Election time is a time of tribes. Political beliefs are tied up with personal and group identity, and people will fight passionately to defend the ideas of their tribe.  
 
A basic understanding of some psychological concepts, however, can help us to check thinking biases that are particularly strong in group settings. I think a lot about, well, thinking. A little neurotic, yes, but it does help me reconcile my world view with the ideas of economics and free markets that I am learning about at the Initiative. Holding both views at the same time isn’t always comfortable. But I am happy to let this internal battle quietly rage on. I will come to why at the end.
 
But first, some core ideas of psychology that help explain this discomfort. Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort we experience when our behavior does not fit with our attitudes. If you do something misaligned with your moral compass, you will tend to feel guilt. Unless you just adjust the compass, that is. The tendency to avoid discomfort means that we either change our attitudes to match behavior, or vice versa. Either way, we strive for equilibrium.
 
Confirmation bias is another thinking trap, where we seek out information that confirms our own beliefs. This is why researchers should never start with conclusions and work backwards, because without even knowing they are doing it, they would select and bend the data to suit.
 
And then there is the backfire effect. When someone presents information to you that does not fit with your beliefs, the information backfires and actually strengthens your convictions. 
 
These kinds of biases in our thinking are particularly strong in group settings. We go tribal. We group think. No tribe is immune: neither political parties, nor unions, nor even think tanks.   
 
Of course, group thinking can be a powerful force for positive change. But because it can also reverse human progress, we should all strive to be open minded to other groups’ ideas. The danger otherwise, in the words of author and teacher Parker Palmer, is that we “see everything as this or that, plus or minus, on or off, black or white; and we fragment reality into an endless series of either-ors. In a phrase, we think the world apart”. 
 
Recently I came across an antidote to this in a Harvard series on the Psychology of Leadership with Tal Ben Shahar: Janusian thinking. This is “conceiving two or more opposite or antithetical ideas, images or concepts simultaneously”.  It is hard work, cognitively, to hold different viewpoints at the same time. But applying one world view over the other, like trying two different lenses over top of each other at the optometrist, can actually sharpen the focus like never before.