of course, it's not just isolated incidents where confirmation bias and "filter bubbles" come to bear. Everyday we are seeing the transgressions of our enemies and missing the slips of our friends. Added up over the years, its no longer a surprise Democrats think Republicans are rude thugs and Republicans find Democrats to be patronizing prigs. That is, indeed, the picture each sees.
Which image is correct? Unfortunately that's not question that can be answered. The best one could saw is both, and neither.
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