Why Is It So Hard To Admit When You're Wrong? WHEN IT COMES TO POLITICAL POLARIZATION, IT'S CONFIRMATION BIAS ALL THE WAY DOWN.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald

PEOPLE WHO COMMIT intentional murder--and only those people--should be executed. That's a view I held for virtually all of my adult life.

I am fully aware of the decadeslong debate over the death penalty. I have made it my business over the years to read the many conflicting studies on the practice's efficacy. But I didn't care if executing convicted murderers has a deterrent effect or not: I supported capital punishment because I want to do justice.

I am by nature a peaceable man; I have not hit anyone in anger since my teenage years. But my conception of what is just is informed by what I would want to do to a person who, beyond any shadow of a doubt, willfully killed my wife, another family member, or a close friend: inflict barbarous atonement for a barbaric act. One of the chief purposes of state-sanctioned execution has been to maintain social peace by forestalling blood feuds between people who would otherwise seek justice on their own.

I was not alone in advocating death sentences for murderers. Gallup reports that an average of 66 percent of Americans (and a majority of both parties) favored the death penalty for convicted murderers during the first decade of this century. By 2020, however, that number had dropped to 55 percent. Gallup has been documenting a wideninggap on the issue between Republicans and Democrats over the past two decades, with a rock-solid 80 percent of Republicans still favoring the death penalty even as Democratic support has dropped to under 40 percent.

Despite that recent shift in the numbers, any rancor over the widening partisan divide with respect to the death penalty has been relatively mild compared to the growing estrangement over such issues as guns, affirmative action, climate change, and vaccinations. Research shows Americans increasingly align their opinions on hot-button issues along partisan lines and that they are likely to stick with those positions once committed.

Today, if you are a member of one of the two major American political parties, you are statistically likely to dislike and distrust members of the other party. While your affection for your own party has not grown in recent years, your distaste for the other party has intensified. You distrust news sources preferred by the other side. Its supporters seem increasingly alien to you: different not just in partisan affiliation but in social, cultural, economic, and even racial characteristics. You may even consider them subhuman in some respects.

You're also likely to be wrong about the characteristics of members of the other party, about what they actually believe, and even about their views of you. But you are trapped in a partisan prison by the psychological effects of confirmation bias. Being confronted with factual information that contradicts your previously held views does not change them, and it may even reinforce them. Vilification of the other party perversely leads partisans to behave in precisely the norm-violating and game-rigging ways they fear their opponents will. It's a classic vicious cycle, and it's accelerating.

It also traps individuals within their preexisting world-views. As a libertarian, conventional left/right partisan splits over many public policy issues are not particularly relevant to me. But even as my unease about the death penalty slowly mounted, I found in myself an incredibly powerful reluctance to publicly change my view and renounce prior commitments on the matter. Why is it so hard to admit when you're wrong, especially in the realm of politics?

SOCIAL SCIENTISTS HAVE a term for the phenomenon described above: affective polarization. In the U.S. context, that means Democrats' and Republicans' growing tendency to dislike and distrust each other.

Since 1978, the Northwestern University psychologist Eli Finkel and his colleagues have been trying to capture this phenomenon with a thermometer. By asking Americans to describe their feelings on a scale from cold (0 degrees) to warm (100 degrees), they've found that people feel quite warmly about their co-partisans, consistently reporting between 70 and 75 degrees. In contrast, feelings toward opposing partisans have plummeted from a mild 48 degrees in the 1970s to a frosty 20 degrees today: an emotional cold snap. "Since 2012--and for the first time on record--out-party hate has been stronger than in-party love," they write in the October 30,2020, issue of Science.

The consequences of this big chill are apparent in several other studies, notably the work of the Louisiana State University political scientist Nathan Kalmoe and the University of Maryland political scientist Lilliana Mason. One of their more striking results is that 60 percent to 70 percent of both parties in a 2017-18 survey said they thought the other party was a "serious threat to the United States and its people"; 40 percent of respondents in both parties thought the other party was "downright evil." In another poll, 15 percent of Republicans and 20 percent of Democrats agreed with the brutal sentiment that the country would be better off if large numbers of opposing partisans in the public today "just died." And 18 percent of Democrats and 13 percent of Republicans said that violence would be justified if the opposing party won the 2020 presidential election.

Such studies suggest that there is something substantially different about the virulence of partisan sentiment in recent years and that the trend isn't going away.

WHY DO AMERICANS increasingly think ill of their political opponents? To some extent, people may be taking their cues from political elites. Parsing the roll call votes of Democratic and Republican legislators reveals steeply increasing partisan polarization in Congress since the 1970s. In a 2018 Electoral Studies article on how party elite polarization affects voters, the Texas Tech political scientist Kevin K. Banda and the University of Massachusetts Lowell political scientist John Cluverius find that "partisans respond to increasing levels of elite polarization by expressing higher levels of affective polarization, i.e. more negative evaluations of the opposing party relative to their own."

The Emory University political scientists Steven Webster and Alan Abramowitz have...