Perhaps due to social media or 24-hour news, there seem to be more and more people loudly protesting for justice, truth, or inquiries to achieve those. Justice and truth are needed in a democratic, decent society. Yet not everyone who calls for those necessarily supports those, even when they believe they do.
That may sound harsh but that doesn’t make it untrue. These people are not liars. They are sometimes mistaken and misled by a part of our thinking increasingly revealed through science. If those words anger you, you may be proving my points below. If you don’t read on from here, you just did.
Protests and public discourse
Public outcry is an inherent right in free societies. Protests led to the creation nations such as the United States, and governing systems in countries across the globe. Although Afro-centric groups have been front and centre in media the past two years, other groups step out and protest too.
Protesters loudly called for justice after former CBC host Gian Gomeshi was acquitted of all counts in his sexual assault case. And, long before the so called Ferguson effect, lots of other groups loudly called for justice and truth, or inquiries to get those. Following the G20 summit in Toronto, for instance, there were many calls for public inquiries into police actions and government direction of those actions. Therefore, calls for justice and the like not a Black thing, they are a human thing. I support these principles.
In the movie An American President, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin had the title character speak of these principles in a press conference,
You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil whose standing centre stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would oppose for a lifetime at the top of yours…then you can sing about the land of the free.
Freedom and democracy are messy things. Winston Churchill wrote (in Churchill by Himself), “Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…” What makes that form of government better, in my view, are people seeking the truth as best and accurately as they can.
Where the problems start
Not everyone is necessarily correct in their calls for justice. Volume, numbers, and repetition do not themselves determine the truth of any argument. Undefined terms commonly fuel misunderstanding and disagreement. Justice is often undefined.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “justice” in part as “(1) Just behaviour or treatment”, and “(1.1) The quality of being fair and reasonable”. For this discussion I define “reasonable” as that which can be supported by objective facts and determined by impartial, unbiased assessment of those facts. I hope you agree.
I previously wrote in a few posts about the importance of fixed principles in reasoning. Justice and reasonableness are fixed principles. They do not favour any belief system, political cause, or group. Documented reasoning emerged in Ancient Greece long before this part of the globe was even known (outside of the Indigenous peoples living here, that is). Our justice system predates today’s issues by centuries. Obviously, there are some miscarriages of justice as revealed by groups like the Association for the Defence of the Wrongfully Convicted (ADWYC). Nevertheless, the system is designed to be as transparent and fair as possible. ADWYC has achieved dozens of reversals through that justice system. No judge would say the system is perfect. The existence of appellant courts speaks to this, as do laws evolving through legislation.
Homosexuality was unlawful in many countries until mere decades ago yet today that seems draconian to the vast majority of people in the Western world regardless of their sexual preferences. Racial segregation on buses was the law in places like Montgomery, Alabama, until the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down in Bowder v. Gayles in 1956. That same court outlawed the ability of the Skokie (Illinois) town council to ban Nazis from marching in their town in 1977, despite many Holocaust survivors living there. In the latter case, the American Civil Liberty Union (ACLU) defended the Nazis because the principles of free speech and assembly are enshrined in their Constitution. More to the point, the ACLU defended their Constitution despite who it benefitted in that case.
So it goes with justice and truth. Sometimes, it makes one group happy and another miserable. Sometimes it helps people we revile but if justice and truth are important to us, so be it. Sometimes the truth sucks, but that doesn’t make it untrue. In precisely the same way, sometimes the results of justice leave us miserable but that doesn’t make something unjust.
In a previous post, I referenced simultaneous sets of findings by the U.S. Department of Justice concerning Ferguson, Missouri. One set of findings was that systemic racial discrimination existed within the policing and justice systems in Ferguson. The other set cleared then officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, stating that the shooting was justifiable. Attorney General Eric Holder cited significant evidence supporting both sets of findings, including disgusting emails showing racial discrimination, and significant forensic evidence corroborating Wilson’s version of events.
