Cognitive Biases Are Splitting America
How our brains influence the way we feel about one another
Americans feel divided.
Thirty-eight percent of Republicans said they would “feel somewhat or very upset at the prospect of their child marrying someone from the opposite party,” according to research from a 2020 Economist/YouGov poll. Likewise, said exactly the same percentage (38%) of Democrats. We haven’t always felt this way. In 1960, people hardly shrugged at the question — only 5% of Republicans and 4% of Democrats said they would be upset.
There’s a lot of talk about how divided we are — among party lines, as Red States and Blue States. And how big the chasm is — that we’re “massively more divergent.” Most of us feel the division, too. When asked if there will be a civil war in the United States “in the next few years,” half of us agreed.
Yet, there’s plenty of agreement and shared experience.
In 2019, 63% of Americans thought we should send astronauts to Mars. 94% of Americans say that “they have felt the impact of the high inflation in their own life” and 82% agree “either that we are already in a recession, or there is one likely in the next year,” according to a recent Economist/YouGov Poll. Half the people in the United States own just 2 percent of the wealth.¹ Both Governor Newsom of California and Governor Reeves of Mississippi agree that “the federal government receives too much attention.” We have a lot in common, why don’t we feel like we do?
Cognitive biases lead to the splitting of America.
Humans struggle to think statistically — our brains take shortcuts. These cognitive biases, while useful in the short term, do us a disservice in the long term. (If you’re interested in diving deeper into human rationality and irrationality, I recommend Daniel Kahneman’s great book Thinking, Fast and Slow.) Here are a few of the cognitive biases splitting us apart.
Availability
The easier it is to think of something, the more significant we deem it. Yet, the frequency of exposure to specific outcomes or the ability to easily recall those outcomes does not make those outcomes more probable or more significant. How easy is it to come up with an example of political differences, or an occurrence of someone losing their home? We face a steady drumbeat of division, disaster, and disagreement in the news and political messaging — so these messages are readily available for our recall.
Loss aversion
Humans are more likely to minimize loss than to maximize gain, even when those losses are much rarer outcomes. When we talked to people in Chicago about their fears of taking on a mortgage, their answers frequently pointed to loss aversion: I’m afraid I could go broke. I’m afraid I could lose the house. Delinquencies are edge cases, defaults even rarer. Despite the slim chances of these outcomes, our brains amplify them to help us avoid them. We’d rather not lose the footing we have, even if it’s not at risk. If we are convinced that there is a chance, however, slim, that outsiders will take something we value, we will stick to the “safety” of the people we know—a bias that can drive wedges between groups.
Framing
The way information is presented shifts the way we think about it; it’s almost like a trick of light. Feel the difference between these two sentences: “We have to lay off 10% of the company.” “We saved 90% of the jobs.” The first seems more significant and severe, even though they convey the same information.
Consider this example. People with mortgages often think they own their homes — and why shouldn’t they? We call them homeowners. In actuality, if they have a mortgage the bank owns their house. Even if there is no mortgage, most cities hold an interest in houses through mortgage tax obligations. Amazing how our minds are so quick to accept that we “own our homes,” when we don’t own anything but a debt, and simultaneously fear that we’re in “danger of losing our homes,” an event that has a less than 2% likelihood of happening to us.
Illusion of control
Even as the brain is wired to avoid loss, it often underestimates costs and overestimates benefits, giving us the Illusion of control. Because of this, we assume the future will be more like the past than unlike it, and we assume that when we’re in control, we’re safer. So, the car we drive feels safer than the plane someone else pilots. As you might guess, our brains are wrong about this: there’s a 1 in 11 million chance of dying in a plane crash; a 1 in 5,000 chance of dying in a car accident. When we’re not in control, as is the case for most of us with regards to the economy, domestic policies, and international relations, we’re less confident in the outcome.
We need to actively design systems that help us make better decisions.
At Sawa, we’re obsessed with behavioral science. We believe that research can help us to overcome cognitive biases, and use it to drive our product decisions. We’re realistic that we’re never going to be able to get rid of all of our biases, as there’s a reason we humans have them after all. What we are doing is building a community technology platform where people feel united around a common goal and using what we know of these cognitive biases to tilt the scales toward unity and financial health for the entire community.
¹ “That is, of total wealth of land, buildings, business assets, and industrial and financial wealth of all kinds, net of debt.” Thomas Piketty, A Brief History of Equality, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022), 32.