A Master Class in Confirmation Bias

a fresh snarkfest on why #trustthescience is nonsense

A new study came out recently purporting to draw conclusions about the psychology of people who refused the COVID vaccines. I’m sure you will be shocked to find that COVID vaccine refusers have negative psychological traits, according to these academics.

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Before we laugh at this nonsense together, I want to make something clear: if you got the COVID jabs, I am not laughing at you. As I am a fully remote worker who lives alone, the consequences of my decisions are borne solely by me. I absolutely recognize that this isn’t the case for everyone. My company respected my right to decide for myself what goes into my body. If my company didn’t respect that right and my employment had been on the line—particularly if a child who really needed me to provide a stable income and health coverage had been part of my calculus—it would’ve been a far more complicated decision for me than it in fact was. I understand this. My good fortune in this regard, that nobody had enough leverage to make me get the COVID jabs, makes it into my gratitude app, oh, about twice a week. So please feel no need to comment or email telling me how horrible the position you were forced into was; I do understand. Really.

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MSN reported on the study here. The short version: COVID jab refusers evidence a “lack of problem-solving skills” and “rigid thinking,” as well as an “inability to see complexity.”

Where shall we begin?

The Many Ways This Study is Bullshit

This essay would be longer than the study itself if I gave it the dissection it deserves, so I’m going to have to limit myself to just a few points. This is more snarkfest than serious refutation because, frankly, it’s so goddamn dumb that it doesn’t deserve the time investment that a serious refutation would take.

So let’s laugh together.

Way #1: Their Construct Is Bullshit

Their study looked for evidence of a construct they call “socio-cognitive polarization.”

“Recently, we introduced the construct of socio-cognitive polarization (SCP), a factor capturing conservative political ideology, absolutist thinking, intolerance of ambiguity, and xenophobia.”

Let’s break this down. They have a construct that is defined first by “conservative political ideology.”

Boy, there’s some scientific rigor if ever I heard it. Who the fuck knows what “conservative political ideology” is these days? Barack Obama is considered a neo-con by some. Woody Harrelson, a thirty-year vegan and pothead, is called “far-right” for a calling-out-big-pharma monologue on SNL that is exactly and precisely the kind of thing liberals used to do. Unfettered free speech used to be a primary value of the left; these days they want you banned from social media for your “violence” if you annoy a member of a favored group. What was “liberal” ten years ago is “far right” now on any college campus and in most newsrooms.

Most of us know, or at least have met, elderly people who marched with Dr. King and protested the Vietnam War—people whose politics haven’t changed an iota but are considered conservative or even far-right these days. The definition of “conservative” is (unfortunately) both fluid and context-dependent, as is the definition of “liberal” and “centrist” and the other terms that are defined in part by contrast to “conservative.” What makes you a progressive in Mississippi makes you a right-leaning centrist in Vermont. A Portland centrist is a Utah commie. Definitions are everything here.

Their paper says: “More precisely, a measure of conservatism was calculated as a function of conservative political ideology endorsement (“I endorse many aspects of conservative political ideology”) minus liberal political ideology endorsement (“I endorse many aspects of liberal political ideology”).”

If this means that they had people give themselves a ranking, by ranking themselves on a likert scale or such, then it’s even more useless than I thought. How many of us still know people who think “males should not play sports on female teams” is a good, solid, progressive-left position? Or that vaccine mandates are something only evil right-wingers would ever consider, because “my body my choice” is sacrosanct?

Most of us, I would venture. The difference between the Very Online and the normies in these sorts of applying-subjective-measures-to-the-self is massive, and using subjective measures of politics in this way is lunacy at best.

They might as well have said that their construct is based in part on factoring who’s a poo-poo head.

Way #2: The Questions They Used to Screen Applicants

The study conductors asked two questions.

Their first question was: ‘Are you vaccinated against COVID-19?’ This is a ridiculous question to ask in a yes or no manner. It does not have a clear definition, for one thing. This is why we have the “fully vaccinated” construct that is normally used, along with “fully vaccinated and boosted” and other such qualifiers. That there is no sharp line is why our data on COVID is such a polluted nightmare. Things that happen within two weeks of vaccination are recorded as happening to an unvaccinated person.

Additionally, people might be unable to get vaccinated who very much wish to be. Medical contraindications exist, as do prior infections. Some medical professionals advised waiting a certain amount of time after a COVID infection, while others did not.

Their second question was: ‘Are you in favor of the COVID-19 vaccine?’

This question is ambiguous, probably deliberately so. It makes absolutely no sense to ask this question in this way.

Am I “in favor of” the COVID-19 vaccine? Let’s see. I didn’t take it myself. I strongly encouraged two friends with multiple comorbidities to take it. I was relieved when I heard that a friend’s elderly grandparent had been able to get it, but shivered with nerves when told that another friend’s 15-year-old son had been vaccinated. I would, if decisions had been left up to me in early 2021, probably have encouraged the vaccination of everyone of age and health status to be in nursing homes. I would probably have strongly encouraged people over 50 with any comorbidities (or over 40 with multiple/severe comorbidities) to get vaccinated. I would not have mandated it for anyone.

