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[Back to Reason, Science and Faith]

(This is taken with permission from a Facebook post by Duane Hirini.)

We are not truth seekers. When it comes to tribal identity, we are motivated reasoners. So begins Dan Kahans explanation of world politics and media theory that blew my mind. His work explains why facts today fail, why truth is metamorphosizing into a bloated caricature of itself, and why the attainment of truth is no longer as important as group belonging.

Here’s a breakdown of Kahan's key concepts:

1. Identity-Protective Cognition: This is Kahan's central thesis. It's when we unconsciously accept or reject information based on whether it protects our standing in our cultural group.
2. Cultural Cognition: This is the broader framework. It posits that individuals fit their perceptions of risk and facts to their values and group commitments. People with communitarian worldviews see climate change as a serious risk, while those with individualistic worldviews are more skeptical, because accepting the risk would mean accepting regulations that threaten their worldview.
3. The "Politically Motivated Reasoning" Paradigm: Kahan's work shows that on polarized issues, the more scientifically literate and numerate people are, the more polarized they become. These individuals use their advanced reasoning skills not to find the truth, but to find facts that justify their tribe's position and to deconstruct the arguments of the opposing tribe. This is why simply providing more information often backfires.

So, how does this create a loop?

While Kahan identified the psychological engine, the loop is a synthesis of his work with media theory.

• Step 1 (Psychology): Individuals, driven by identity-protective cognition, seek out information that validates their group's stance. (Kahan's core contribution).
• Step 2 (Technology): The algorithmic attention economy of social media is perfectly designed to feed this need. It identifies your tribal affiliations and serves you content that affirms them, creating a personalized reality.
• Step 3 (Amplification): This constant validation strengthens the individual's connection to the tribe and deepens their aversion to the out-group's "facts." It makes identity-protective cognition the default, highly rewarded mode of thinking.
• Step 4 (Feedback): As this pattern repeats for millions of people, public discourse fractures. Trust in neutral, cross-cutting institutions (like mainstream science or media) plummets because they are seen as threatening to the tribe's unique identity and worldview. This erosion of common ground creates an even greater demand for tribal information sources, sending us back to Step 1, but with more force.

While Kahan is the primary source for the psychology, the full "identity-validation loop" is a synthesis of his ideas with others:

• Cory Doctorow: He coined the term "enshittification" to describe the platform dynamics that fuel this. (great verb!) Platforms gain users by serving their needs, then shift to feed them addictive, identity-based content to exploit their attention for profit.
• Ezra Klein: In his book Why We're Polarized, he masterfully details how political identity became a "mega-identity" that swallows all other aspects of self, making virtually every issue a subject for politically motivated reasoning.
• Jonathan Haidt: His work on moral foundations theory explains why different tribes have such different intuitive reactions to the same facts, providing the moral substrate that Kahan's identity-protection operates on.

The "identity-validation loop" describes how a innate psychological tendency becomes a society-wide crisis when wired into a powerful, profit-driven information architecture. I think his work epistemically illuminates much.