Many people rejected findings about systemic racism but cheered for the officer being cleared. Others cheered the first findings while rejecting the second. Put another way, many people employed in Ferguson to administer the law chose to ignore findings by the highest organization in their country for administering the law, and many people who called for justice chose to ignore the findings of their federal department of justice. That’s the problem when people adopt a set of views and thereafter reject anything that conflicts with those views no matter the facts or the people finding them. This is confirmation bias, which is demonstrated by both sides in Ferguson, and elsewhere.
Specific examples
I have no direct knowledge in two examples I provide below but each shows, as does the one I know a little bit about, an interesting aspect of human cognition examined more closely later on. I believe each group earnestly believes what they do and that they may be right, or not.
Protesters attacked the acquittal of Gian Gomeshi. Violence against women, particularly sexual assault, deserves serious attention, more so when the allegations involve three women, strangling, and punching. The case was covered in minute detail and was already analyzed in a documentary that included interviews of two alleged victims before the verdict and the other one within hours of that verdict.
Virtually every angle of this story, including the alleged victims’ interviews, suggests they withheld information relevant to the case. Defense counsel was surgical and thorough in revealing that, which is their job. Accordingly, the judge found none of the victims credible and the case could not stand without a credible victim. Victims are human and we all make mistakes. Those of us not victimized by sexual assault should allow a wide berth for those who are, and for their foibles, which we all have. The sad fact is that these women may all have been victimized by Gomeshi. He wasn’t proven innocent, but the onus is always on the prosecution to meet the burden of proof. Were it not so, any one of us could be stuck trying to prove our innocence against a large government agency. That happened for centuries elsewhere in many places, to devastating effect. Despite the safeguards in our justice system, that sometimes happens here to devastating effects too. But sometimes the system does work, and it appears to have in the Gomeshi matter despite an outcome that upsets many.
I truly hope future victims will not be scared away from reporting crimes due to what happened in this case. The outcome is upsetting to many advocates of women’s safety, and to me, but it is the only reasonable conclusion a judge could come to in the absence of credible testimony.
Loku Protesters: Black Lives Matter – Toronto Chapter protested out front of police headquarters for many days. Their recent focus has been on the 2015 shooting death of Andrew Loku by Toronto officers, and the Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit (SIU)’s determination that the shooting was justified. The protesters would tell you that Loku had a hammer (not a gun or knife) and may have been mentally in crisis when he was shot. All that appears true. The SIU believes the shooting was justified anyway and explained that in their press release.
Ontario has had police-involved incidents involving serious injury and death independently investigated since 1990. The SIU has charged several officers. Some previous SIU directors have harshly criticized police agencies on a number of fronts. A few officers have been convicted (Regina v. Forcillo and R v. Sandhu are just two cases). They have also been criticized by the court for laying charges where none were justified (R. v. Cavannagh). Accordingly, it’s an uphill argument to suggest the SIU is in league with the police. Still the protesters have rights and are availing themselves of those. I wonder why they haven’t also protested the SIU office but maybe they have and no press covered that. The absence of an event in the news doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Would any objective facts change the protesters’ minds? We’ll see. Have Black communities endured all manner of crap for centuries, enough to make some of their members suspicious of many patterns? Without question.
G20 Protesters (2010): This was, generously speaking, a hot mess. It was a mess during the summit due to protests, many of which were prevocational and some which were violent. After the first mess, groups took to demanding all manner of inquiries, firings, and changes. Some criminal charges and other actions followed but nowhere near as many as many protesters called for.
My involvement in this issue afforded me a closer look at the problem with some calls for justice. A month after the protests, a friend of mine emailed me a Flickr photo and accompanying narrative posted by the photographer of that pic. It railed against officers harassing other photographers and how a camera is not a weapon. I agree. Nonetheless, I replied largely because I was in the photograph.
I was briefly speaking with an officer I know personally and photographed by the Flickr contributor with that officer That’s why my friend emailed with the link. So I pointed out that that contributor was mistaken and presumptuous. One of the other officers was a photography enthusiast who asked a photographer about an $8,000+ lens he loved. I even offered to introduce the gentleman to the officer who spoke with the photographer. To his credit, he backed off and even apologized. However, he repeatedly called for a public inquiry into police actions.
