Confirmation Bias as Ratio Strain

A Witch Surfing on A Sieve (Turner ,1807)

I wonder how much the notion of confirmation bias can be thought of in terms of what in behaviorism is called "Ratio Strain".

A reduction in the rate of a target behavior and an increase in emotional behavior resulting from an increase in the ratio of behavior to reinforcement.

In order to understand ratio strain, it is important to understand a basic principle of behavior, the Matching Law.

A description of a phenomenon according to which  organisms tend proportionally to match their responses during choice situations to the rates of reinforcement for each choice (i.e., if a behavior is reinforced about 60% of the time in one situation and 40% in another, that behavior tends to occur about 60% of the time in the first situation, and 40% in the second)

Behaviorists talk about how we all live in something you might call a "sea of reinforcement and punishment". That is, our behavior is a product of a countless number of contingencies that have and are currently operating on us, either reinforcing (increasing) or punishing (decreasing) our behavior.

At this moment, for example, I am experiencing various reinforcements, a "schedule" if you will, in my environment. There is a constant ebb and flow, or push and pull between reinforcement and punishment. Every time I sip my coffee, that behavior is reinforced - it will be more likely to occur. However, as my bladder is filled, drinking is being punished.

As I type, when I come up with a good, satisfying sentence, my typing is reinforced - I will continue. But if I struggle, I will encounter less reinforcement.

My chair is comfortable at first, which is reinforcing, but after a while it might become punishing, and I will get up, which removes the stiffness, and is reinforcing (next time I will "know" to get up. I put "know" in quotes because usually I won't even be conscious of it, and thus "unknowing").

The Pink Floyd song playing makes me feel good, and so is reinforcing. I will put it on again! But not too frequently, as like food, I become satiated, and so engage in the behavior of eating and listening according to my biological needs - whether dietary or sonory.

So, back to what is called "confirmation bias".

The seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations or a hypothesis at hand.

It occurred to me this morning that confirmation bias could be explained in terms of ratio strain: the reduction of behavior according to a ratio of decrease in reinforcement. I had been reading a comment thread. Someone posted an argument I disagreed with. Someone else then posted a response which I agreed with. The original poster then rebutted... and I realized that I was skimming - barely reading - the response. I didn't feel like reading it. Reading it seemed a chore.

The behavior of reading verbal behavior we agree with is much "easier", as it involves relations that have already been reinforced. However, verbal behavior that challenges us in some way, is much more aversive. It requires engaging in behaviors (types of thinking - recalling, classifying, comparing, interpreting, etc.) that can be quite effortful. Not do these behaviors require work, but the greater the ratio strain, the more likely are they to evoke "emotional behavior", that is, uncomfortable feelings such as anger, fear, etc. And that is aside from the content! If, as we further understand the content of an argument we disagree with, it may challenge our preconceptions - our expectations of the world, which had been reinforced. The fact that they are suddenly no longer being reinforced - a process referred to in behaviorism as "extinction" - can produce uncomfortable side-effects.

Findings from basic and applied research suggest that treatment with operant extinction may produce adverse side effects; two of these commonly noted are an increase in the frequency of the target response (extinction burst) and an increase in aggression (extinction-induced aggression).

Noticing this, much of our tendency towards "group-think" and ideological rigidity would seem to be explained. It is simply easier and more enjoyable to read what has been previously reinforcing. Encountering contradictory views is more effortful, fundamentally less reinforcing, and possibly uncomfortable and anger-inducing.

Now, the nice thing about behavior is that we can change it by altering the contingencies in our environment. We can learn to tolerate delays our reinforcement, as well as create rules to help us along the way, as sort of mental prompts. We can learn to find enjoyment in difference, and even come to be reinforced by the process of having our beliefs changed and enjoying the benefits of expanded knowledge and, ultimately, closer synchronicity with reality.

How to go about doing this, of course, isn't simple or easy. In this post, I'm merely laying out a behavioral case for noticing the process. Who knows, maybe it will allow me to more easily notice (or "tact" as behaviorists call it), and become aware of a trap I might be falling into, and to this make choices that might be more rewarding in the long run.

