When Our Evolved Minds Go Wrong: Social Psychological Biases

Abstract

This chapter examines more direct demand biases, exploring what the field of social psychology can tell us about our psychology on matters of social and political importance. In contrast to the liberal assumption of human rationality, our psychology is ridden with irrational biases that interfere with an ideally rational way of learning and thinking about politics. This chapter focuses on biases likely to affect how we construct our political worldviews using the information about the outside world we receive from the media: from in-group bias to the system justification tendency. Even if our media systems were designed to offer an objective and bias-free supply of political information from diverse perspectives, demand-side biases may nonetheless distort the way information from the news media is received, processed, and remembered.