Frankly speaking, many of us are caught in a time when our unconscious biases smother our better judgments.

So much so, it’s likely that all of the fact-finding, investigating and filing of cases against the high/low-flying politicians whom we suspect of being involved in the massive thievery in flood control projects won’t readily change our minds or opinions about them.

Consequently, we find idiotic psychological advice that keeping ourselves emotionally distant from politicians is a crucial key to checking our biases.

But by keeping an emotional distance from politicians, we are better able to rationally process information and give equal weight to multiple viewpoints and evidence on really finding out who are the truly corrupt or not.

Nailing down the real culprits and the true causes of the widespread corruption, which is about to cast us into political unknowns, are the real challenges we face, not our initial judgments.

As such, a word or two on the many cognitive biases we often innocently harbor at this time will do good for preserving our intellectual honesty, political health and sanity. It also prevents spin masters and propagandists from turning us into useful idiots.

Now, for our purposes, there are three better known cognitive biases within politics to sway public opinion. These are: confirmation bias, coverage bias and concision bias.

There are, of course, many other biases besides the three which similarly warp our critical thinking and judgement.

Anyway, the well-known of the three is confirmation bias, which is about people’s tendency to look for evidence that support their political views and ignore evidence that challenges them. Sadly, confirmation bias is a common, widespread human failure.

But, once too many people fall victim to confirmation bias, solving such complex sociopolitical issues like the country-threatening corruption we’re now facing won’t be easy.

Indeed, while jailing politicians of the other side and stripping them of their ill-gotten wealth generally warms partisan hearts, it’s only scratching the surface.

Corruption isn’t only about individual immoral people, it is also more about the system which in the first place bred, nurtured and then allowed such types to thrive.

Meanwhile, coverage bias in the context of politics is a form of media bias where certain politicians or topics are disproportionally covered.

This problem became acutely pronounced in our social media era. There’s no question that our present beliefs, even our present political identities, have been swayed or reinforced by what we come across online. We’ve undoubtedly been dramatically influenced by algorithm-induced social media.

Now, the only way to remedy coverage bias — which often dovetails into confirmation bias —requires us to follow a wider variety of information sources, even those we may not initially agree with.

But many of us are reluctant to exercise such a basic responsibility, primarily since many of us don’t have the time nor the attention span.

Closely related to coverage bias is concision bias, which is when politicians or media selectively focus on information or interpretation that are easy to get across to the general public.

A common application of concision bias in traditional media is the sound bite and card summary posts. In social media, the Facebook reel, TikTok clip, and YouTube video, does the trick.

The only trouble with this easily digestible information, however, is that it all too often ignores nuanced and complicated views, even contexts.

And, without proper context, multi-faceted issues like corruption simply careen into extremely polarizing politics, where corruption holds true only for the other side, not one’s own.