Maybe I'll go back to that comment thread and spend more time reading that comment with an open mind....

A related paper:
A Behavioral Analytical Account of Cognitive BIas in Clinical Populations

Unconscious Bias and Humility

Daniel Kaufman is a professor of philosophy at Missouri State.  He is a frequent video-blogger on Bloggingheads, and I enjoy his conversations.  After a wonderful recent conversation he had with David Ottlinger on the philosophical roots of classical liberalism, he provided me with this link to a piece he wrote on liberalism and the Harvard Implicit Bias Test, which he argues is vague and only helpful as cannon-fodder for the PC police (I'm paraphrasing).

I agree with him that the test itself is of limited utility in that it can't possibly give you much detail into what, why, how or where specifically your biases lie, beyond a general score that you might have some. But it is scientific in that it measure responses to  certain stimuli.  It is logical that you would be able to measure unconscious bias. In behaviorism, we would look at it in terms of stimulus control, where certain stimuli have been paired with behaviors (either thoughts or actions) which have then been reinforced. In my practice I do a lot of desensitization with children who have very heightened emotional responses to various environmental stimuli.

I do agree that the test could be misused, its results overblown with some kind of moralistic, shaming agenda. But personally, I found it fascinating. I readily expect myself to have all kinds of biases against gays, blacks, women, fat people - you name it. I found it a simple confirmation of what I already know to be the case.

My stance has always been that we need to remove the shame and stigma from bias - to accept that it is simply part of living in our society , and in many ways a natural human process coming out of how we learn. It is in many ways a helpful heuristic, but it has its downsides, and we can take steps to correct for it. For instance, the more I know about stereotypes, I can then notice them coming into my mind and I can recognize them.

My favorite example of this is the tendency of some people to become upset about "black english". I've seen facebooks memes arguing that you should say "ask", not "axe". However, this is is highly selective and racially biased. I've never once seen such memes directed towards colloquial english spoken by ethnic whites, who constantly speak in "poor english". We say "ummana" "instead of I'm going to", or "whataya" instead of "what are you".

If you are a hyper-grammar partisan, OK, maybe. But I think this is a case of ethnic stereotyping and shaming. I think the vast majority of bigotry is simply an extra sensitivity to the foibles of out-groups; you have a lower tolerance of it because it is easier to spot and an easy target of ire when your grumpy, afraid, stirred-up, etc. But it's totally human, and helpfully remedied with reflection.

I wish more PC-minded liberals would be more forgiving and lighten up. I wish more anti-PC people would be more forgiving and a little self-reflective. This combative stance is unhelpful I think in light of the fact that we are all subject to unconscious bias, and we can just try to be better people. Lord knows we all are constantly trying to be kinder, nicer, more forgiving, etc. in other areas of life.

Untidy Thoughts

Why won't they just speak English?  Why don't they have better control of their kids?  Why won't he pull his pants up?  That's not how you say "ask"....

Hardly anyone is explicitly racist anymore - that takes a lot of guts.  But we all have biases, and it is common to treat groups of people differently by engaging in any number of small slights - not affording them the same respect as they would another group in the same position.

It happens quickly, is often reasonably deniable, and difficult to pinpoint or quantify.  When I treat my mother-in-law a little bit differently, say, bristle a bit more at her foibles, my lack of respect towards her is hard to define.  But it is a result of a bias I have, and comes through in my interactions with her.

These are the kind of untidy thoughts we can all fall prey to with any community who has historically been the target of discrimination.  Disreputable narratives develop about them which, we absorb from the larger culture, and that we are often unaware of.  

...Why should people be required to speak English in America?  Maybe they have good reasons for not learning it yet.  Maybe they just weren't talking to you.

...Maybe they are having a bad day. Maybe plenty of white parents let their kids run all over.

...Maybe that's his style - his way of expressing himself through rebellious fashion?  Why do you pull your pants up over your bellybutton?

...Maybe because that's how she pronounces the word ask.  Do you articulate all of your words perfectly?  Do you never say the word "gonna", or "I'm-unna"?

