Good Facts Won’t Save You This Time
This is an adaptation of the latter half of a post I just wrote at The Debate Link. The post there involved a specific debate over American views on tax policy, but the second half discussed some new research regarding how citizens understand facts in political deliberations, and that issue I thought would be more interesting to TMV readers.
A friend of mine, exasperated with partisanship, Washington gridlock, and the seeming dominance of know-nothing blowhard pundits setting the public agenda, recently wrote a frustrated Facebook post saying she wished that only the well-informed could vote. Maybe then, she said, “we’ll finally have some centrism going on.” I regretfully had to burst her bubble: an electorate composed only of the politically well-informed would likely be even more polarized than what we see today. Political ignorance runs rampant in our society, but the folks who are most likely to be at the bottom in terms of political knowledge are the vaunted “independents”, “moderates”, “centrists”, and “swing voters”.
This isn’t because independents are idiots. Rather, it is perfectly predictable under standard rational choice metrics. Simply put, there is very little reason for anyone to become knowledgeable about politics. The odds that me becoming better informed on, say, the health care debate will actually result in better outcomes is virtually nil in a multi-million member polity. “Rational ignorance” is the technical term for a situation where the benefits of becoming informed are outweighed by the costs of attaining knowledge.
So why are some people informed about politics? Simple: Because they gain some other benefit from becoming informed. And the most common form of that benefit is the joy of “rooting for your team” — also known as partisanship. More fundamentally, there is a strong correlation between being an “independent” and simply not caring that much about politics. If you find politics and policy to be fun and interesting, you likely have strong views on policy. And despite what your Green Party friend will tell you, there are in fact pretty substantive differences between the parties which track coherent ideological divides. Occasionally you find the truly idiosyncratic wonk who is undecided because she has strong and well-founded beliefs that happen to substantially cross-cut partisan divisions. But odds are, if you know enough to have a well-grounded opinion on a topic, it is pretty apparent which party best matches onto your policy preferences. It’s the folks who lack such knowledge (or any real desire to attain it) that cluster towards the center.
Okay, you say, that might be disheartening. But it just points to the importance of political education. Right now, the only folks who have an incentive to become informed are partisan operatives. If we expand the pool so that everyone gets a good civic education, learns the facts, and becomes better informed, then we’ll see a gradual political convergence away from partisan stereotyping and towards good governance.
There is an intuitive plausibility to this. Generally, we believe that as people learn more facts about a given subject, their policy beliefs on the subject will begin to converge. The idea makes sense: learning more means dispelling inaccurate stereotypes and prejudices; as information is attained, people begin discarding stances that don’t fit the facts and instead adopt those which do.
Unfortunately, as research by Dan Kahan and others indicates, the opposite is usually true. Providing additional facts and information doesn’t cause policy convergence, it causes policy polarization. The reason is that most fact patterns contain narratives, inferences, and interpretations which plausibly can be deployed to support diverse policy positions. Facts, alone, can never by themselves tell us anything about fundamentally value-based policy judgments, even under ideal deliberative conditions. People accordingly interpret the information they receive in manners which support their prior dispositions, only now they feel more comfortable in these beliefs because they have “facts” to back them up. Given this latent ambiguity, there is no incentive to agree, and lots of psychological incentives to latch on to friendly fact stories in order to preserve ones preexisting beliefs. These incentives are, of course, exacerbated when the deliberative community is ideologically homogeneous.
Even where the facts unambiguously support one position over another, that still doesn’t guarantee any shift in attitudes. We’ve already discussed rational ignorance, now consider “rational irrationality”. Rational ignorance indicates that people won’t seek out political knowledge, but it doesn’t make any claims about how they will respond to new information that they happen to come across — we would hope that they would take this happy happenstance to update and improve upon their prior beliefs. Once again, prepare to have your hopes dashed. Rational irrationality occurs when persons value holding a certain belief (e.g., the bible is infallible), and the costs of maintaining it are less than the discomfort that comes from reassessing it. This, too, is common – unless one is a scientist, there are relatively few personal costs to declaring oneself a creationist compared to the psychic costs (for some) of abandoning biblical literalism. Likewise for political beliefs – given the aforementioned unlikelihood that any one person’s change in attitude is going to actually cause a change in policy, there are few benefits to reassessing one’s beliefs in the face of new evidence that would stack up against the dissonance of, say, breaking with your peer group or abandoning a previously deeply held commitment.
In a large sense, then, the technocratic dream of informed, grounded, fact-based moderates is a fantasy. The people who are informed about politics are the people who are most likely to be partisans. Adding more facts will simply entrench preexisting ideological divides. To the extent they matter at all, facts are largely instrumental players that only come into play once we’ve resolved (through deliberation or brute majoritarianism) the far more fundamental value conflicts. We can have a system where informed citizens control, or one in which “moderates” control, but we almost certainly cannot have both.
23 Responses to “Good Facts Won’t Save You This Time”
Interesting topic and I think the outcome you prophesize is true.
However, I don't think “more facts” in the abstract is really the driver of the equation, rather I believe it would be how those additional facts play to each person's situation. Facts about government programs are rarely going to have a perfectly equal amount of good and bad to an individual's situation……therefore, the more of these facts that are discovered, the less logically likely these are going to drive someone towards a centrist position.
Team rooting is for public jawboning purposes….behind the voting curtain is self-interest.
Thought provoking concept, even if the presentation was a little hazy.
There's something else here that I don't think was properly factored in: the drive to question authority. Outside of common mathematics and classic physics, there's very little absolutely provable truth out there. Yet the emphasis of traditional education and mainstream news is the spoon-feeding of their truth in factually stated ways. The nation, in general, is not teaching kids to pursue truth but to echo back what they've been taught. But the major advances in science, religion, politics, and culture come from people who have questioned the facts that they were given, broken out of the patterns that they were taught, and fought for new ideals and ideas.
