Moon as puzzled as Romney

By Jason Lim

It’s ironic that the comments coming out of the Moon Jae-in camp sound a lot like those that came out of the Mitt Romney camp immediately after his loss to Barack Obama, which boils down to, “We thought we had it won because everything we saw, heard, and touched in the days leading up to the election told us we were going to win. We are dumbfounded to have lost.”

One of the most vocal members of the Moon camp ― at least on the social media front ― assemblyman Jung Chung-rae, posted the following on his Facebook page a few days after the election defeat: “Like you, I am only a weak human being and couldn’t come to my senses for a while. Just two days before the election, public opinion polls of all three major broadcasters KBS, MBC, and SBS had Moon overtaking (Park Geun-hye) to lead by 1.4 percent and, with the voting percentage so high, I couldn’t imagine that we would lose.”

At least the Korean democrats had some polling numbers to misinform them. The Atlantic Monthly reported that the Romney camp had actually discounted polling numbers that showed Obama to be ahead and reshaped the results to suit their hoped-for version of events and believed in its inevitability so much that they were shell-shocked to end up in a different place. Just the fact that Boston’s Logan Airport was overflowing with private jets bringing in well-heeled friends of the Romney camp to celebrate the impending victory speaks volumes to how they allowed themselves to be misled.

And that’s the key. They all allowed themselves to be misled because they wanted something so badly. This is called confirmation bias. It’s one of the most common cognitive biases and refers to a subconscious tendency to seek out information that supports a hypothesis or end state that one is hoping for. It frequently leads to incorrect conclusions because you are only allowing yourself to see information that supports your wished–for scenario. And more often than not, you are unpleasantly surprised at the end.

No one is immune to these types of subconscious influences that shape our thinking processes. Even Ross Douthat of the New York Times admitted, “It was remarkable how many analysts not normally known for their boosterism (I’m thinking of Michael Barone and George Will in particular) were willing to predict that Romney would not only win but win sweepingly, capturing states that haven’t gone Republican since Ronald Reagan. But even less starry-eyed conservatives ― like, well, myself ― were willing to embrace models of the electorate that overstated the Republican base of support and downplayed the Democrats’ mounting demographic advantage.”

But the real interesting lesson in the Moon loss was how the election played out in social media. No, I am not rehashing the same, tired question on how the social media traffic did or did not reflect that true nature of the electorate. That’s immaterial.

What is real is that the rule of homophily once again prevailed. Homophily is a basic social media axiom that says “similarity breeds connections.” In other words, if you are a Facebook user, you tend to friend those people with whom you share similar beliefs, outlooks and values, as shown by their postings. Conversely, this means that you tend to unfriend or not friend those with whom you don’t share the above similarities.

A case in point is a Facebook friend of mine who was a disappointed Moon supporter who posted, “At least the election provided me with a list of which jerks I should unfriend.” He was obviously referring to Park supporters among his Facebook friends.

Needless to say, this is similar to the confirmation bias that I spoke about before. They both tend to limit you to the information flow that tends to support the end–goal that you are seeking. Perhaps this similarity between homophily and confirmation bias is not so surprising in light of recent leading thoughts that propose that the Internet is evolving like the human brain.

Jeff Stibel’s “Wired for Thought” makes a compelling case that the “Internet is more than just a series of interconnected computer networks: it's the first real replication of the human brain outside the human body.” Also, an award winning film called, “Connected,” makes the case that the “Internet is a dynamic and sensitive network similar to a child’s brain.”

So, if the web of social media connections has evolved to “think” similarly as the human brain, doesn’t it reason that it is also subject to the same types of cognitive biases that the human brain is? And I am not just talking about confirmation bias. There are other common ones such as anchoring bias (when you put too much emphasis on one observation or event to color everything else) or how we tend to like those things or people that we are more familiar with.

Of course, more robust work needs to be done by people who are far smarter than me but I think cognitive science could provide an interesting framework to look at what’s happening in the world of social media. And hopefully it will keep us from collectively indulging in the same types of biases that misleads our individual decision making.

Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C., based expert on innovation, engagement and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. He can be reached at jasonlim@msn.com, facebook/jasonlim2000 and @jasonlim2012.