Maybe in each of these examples you are treating them differently because of their race, by not giving them the benefit of the doubt, by jumping to conclusions, and by not having reflected on your own choices.  Maybe you are behaving in a racist way without even knowing it.

Finding Humanity

The Black Lives matter movement is sometimes dismissed as unnecessarily focusing on race.  Don't "all lives matter"?  Of course, this misses the point - that the implied refrain is "black lives matter too", pointing out the fact that there is a obvious pattern of blacks being treated with less restraint than whites in similar exchanges.  

It doesn't seem seem like such a stretch to say that because of disproportionate levels of poverty in black communities, and adjunctive criminal behavior, that police would be more sensitive to threat from blacks. I imagine police work in general is toxic to one's ability to treat others with kindness and good-will, when constantly exposed to the worst elements of society. So I can understand that an environment likely develops in which people become dehumanized.

* A personal anecdote (I am white): The one serious run in with police I had was when my car back fired as I tried to fix it on the side of the road. Someone in the neighborhood called the police, reporting gunshots and giving them my description. I found my self surrounded, was thrown to the ground. They ignored my telling them I had neck injury and painfully yanked my hands behind my back. They put me in a squad car and searched my vehicle, all the while explaining nothing, aside from a report of gunshots. After around 20 minutes, they told me with zero sympathy in affect, that I was free to go. Throughout the ordeal I had been extremely cooperative (guns were pointed at my head). I've never forgotten and felt profoundly humiliated.

I agree that overt racism is likely not the issue. However, the "implicit bias" cannot be brushed off. Cultural stereotypes are rampant, and of course must be fuel to any dehumanization already present in routine policework.

I would think the solution is to take this psychological phenomenon seriously, and embed systematic protections into the system. Maybe a certain amount of professional development time is set aside in which each officer is given the chance - maybe at least a day a month to engage in positive community relations activities as a sort of positive stimulus to counterbalance the negative stimuli they encounter routinely.

Cognitive Cleansing

I've been reading The Culture of Fear, by Barry Glassner, in which he does a masterful job deconstructing so many of the popular hysterias we've all been so used to hearing about in the media - drugs, crime, youth culture, etc..  Written in 1999, it has a somewhat dated feel, in that the cataloguing mainly covers the eighties and nineties.  Yet at the same time, this allows the modern reader a sophisticated perspective on current events; things have hardly changed. 

What's maybe the most interesting theme of the book, is Glassner's hypothesis that hysterias are fundamentally rooted in cognitive error.  Society is complex, sometimes uncomfortable and confusing, and very often brutal.  When faced with cognitive limitations in our understanding of why things are the way they are - so often painfully so - we have a habit of looking for real, understandable explanations to ease the sense of unease that arises from feeling as if we are at the mercy of things we don't understand.

So, for instance, the perennial fear of the aged, youth rebellion, attaches to whatever the latest youth craze is - no matter how limited in scope or consequence - and decries it as evidence that civilization is going to hell.  Of course, this has been the refrain for decades, even millennium. 

But other, very real fears, such as income inequality and the dangers of poverty and all that comes with it, find their focus not on larger, complicated political and economic questions about how to organize society, but rather in simplistic, iconic issues.  These issues gain salience as emblems for the larger, inchoate anxiety about things more nebulous such as government, corporations, scientists, politicians, or - so often unfortunately - minority groups.  Thus, relatively isolated dangers can come to take on over-sized import in the public imagination.  Frequently, the dangers aren't even real to begin with.  Based on flawed science or sloppy reporting, the actual truth is less important than the story that is being told in which the larger anxiety is given a seemingly real and substantive causation. 

A perfect example of this is Glassner's discussion of the hysteria surrounding breast implants.  Maybe the most profound example of sexist, decadent patriarchal values, cosmetic breast augmentation is a moral horror to many.  And so when reports that implants were causing pain, disease and even cancer in women, the story was perfect.  See, one might say, this despicable cultural phenomenon now has physical consequences.  As satisfying as the notion might have been, it wasn't true, study after study showed.

