Confirmation Bias

Teaching dispute resolution typically includes making students aware of the many different biases that influence our views of conflicts and our decision making. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about confirmation bias during this election. According to the Oxford Dictionary, confirmation bias is “the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories.” A prime example of this bias in operation during the election cycle is the decision about who won the second Presidential Debate. Republicans tended to state that Romney won, while Democrats typically called the debate in Obama’s favor.

There’s an interesting blog post about this phenomenon and satire on Social Psychology Eye, an associated site for Wiley-Blackwell’s review journal on Social and Personality Psychology. Even though the post is from April 2011, it has some good points to keep in mind in the next few weeks while we’re barraged by negative ads, phone calls, internet ads, etc. One great piece of advice is at the end of the post:

“Here is one tip for overcoming confirmation bias within yourself: When most people do ‘reality testing’ they seek information that confirms their existing views are correct. Instead, try to do the opposite. Try to find evidence that argues against your existing views. It may be uncomfortable, but it can be more likely to lead to information that is accurate rather than just comforting.”

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The Boden Lecture: The Reconstruction Era Birth of Our Concept of Citizenship

The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 – as great as the first two were, it was the third that put in place the concepts of American citizenship and the civil rights of all Americans that are part of the bedrock of American life, prominent historian Eric Foner said in a lecture at Eckstein Hall.

Delivering Marquette Law School’s 2012 Robert F. Boden Lecture last week, Foner focused on the origins in American law of birthright citizenship, the principle that (with immaterial exceptions) anyone born in the United States is a citizen and has basic rights that go with citizenship.

Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, said many people assume that the principle of “equality under the law” dates back to the origins of the United States – or, as he put it humorously, that the nation was born perfect and has gotten better ever since.

In reality, he said, the nation was definitely not premised on equality under the law in its early stages. For one thing, the Constitution itself did not give citizenship to even free black people, much less to slaves. And, Foner said, citizenship issues were controlled by individual states, rather than the federal government. Every state in the nation had laws that treated black people worse than white people, he noted.

The great changes that declared all men (women’s issues came later) born in America to have basic rights, such as the right to own property and take disputes to court, came with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, put into law by Congress over President Andrew Johnson’s veto, and the subsequent adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The rights extended by those federal enactments and others in the Reconstruction Era were violated with impunity for many decades. But the rights they embraced eventually took hold and came alive in the Civil Rights Era of the mid-twentieth century, Foner said.

Foner said the history of America is a tale of ups and downs, of rights granted and lost. The right to citizenship extended to anyone born in the United States has become controversial in recent years as immigration issues have heated up, he observed. It is a right that arose from the “titanic struggle” of the era of the Civil War and its aftermath, and it was one of the nation’s ways of addressing the legacy of slavery and the pervasive denial of rights to black people. Given how birthright citizenship has served the country, Foner said, “we should think long and hard before changing it.”

A version of Foner’s Boden Lecture will appear in 2013, in the next Marquette Lawyer.

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The US’s Pivot to Asia

In June of this year, I was privileged to attend a series of discussions at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis between retired four-star Generals from both China and the US. The discussions covered a range of topics relevant to the American and Chinese military, including counter-terrorism operations, the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the South China Sea dispute. But a recurring point of contention and debate was America’s “pivot to Asia”, that is the strategic military refocus on Asia which was announced in 2011.

The Obama administration has been at pains to point out that the so-called pivot is not aimed at containing China. US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, speaking in Singapore earlier in June 2012, likewise insisted that the shift of focus to the Asia-Pacific is not intended to contain or challenge China, saying that “increased US involvement in this region will benefit China as it advances our shared security and prosperity in the future”.

However, despite such reassurances, my impression from the Chinese Generals I met in Annapolis was that the pivot to Asia is widely regarded in Chinese military circles as indicative of American mistrust and suspicion towards China and its regional aspirations, and thinly veils America’s intention to assert its power and dominance in the Asia-Pacific region, including by means of military influence.

So I was interested, in last night’s Presidential debate on foreign policy, to note that in the segment dedicated to “The Rise of China and Tomorrow’s World” President Obama took the surprising step of referring to China as an adversary: “China is both an adversary, but also a potential partner in the international community if it is following the rules.” This characterization of China is inconsistent with the rhetoric deployed by the Obama administration, but is sure to resonate with many in China as indicative of the true nature and intent of America’s military pivot.

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