Why both sides of politics think they’re always right — doesn’t someone have to be wrong?

So you’re watching a soccer game on TV when a player from your team gets fouled by the referee at a crucial point of the game. Immediately you protest in outrage, shouting a colourful mix of expletives that translates to an opinion that the referee got it very wrong. In the process, you analyse the situation for anything that proves the ref is a corrupt idiot and your player has been robbed, meanwhile completely shut yourself off to any evidence that proves the referee may have been right.

But the next minute when the other team gets fouled for the very same thing, suddenly you’re buddies again with the referee and you’re embracing every bit of evidence proving the player was way out of line and the referee is an absolute champ for picking him up for it.

Sound familiar?

It’s called motivated reasoning. It’s our uncanny ability to scrutinise ideas and events more carefully if we don’t like them than if we do. Essentially, the end goal motivates how we process the information. Because we want our team to win the game of soccer, we tend to look for information that will lead us to that outcome and heavily scrutinise anything that may stand in its way.

Its close sibling is confirmation bias, which is the tendency for people to search for what confirms their beliefs and ignore everything that contradicts it. For example, researchers collected two groups of people — one group supported capital punishment, the other opposed it. They were given two fictional studies regarding the ability of the death penalty to deter crime, one seemingly confirming their beliefs and the other opposing it. When the participants were asked to rate the studies, almost everyone reported that their opinions hadn’t changed and they picked out the evidence that supported their belief while ignoring anything to the contrary. This demonstrated they were confirming their pre-existing beliefs.

Of course, this phenomenon exists in every aspect of our lives. It’s why some people still believe climate change is a hoax or vaccines cause autism — because they only expose themselves to the evidence that proves this fringe opinion. But naturally, a climate change denier would use the very same logic to attempt to disprove people who believe in climate change.

What is most dangerous of all is how unaware we are to this phenomenon. We all believe we have some exclusive access to the truth that trumps any other pre-conceived belief. We believe we have the ability to be objective when in reality that objectivity is being fundamentally shaped by our experiences and beliefs. It’s why both sides of the political debate are so indignant that they are right and can dredge up endless evidence to support it.

In the aftermath of the US election, you’ve probably heard a lot about the so-called “filter bubbles” we’re all inhabiting. Most people have aggressively pointed the finger at social media for creating a world where algorithms simply spit out news feeds full of articles and world views that mirror our own, never exposing ourselves to the other side of the debate. Did anyone in your news feed vote for Donald Trump? I didn’t think so.

But social media has simply translated confirmation bias and motivated reasoning into a technological algorithm. We don’t even need to search for the information that supports our views, it’s been neatly packaged on our timelines everyday for us to cosy up to.

But the reality is that social media hasn’t created these bubbles but merely amplified them. They exist geographically and socially. Our friends and colleagues generally mimic our opinions, due to the social and economic factors that lead to you being friends or colleagues in the first place. Just look at this map of the United States and how it voted. Pretty obviously, liberals are trapped in progressive inner-city bubbles while conservatives are trapped in rural, small town bubbles — locking us into ever diverging trajectories where we barely even hear a whisper of the other side of the debate.

The prevailing opinion after the election has been that if we can break through these filter bubbles on social media, then we will be able to magically see the world through a clear glass lens and objectively see the truth. That if we like a few websites from the opposing perspective, then we’ll suddenly be an all-knowing objective truth teller.

But this denies the reality that even when we are exposed to the other side of the debate, confirmation bias and motivated reasoning are still going to play their part. Even if you read The Daily Telegraph before you read the The Guardian, you’re still going to have a pre-existing motivation to find fault with The Telegraph if you’re a progressive or with The Guardian if you’re conservative.

It exists powerfully on both sides of the political divide and creates constant hypocrisies. Just look at some recent examples. Before the US election at the third debate, progressives slammed Donald Trump for saying that he may not concede defeat if he lost the election, mocking him mercilessly for potentially questioning the validity of the election result.

And yet as soon as Hillary Clinton lost, suddenly progressives were very keen to dispute the outcome of the election and demanded a recount based on frankly very flimsy evidence of voter hacking. Jill Stein stepped up right on time with Clinton’s eventual support. Can you imagine if Donald Trump had demanded a recount after he lost with the same evidence? The very same progressives would have laughed in his face and interpreted this “voter hacking” evidence completely differently, seeing it for what it was — a largely irrational and flimsy last resort.

Don’t laugh too much Conservatives. Those conservatives mocking progressives for the recounts would have embraced one if it was Donald Trump on the losing side.

Can you see the problem? We’re so blatantly biased by our worldview that objective evidence and situations become completely warped.

Meanwhile, the right is constantly and blatantly hypocritical when it comes to so-called “free speech”. In Australia, far-right politicians like Cory Bernardi are all for changing the Racial Discrimination Act because it limits people’s abilities to offend racial minorities. And yet, Cory Bernardi is deathly silent when it comes to anti-whistleblower laws which can prosecute social workers who speak up about abuse on off-shore detention centres. It’s still free speech Cory Bernardi.

Or the blatant hypocrisy when free-speech loving conservatives were outraged by the peaceful protesters glueing their hands to the rails in Parliament House who were literally exercising their right to free speech. If they had been far-right protesters advocating for change to the Racial Discrimination Act, I wonder how their tune would have changed?

And don’t even get me started on the Hamilton controversy over safe spaces.

Breaking out of our filter bubbles means more than reading a little more widely. It’s about trying to use everything at our disposal to gain an objective and accurate picture of reality even when it might be unpleasant or challenge our worldview. It means having the ability to judge ideas on their merit alone, not based on their attachment to a political ideology. For progressives, if Trump has a good idea, it’s actually okay to agree with it. And for conservatives, it’s possible that minorities might have a point every once and awhile. If everyone holds their own side of the political spectrum to the same level of scrutiny, we might be able to start seeing through the bullshit, work out what is important and what needs to be most urgently changed.

Julia Galef, in her TED talk advocates for the use of “scout mindset” — a mindset which involves curiosity, an itch to solve problems and to feel constantly intrigued. Those that have this mindset always want to test their own beliefs and are grounded, not tying their self-worth to their opinions.

So for example, if someone believes capital punishment works and then sees evidence that disproves their theory — then they are able to say “I guess I was wrong” and it won’t hurt their identity because they value the truth more greatly than their own self-image. If we want to pop our filter bubbles and improve political discourse, a little more scout mindset would go a long way.

As she concludes in her TED talk, we need to start asking ourselves — do you yearn for your own beliefs or do you yearn to see the world as clearly as you can?

Easier said than done.

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This article by Cameron Nicholls was originally published at The Vocal.