Of course, as we also witness again and again, facts have a hard time standing up to cognitive bias, when the story feels as though it is being threatened.  Even though whether or not breast implants are safe says nothing about the objectification of women and patriarchal values, once one has become sufficiently invested in the notion that they are bad because they are dangerous, it becomes difficult to persuade them otherwise.

Another fascinating chapter of the book deals with vaccines, the perennial go-to source of anxieties about "big government" and "big science".  Written before the Wakefield scandal, in which a deeply flawed study was published in reputable medical journal purporting to show a link between a frightening rise in autism and vaccines, Glassner recounts how vaccine fears in the early eighties about a completely different vaccine, and completely different diseases, caused a major stir even though in the end there was no evidence of any problem whatsoever, and children were in fact much better off getting their shots.

Confirmation bias is all over us.  It is unavoidable as as necessarily cognitively limited members of a complex society.  Yet Glassner's book implies some genuinely good advice.  Society is prone to hysteria.  Media accounts are often based on sloppy reporting.  Scientific studies take time, yet are ultimately our best chance at objectivity, as peer review and institutional reputation provide checks on bias. 

Yet as consumers of information, we must be vigilant.  If you have a position on something that someone might disagree with, try and examine it as if you were them.  It is enormously difficult to do so.   Can you examine your assumptions objectively?   What are the benefits of reaching your conclusion?  Is there a larger story you are trying to tell that the particular explanation satisfies?

Society is far from perfect.  Yet how much of its imperfection actually results from people who are wrong, who have accepted untruths, who are not thinking clearly, whose feelings about issues are misguided?  A good deal, no doubt.  In Glassner's book, while he certainly has a liberal bent, he spares no particular ideology.  He is genuinely after what is true.  If we imagine ourselves similarly, we would all do well to follow his lead.

Letting the Light In

According to Wikipedia, the psychological phenomenon known as confirmation bias works thusly:

[it] is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. For example, in reading about gun control, people usually prefer sources that affirm their existing attitudes. They also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).

We see this both on the left and right, as especially partisan liberals and conservatives often seem immune to facts.  The stories they tell, their ideological narratives seem both lacking in nuance and introspection.  In the Bush administration, the president was evil incarnate, a racist xenophobe intent on establishing a Born-Again Christian Caliphate.  Today, the president is a Socialist Muslim.  In both cases, policy objections are based on legitimate political and social philosophies.  Yet these deeper convictions become buried in unserious, often outright untrue and tribal attacks.

So, where does this come from?  It seems to be a cognitive style, and one that can be consciously guarded against.  If my view on an issue is quite strong, confirmation bias theory would predict that I would be more accepting of facts that seem to support it, and less accepting of facts that seem to contradict it.  Positive facts will reinforce my pre-existing narrative, as I will remember and incorporate them into my story.  Negative facts, on the other hand, will be more likely to be dismissed and forgotten. 

No one wants to be biased.  They want to be thinking clearly, bravely adjusting their beliefs according to evidence and reality, not illusion.  Yet given the universal nature of biased thought, and its terribly insidious nature, we must all admit that it is an unavoidable part of being a thinking human.  Because of its unconscious nature, unless we are actively setting ourselves on guard against it, recognizing its patterns in our own cognitive habits, its work will go unnoticed.  Daniel Kahneman talks about fast and slow thinking, in which most of our thought - conscious as though it appears to be at first glance - is actually being prepared in a largely unconscious manner, cooked up in the hidden kitchens of our primal brain, our conscious perception of it only served up as a final product at the last second.  Studies have shown that these pre-conscious, pre-formed thoughts actually begin their creation up to multiple minutes before they reach consciousness.  Yet our awareness of them feels instantaneous. 

One of the remarkable feats of he human mind is its ability to simulate multiple orders of consciousness.  Not only can we self-reflect on our own person-hood, we can imagine in others a model of person-hood.  We can assume, for instance, that if a piece of sweets tastes good to us, another person would also find it delicious.  We can then take this further, and imagine that another person has the same capacity, and imagine in them an ability to anticipate the response of a third party.  In his book, Unconscious, Leonard Mlodinov describes how writers often do an amazing set of mental gymnastics in not only imagining their reader's perspective, but imagining their reader's imagining of the story's narrator's perspective, and in turn of the perspective of the characters in the book.  Quite a hall of mirrors.

