I wrote my first diary on exceptionalism warping the perceptions of Americans, including the members of our community, in 2014. I can even quote from it regarding the two common misconceptions that contribute to the problem:
1. Everything that happens in the world happens because some force in the US made it happen. 2. Reading a popular article (or several) in the US or (at best) English press makes you an expert on a mad rat's nest of regional conflicts that predates the US by several centuries.
Sadly, the same exceptionalism permeates a lot of the most heated recent discussions in our community centered around the Hamas terror raid of October 7 and the ongoing Israel retaliation in Gaza. If anything, reading some comments I begin to doubt whether some people commenting actually appreciate that the folks dying or dead in the Middle East are as real as them. More below the cut.
Some community members appear more concerned about the effect that the Israel-Hamas war will have on the US politics than about the casualties in the war (PM me for examples). A variation of this is a dismissive “a pox on both of their houses” or “both sides this, both sides that.”
The other glaring problem (perhaps less obvious when the discussion centers around the war in Ukraine) is privilege. Both Arab Americans and Jewish Americans are minorities in the US and targets of hate crimes. While the most recent spike in hate crimes has predominantly targeted Jews, I still cannot even process the brutal murder of a Palestinian-American child in mid-October. Nevertheless, some members of the community not belonging to either minority feel free to tell the minority members what is and what is not an aggression against them. Here I feel that the Jewish minority is targeted disproportionately. Having stated that, I have to disclaim that, as an observer, I am not bias-free. This brings me to the last topic of the title, cognitive bias.
In my line of work, I need to be aware of cognitive biases such as law of the instrument, expectation bias, and selection bias. This makes me curious about cognition distortions in general, and perhaps more sensitive to their manifestations in general discussion. And cognitive bias can mess up an attempt to have a constructive discussion just as badly (if not worse) as it can mess up a scientific paper submitted for peer review. Here are a few examples (likely filtered by my own biases).
Anchoring bias, to put it simply, is the overreliance on the first piece of information to be acquired on the subject. The first reports of the Al Ahli hospital blast on October 14 claimed that the hospital was hit by an Israeli airstrike with massive (in the hundreds) casualties. Followup investigations put the specifics of this claim in serious doubt, including definitively ruling out that the hospital itself was hit — the blast was in a parking lot. And when doubts remain about the exact origin of the explosion and the casualty count, the refusal of Hamas officials to present fragments of the munition that hit the parking lot is not exactly helpful. However, what most people (including members of this community) remember is that the hospital was hit by Israel with a massive casualty count.
At least a part of the anti-Israel sentiment on the left (sometimes veering into poorly disguised or utterly shameless anti-Semitism) can be traced to the Soviet anti-Israel propaganda that was extensively injected into the global discourse for decades since the 1950s. The Soviet Union initially supported the founding of Israel. USSR was the first country to legally recognize Israel. USSR and its allies (Czechoslovakia) supplied weapons to israel in 1948. However, right around that time Stalin ordered the assassination of Solomon Mikhoels, the chair of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and a brilliant actor and director. As Israel gained increasing support in the West, Stalin’s paranoia brought him to perceive Soviet Jews as potentially disloyal, which led to purges of prominent Jews, including the 1952 execution of at least thirteen Jewish poets and writers and the 1953 “Doctors’ Plot” hoax that was intended to trigger pogroms, stage trials, mass executions, and deportations of the Soviet Jews. This plan was stopped only by Stalin’s death, however, I personally knew two prominent doctors who had been fired and arrested in early 1953, only to be released and reinstated with no explanations later.
At about the same time, the Soviet Union launched a massive propaganda campaign against Israel which only expanded in the following decades. After the 1967 war, the Soviet Union and most of its satellites stopped diplomatic relations with Israel. The propaganda escalated, borrowing tropes from the Russian Empire and the Nazis, and culminating in the establishment of the “Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public” in 1983. Some of the most toxic recent proclamations on Daily Kos attempting to equate Zionism with Fascism can be traced directly to that propaganda — chances are, if one’s parents were Lefties, one literally inherited this anchoring bias.
Related to this is the combination of confirmation bias and recency illusion. For example, the October 31 IDF strike on Jabalia refugeee camp left a giant smoking crater in the middle of the camp. To many a commenter, this (recency) would appear to confirm that the earlier hospital blast was also the responsibility of IDF. However, in the comparison of the two explosions, quite a few questions arise to challenge this confirmation. IDF confirmed one strike but not the other. The scale of destruction in Jabalia completely dwarfs that at the parking lot near Al Ahli, yet the claimed casualty count is appreciably smaller. Nevertheless, confirmation bias would make the observer dismiss such considerations.
“Both sides...” mentioned earlier can also be considered a bias, although to me it seems more accurate to regard it as a fallacy known as argumentum ad temperantiam, where it is assumed that an argument between two extremes must be right. In turn, this fallacy can be attributed, like many others, to miserly cognitive processing: simply put, in many cases people lack the bandwidth to deal with complexity, leading to judgmental shortcuts that frequently save the mental effort but can take an unsuspecting person completely off-course.
Finally, going back to what I wrote about exceptionalism, there is such a thing as bias blind spot, where a person tends to perceive oneself as less biased than other people. For good or for bad, I perceive myself way more biased than many other people in the case of the Israel-Hamas war: Hamas killed my father’s friends. It is imperative that we recognize our biases and also realize that people who are now dead were quite recently just alive as we are and had as much agency.