Biases
The average rationalist middle schooler has learned about logical fallacies... burden of proof, strawman attacks, slippery slope, no true scotsman... they often come to the conclusion that we simply need to be more logical. They pride themselves on their emotionless discourse. What they do not consider is that we only use logic because we are emotional. Without emotion, we would not be making logical arguments in the first place - and our motivation for engagement influences our results far more than a logical fallacy might.
Belief Perseverance
People will continue to believe things even when the original evidence for their belief has been discredited. The amount of evidence required to make someone change their mind is higher than the amount of evidence needed to convince someone in the first place.
Motivated Reasoning
People will arrive at conclusions that they want to arrive at significantly more often than they should. They don’t simply conclude what they want to, but selectively analyze information and come up with justifications towards what is desired.
Motivated reasoning is a very strong cognitive bias. Shown the same mixed (fabricated) evidence on capital punishment, those against it ended up further against it and those for it ended up further for it (link). The same applies for climate change, gay marriage, and so on. This is part of why we believe unprovable things: given mixed evidence (and the evidence will always be mixed), our belief grows stronger. Heck, some belief systems even gain from being unfalsifiable, as that makes them far stabler sources of psychological needs; this applies to politics just as much as it does religion.
People are not able to conclude what they want to conclude simply because they want to - as much as [Insert political position] may make you feel that way - but constructing a good-enough reason for something to be right or wrong is usually quite possible, when we selectively acquire and analyze information.
Confirmation Bias
You’ve probably heard of the study where, if you ask people to identify a pattern in the numbers 2-4-6, given infinite attempts, they will rarely try to prove themselves wrong to get the actual answer… do I really need to list a bunch of things? Confirmation bias is the most well-known bias, and I don’t have anything new to say.
And, think about it. Whenever you see something you agree with, that’s just added to the emotional pile of evidence towards your conclusion. When you see something you disagree with, you justify why it’s wrong, and discard it. You don’t keep an active tally of the evidence toward the other side, and you are much more likely to try to find a reason to discard evidence that discredits your belief.
If you’ve been on social media recently (as of January 2023), you’ve heard the news regarding self-described mysogynist Andrew Tate and how his failed attempt to roast Greta Thunberg, inadvertently alerting his location to the authorities, got him arrested by the Romanian police. This is a perfect narrative; we love when young voices speak to power and win, we love when the bad guy self-owns, and we love a moral victory. But the story... was wrong. Andrew Tate’s arrest was in no way caused by a pizza box. We are not immune to failing to fact-check information that pleases us.
Not that your beliefs are wrong - though, statistically, many are - or that they are unimportant - politics is, of all the things we humans can decide, the most important. Just that we get trapped.
And so it turns out: you don’t convince someone by changing their beliefs. You convince someone by changing what they want to believe.
With all that said, one generally cannot start without starting.