Political tribalism and cognitive bias.

Lately each political tribe's claims about the other political tribe's intellectual and argumentative failings have been really jumping out at me.

But here's the truth about your tribe, speaking to all conservatives, all liberals, all libertarians, and all whatever other groups any readers identify with: Your tribe is not more fact-based and empirically grounder than any other tribe. Your tribe is not less likely to appeal to emotion, distort what the other side says, or engage in name calling.

All political tribal members are humans first and foremost, and have all the failings of humans, particularly tribalism itself and numerous cognitive biases that distort our reasoning while persuading us that we're actually thinking very clearly. No ideology has a stronger tendency towards these errors than any other. They are fundamentally human flaws, very much part of what makes us human, and they interact predictably with our ideology, whatever it might be.

You can learn to do better, but you will still fail frequently. Success is only a reduction in the frequency of committing these errors. Your tribe will never get better. Only you as an individual can, and to do so you have to learn about these cognitive biases, and go beyond seeing how other tribes clearly fall victim to them, but commit to seeing how you fall victim to them yourself, and engage in the unpleasant cognitive dissonance that fighting those biases entails. You have to consciously deny yourself the psychic satisfaction - a true chemical, physical, reaction - that comes from certainty, from shutting out the information that creates cognitive dissonance.

You won't do that, at least not often. We're addicted to the chemically induced high that comes from certainty. But you can be aware of this truth, and at least gain the humility to recognise that the other tribe is not fundamentally intellectually different from your tribe.