Reasonable until proven otherwise

About a week ago, Republican Idaho state legislator Vito Barbieri found himself in the crosshairs of the national media for asking a rhetorical question. At a hearing regarding the use of telemedicine to prescribe abortions, Barbieri made the misstep of using sarcasm to make a point: when the doctor being questioned testified that colonoscopies are now performed remotely using a swallowed camera, Barbieri asked if this could be done to examine pregnancies, as well. Due to obvious features of anatomy, the answer to this question was an unequivocal no, speaking to the representative’s point that the two examinations are different. The audio recording of the hearing clearly captures Barbieri’s heavily sarcastic tone throughout asking the question — though a transcript of the event would seem to bespeak a shocking gap in the representative’s knowledge, a few minutes of research clearly demonstrates that the question was intentionally and rhetorically absurd.

However, the media response to Barbieri’s question was as gleeful as it was shallow. “Anti-Abortion Lawmaker Clearly Doesn't Understand Female Anatomy,” declared the Huffington Post headline, while MSNBC announced “GOP lawmaker flunks Anatomy 101” and Slate painted Barbieri as “painfully ignorant.” Understanding the context in which Barbieri was speaking, it is obvious that he is not some bumbling incompetent, but it would seem that, because his opponents were so primed to hear a Republican legislator confirm their stereotypes about the out-of-touch, sexist, anti-science right, the context and true meaning ceased to matter.

Before anyone starts throwing stones, though, realize that this phenomenon is seen on all ideological sides and even on our own campus. A couple of months ago, Newby Parton wrote a column in The Daily Princetonian entitled “The History of ‘wh’: A Microaggression.” In this piece, he relates a minor anecdote from his brief experience on campus, in which friends ribbed him for his Tennessee accent and then shrugged off his complaints as trivial. The point of the whole column is found in the last two paragraphs: from this experience, he realizes that it’s possible that he has “spent eighteen years not understanding when I have said something offensive” and exhorts others to “send [him] a message if [he] has ever hurt [their] feelings.”

Now, this column could not be much more innocuous — in a nutshell, Parton got offended, found that it hurt, saw how little empathy his friends felt and realized that he might have been showing this same callousness to others his whole life. The responses to the column, however, were not so innocuous. The top comment on the ‘Prince’website directs Parton to “grow a pair, you insufferable, sniveling whinebag”; the National Review’s sardonic take featured the image of a sad geek superimposed on a container of Cool Whip; the College Fix accused Parton of “whining and groveling”; and any number of other blogs and sites picked up the column as supposed evidence of the absurdity of the campus left and our generation more generally.

These responses are puzzling at best: Parton states unequivocally that the “microaggression” that he experienced was “not very important” and that he is “ashamed” of his complaint to his friend. Considering that the point of his story is just to set up how he realized that he wasn’t being empathetic enough, it’s true that he spends too much space discussing this component of his argument. But it is abundantly clear from even a cursory reading of the column that the insult to Parton’s regional dialect is ancillary to his point and is even acknowledged as trivial.

Why the vitriolic response, then? The commentators who picked up the story must have either not finished the column or been so predisposed to seeing what they wanted to see that the last couple of paragraphs didn’t register. In fact, I would venture that the reason for such harsh responses for this piece was, essentially, the word “microaggression”: seeing a buzzword of the left, conservative commentators were so primed to read something that confirmed their stereotypes of the other side as spineless whiners that the nuance and real point of the column were lost on them.

The above are two examples of a worrying trend: confirmation bias leads people to see the evidence they want to see in support of the views they already hold while ignoring, forgetting or flatly denying anything that directly challenges them. A dangerous positive feedback loop results: a preconception biases its holder to evidence confirming it, which in turn deepens the preconception and makes it more likely that future evidence will be viewed through its lens. This effect is only compounded by the Internet providing the unprecedented ability to surround oneself with only assenting opinions.

Of course, confirmation bias is universal, and it would be an exercise in futility to try to end it with a single column. But as University students, we represent, ostensibly, some intersection of future leaders and the intellectual elite: we can and should hold ourselves to higher standards. The first step to combating this bias is to avoid demonizing our enemies — it is tempting to ascribe the attitudes of those with whom you disagree to willful ignorance or moral infirmity, but the reality is that most people are reasonable and well-intentioned. Newby Parton isn’t a caricature of effete liberalism and Vito Barbieri isn’t one of overbearing, ignorant conservatism. Constantly challenging our own preconceptions and giving our opponents a fair hearing may be exhausting, but there is no other way to ensure that we believe what we believe for the right reasons.

Steve Swanson isa computer science major from Vienna, Va. He can bereached at sswanson@princeton.edu.