If you’re reading this, the chances are that you’re the kind of person who likes to think that their beliefs are well-founded, not just based on hearsay, prejudice or received wisdom. You may well also believe that it is impossible to be both sincere and secure in that belief. The myriad ways in which our beliefs are affected by non-rational forces are just too well-documented for anyone to think they are entirely immune to them.
Still, being aware of things like confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, implicit bias and so on can help us to diminish their power, if not entirely neuter them. But not all non-rational forces can be as readily suppressed. Some may be entirely subconscious and unable to be dragged into the light of conscious awareness. But others might so tied up with our fundamental characters to be countered.
Take political beliefs. A supporter recently directed me to a Scientific American article with the helpfully concise summarising headline “Many Differences between Liberals and Conservatives May Boil Down to One Belief. Conservatives tend to believe that strict divisions are an inherent part of life. Liberals do not.” More precisely, conservatives tend to believe that the world is inherently hierarchical, liberals that it isn’t.
The problem here is that these different beliefs are not easily verified or falsified by empirical evidence. The same is true for another predictor of political belief: how dangerous you think the world is. On average, conservatives see the world as a more dangerous place than liberals. But, again, it is hard to settle who is right simply by pointing to evidence. Is the UK homicide rate of 11.7 per million population reassuringly low or too high for comfort?
Which way you lean on this seems to be quite deep-rooted. It might be too much to say that they are a matter of personality, but for other predictors of political allegiance, that seems to be exactly the right description. In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt famously argued that there are six key aspects of moral judgement: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression. Conservatives and liberals place different weight on each. But this is not because they arrives at different conclusions after having scrutinised the evidence. It is just that they are differently predisposed. Haidt compares moral senses with the physical senses, arguing that we are more or less born with them as they are.
My impression is that personality at the very least strongly informs political belief. I remember a fellow English as a foreign language teacher in Bilbao who seemed to think that everything that was not right in his life was someone else’s fault. I don’t think it was a coincidence that he identified as far left. It suited his personality to buy into a political worldview in which every imperfection was a result of unjust structures and nothing to do with individual responsibility.
Let me stress I am not saying that this is the personality type of all left-leaning people, thank goodness. I also suspect that people who are both extrovert and empathetic (at least in certain specific ways) are more likely to hold left-wing views, since they care a lot about others and naturally seek social solutions. An equally empathetic but very introverted, autonomous person could go the other way, caring just as much about the less well-off but believing that left-wing political solutions are counterproductive, because they undermine personal agency.
Of course, I’m speculating about these particular causal pathways. But I think the evidence for the general principle that personality strongly drives at least some types of belief is overwhelming. In The Edge of Reason I described this as “philosophy’s dirty secret”. Far from simply following the argument wherever it leads, which path a philosopher follows turns out to be strongly determined by intellectual temperament. Summing this up in How to Think Like a Philosopher, I wrote, “People who by disposition like neat, logical distinctions end up – surprise, surprise– making neat, logical distinctions. Those who are attracted by ambiguity and mystery avoid such tidiness. People who live in their heads do philosophy in their heads; those more curious about how the world works are more empirical. Ambitious people come up with ambitious, bold theories: more modest ones do not dare.”
Far from being a help, having a philosophical training might actually compound the problem.
“[A]dvanced reasoning skills can enable people to come up with ingenious arguments to explain away any apparent conflict their views may have with reality. David Hume spotted this centuries before modern psychologists. ‘The passion for philosophy,’ he wrote, ‘may only serve, by imprudent management, to foster a predominant inclination, and push the mind, with more determined resolution, towards that side, which already draws too much, by the bias and propensity of the natural temper.’ The result is rationalisation rather than rationality: the ‘natural indolence’ of the mind ‘seeks a pretence of reason, to give itself a full and uncontrouled indulgence.’” (How to Think Like a Philosopher)
Should this make us despair? Not so fast. These biases are unavoidable when it comes to normative issues: those which concern how we think things ought to be. But when it comes to matters of fact, how things are, such biases can be countered. It is certainly true that confirmation bias means people are more quick to accept purported facts that support their worldviews and reject those that challenge it. But facts are stubborn and if you can challenge yourself to face them squarely, prejudice can be overcome. For example, I’d like to think that the best way to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of farmed ruminants is to allow them to graze free-range, but it seems indisputably that some horribly intensive systems score higher on that metric. (Because this is only one factor to be considered, however, it doesn’t mean we should all go and buy inhumanely reared meat.)
