Partisanship in Perspective: Does it make us Irrational?
Dive into political behavior, how to recognize it, and how it affects you and your life
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In my last article, I’ve personally defined politics and how it affects our daily basis by being political. In the meantime, what constitutes great politics isn’t just from us by being political but, we as a community working collectively through our system in certain political events trying to achieve common goods. While we are on our way to manifest political goods, sometimes being political make us dumb enough and not thinking straight! I put an exclamation mark to make all of your concern and aware enough that this shit normally happens especially in big political events like an election. Before I begin to break my points, I recommend you take a cup of nice coffee and make yourself comfortable.
In 2013, there was a math test conducted among aprroximately one thousand random participants. Each participant must answer the following questions. What is the correlation between rash skin and skin cream? And what is the correlation between crime rates and gun control? Both questions had identical math equations, but almost 90 percent had the wrong answer for number two. Then, what’s wrong with it? The answer to it that we have different perspectives and political identities to approach it. People who get the right answer correlate with the view on how guns should be controlled and others who get wrong get challenged by that question and got their logic error. The question right now is does someone’s political identity actually affect their ability to process information?
Essentially, we humans will join or connect with another human group as a ‘home’ to our identity. It is natural and healthy for us humans doing that but in this transparent time, a phenomenon arises within our society called partisanship.
Partisanship mostly appeals in the context of politics, it is broadly defined as a strong preference or bias toward a group or idea. Our ethnicities, religions, political identities are all different forms of partisanship. It happens because we are defined not only by ourselves as an individual but as a group we belong to. Therefore, we strongly believed and are motivated to defend our group identities, protecting our sense of self and society. In reality, partisanship nowadays becomes a problem when the group belief is against reality. In a situation like that partisan that motivated and driven will maintain a positive relationship with his group then perceive the world accordingly to the group. The growth of partisanship occurs because the trends of clustering like-minded communities geographically, rely on partisan news and trapped in social media bubbles.
To get more understanding of this concept, imagine this. You’re a fan of the Lakers team. Your team is playing against the Celtics, a long-time rival. You’re watching with your lakers fans group. The match is tight and then in the 4th quarter, a Lakers player made a dirty block and the referee didn’t call that as a foul. Imagine this play way back before (high tech virtual assistance referee). There will be some scenarios on how you approach this as a fan or now partisan. Normally or the rational way you will accept the referee call and still cheers to your team but, as I mention that partisan concept before you will be dealing with this differently. First, you know that foul was against the rules but your friend in the group thinks it’s acceptable. You will get tension in your thought on how to behave in this situation and cause dissonance. The results are, you might scream to the arena it wasn’t a foul, your group also screams the same with you. Next, you start blaming the referee and saying bad things to him (some people do it without even understand the context) and that’s what I called Ad Hominem fallacy (google it for those who don’t know). Finally, after you’re tired of screaming and blaming, you convince yourself or got convinced that it wasn’t foul in the first place. There it is. Partisanship. People often maintain a positive relationship with the group than perceive it accurately.
I am personally affected by this behavior especially back then in 2019 election time, we all do get affected because politics is deeply personal to us. While polarization in politics is common but, with that behavior it damages our common sense. Partisan behavior while defending his believes must be with these three common logical fallacies. The next question is, how are we dealing with partisan and escape from this distortion?
Check your FACTS! It is essential and obligatory to us in this fast-paced information to think that we are more biased than we think, so when you come up with a new information you make effort to push your initial intuition and evaluate analytically. Always make the assumption of a valued information that it might be a misinformation. When we counter a person and try to persuade or give information, affirming to their beliefs, and framing it to their language can help us to affirm our own information.
Partisanship is a problematic behavior that you should solve. It isn’t happening to us just by being political, it affects everyday life. Read and be better informed. It will help us make evidence-based decisions in reality.
thanks for reading,
and keep doing what you love.