We political activists all have our creeds – the various strands of liberal, conservative, labour and other political thinking that our opinions stem from.
And most of us, whatever our politics, believe that the evidence also backs us up. Remarkably, my views on policy both stem from my political philisophy and are supported by the available evidence.
Even more amazingly, my political opponents believe the same is true for them. What are the odds?
Needless to say, this is absolutely not confirmation bias – no way! That’s the psychological failing we pretty much all fall prey to at least some of the time – right up to the top scientists – where we tend to pay attention to evidence that supports our existing opinions and ignore the rest. But us political types are, of course, completely immune to that one (and, naturally, Lib Dems are more immune than the rest).
Ah – but can you prove it? Where’s your evidence?
Can you name a policy area where the evidence goes against your opinions, or where you’ve changed your view to one that goes against your general philosophical outlook because of the evidence.
Here’s one of mine: gun control.
Philosophically, I’d always been strongly in favour of gun control, but looking at the evidence and debating with anti-gun control people forced me to the unwelcome conclusion that the strength of gun control laws and level of gun ownership has no impact on crime. Each side in the debate have become masters at selecting the evidence that backs up their case – and there’s a lot to choose from – but when I forced myself to look at it all, I really couldn’t see a case for gun control making us either less or more safe.
(I’m still opposed to a relaxation of gun control in this country as I don’t see any benefit and I don’t think it’s what most people in our culture either want or would feel comfortable with).
What about yours – do tell.
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17 Comments
It’s more subtle than that. Evidence is hard to find and requires considerable effort to read and interpret. People tend to look for evidence that supports their existing opinions. It’s completely unsurprising that they tend to find supporting evidence rather than contradictory evidence.
(I tend to take a looser approach on non-technical matters: find somebody who believes the opposite and is capable of making a coherent case for it, and argue the point with them. At the very least you refine your argument based on their critique; you might even learn something new from their argument. You do need to be able to argue a point without getting emotionally invested in it, though)
No, no, no! Unless those “top scientists” are like Andrew Wakefield, they do not do that. They start with hypotheses, and through rigorous application of the scientific method which includes all data, arrive at theories or proof (or lack thereof). I’ve known some [not necessarily top, but scientists all the same] who decline to read fiction ‘cos its fanciful nature ‘pollutes’ their minds.
Outside of mathematics, there is little which can be conclusively proved… but much which can be *disproved* such as Creationism, Idiot Design and MMR/autism.
Many of the problems with wild, all-encompassing conspiracy theories and metanarratives concerning international events hail from attempts, I suspect, to fit complex human interactions into nice, understandable mathematic equations. Linguists and computer programmes are especially prone, and then there’s authors and literary theorists who think they can create events in this world just as they do in their fictional worlds..
I have felt compelled to change some long cherished opinions; Many years ago when I read the excellent book “Small is Beautiful” by Fritz Schumaker, I was persuaded to oppose nuclear energy. But in 1973 Schumaker did not know about global warming, and today James Lovelock has (almost) persuaded me to believe otherwise.
A good argument against public ownership was the French nationalising the banks in the 1980s. Today however we are doing just that and the new model we now wish to create; banks that are not too big to fail requires substantial state intervention to keep things that way, even though they will be run privately (eventually, we think).
I have always believed in an ethical foreign policy, but this is nothing like as straightforward as it seems. It is ethical surely to use the power of western intervention to bring democracy to as many places as possible? However the consequences of doing this in the former Yugoslavia and in Iraq have been disastrous. How can an ethical foreign policy be ethical if it leads to civil war and genocide? Now we have to think about when to introduce democracy. It would appear the answer to “When?” is not always straight away, and quite possibly never!
Personally I rebel against ideological blindness, where the “facts” are always interpreted suit the ideology. In my opinion Liberalism is not one thing, and if a certain aspect of it appears to be wrong, then Liberalism has to be modified into a new version. This happens anyway through time when you consider that the Liberal party was founded by staunch Christians who back then were social conservatives, as was everyone in the Victorian age. Today we find homophobia (for example) offensive.
I have to say that I have been very impressed at how some Liberals have modified their thinking on equality after the “Spirit Level” was published. It fits in nicely with the famous Keynes quotation “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
The reporter John Harris recently said that what annoyed him about LD conferences is that he found Lib Dem members to be very deferential towards their MPs, unlike at Labour conferences. I agree with him that this is not healthy. We should read other opinions and ask ourselves the difficult questions.
If you read the excellent ‘Bad Science’ by Ben Goldacre you’ll see how people tend to either do the right thing in terms of gathering and understanding data based on a sound plan or they’ll make some major mistakes in their logic and the outcome will be flawed.
Its only through the process of peer review and accountability that the correct interpretation can be placed on any set of results but that cannot happen unless the source data and initial hypothesis that the data was collected against are published in full.
Political decisions that are made against the research must be sure that the data and any conclusions have been through the proper scrutiny *before* they are enacted. It would be nice, nay it should be mandatory, that any policy decisions that are enacted have a full cost benefit analysis with clear goals at the beginning, middle and end and the politicians have the guts to say “Sorry this isn’t working we’re going to stop doing it…” at any point in that process.
