Consider the following disagreements:
Alice believes it is wrong to restrict immigration into the US because many people would be better off being able to live there, and it would not economically harm anyone else. Bob thinks it is bad to allow unfettered immigration because it would hurt the livelihoods of hard-working Americans. Alice accuses Bob of being uncaring and xenophobic, while Bob accuses Alice of caring more about foreigners than her own country.
Carlos encounters Daniel at the grocery store during the covid-19 pandemic. Carlos, who is wearing a surgical mask, is upset that Daniel is not wearing a mask, and accuses him of not caring about the people he is putting in danger. Daniel says that Carlos is being a jerk, because wearing a mask does not affect anyone else and they’re both adults who should be able to make their own decisions about which risks they take.
Elaine and Frances are having an argument about minimum wage. Elaine, who prefers a higher minimum wage, accuses Frances of not caring enough about working-class people, because the current minimum wage is not enough to prevent greedy corporations from exploiting workers. Frances accuses Elaine of only caring about scoring political points with progressives, because a high minimum wage will only make it harder for businesses to hire workers and poor people to find jobs.
In each of these scenarios, matters of fact are clear part of the conflict. Alice and Bob disagree about the expected outcome from more open immigration laws, Carlos and Daniel have different beliefs about how much wearing a mask reduces risk for other people, and Elaine and Frances disagree about the effects of minimum wage laws on employment. What is less clear is what differences they have in their values or moral judgements. Carlos and Daniel might disagree about how to weigh individual liberty against the externalities of allowing people to go maskless at the store, but it’s hard to tell until they sort out their differing beliefs about the effects of masks on risks. Nonetheless, each person accuses the other of disagreeing on the basis of poor moral judgement.
This is so common that I think it’s appropriately viewed as the default way that people discuss politically-charged topics, rather than an occasional error or argument strategy. It’s common enough that it sometimes feels to me like it is either the cause or symptom of half the world’s problems. Replacing what should be a disagreement about facts with one that is about ethics is a big deal. Navigating a difference in views is much easier and less prone to serious conflict when the other person has different information or is thinking about something differently than when they have substantially different values or moral judgements. I see people get in fights, ostracize each other, put extreme constraints on their dating and professional opportunities, and generally live more frustrating, scary, and combative lives than they would if they made more of an effort to make sense of others’ beliefs about how the world works.
I’m not sure what causes people to do this, but I have some guesses.
- The previously-discussed curse of knowledge applies here. It is hard to inhabit the mind of someone who does not know the same things as you. For example, knowing that face masks reduce covid transmission makes it hard to imagine what it’s like to believe otherwise, even for someone who used to believe otherwise. This difficulty in perspective-taking can make other people’s views seem confusing or even implausible, to the extent that it may seem much more plausible that others hold the same factual beliefs and only differ in moral judgement. It may not even cross Carlos’s mind that Daniel does not believe wearing a mask will protect others, because the curse of knowledge makes that view so confusing to Carlos.
⠀ - If you have a very low opinion of other people’s moral judgement, your prior expectation that someone disagrees with you due to a moral failing will be very high. If a disagreement looks, on the face of it, like it could be caused by someone just not caring about other people, and this is mostly what you expect from other people, you might readily accept moral failing as the real cause of a disagreement and dismiss any claimed factual disagreements as lies. Although most people will not have such a low view of all people, they may have such a view of whatever category the person whose views they’re evaluating belongs to. I have encountered many people who express a complete lack of faith in the moral judgement of large groups of people. These groups include, but are not limited to: Republicans, Democrats, communists, libertarians, Muslims, Christians, meat eaters, people who believe in evolution, people who do not identify as feminists, people who read Harry Potter, people who drive cars, people who ride bikes on roads, people who are not effective altruists, and people who two-box on Newcomb’s problem.
⠀ - Sometimes we just don’t care why someone disagrees with us or what they actually believe. Oftentimes, people only care about making the other side of the disagreement look bad, so that they can “win” the argument, make their preferred policies look more favorable, and make their political opponents look bad. This is often the story one side will tell about the other, and, in some cases, people will openly admit this is what they’re doing. There is a distinction between not caring to account for a political adversary’s beliefs and not even caring to understand their beliefs. To me, it seems to mainly be the latter. I have had many conversations in which people will tell me they do not know and do not care why someone believes the terrible things they seem to believe. For two concrete examples, my grad school friends frequently dismissed effort to figure out why people support trump as a waste of time, and various people in my personal life have told me that figuring out what men who harass women on the street are thinking is an inexcusable distraction from the matter at hand.
