Identical but asymmetric decision making errors

From Science Denial Across the Political Divide: Liberals and Conservatives Are Similarly Motivated to Deny Attitude-Inconsistent Science by Anthony N. Washburn and Linda J. Skitka. Probably true but needs to be replicated with a larger random population. From the abstract.

We tested whether conservatives and liberals are similarly or differentially likely to deny scientific claims that conflict with their preferred conclusions. Participants were randomly assigned to read about a study with correct results that were either consistent or inconsistent with their attitude about one of several issues (e.g., carbon emissions). Participants were asked to interpret numerical results and decide what the study concluded. After being informed of the correct interpretation, participants rated how much they agreed with, found knowledgeable, and trusted the researchers’ correct interpretation. Both liberals and conservatives engaged in motivated interpretation of study results and denied the correct interpretation of those results when that interpretation conflicted with their attitudes. Our study suggests that the same motivational processes underlie differences in the political priorities of those on the left and the right.

There is an interesting implication, unexplored in the paper.

I suspect that the finding is true, that leftwing liberals and rightwing conservatives are equally prone to motivated reasoning (and I would suspect the same to be true of moderates in the middle.) However, given the nature of their respective belief systems, this a far greater issue for people of the left than for people of the right.

People of the left tend to entrust a much wider range or activity to the government than do people of the right. To give this some specificity, let's assume that people of the left are comfortable entrusting 60% of all decisions to the central government to be made on everyone's behalf. In contrast, people of the right might entrust only 20% of all decisions to be made by the government and all the rest to be made by individuals.

Now let's also assume that only half of all decisions are in fact correct (arbitrary number but it is worth noting that only about 50% of science papers replicate.) Finally, let's assume that there are bad consequences when decisions are made on wrong information.

Under the leftwing view of the world, citizens will be bear an exceptional and unavoidable imposed burden of 30% of all decisions being wrong (60% of decisions are made by the government on behalf of everyone and 50% of the 60% will be wrongly decided.)

In contrast, under the rightwing view of the world, citizens only bear an imposed burden of 10% of decisions being wrongly decided (half of 20%).

The often unstated assumption on the part of people of the left is that centralized government can make better decisions because the government can access the best decision makers. As reality reveals consistently and repeatedly, this is not a good assumption. Either the government does not have access to the best decision makers (not uncommon) and/or when the government does have access to the best and the brightest, they still make bad decisions. Deficit spending for consumption, cholesterol, educational policy, dietary advice, attempting to micro-manage the economy, etc. are all examples of consequential decisions badly made and imposed on the entirety of the population.

When government makes a bad decision, it can take forever for the negative consequences to begin to drive reform and a change in direction whereas with individuals, the bad consequences come to roost a lot faster and with heavier weight. People tend to change their activities and behaviors as soon as they notice that assumptions were not borne out. Centralized government tends to be far more resistant to reform no matter how bad the decision.

The consequence is that the more left wing you are, the more critical it is that you need to be resistant to motivated reasoning. What this research suggests is that left and right are equally motivated by negative reasoning and therefore this is much more consequential for people of the left.