Why Cognitive Biases Make It Hard to Get History Straight

Earlier this year, the New York Times (NYT) launched it’s 1619 Project, a series of essays designed to refocus American history with the legacy of slavery at the center of the American narrative. Since its inception, the project has garnered considerable attention and a supplementary education program is in the works for use in schools.

At the same time, the project has been polarizing. Some people feel that the 1619 Project is a well-needed correction to American history, which often underplayed the role of slavery. Others feel that the 1619 Project is itself biased, ignoring inconvenient facts of history in order to promote a particular ideology.

This issue heated up when several leading historians criticized the 1619 Project on factual grounds (the NYT has defended their project). Several criticisms were raised.

First, brutal slavery has existed across time and cultures and, largely left out of the 1619’s narrative is the role of Africans in the slave trade as well as owning other black Africans themselves. Some Native American tribes owned slaves. Modern versions of slavery continue to the present day, throughout the world. By not acknowledging a cross-cultural global phenomenon of slavery, the 1619 Project doesn’t put its history into context. Further, slaves existed in the Americas prior to 1619, particularly in Spanish and Portuguese/Brazilian possessions.

Second, the 1619 Project minimizes the contributions of American abolition and fails to acknowledge the concept of abolition was largely unique to Britain, the US, and other western cultures. Related, figures such as President Lincoln are portrayed negatively, despite their contributions to ending slavery. Some of the essays are worded with highly negative interpretations of U.S. culture, such as that it has a “brutal” form of capitalism or is “stealing” black music (that essay is more nuanced than the title, in fairness). A quote in an essay by project leader Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country,” has particularly come under fire.

I’m a psychologist; I study the interaction between psychology and history, among other things. Overall, my impression is that the critiques of some 1619 Project essays have merit. Even historians who declined to criticize the 1619 Project directly seem to acknowledge that it has factual problems.

Ironically, the 1619 Project may have similar limitations as efforts by some conservatives to diminish the role of slavery in U.S. history. In effect, dissimilar groups are struggling over different ideological narratives. If previous efforts to downplay slavery focused on a kind of optimistic American exceptionalism, the 1619 Project sometimes reads as kind of a pessimistic version of American exceptionalism. Thus, Hannah-Jones states American slavery was “… a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before.” Was it meant to convey that millennia of non-American slave societies weren’t as brutal?

History has always had a problem with being framed to support current social agendas. The problem, evident in both efforts to downplay slavery as well as the 1619 Project, arguably is that some facts are highlighted or others ignored in order to promote specific accounts of slavery. This is a psychological phenomenon known as confirmation bias. People become emotionally invested in particular beliefs and use different standards for evidence supportive or unsupportive of those narratives.

Another psychological phenomenon—cognitive dissonance—can occur when opposing beliefs or actions for an individual are incompatible. For instance, people may believe in equality and want to think of themselves and their culture as good yet engage in actions that are negative to certain groups. People who wish to downplay slavery, as with some textbooks, might relegate it to a minor role in U.S. history. But similar omissions open the 1619 Project to criticism. For instance, slaves such as the 20 Africans from the initial 1619 story were typically captured and sold initially by other Africans, not Portuguese or English, a fact that is left unmentioned. Carefully constructed narratives can allow both conservatives and progressives to preserve a sense of moral self-worth.

It is not my intention to suggest the 1619 Project is without value. As a series of opinion pieces, they can be illuminating regarding the perspectives of their authors, even if we might disagree on some points. But to the extent the NYT advertises them as factual history, they increasingly move onto thinner ground. History often is at the mercy of those who wish to turn it to their own political ends. Yet, on that score, the 1619 Project also does not appear to be an exception.