These three behavioral patterns are not mutually exclusive. I expect they all play a substantial role in the complete shit show that can be seen in almost any discussion of divisive topics these days. Still, the curse of knowledge is somewhat different from the other two. It is a relatively generic weak point in human psychology, which happens to make some disagreements more difficult to navigate. Although it can be hard to overcome entirely, even through deliberate practice, the strategy for overcoming it is fairly straightforward: Adopt a high level of uncertainty about others’ views, even for things that seem obvious, ask lots of questions if you can, and bias yourself toward a higher level of trust that other people are being honest about what they believe. This can leave you vulnerable to certain kinds of bad actors, but I think it’s worth it. Besides, you can always just admit you’re not sure what someone else believes, walk away, and be cautious about the person going forward. I will probably write about it in the future.
The other two mechanisms share similar mitigation strategies because they are both closely related to more conflict-theoretic views of the world. Conflict theory is the view that most disagreements arise from fundamental value differences, rather than mistakes in understanding or communication (the other end of the spectrum is called mistake theory). An important thing to understand about “fundamental value differences” is that they have a strong tendency to look like moral failings. Libertarians tend to put more weight on personal liberty and less weight on fairness compared to leftists, and to leftists, this looks like evil selfishness. It would be wrong to say that these two mechanisms are themselves a description of conflict theory—at its core, conflict theory is a theory of why people disagree in the first place, not about how people navigate disagreements. But it it would not be such a stretch to say that “the guys over there are morally bankrupt, so it would be counterproductive to debate them or try to understand their views” is a summary of both this tendency and the overall approach that more extreme conflict theorists take toward disagreements. So the strategy for mitigating this tendency is to be a bit less of a conflict theorist and a bit more of a mistake theorist, at least when dealing with individual people whose views you have direct access to. What this actually looks like is going in with the assumption that you do not fully understand other people’s views, and that they might be saying things that sound terrible to you because of mistakes in their reasoning or because of mistakes in communication. As with the curse of knowledge, this is largely a matter of adopting a higher level of uncertainty about other people and will leave us somewhat more vulnerable to certain kinds of bad actors. Again, I think it’s worth it.
I wouldn’t say that I am against conflict theory, as it’s clearly useful and accurate in many cases. Explaining the second world war or Bernie Madoff without conflict theory might be an interesting exercise, but it will miss many important things, and many great victories of the past, like the abolition of slavery, were accomplished by people who were (or outwardly appeared to be) conflict theorists. But I do think many people reach for conflict theory much too readily and lean into it too hard. Insofar as it drives us to disregard the factual parts of a disagreement. It leads to inaccurate beliefs about each other and cuts off opportunities to find less costly resolutions, should they exist. I want to emphasize that this isn’t just a matter of taste. I think it is plausible that if the Democrats had adopted less of a conflict-theoretic view of Republican voters in 2016, Trump would not have been elected. (That said, I still fully endorse viewing Donald Trump himself through a conflict theory lens, as it lends far more clarity to his behavior than does mistake theory.) At the more personal level, I knew people in grad school who did not want to work for a particular PhD advisor because of his supposedly conservative or not-sufficiently-anti-Trump opinions, even though they knew almost nothing of his actual views and he was otherwise a very good fit for them. There really is a lot to be gained by not assuming people who support bad things are themselves bad people who are not worth getting to know.
I first remember noticing people rounding off complicated factual + values disagreements to simple values differences when I was involved in college atheist clubs. It struck me as such a silly, blatant error that it left me feeling like most people were kind of dumb, at least when it came to understanding conflict. It’s pretty obvious to me now that I was being very dumb, because even if I was more willing to tease apart disagreements and had more practice doing it, I had enormous blind spots for swaths of human psychology and basically all of conflict theory, outside really easy cases like “con men are defecting and should be treated as such”. (In my defense I was 20 or something and much less wise than most of the early-20-somethings I now know.) I still have big blind spots in those areas, but now they’re smaller and I’m more aware of them. And I still think we should adopt a presumption of extreme ignorance about other people’s beliefs. We should ask questions, even when we think someone’s views are abhorrent, because abhorrent views are so common they’re boring and because we almost certainly will learn something. We should cut people a lot of slack when they misrepresent our beliefs, so long as we have reason to believe they are arguing in good faith, because the curse of knowledge makes it horrendously difficult to convey our view of the world. In doing this, we give up some convenient defenses against some attacks, but it is worth it because truth and understanding are asymmetric weapons and that which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
Underconfidence 