So the personality factor is only ineliminable when it comes to normative issues of how we should live, as individuals and as a society. This would only be dispiriting if we believed that there was only one way to live a good human life and so all national minds should converge. If, like me, you are a pluralist, and think that there are many routes to human flourishing, different normative judgements are both natural and inevitable. One of the most important tasks of politics and ethics is to balance these differences, ensuring that not just one template for the good life is imposed on all.
So the problem with personality driving our normative judgments is not that they should be being driven by something more objective. The only problem is if we imagine that these judgements are being determined purely by objective factors, and that personality has nothing to do with it. In other words, it’s fine if our personalities are in the driving seat, just as long as we realise that reason isn’t. But reason shouldn’t be a mere passenger either. It’s more of a vital back-seat driver: not a nagging know-it-all that should be ignored, but a guide that has a lot of useful information to impart.
News
The first two episodes of series five of the Microphilosophy podcast are now out. Each episode in the series will feature two philosopher guests with their advice on how to think better. It takes as its cue my new book How to Think Like a Philosopher, which offers 12 key principles for a more humane, balanced and rational approach to thinking. The first episode was recorded live at St Georges, Bristol with Lisa Bortolotti and Rebecca Buxton. Episode two features Patricia Churchland and Owen Flanagan. You can subscribe to the series at Apple, Google and all the other usual podcast outlets.
I’m talking about the book at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution on Tuesday 7 March. I’m also talking about it online for the Humanist Association of Ireland on Wednesday 15th March at 19:30. You can watch it for free, humanist or not.
My latest philosopher-at-large column for Prospect is on the right to happiness. (Spoiler alert: there isn’t one.)
My review of Sarah Bakewell’s Humanly Possible for the Literary Review is out but behind a paywall. I will put up a version for supporters soon.
The next online cafe philosophise discussion for supporters is Monday March 13 at 8pm UK time. Join now from only £5 a month for this and other benefits (for both of us!).
Thanks to everyone who has already bought my new book. It hasn’t shot up the bestsellers chart but it had as strong a first week as we could have reasonably hoped for. (When I play tennis I always say the first objective is to avoid being whitewashed. It’s the same for publishing a book: first objective: don’t disappear without trace. It happens to a lot.)
On my radar
I wonder if I have the name of this section right. Radars are usually looking out for threats, not good things to recommend. This week my radar has been flashing red. It picked up the twitter hashtag #TransWomenAreConMen. Clicking to see the tweets using this was very depressing. I have serious doubts about the simplistic versions of #TransMenAreMen and #TransWomenAreWomen which refuse to accept any meaningful difference between trans and cis men and women. Of course (that should not need saying) that doesn’t mean I think #TransWomenAreConMen. But if you’re a trans person and see hashtags like this trending, and read the often hateful tweets attached to them, I can see how you might think that many, if not most, people who take a “gender critical” position support such transphobic sentiments. My three podcasts on this issue tried to bring some mutual respect and understanding to the debate but the people who most needed to listen didn’t. The polarisation of this debate is catastrophic.
I’m a big fan of Iranian cinema, but until now I had not seem Abbas Kiarostami’s Close Up (1990). I was reminded of it by its appearance at #17 in the latest of Sight and Sound’s once a decade Greatest Films of All Time Critics’ poll list. The only place I could find to watch it was free on YouTube, apparently legally. It’s well worth it. The film is deeply philosophical. Sight and Sound says “The film is driven both by deep, unsentimental compassion and by genuine philosophical curiosity; it explores the fraught relationships between truth and falsehood, film and ‘reality’, intention and action, and acknowledges, from start to finish, the role and responsibility of the director in his engagement with the people in his film.”
#14 on the list is Agnes Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, which I also saw for the first time. I can imagine this being a divisive film, with many annoyed that not much happens. But I think a lot happens psychologically: our understanding of the central character develops considerably but, crucially, by the end we still don’t really know what to make of her.
Add to Playlist is back on the BBC. I usually grit my teeth at the contemporary style of two-handed, super-enthusiastic presenters, but I love this programme. It pulls off the great trick of getting you to understand music of all types better without having any musical knowledge. Cerys Matthews in particular is brilliant at asking guests “what do you mean?” whenever they say anything remotely technical or insider-ish. But be warned: if you are old school and still prefer to own music, you may be provoked into ordering a lot…
There is an online benefit conference for Ukraine 17–19 March which asks What Good Is Philosophy? There are some great speakers, including Margret Atwood.
That’s it for now. Until next time, if nothing prevents, thanks for your interest.