This capacity for imagining the other, maybe loosely described as empathy, is generally a highly-valued human trait, begetting wisdom and fostering trust and authority.  What more do we often desire in others than their ability to understand, to "get" us? 

And it is difficult.  As similar as most humans are, our different cultures foster different experiences.  Our different personalities and temperaments find us emerging as often quite dissimilar.  This can make empathy hard to develop.  Imagining second, third and fourth order personhood is often utterly impossible.  If we cannot understand another, to get into his mind and imagine life from behind his eyes, how can we imagine how he might imagine what lies behind our own?  How strange we must seem to him?  How might the extrovert imagine the world of an introvert, and how might the extrovert imagine an introvert might perceive him?

In learning theory, new thoughts, ideas and facts are more likely to be retained if they are placed within context of one's prior knowledge.  New information is more readily incorporated into old if there is a context within which new connections can be made. If one is unable to develop even second order empathy with sufficient accuracy with another, how is one to incorporate their ideas into their own? 

If every one was the same, it would be rather easy to accomplish this task.  This explains why we so enjoy hanging around people who are similar to us, who see things the way we do.  All we have to do is imagine what we would think if we were them, and - presto! - we get a fairly accurate idea of what they might be thinking.  When we meet someone of sufficiently different personality, culture or temperament, our capacity for empathy is suddenly lost.  Climbing into the space behind their eyes, it is as if we are climbing into the abyss.  Their words come at us as if from the darkness, attached to nothing we can relate to in our own experience.

Politics is the process of sharing power.  When we engage in political thought we are not only developing our own responses to how we want to shape society, but at the same time developing our response to the desire of others to shape society as they see fit.  If we believe that truth and facts are essential to shaping a society that is good, fair and just, then we must seek the most honest accounting possible of whence our ideas come.  Because we have no alternative but to rely on second, third, etc. imaginings of person-hood, we must endeavor to develop empathy with constant vigilance.

Unfortunately, this process is not only difficult when attempted with conscious purpose, it is hard to remember to attempt in the first place.  Therefore we must develop it as a cognitive habit.  In order to truly see the world as others see it, our minds must be as open as possible.

A number of obstacles stand in the way of developing an empathetic imagination.  As we saw earlier, confirmation bias makes empathy difficult from the outset, keeping us from being open to new ideas.  The more rigid we are, the more prone to reinforcement of preconceptions, even if the preconceptions are wrong.  If we surround ourselves only with those who think like us, we may feel more comfortable emotionally, and feel less taxed by the process of having to constantly negotiate unfamiliar personhoods.  Engaging with those who have very different and contradictory sets of values and beliefs can often leave one feeling numerous negative emotions such as frustration, confusion, anger and even sadness.

So it makes sense for us to choose to spend our time with those with whom we feel a kinship.  Yet what then to do when we are faced with political thought that has direct bearing on the society we all share?  If we cannot bear to actually be friends with others who see the world so differently, how are we ever to understand them well enough to experience their truth?

I think much of the answer lies in developing a cognitive style that is able to both and give and to receive political thought that is purposefully open-minded and attune to natural proclivities towards bias, not just in others but in ourselves.  We must in a sense develop our own second-order person-hood that resides within ourselves and exists in constant dialogue with new thought.  Much like an objective moderator of a debate, this "person" acts as an impartial arbiter of truth not by pronouncing on the accuracy of a given thought, but rather as a referee who's job it is to be on the look out for bias and other forms of mental laziness.

In order to develop such a cognitive style, however, one must expend extra time and mental energy.  This type of thinking is necessarily "slow" - it requires not just thinking the first-order thought, but performing the calculations for the second-order construct, and then in turn processing it and incorporating it into the original ideation.  In much of daily life it simply isn't practical; decisions and responses must occur more rapidly than time for sufficient second-order processing might allow. 