I didn’t argue against that and didn’t think it was my place to. However, I asked a few times if he would accept a different view of what occurred if irrefutable facts proved those in such an inquiry. He never directly answered. He merely repeated his claims, which I took as an indirect NO. Apparently, then, this man accepted one version of events, wanted that view aired more widely, and would not accept a contrary view no matter what the facts were, no matter what the truth was.
To be fair to this man and the two protesting groups I mentioned above, this approach to the truth and justice is far more common than some may believe. Furthermore, it is on both ends of most issues.
The science on confirmation bias
In recent years, the term bias has replaced prejudiced and racist although with marginally less sting. One colleague said months ago that to be branded as racially biased is only slightly less devastating than being branded a pedophile. Because the most common form of bias discussed has been of the racial kind, racial bias is accepted as being almost everywhere. I agree. Biases of all kinds are almost everywhere, negative ones and positive ones. One of the most common forms is confirmation bias, of which I’ve written more than once in previous posts.
In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman outlined many heuristics, the hallmark of fast thinking. Often, they are also the roots of bias. Our brains are hard-wired to identify patterns with which we can almost instantly react to future situations based on subconscious recognition of those patterns. In prehistoric times and many others, these helped our ancestors survive. They still help us, avoiding vehicle collisions and some other harm, for example. The down side of this fast thinking is that these patterns aren’t always correct, and there aren’t always patterns where our fast thinking seems to believe there are.
Heuristics are based on experiences, stories and well as interpretation and remembering of those. Interpretations and memory can be spot on or way off the mark but fast thinking leaves little room for doubt. With a bias in place, further experiences and stories are often viewed through that biased lens. Moreover, many of us notice more, seek more, and remember more information that confirms our biases (confirmation bias), and reject, ignore, or expend energy disproving contrary information (disconfirmation bias).
Here’s a quick story I ask that you picture in your head. Ready?
At 9 PM on September 21, 2009, a White, uniformed police officer quickly jogged up to a Black man in his early twenties, who was dressed in hip-hop attire and standing on a sidewalk. The officer looked concerned and a bit excited, perhaps even fearful. The man standing on the sidewalk was panting slightly with his hands on his hips standing upright, and he appeared slightly agitated or angered. That’s it, the end of my story.
“Huh,” you might wonder, “where does the story go from here?” For a lot of readers, your fast thinking brain already started finishing the story, filling in the blanks. Bias often creates expectations of what will most likely happen next. Did you?
I’ve used this technique in classroom for demonstration. Most people who exhibited a pro-police or pro-White bias anticipated that the officer would arrest the man for some crime he just committed and fled from. Most people with the opposite biases anticipated that the officer would harass an innocent man. Bias and the heuristics don’t usually seek more information unless of the confirming kind. Bias and heuristics tend to say, as Kahneman put words to these subconscious processes, “What you see is all there is.”
Fortunately, some people said there was nowhere near enough information to anticipate what happened next. Most of those people likely had biases, being human beings and all. But they also engaged their slow thinking. This part of thinking often says, in my words, “Hold on. There could be more here. Who knows what that is or what it will mean?”
There are many ways my story could play out. Blatant police harassment of a visible minority. A justified arrest of a bad guy, his skin colour being irrelevant. Officer approaching a victim who just fled an attack. Officer coming to help a colleague in street clothes or working undercover, who was just attacked or who just chased a suspect. Officer approaching a witness who chased a suspect and lost him. The list of possibilities goes on but bias narrows conceived possibilities to a few, and sometimes to only one.
Stopping long-ingrained biases from narrowing our consideration is not easy for people, especially if we do not routinely use slow, deliberate thinking. It takes longer and it takes more mental energy. It doesn’t satisfy an innately human characteristic, wanting to be certain all the time. It doesn’t satisfy the emotional responses which fast thinking often kick start. However, it tends to point us to more accurate, truthful conclusions.
