You see what your ideology intends you to see. Sorry, “data.”

I won’t go hard on this topic, because in my day I’ve already written about the power of belief on narrative, the idea that we live in a belief-driven world and not a data-driven one, the concept of guesswork vs. Big Data, the idea of “gut feel” vs. “use analytics,” and much more. I think your life is shaped by your belief structure and your ideology, and The Platform Economy — like-minded groups and rabbit holes — has only underscored that.

Now we have a pretty good article out of Northwestern about all this, and I say “pretty good” because ultimately it’s an academic science type article and you need to slog through some experiments that aren’t happening in the real world, and draw inferences from that, and not everyone can do that. Still, this part stands out as relevant:

In other words, Kteily says, people with contrasting beliefs about social hierarchy can look at the same situation and see different things. “The conclusions that we arrive at in terms of how we perceive the world are shaped in important ways by the beliefs that we hold,” he says. “We tend to think about ourselves as neutral processors of the world, but the reality is that our belief systems shape what rises to the level of our attention in the first place.”

These experiments and research are designed around social-dominance orientation, or SDO. Basically, people with high SDO are comfortable with social hierarchies, while people with low SDO are less comfortable with those hierarchies. If you haven’t guessed, I am low SDO. I am apparently also low testosterone.

The “nut graf” finding of all this work is that participants with high SDO — that is, people who hold less socially egalitarian views — were significantly less attentive to inequality than those low in SDO. SDO correlated negatively with direct mentions of inequality, but also indirect ones: a sign that high-SDO individuals simply aren’t as attuned to signs of unfairness in the world around them as low-SDO individuals.

Basically, if you are a person who loves process and hierarchy and rising the ladder and dominance and all that, you probably don’t care that much about inequality, grand scheme of things. And who tends to run companies? Right. Mostly middle-aged guys who care deeply about…