If you were conducting this study and I told you my views of the COVID jab, as above, and you had to mark me on a paper as a yes or a no on this “in favor” question, which would you choose? Do you see that which column the checkmark went into would have a lot more to do with your politics than my actual view of COVID?

After they outline these questions, they add: “To be considered for the present investigation, participants must have demonstrated a clearly defined and coherent approach toward COVID-19 vaccines. More precisely, only participants who provided matching responses to the behavioral (a) and attitudinal (b) aspects of vaccine acceptance were included in the study.” (emphasis added)

A reasonable interpretation of this is that they only took people who answered “yes” to both questions or “no” to both questions.

This leaves out everyone who wanted very much to be vaccinated but could not be. It leaves out everyone who had a nuanced view of who could benefit from the COVID jabs—or simply understood risk stratification and would, if asked, apply it to the odd concept of “favor” regarding a vaccine—as well as everyone who had a complex situation that prevented them from a simple yes/yes or no/no on these two questions.

What does that mean for their study?

These people literally did a study where the applicants were screened by two questions that primarily (if not exclusively, or almost exclusively) ideologues would answer with an unqualified “yes” or “no”.

They thus limited their study to people who understood the question to be a proxy for a political litmus test, which in my opinion was the correct understanding.

The results of this study—where participants were screened with this level of oversimplification and ambiguity in the questions—were then interpreted, for vaccine refusers, to give evidence of inability to see and handle complexity.

Reminder: the fully “non-rigid” and “able to handle complexity” answer to the screening questions for this bullshit “study” was: “YES!”

Way #3: Their Tests for Problem-Solving Ability

Many of you may not know this, so let me clue you in on a secret. The majority of psychological experiments are conducted on college students. Participating in at least two of them was a requirement for several courses I took as a psych minor. Psychology courses skew heavily female and have for awhile. That means that the subjects are mostly drawn from females of the social class that tends to both go to college and major in something that doesn’t make you employable the day you graduate—psychology. Older results, from an era before college campuses skewed female, were mostly drawn from a pool of young men of the social class who tended to go to college and major in psychology.

Do you think we might put just a wee bit too much stock in some of these findings?

If you said yes to that question, the replication crisis would indicate you’re probably right.

The same skewing-towards-the-American-college-kid-mindset that results in mistaking American college students as good proxies for humans, period, is present in this study.

Their tests for problem-solving ability were rebus puzzles (for example, ‘cycle, cycle, cycle’ would be solved as ‘tricycle’).

Gosh, do you think that rebus puzzles as a measure for problem-solving ability just might give an advantage to the skillset of lefties who spend all day on the internet, scrolling Twitter shit-talking those who recognized the lab leak hypothesis for COVID origins as valid, working from home, and advocating for lockdowns and vaccine mandates—over, say, the problem-solving abilities of the cable techs who kept their internet running? The short order cooks who prepared the food they had DoorDash bring them?

“When poor problem-solving skills are associated with rigidity (high polarization), this probably implies the tendency to rely on absolutist and dichotomous thinking to make reality more understandable and manageable, even though this may lead to an oversimplification of the situation.”

The global situation was of course very complex, but each individual situation came down to a choice that was in fact a dichotomy. Either the needle with the experimental drug would penetrate my body, or it would not. Yes, or no. Binary. Two choices. A dichotomy.

Nobody needed an understanding of epidemiology, evolutionary theory, or the legalities of lockdowns to understand that they had choices to make about their own body and that of their children. Again, the irony is thick—the situation was more complex than the study conductors seem to realize, because they seem to fail to see the parts of it that were in fact very simple.

Their myopia is tragic in another sense. Vaccine refusers were faced with new problems in many areas of their lives. It was in fact a major argument in favor of vaccination—get the jab and get on with your life; the problems caused by refusing would be solved.

This bullshit being pushed by these academics and reported on by the legacy media is especially insulting on that metric.

Inability to See Complexity?

This charge is so absurd, it’s laughable. Their conclusion is based on the idea that reasonable people, faced with the complexity of a global pandemic about which data was constantly changing, would of course take the immutable step of injecting a novel vaccine into their bodies and the bodies of their children.

The COVID jab was the first vaccine I have ever refused. I went to great lengths, as an adult, to determine what vaccines my parents neglected to get for me as a child and catch myself up.

In my immediate circle, this circumstance—refusing a vaccine for the first time—is true, to the best of my knowledge, of everyone who refused it. People who took other vaccines promptly and on schedule largely looked at the complexity of the situation surrounding this one and said no.