Fortunately, through sustained development, this type of slow-thinking cognition becomes more adept and itself becomes a piece of first-order thinking.  That is, it becomes less and less conscious.  New ideas are sent directly to this kind of "quality control" for processing as matter of course.  As we age and develop, we all become wiser; children have limited capacity for second-order thinking (however this is an important skill that can be fostered to a great degree in the earliest years).  When we think of "wisdom", what we generally envision is both an incorporation of slow thought processing such that it is nearly automatic, but at the same time a patient vigilance towards steady observation of nuance.  The more you know, the wise phrase goes, the less you know.

But how much of a role does ideology play a role in one's development of cognitive style?  As mentioned previously, both the left and the right have their share of fast-thinkers, both with a subsequent array of embarrassingly retarded ideas.  Yet the two ideologies seem to directly engender different levels of cognitive processing.  The left seems in many ways to be almost designed for slow-thinking, while the right does not.  One would think that this would not be something to be proud of, however the right actually promotes itself, and denigrates the left, as being just so. 

Right-wing critiques of the left are often that it is too open-minded, "relativist", or tolerant.  These are seen as weaknesses.  The left is seen as being too compassionate, too forgiving, too willing to cooperate with others, to let down its defenses and accept others.  These are all critiques that, at their core, are about empathy, or second and third-order thinking.  When Supreme Court Justice Sotomeyer was in the nomination process, Obama's publicly stated desire for a judge with "empathy" was pounced on by conservative critics as emblematic of everything wrong with liberalism. 

There is a reason religious fundamentalists are right-wing, not left-wing.  They are enormously rigid.  They see the world in black and white.  They abhor nuance and embrace literalism.  Their main cause is protecting what is traditional, preserving what is known and familiar. 

Progressivism is anathema to this state of mind.  It seeks to challenge existing dogmas and the concept of "common sense".  It promotes the new, the process of change, the deconstruction of old ideas and the concept of reinvention.  It embraces nuance and reinterpretation.  It abhors literalism and revels in the unknown and unfamiliar.

Of course, these are two poles, and most of us are somewhere between them.  But the driving impulses are real enough, and inform both ideological perspectives.  And both have serious implications for one's cognitive style.  The degree to which one embraces nuance, relativism, change and challenges to existing paradigms, one will be more comfortable with slow thinking.  The degree to which one embraces rigidity, literalism, tradition and conformity, one will be less comfortable with slow-thinking.

In this sense, one's degree of bias is built-in to their political ideology.  Liberals will indeed be more biased to the degree to which they, whether consciously or not, adopt the right-wing principles of rigidity and conformity.  Conservatives will be less biased to the degree to which they adopt left-wing principles of change, nuance and relativity.

All of us, if we agree that knowing truth is dependent on seeing reality - and seeing our own seeing of reality - from as many angles as possible, will endeavor to be vigilant against mental laziness and cognitive bias, to open our minds and let the light in.

How Can Smart People Be So Wrong?

The Flying, Anchise Picci (1982)

This morning I was thinking about cases where otherwise smart people believe crazy things.  I wonder if the common variable isn't the degree to which they have a strong ideological "feeling" about something.  We've seen cases where enormously smart/educated people seem immune to facts - anthropogenic climate change deniers, vaccine skeptics, creationists.  In some sense, one wonders if their intelligence doesn't allow them to create ever more elaborate rationalizations.

I'm not sure what that "feeling" really is.  It's obviously an unconscious bias; it's as if their reasoning is a rope you follow along until you come to a dark cave, beyond which there is nothing but darkness.  This is the point at which conscious reason disappears.

Yet we can find interesting patterns when we zoom out and examine the larger context of their ideology.  There are correlations between the likelihood of specific beliefs and larger attitudes.  Religious fundamentalists might be the easiest to understand, because they have a scriptural interpretation that they insist is the final authority.  It becomes more difficult when dealing with something like homeopathy, or 9/11 "truthers" where there is no specific scripture they are required to obey. 

