Why your guy wins every debate.

One of the first and most famous televised political debates saw Richard Nixon square off against John F. Kennedy. It was 1960. Lenny Bruce was watching and, as usual, he saw what others did not.

"I would be with a bunch of Kennedy fans watching the debate and their comment would be, 'he's really slaughtering Nixon,'" Bruce recalled. "Then we would all go to another apartment, and the Nixon fans would say, 'how do you like the shellacking he gave Kennedy?'"

"And then I realized that each group loved their candidate so that a guy would have to be this blatant -- he would have to look into the camera and say: 'I am a thief, a crook, do you hear me? I am the worst choice you could ever make for president!' And even then his following would say, 'now there's an honest man for you. It takes a big guy to admit that. There's the kind of guy we need for president.'"

Today we don't need to go apartment to apartment to witness the same phenomenon. A quick check of the blogs will do.

Bloggers committed to a party or candidate will, almost without exception, praise their guy and mock his or her opponent. And they will do so in proportion to their commitment. Moderates will praise and mock moderately. Fierce partisans will praise and mock fiercely.

The reactions to Thursday night's vice-presidential debate fit the equation perfectly. (I'll stick with the American debate because the bipartisan and polarized nature of American politics makes the contrasts particularly sharp.)

Moderate liberals faulted Sarah Palin moderately, praised Joe Biden moderately, and gave the edge to the Democrat. Moderate conservatives did the reverse.

Hardcore liberals cranked it up: Biden's performance was "superb," wrote Ezra Klein, but "I find it really disconcerting when Sarah Palin looks like Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin."

Hardcore conservatives did the reverse. "This isn't a debate. It's a slaughter," wrote Jay Reding. "Palin is walking all over Biden."
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Polls of uncommitted voters show how biased these assessments really are. Forty six percent of those surveyed by CBS News, for example, felt Joe Biden won the debate, 21 per cent declared Sarah Palin the victor, and 33 per cent thought it was a tie.

In politics, a plurality is a win. But as a measure of what actually happened in the debate, this poll -- and others that got similar results -- revealed a mixed bag. As debates usually are.

So why are the reactions of committed observers so predictable? The answer lies in one of the most important concepts of psychology.

In 1957, Stanford psychologist Leon Festinger coined the term "cognitive dissonance" to describe the distressing mental state people experience when they "find themselves doing things that don't fit with what they know, or having opinions that do not fit with other opinions they hold."

The rational response to such contradictory thoughts is to put them on the table. Carefully examine them. Decide which is right. Discard the other.

But in a series of experiments, Festinger showed we hate to give up beliefs. He also showed that the deeper our commitment to a belief, the harder it is to discard it -- even when there's overwhelming evidence that it's wrong.

And so, rather than seeing the contradiction clearly and figuring out which idea to jettison, we go to great lengths to paper over the contradiction.

No contradiction, no dissonance. No dissonance, no problem. Lenny Bruce got this exactly right.

If a politician stated flatly that he is incompetent and criminal and should never be elected, many of that politician's committed followers would not accept that he is unfit for office. Instead, they would rationalize like crazy -- That's so courageous! He's so honest! -- and feel all the more certain they are backing the right man.

This is what lies behind the insidious habit psychologists call "confirmation bias." Once we believe something -- anything, for any reason -- we will start to screen information in order to confirm that we are right. Information that supports the belief is accepted without question; information that contradicts it is scrutinized harshly or simply ignored.
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When committed partisans watch debates, they find moments when their candidate does well compelling and memorable. When he trips over his feet, they scarcely notice. This bias is reversed when they watch the opposition.

Result: Both sides' supporters conclude their guy stole the show.

Some people are uncomfortable with the thought that humans are routinely and predictably irrational. Well, tough. The science is clear.

In a study during the 2004 election, psychologist Drew Westen put committed Democrats and Republicans in MRIs and scanned their brains as they read information that reflected positively or negatively on George W. Bush and John Kerry. The MRIs revealed that emotional circuitry dominated. Even when the brain struggled with negative information, it managed to reduce the dissonance -- and thus the bad feeling -- "with little involvement of the neural circuits normally involved in reasoning."

Still think people are rational?

Of course, we shouldn't despair. Now and then, people do face dissonance head on and reject a cherished belief. We see this after debates occasionally, when partisan observers grit their teeth and admit their guy got beaten up.

That's reason trumping feeling.

People who manage this typically understand that gut convictions aren't enough. They look for objective yardsticks. And they maintain a sense of detachment -- a bit of mental distance -- that allows them to observe and see what others who lack that detachment do not.

That's another thing Lenny Bruce got exactly right.

You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

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