People Are Crazy

Explaining Jan. 6, 2021 — Part Two

All of us are less rational than we would like to admit. Some of us just hide it better.

Little more than a MAGA hat (or a set of horns) separates the best of us from the rioters who ran through the halls of Congress on Jan. 6. We all have our irrational moments.

I’m not talking about incipient road rage when some guy in a Porsche cuts you off on the highway or the searing temptation to tell off a dinner-time telemarketer. I’m referring to the frequently irrational way we often make conscious decisions. (This isn’t to excuse the irresponsible, dangerous behavior of the wing-nuts who attacked the Capitol, but it does help explain it.)

OtherWise, a book I researched and wrote in 2012, catalogued many of the cognitive deficiencies that not only make it difficult to make rational decisions, but also create the alternative reality in which some of us live.

Over the coming days, I’m giving readers access to some of the book’s chapters in the hope it will help explain the underlying forces at work in the assault on the Capitol. To start, consider some of the mental shortcuts that helped our ancestors survive in snake-infested jungles, but make such a toxic muddle of our modern lives:

Our fragile grasp on reality: As Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman explained, “We think we make our decisions because we have good reason to make them.” In reality, it’s the other way around. “We believe in the reasons because we’ve already made the decision.” Rather than spending time and calories on analysis, we fall back on prior experiences, biases, memories, and instinctive behavior. Just as our stone-age ancestors did. In those perilous days, survival favored quick rather than considered action.

Even today, psychologists and behavioral scientists have identified, studied, and validated an extensive catalog of cognitive deficiencies that cause us to give greater weight to data that agrees with our pre-existing opinions (confirmation bias) or confirms what our friends are thinking (bandwagon effect). On the other hand, we ignore or discount data that conflicts with our own opinions or those of our friends.

Most alarmingly, social scientists have recently discovered that political partisanship is no longer so much a battle over ideas, but more of an affective disorder. At the level of ideas, there appears to be more overlap than difference between the two major political parties. But at the level of feeling, there is no room for compromise. “Ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distrust those from the other party,” the study concluded. “Democrats and Republicans both say that the other party’s members are hypocritical, selfish, and closed-minded, and they are unwilling to socialize across party lines.”

According to another study, this affective disorder is so severe that it actually leads to a form of cognitive dissonance in which partisans change their political beliefs to align them with those of their party’s leader (authority bias). All of which may partially explain how a bare-chested guy in face paint and animal horns can lead a crowd across police lines and through a broken window into the halls of Congress.

For more, you can read the full chapter of “People Are Crazy” in OtherWise here.