Why didn’t I take this one? For starters, COVID was minimally risky to people of my age and comorbidity status. Also, I have a history of getting very unusual drug reactions. I am the “zebra” who frequently shocks the pharmacist with my reaction. She then pulls up the fine print on her computer and says, looking stunned, “Well, there it is. In the clinical trials, that happened to one person. Wow. I’ve never met anyone else who got that side effect but yep, it is a known, very rare side effect.”

Finally, the novel mRNA platform is not something I was comfortable with, particularly with minimal data available. When I was deciding, I looked up the data on the original trials and the one I studied most closely had only about 10,000 participants.

They rolled this vaccine out with an intention of jabbing everyone. All 330,000,000 Americans. In my view, ten thousand may be enough for a drug you’re trying to get information on to give to a group, even a large group, but common sense says that’s not enough people to get data sufficient to turn around and give it to everyone. If the 10,000 people were truly chosen at random (and of course they weren’t; they were chosen from people with the network, education, and resources to be aware of the trial, volunteer for the trial, get to and from appointments, etc.) we would still expect it to miss all opportunities to get information about how the vaccines might affect every illness or condition that has an occurrence rarer than 1 in 33,000 people (as there are 33,000 sets of 10,000 people in our country).

I’ve got one of those rarer-than-1-in-33,000 conditions myself, and a few years ago had surgery for another. So no, I didn’t think they did a good enough job gathering data for me to trust their “safe and effective” conclusion. And subsequent events have only made me feel better about my decision.

On the other hand, when two friends asked me for my advice, after careful questioning I strongly encouraged them to get vaccinated. They had serious comorbidities known to make COVID very risky. We had an interesting 3-way call that night about how and why I came to the conclusion that the vaccine was right for them and wrong for me.

I walked three other people (siblings and significant others of friends) through a discussion of risk/benefit. Two I advised against it and one I advised in favor of it.

Inability to tolerate complexity? Yeah, okay.

Rigid Thinking Is A Nuanced Topic

The authors of this study regard “rigid thinking” as a negative, without exception.

The lack of self-awareness in this would be breathtaking if I didn’t need my breath to laugh my ass off.

Rigid thinking is not a universal negative. It is a characteristic that requires nuance to apply when useful and discard when not. Rigidity in thinking is appropriate when a situation calls for it and inappropriate when it is not called for: DUH. An example: we want all police officers, at all times, to think rigidly about the question of whether beating up civilians is appropriate, do we not? And to rigidly, without self-doubt or second-guessing, turn in fellow officers who fail to think rigidly about that topic…do we not?

Y’all…..the people who brought us “Transwomen are women!” and “Trust the Science!” now want us to believe that they oppose rigid thinking.

Self-Knowledge of Rigid Thinking

It’s easy to conclude that people afflicted with their imaginary construct wouldn’t see it in themselves, so let me cop to my own rigid thinking here.

My attitude towards the COVID jabs, and my willingness to potentially take one in the future, did in fact change and become rigid. I went from being willing to reconsider this decision, as new information came available, to an attitude—indeed, a commitment—that they could stick their COVID jab into my cold, dead arm. I can tell you exactly when, and why, this changed.

On September 9, 2021, President Biden gave his infamous “our patience is wearing thin” speech. (Side note: this is the best reaction in the history of reactions and I want to be this woman when I grow up. If anyone is in contact with her, please tell her that I adore her.) That cemented me forever into a “no way in hell” position. At the time I made the decision, I had no idea if my employer would go along or not. Nor did I know if it would affect me, if my company cooperated. (Sometimes I am given data sets to analyze without knowledge of the clients, and if any of those were government data sets, his EO would potentially affect my job.)

What cemented me was this: having a male authority tell me that if I don’t want to suffer consequences—consequences he will do his best to impose—I must submit to having my body penetrated with an instrument of his choosing, against my will and without my consent. That was the moment that this went, for me, with regard to my own body, from a risk/benefit calculation to a moral principle of bodily autonomy on which I will not bend. Period.

Is that rigid? Yep. Is it perhaps even irrational? Is it one of those times when rigid thinking is likely not called for? Granted. Admitted. Owned.

But that’s where I am very much like every vaccine refuser I know: I can tell you exactly what would change my mind, both today (nothing) and prior to the point when my thinking became rigid (longer term data that changed the risk/benefit analysis for someone of my risk level).

Meta-cognition (the ability to accurately think about your own thinking) is not a particularly strong skillset of any noticeable group, on any part of the political spectrum, as far as I can tell. But it’s certainly not something only found on the left, as the authors seems to think, and it’s absolutely present among many vaccine refusers.

Conclusion

Now that this study is getting attention, I’m sure that someone will write a proper, detailed dissection, point by point, without gifs or swearing. I don’t have time for that, nor do I care enough what a bunch of brain-dead academic zombies think to invest the time. (If it happens to occur on Substack and I’m alerted, I will cross-post it for you all.)

I was just in a mood to write a bitchy snarkfest to make fun of this ongoing stupidity. Hope y’all enjoyed it.

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