Behind a paywall
But freely available from one of the authors’ website.
Basically, pigeons also start with a slight bias towards keeping their initial choice. However, they find it much easier to “learn to switch” than humans, even when humans are faced with a learning environment as similar as possible to that of pigeons (neutral descriptions, etc.). Not sure how interesting that is.
Well, if people are absolutely, definitely rejecting the possibility that this might ever be true, without looking at the data, then they are indeed probably professing a tribal belief.
However, if they are merely describing reasons why they find this result “unlikely”, then I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that. They’re simply expressing that their prior for “Communist economies did no worse than capitalist economies” is, all other things being equal, lower than .5.
There are several non-obviously-wrong reasons why one could reasonably put a low prior on this belief. The most obvious is the fact that when the wall fell down, economic migration went from East to West, not the other way round (East-West Germany being the most dramatic example).
Of course, this should not preclude a look at the hard data. Reality is full of surprises, and casual musings often miss important points. So again, saying “this just can’t be so” and refusing to look at the data (which I presume is what you had in mind) is indeed probably tribal. Saying “hmmm, I’d be surprised if it were so” seems quite reasonable to me. Maybe I’m just tribalised beyond hope.