The Pollyanna Delusion

Psychologists refer to our tendency to subconsciously emphasize positive thoughts over negative ones as the Pollyanna Principle, according to which people tend to produce a positive bias toward past events, show a propensity to ignore negative stimuli, and have an inclination to react to pleasant stimuli faster than unpleasant. In simple terms, it holds that people prefer to look on the bright side of things even in the face of discon rming evidence and when doing so isn’t in their own best interests. Books have been written about the Pollyanna Principle,1 and it’s been observed in a variety of human endeavors, from mass media, communication, advertising, and marketing, to writing stockholder reports.2 There’s interesting cognitive psychology behind this principle, along with its close cousins—con rmation bias, cognitive dissonance, and balance theory. This branch of psychology explains much about our nagging political dysfunction, but a related phenomenon exists that has yet to be fully appreciated by the social science community. I’ll call this the Pollyanna Delusion, which holds that scholars tend to underappreciate the potential misuse of their scholarly work by partisan and special interests. The latest Pollyanna Delusion candidate is the recent “One Internet” report from the Global Commission on Internet Governance.3 The subject of this report is nominally the Internet, however, it focuses primarily on politics and the law in which the Internet is ensconced, with scant attention paid to the technology itself. The result is a set of weak observations and policy recommendations that invite misuse by playing into the hands of the power elite who seek to control the Internet for ideological or economic advantage.