Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt

by Arthur C. Brooks

Psychologists have consistently shown that virtually everyone falls prey to “confirmation bias,” a propensity to believe evidence in support of prior beliefs and to reject evidence that contradicts these beliefs. In other words, if you think an increase in the minimum wage won’t destroy any jobs, then hard data I present to you that say otherwise will just look self-interested. You’ll question my motives sooner than your own beliefs. On politically contentious topics, the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber call this “myside bias.”3 They show in their research that people are remarkably good at finding the weaknesses in others’ arguments but terrible at seeing the weaknesses in their own.