But maybe these two aren't so dissimilar.  What if we assumed that scriptural fundamentalism wasn't really about the text, but rather about a socially normative relationship between one and their community - friends, family, congregants, pastor, etc.?  We could assume the same about the homeopathist.  They too are following certain communal norms.  A striking commonality among these groups is how frequently they live in an insular world, in which they are rarely challenged.  And when they are, it is likely by someone who is an "outsider" to their special community.  Immediately, they are a "traitor to the cause".

So, I think we're getting to tribal and identity politics, which largely exist at the unconscious level. 

Maybe something interesting to think about is the individual who is allergic to these sort of ideological "feelings", those who seem to be reasonable and level-headed, better able to think objectively.  They too might live within insular communities, yet somehow don't feel the same strong sense of allegiance that promotes unconscious tribal bias.  How is it that they have been able to establish within themselves a sense of comfort with breaking tribal norms?  Do they have some special self-esteem?  Do they not feel the same fears?

In thinking about myself, I am objectively a pretty reasonable person - at least in terms of your standard political bogeymen.  I have a lot of nuanced views, and understand both sides pretty well.  But it is enormously difficult to self-analyze this stuff.  Reaching into one's unconscious is hard - where to even begin?  I'm sure I've got plenty of tribal bias.  And how much is any of it affecting my cognition at any given moment?

The Imperial Wing

There is a tendency on the right to deny the extent to which context, specifically the dynamic of power relations between groups, must be considered when evaluating cultural expression.  The question is often asked why a seeming double-standard exists.  For instance, why is it OK for atheists to promote themselves at the expense of Christians, while Christian attacks on atheist are deemed "intolerant"?  Or why isn't it OK for a preacher to burn a copy of the Quran, when if a Muslim were to burn a bible, hardly anyone would notice.

Yet, context is so important.  Atheist attacks on religion - while often tendentious - are just not going to be as hurtful to people because of the cultural context. If they were to attack religion in a reverse situation, where religion was in the small minority, a sense of threat and oppression would be much greater. Because they aren't, as an atheist I often find them refreshing, almost as a sort of venting process. For instance, when a black comedian makes fun of white people for a black audience, he's allowing them to feel bigger than they are for a moment, and experience a sort of freedom.

There's something here that is a strong piece of right-wing nationalism. It's this notion of majority/minority dynamics. In race and gender studies, the word "privilege" is often talked about. A key part of it is the insight that those in a dominant majority, or simply a dominant cultural position, tend to be blind to their own privilege. Thus, it is difficult for them to see how their assumptions and behavior don't apply to non-dominant groups.

Somehow, right-wing nationalism - almost better described as dominant-ism - is predicated on the denial of this context. There is a high sensitivity to the threat of diminishment. Michelle was maybe getting at this when she kept referencing Breivik's sense of emasculation. It is as though one's identity is so narrowly defined, so rigid, that seeing it as relative presents a serious threat. The right routinely talks about left-wing notions of relativism as being fascistic. (We should note the difference between culture as an artifact relative to time and place, and moral relativism's idea that there is no right and wrong. I'm speaking of the former).

The white, Christian male feels under attack. Yet he isn't really. What is under attack is a narrow and inflexible vision of that identity. Identity critique is assumed to be existential. So, take the founding fathers for instance. They were not perfect men. The original leftist critique of them was really a critique of the whitewashed image of them which was not only wrong, but advanced oppressive notions about American history and thus current and future reality.

I'm reminded of the story of the Emperor's New Clothes. His stubborn persistence in maintaining a deluded vision of himself is so great that he goes out in public stark naked, rather than admit to his flaws. We are all guilty of this of course. Any of us have found ourselves guilty of having pridefully deluded ourselves into a convenient myth-making. But right-wing nationalism seems to make an art out of this impulse.

"White pride", for instance, is an oxymoron. Unless you are so paranoid and deluded as to think that pride has somehow not been afforded you. "Black pride" or "gay pride" however, is a perfectly congruent articulation of the need to correct an historical position of disempowerment, and subsequent internalized oppression. The Emperor's New Clothes was a story about an emperor who did not grasp his own privilege, his haughty pride a parallel to his position. It would have made no sense to write a story about an underprivileged person. The Humble Fishmonger's New Clothes wouldn't make much sense.