On gun control, surely anything that limits the availability of guns is a good thing? It might not stop a criminal from obtaining them but it does stop accidents at a minimum. A quick google for some stats brings up http://www.gun-control-network.org/International.gif as a baseline for calculation, but the site is pro-control therefore needs an expert to check the accuracy of the figures and provide full scrutiny of the data before I accept it as the best solution.
Kehaar – what good scientists do is to realise the issue and consciously counter it, which is very different from saying that they somehow avoid the psychological flaw.
James – although gun accidents often make it into the news, the evidence suggests that having a gun in your home is a lot less dangerous than having a swimming pool in the garden as far as accidents are concerned.
If you are referring to the book by Wilkinson and Pickett rather than the Seamus Heaney poetry then the Wikipedia entry describing this book makes it look like it is a prime example of a confirmation-biased argument described in the article above. Have not read it myself …
@Geoffrey Payne: It is ethical surely to use the power of western intervention to bring democracy to as many places as possible? However the consequences of doing this in the former Yugoslavia and in Iraq have been disastrous. How can an ethical foreign policy be ethical if it leads to civil war and genocide?
Completely take your point that the invasion of Iraq was disastrous, and that on balance the Iraqi people would have been better off under Saddam than being killed in droves (though Saddam was pretty awful too). That was a painful realisation for me, since I had at the time supported the invasion.
But I don’t get your point on former Yugoslavia. The problem there was lack of intervention early on, which allowed the ethnic conflicts that erupted after Tito’s death to become much more deadly than if European and UN intervention had been swift and robust. What am I missing? (And in any case international intervention in former Yugoslavia was never justified as “democratisation” – instead it was intended to be a peacekeeping operation.)
And on the Spirit Level, I’m afraid Wilkinson and Pickett are good examples of academics suffering from confirmation bias.
Can you name a policy area where the evidence goes against your opinions, or where you’ve changed your view to one that goes against your general philosophical outlook because of the evidence.
Hmm. Had you asked me a couple of years ago I would have said drugs policy, as I was then against any legalisation. Thanks to the weight of evidence and a bit more liberal thinking I’ve come round to legalising cannibis and other relatively harmless drugs.
One area where I suspect many people have strong opinions regardless of the evidence is prostitution. It doesn’t help that the evidence is equivocal, but despite a strong moral opposition to the idea of buying and selling sex I do think that Swedish-style criminalisation has negative side-effects. In issues like this I try to separate my personal moral stance from my belief about what the law should say.
Iain – by having the level of gun controls currently the number of guns is reduced per head of population, therefore for a given % accident rate per 1000 guns (which one would assume remains fairly constant) the number of deaths or injuries per head of population is kept low. Only if you can demonstrate that the % accident rate per gun is relative to the exposure (i.e. the greater the exposure the lower the rates of accidents) can you move to a relaxing of the controls (but only to a point where the number or accidents per head of population does not rise).
Your argument therefore is about backyard pool control…. h&s gone mad!!!!
Niklas – With prostitution the issues I have are more about the safety and protection of those that feel the need to (or have been dragged into) the industry. If we could move to a safer environment (and taxing…) for sex workers then surely we can raise standards and people can move it out of the shadows of the economy. What frightens me most about the laws in this country is that we actively prosecute those sex workers who are safest (i.e. those in brothels). That said I don’t have enough evidence to say that XYZ is the best approach to tackling the problem *in our country* maybe we set up some trials and see what is the best way to reduce the criminality of sex workers whilst at the same time increasing the revenue to the tax man.
James – you may be right, but should we ban something with a relatively low accident record just because banning it will make accidents even rarer? Surely that argument gives the state a carte blanche to ban whatever it feels like, since there’s virtually nothing that doesn’t cause accidents. Baths, cushions, TV remotes…
Niklas, the point on Yugoslavia is that democracy made the divisions in Yugoslavia worse not better. It is assumed that democracy is a uniting force, but often it can be very divisive as politicians highlight their differences to encourage you to vote for them.
You say that if we intervened earlier etc, but that actually makes my point. If you say something else has to be done to make democracy work, then that returns us to the question of when it should be done.
To answer that question you have to look at a whole number of variables; history, culture, economics. It is a complicated decision. Democracy has to take place at a time when it does more good than harm, and it is easy to get that wrong.
I know you always criticism The Spirit Level, but what would persuade me to think again would be if the findings are refuted by social scientists with a similar background in epidemiology. All the critics that I am aware of so far, including you, have your own political agenda of which the findings of The Spirit Level do not coincide.
I know what you mean – similar issue with CGT. Raising CGT, which I feel is the right thing to do in principle, would probably lead to reduced revenues, as it has done in other countries.
We have all had to attend to our world view since the advent of the coalition. I’m sure I’m not alone in my default response to a statement by a Tory minister being, “You bastar…, hmm, well, maybe there’s something in that!”
