Strangeness and Bias

I always come back to the problem of how and why people believe strange things. I am certain that I have believed strange things before, and likely will again, but feel that I have also developed a certain level of critical detachment that helps me to hold ideas contingently. I like to think that I am always "on guard" for the support structure of an argument. So it both worries and interests me when I read the political blogs and my local paper, when I keep hearing the framing efforts of the President to portray the situation in Iraq as entwined with terrorism, and when I hear kids educated in our public schools talking about almost anything.

But really I believe very many strange things, as you will see.

Norbert Schwarz and compatriots at Michigan work extensively on the issue of how our minds process ideas. I first encountered a discussion of Schwarz' work over the weekend as we were driving to lunch and On the Media was on Sirius NPR Talk. I tracked down one of the papers:

Metacognitive Experiences and the Intricacies of Setting People Straight: Implications for Debiasing and Public Information Campaigns

Now, "metacognitive experiences" initially struck me as strange and New Agey. In the paper and broader literature, however, the phrase refers to mental experiences that accompany or affect cognitive processing. Calling it an "experience" seems at odds with most cognitive psychology, but I think the term was chosen because it the mental facilities are still being identified and detangled. Much of this work builds on the kinds of bias studies like Kahnemann and Tversky and others during the heyday of cognitive psychology, but carries it forward to link it to social psychology.

Anyway, the gist of the paper is that "rational" information processing is altered and biased by these metacognitive experiences. One example is an experiment with a facts versus myths flyer created by CDC to combat common myths about flu vaccines. It turns out that over time the myths get incorporated as facts with an alarming rate, essentially reinforcing the myths rather than debunking them. It only takes a few minutes for this to happen! We are prone to regard recall preferentially as factual, it seems.

So we stop off after lunch at REI to get some replacement socks for hiking and general winter applications. As I wander around, though, I notice something intriguingly strange about my own biases. North Face and Marmot brands are superior to Columbia or Mountain Hard Wear in my thinking it seems. But not because of any rational or experiential facts, really, but purely because of a combination of the exclusivity of the brands (Columbia is more of a commodity brand) and because of a name bias that Mountain Hard Wear is just a dumb name. No advertising polluted my thinking, really, because I don't read outdoor magazines. And while I have seen other people with North Face jackets, I can't recall seeing anyone with a Marmot jacket so my bias is not based on associating the products with exemplars per se.

I just believe strange things.