Writing about confirmation bias on the website You’re Not So Smart, David McRaney wrote, “Your opinions are the result of years of paying attention to information which confirmed what you believed while ignoring information which challenged your preconceived notions.”
McRaney cited many studies, only a few mentioned here. Valdis Krebs analyzed purchasing patterns of people liking or reviling (then) candidate Obama in 2008. The data suggested that buyers did not seek information, merely confirmation. A University of a Minnesota study in 2008 showed that subjects focused on information supporting their assertion while ignoring or forgetting contrary information. An Ohio State University study, in 2009, showed subjects spending 36 per cent more time reading essays that “aligned with their opinion”. Yet the next study McRaney mentioned is truly eye-popping: “Another study at Ohio State in 2009 showed subjects clips of the parody show ‘The Colbert Report,’ and people who considered themselves politically conservative consistently reported ‘Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said.’”
Um, wow! If you’re not familiar with Stephen Colbert’s former show, The Colbert Report, take a look at any YouTube clip from his show and see if you think he believes what he says in it.
You might think someone would have to be an idiot to think Colbert was doing anything other than shredding conservatives in that clip, whichever one you may have just watched. But science shows us, time and again, that when we allow ourselves to be ruled by our subconscious then our beliefs, our words and actions can look fairly odd to people not in lock step with that particular bias. And, those people will seem strange or misinformed or stupid or lying to us if or when confirmation bias grips us.
Education seems not to be an automatic guard against that, unless that education included explicit training in critical thought (largely the basis of slow thinking), and those graduates routinely practice that thinking in their daily lives.
Just like every other aspect of humanity, confirmation bias is not a Black thing, a poor thing, or a left-wing thing. Read up on McCarthyism if you want to see the confirmation bias on the right, or view a Trump rally. Anti-police advocates are correct that police officers are inherently biased in any number of ways. Police officers are homo-sapiens, all of whom are predisposed toward heuristics, and bias. Of course, their critics are also homo-sapiens so they are not immune from all manner of biases either. As Chris Mooney wrote, for MotherJones.com (denial of science), “We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.” That’s the bad news.
The good news about the bad news
As Kahneman pointed out, slow thinking exists but is not our default setting. He too is subject to heuristics but he tries to catch himself and think things out a little more. This is what more-recent researchers refer to as dual processing. In dynamic or rapidly evolving situations, slow thinking will not always be a viable option. This requires that we practice what Brent Snook (Memorial University) calls bounded rationality. As Snook and some judges have noted, it is not reasonable to expect people in rapidly dynamic situations to calmly, rationally drill down on our subconscious thoughts or instincts. As Aaron Barth, assistant professor in philosophy at The University of Western Ontario and principal owner of Dialectic Strategies recently commented, it is not reasonable to judge System 1 (fast thinking) decisions exclusively with System 2 (slow thinking) when circumstances the judged person was in precluded them using their System 2.
When circumstances are not as scary and immediate, though, it serves us well to do two things:
- Learn in advance how to think reasonably in the truest sense of the word.
- Practice that kind of thinking regularly so it has a fighting chance when our emotionally-driven, narrow-minded, selectively-listening, fast thinking automatically kicks in. It is possible and it is sometimes demonstrated.
Many people will recall the 2013 trial of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Black teenager Trayvon Martin, who was unarmed. Lead defense counsel Mark O’Mara became of the face of the successful defense of Zimmerman, who few would describe as a man who did everything right, O’Mara included. Following the trial, Zimmerman was vilified in the press and by advocacy groups, and his subsequent antics haven’t helped his cause. O’Mara was somewhat vilified too.
Since then, O’Mara has been an occasional legal contributor on CNN. Whereas some legal commentators have shown a decided bias for or against police, O’Mara has been remarkably unpredictable, at least to those who expect every incident involving Black people interacting with people in authority to have happened the way they expect it to have.