@Geoffrey Payne: Now I see your point on former Yugoslavia. Certainly Tito was a dictator but under his rule there was no ethnic bloodbath. You’re right that democracy (at least in the sense of elected government) is not a panacea.
I know you always criticism The Spirit Level, but what would persuade me to think again would be if the findings are refuted by social scientists with a similar background in epidemiology. All the critics that I am aware of so far, including you, have your own political agenda of which the findings of The Spirit Level do not coincide.
I know I’m not an epidemiologist, but I have just completed a course teaching me how to understand economic statistics and how to avoid drawing false inferences; a course that Wilkinson and Pickett would have profited from. I don’t see why only epidemiologists are relevant authorities; surely the quality of the data and the argument is what matters, not the messenger?
I plead guilty to being a liberal, so instinctively wary of arguments about individual sacrifice for the greater good, but that doesn’t stop me from supporting progressive taxation, or tax-funded education and healthcare. As for other critics, Andrew Leigh is a member of and parliamentary candidate for the Australian Labor party, as well as a former advisor to the UK Labour Party and research fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington DC, so he’s clearly not a Friedmanite libertarian.
Andreas Bergh is a self-described social liberal who is dead in the economic centre according to his Political Compass profile (see link). He’s an academic at the University of Lund but also works for an research institute backed by businesses. His main writing is about the welfare state, the nature of redistribution and how Sweden has managed to combine economic growth and an egalitarian income distribution. Again, not a Tea Party headbanger.
Lane Kenworthy says he “share[s] Wilkinson and Pickett’s conviction that it would be good for America and some other affluent nations to reduce income inequality, but this book hasn’t convinced me that doing so would help us to make much headway in improving health, safety, education, and trust. To achieve those gains, my sense is that our best course of action is greater commitment to specialized programs and services, coupled with poverty reduction.” Sounds pretty leftish to me, if in a Rawlsian rather than strict egalitarian way.
I’m sure some critics reject W and P’s work out of hand because they are ardent free-marketeers, but there are clearly plenty of informed critics who are not hostile to the theory, only to the unjustified inferences that are drawn in The Spirit Level.
I have a friend who tends towards US Republican style politics so we’ve gone over the gun thing quite a lot and from the figures I’ve seen it seems as though if no-one has guns or if everyone has guns then gun crime isn’t a huge issue. The UK and Switzerland for instance both have pretty low rates of gun crime – very strict gun control and a situation where almost every citizen owns a gun end up with fairly similar figures. From the fairly limited stats I looked up a tightening of gun laws tended to produce an increase for a year or two in gun crime and a decrease below the previous rate within a year or two after that. From now on I’ll mostly be referring to murder rates.
This pattern is broadly followed throughout different countries – if we discount cases like Switzerland where guns are very common and everyone can use them then most countries tend to have lower murder rates for tighter laws. Some exceptions to this trend (South Africa being a notable one) but by and large it seems to hold. Interestingly it doesn’t seem to hold at all, in fact if anything it goes the other way, between US states – I’d thought this would be because of the relative ease of getting things across those borders (particularly with regards to places like Washington DC where some areas of the city are not in the District of Columbia and have looser gun laws) but logically if that played like that across the whole USA it should also mean that . Things like burglary rates, rape rates etc seem to have surprisingly little relation to gun laws. Suicide rates definitely do (looser laws = more suicides) but that’s not really crime.
I’m suspecting now that it might simply be the case that it is preferable, with a view to having low gun crime, to have very few guns at all but failing that it is preferable to have people with guns registered in their name rather than black market guns. In the USA there’s a real gun culture and ordinary people would buy black market guns. In the UK, and probably most of Europe, this is not the case. So I would say that with gun control each country has to be taken differently – regrettably the USA probably wouldn’t benefit from strict gun control as it would just encourage a black market – which is a shame because the USA has rather ridiculous murder rates (especially murder with firearms). However, in the UK I don’t think that there is much argument to liberalising gun control laws – there’s hardly a flood of black market guns among ordinary people. Imo.
Of course, I haven’t done proper statistical analysis on this and it’s largely “by eye” as I haven’t the time, so take with a pinch of salt as an argument of this type really does need a proper analysis to be worth taking seriously.
Because for most people views eventually come down to their values, which cannot usually be subject to empirical testing. Beware of those who equate a particular set of policies/actions with a set of views/values – they haven’t usually thought things through.
Iain Roberts said: “That’s the psychological failing we pretty much all fall prey to at least some of the time – right up to the top scientists – where we tend to pay attention to evidence that supports our existing opinions and ignore the rest.”
Totally agree.
In fact, I’d go further. Many areas of public policy are inherently subjective. They can be so complex that experts should not, in all honesty, claim a watertight evidence base for any particular option. Unfortunately, they still do.
I think we need to do two things. Try to step back from our prejudices and let evidence inform our decisions. And then be honest that we’re frail human beings, and another person, trying equally hard to be evidence-based, may come to the opposite conclusion.
As to areas where I’ve changed my mind: the Euro (used to be in favour), nuclear power (used to be against), and a Lib Dem/Conservative Coalition (thought it was necessary, but never thought the party would have the courage to go for it).