An argument for egalitarian confirmation bias and against political diversity in academia
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An argument for egalitarian confirmation bias and against political diversity in academia Uwe Peters1,2 Received: 12 January 2020 / Accepted: 21 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract It has recently been suggested that politically motivated cognition leads progressive individuals (e.g., liberals) to form beliefs that underestimate real differences between social groups (e.g., in academic performance) and to process information selectively to support these beliefs and an egalitarian outlook. I contend that this tendency, which I shall call ‘egalitarian confirmation bias’, is often ‘Mandevillian’ in nature. That is, while it is epistemically problematic in one’s own cognition, it often has effects that significantly improve other people’s truth tracking, especially that of stigmatized individuals in academia. Due to its Mandevillian character, egalitarian confirmation bias isn’t only epistemically but also ethically beneficial, as it helps decrease social injustice. Moreover, since egalitarian confirmation bias has Mandevillian effects especially in academia, and since progressives are particularly likely to display the bias, there is an epistemic reason for maintaining (rather than counteracting) the oftennoted political majority of progressives in academia. That is, while many researchers hold that diversity in academia is epistemically beneficial because it helps reduce bias, I argue that precisely because political diversity would help reduce egalitarian confirmation bias, it would in fact in one important sense be epistemically costly. Keywords Egalitarian confirmation bias · Progressives · Mandevillian effects · Social epistemology · Political diversity
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Uwe Peters [email protected]
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Department of Philosophy, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
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Department of Psychology, King’s College London, De Crespigny Park Camberwell, London SE5 8AB, UK
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Synthese
1 Introduction “Don’t fight forces, use them.” (Richard Buckminster Fuller)1 Many studies have shown that people frequently engage in politically motivated cognition: we often tend to conform our assessments and beliefs about information to our political goals and political identity rather than to accuracy (Kunda 1990; Taber and Lodge 2006; Nisbet et al. 2015; Kahan 2016). Politically motivated cognition, which is taken to be less than fully epistemically rational because it involves a diminished sensitivity to facts (Huemer 2016; Ringel et al. 2019), has recently become a hot topic in philosophy (Gerken 2019; Peters 2019; Talisse 2019; Carter and McKenna 2020). The present paper offers a social epistemological investigation of a specific type of politically motivated cognition. To hone in on it, notice first that politically motivated cognition is common among people from across the political spectrum. Both left-leaning individuals, i.e., subjects committed to values and goals such as social equality and social justice (henceforth progressives), and right-leaning individuals (e.g., conservatives) have been found to display it (Ni
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