In July of 2015 Samuel DuBose, an unarmed Black motorist, was shot dead by a University of Cincinnati officer who has since been charged in the case. When the DuBose family wanted help on the legal front, they reached out to O’Mara, who is now assisting the family.
Intuitively, O’Mara might seem an odd choice. How could a man who defended the killer of a Black teen do an about-face and represent the family of a killed Black man? Through the lens of fast thinking, through bias, O’Mara might be viewed as previously defending the killing of Black people. In actual fact, he defended one man in one case and he is now representing the family of another man in another case, one where a man was shot in circumstances that appear significantly different than the Zimmerman matter. Similarly, O’Mara ventures various opinions on CNN based on the known-facts of each matter under discussion, just like several other respected counsel do.
O’Mara might be viewed as unpredictable in that he pleases some advocates on one matter and may alienate those same advocates on other matters. Yet I suspect his decisions are not guided by any group or agenda. Rather, his decisions appear to be made on a case-by-case analysis of the known facts. By the same principle, the DuBose family may have shown considerably open minds by seeking out O’Mara despite his involvement in the Zimmerman trial. Their choice suggests that some every-day people can and do make decisions on a case-by-case basis too.
Summary
O’Mara and the DuBose family may have provided an excellent example of the best way to mitigate bias. View each issue, each matter, each argument, individually. Weigh out the objective facts as best as they are known to you at the time, the ones which support your initial belief and the ones opposing it. If you want to, seek out more information on either side of the ledger. Then form an opinion. All the while, remember that your opinion could be wrong despite your best efforts to get it right.
Trying our best to get it right is within our grasps. It isn’t easy. Like driving, it takes learning, practice, experience, as well as learning about others’ mistakes and the bad outcomes stemming from those. Just as there are bad drivers who think they are good ones, there are poor thinkers who believe they are sound ones. As with driving, thinking skills can be improved and it is in our inherent best interests to do that. Wrote Clyde Miller in his essay, How to Detect Propaganda,
Why are we fooled by these devices? Because they appeal to our emotions rather than to our reason. They make us believe and do something we would not believe or do if we thought about it calmly, dispassionately. In examining these devices, note that they work most effectively at those times when we are too lazy to think for ourselves, also, they tie into emotions which sway us to be “for” or “against” nations, races, religions, ideals, economic and political policies and practices, and so on through automobiles, cigarettes, radios, toothpastes, presidents, and wars. With our emotions stirred, it may be fun to be fooled by these devices, but it is more fun and infinitely more to our own interests to know how they work.
There seems to be little point in trying to go head-to-head with someone’s beliefs when they are heavily invested in those being true, at almost any cost. As Chris Mooney wrote, “Head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a backfire effect, where people not only fail to change their minds when confronted with the facts – they may hold their wrong views more tenaciously than ever.”
In my view, the demonstrators against Gomeshi’s acquittal, and the Black Lives Matter Toronto demonstrators, and the previously angry photographer I had a dialogue with could each be right about their beliefs, perhaps a little and perhaps more. Or they could be wrong but they don’t appear inclined to consider that. Very few people are right or wrong about everything. Confirmation bias gets in the way of us realizing that. Confirmation bias knows no sides or ideologies or faiths. It knows only that it wants to be right no matter what, as if the belief holder’s existence hinges on that belief being right. It rarely does unless we make it so.
I wouldn’t try to dissuade these people from their deeply held beliefs; it would be a fool’s errand. I’m not sure if any of those people would be willing to admit the possibility of them being mistaken. I know the photographer never showed me that ability. What I hope to do with this post and others works is to encourage readers to start questioning their own beliefs, or to at least work up the willingness to do that, and no matter whether they agree with me on any given issue or not.
Ideas are supposed to be about that; ideas, not people. Ideas can change if we let them. By extension, people can change too, provided their willing to try new ideas. So, the next time you ask a question, ask yourself if you are seeking information to reasonably consider or merely confirmation of your already arrived-at conclusion.
Please, let me know where I’m wrong here if you believe I am. Sometimes, I am mistaken. How about you?