I hope it's not too late to teach the proper kind of rebellion, but that's what I see as missing ingredient here.
CO: I agree that self-interest effectively drives how people interpret facts, and thus determines which “team” people root for. But rooting behavior itself can't be explained by “self-interest”, because the marginal cost of fandom (the time and effort to learn the cheers and all that jazz) almost definitely outweighs the marginal gain you receive in terms of making policies that benefit you more likely.
I tend to agree with that, and am reminded of the old Jim Hightower comment about the middle of the road being for yellow lines and dead armadillos. Of course my own belief is that if people were better informed politically (and especially if they were better informed generally) there would be a mass migration to the left.
As for the concept of moderates, independents, centrists, etc. I think much of the appeal has to do with a wish for unity. TMV seems to be a place that attracts a variety of points of view and ideologies, although I wouldn't try to pin down the reason why.
I would. The very well enforced (angels singing)Comment Policy(music fades) that allows outsiders to write without getting pounced on and pummeled. Yes, other sites have comment policies, very good ones even, but nothing as well enforced as I've seen here. There's also quite a bit more variety from the contributors.
dear Prof; i especially liked your reference to our usually invisible angel choir. I didnt realize people knew. thank you for noticing what you notice.
dr.e
I'm also rather amazed at how well you patrol the threads here. Maybe angels is better term than I first thought.
“There's something else here that I don't think was properly factored in: the drive to question authority.”
The real conflict remains: that between liberty and power. (Nationalism vs. localism, a lesser and possibly the next most important conflict, analogous to individualism vs. collectivism, comes next.)
“the technocratic dream of informed, grounded, fact-based moderates is a fantasy”
Well, it's not the introduction of television as a home appliance and the failure of hopes or even expectations of “Shakespeare for the masses,” but rather: people in this country often are not easily manipulated or controlled, or overly obedient or subservient — passive objects or instruments that are parts of a plan.
IMO, you're incorrectly interpreting most of this research.
Kahan's research dealt with subjects that were completely ignorant on the topic of nanotechnology….not exactly a common knowledge field. I would argue that his research is only relevant to a specific amount of ignorance. Once a person attains a certain amount of knowledge and is still a “moderate”, more information is not going to drive them to one extreme.
Schkade's research dealt with people that were already at extremes…not moderates discussing a topic.
Caplan's research is pretty right on. I grew up with a lot of religious people that refused to re-evaluate their parent taught relationship with god, despite the encouragement to do so by conservative christian professors.
Re-evaluating your belief system is a tough thing to do…but it is something we should all do. We change, the world changes, our knowledge grows.
That's interesting to me, because my father, a preacher, taught me to examine my beliefs and taught a few of the controversies within the larger church. I know that there are quite a few churches that teach like schools, handing down a set of doctrines like they're the only possible ways to think. That's not good for either secular or religious instruction.
In comparative religion we learn that one of the fundamental differences between Western religion and Eastern philosophy is that the former is based on faith and belief, the latter on practice and experience. The Bible says we can't know or see God, and we are not to doubt the “word of God.” What a contrast with the Buddha who said “much will be written about what I have said. But the truth (Dharna) cannot be found in words, but inside yourself.” His last words were reportedly “Doubt. And find your own way.” Westerners pray, asking an external force to intervene or “bless” what we want and who we love. Easterners meditate, seeking wisdom within. Of course this is a generalization.
Prof, you are fortunate if your religion included the ability to question. I don't think that's common in America. I was certainly never encouraged to question *religious* beliefs (if that's what you meant). Just the opposite.
My experience was always that what was taughtenforced by a large church wasn't exactly how many of the elders of that church believed and/or lived. I was given a rule book of how to live and the penalties for not following those rules. In order to attend the uni, you had to agree to those rules and penalties.
Once you got to the higher level theology classes…things became more much…”well, really, I know we have our rules….but your relationship with god is yours and that is how you will be judged.”
To me, the church uni organization was anything but christ-like, but the professors themselves were good examples of Christianity.
I was taught that I had a personal relationship with God. I worked for an eastern religion that taught the New Testament….figure that one out! Both taught that the path to god is through pray/meditation. Whether you looking within or up…the real question is whether or not you are looking.
@shannonlee: Interesting comment. I think, though, that the findings are more applicable than you give credit. I agree that someone whose underlying instincts on an issue are “moderate” may not be driven to the extreme by new information, though unless they're right in the center being part of an ideological homogeneous deliberative community will (i.e., someone who starts as ideologically center-right will turn doctrinaire right if she deliberates with a largely right-wing community). However, I also stated that I don't believe most people have “moderate” policy instincts, because the very act of becoming informed tends to make one support some cluster of policies over others, and usually (not always) that cluster is affiliated with one ideological orientation over another. The pool of genuine instinctual moderates on any given issue is pretty small.
Professor Kahan presented his latest study at UChicago yesterday, on differing perceptions regarding guilt/acquittal in an acquaintance rape case (so not the nanotech case, but something of reasonable popular salience). The key variable explaining the variance was an underlying ideological identification as a “hierarch” or an “egalitarian” (not, for example, gender, age, or political orientation). Importantly, one thing that exerted very little influence was the addition of different facts regarding the legal definition of rape — people just projected their prior understandings about the type of rape case this was and adopted the facts to fit accordingly. That, along with similar results in the HPV study, indicates to me that the problem is not restricted to arenas where people start as “know-nothings”.
Thanks for your response.
Maybe the problem for me is that I don't see an ideological homogeneous deliberative community. When making these conclusions about moderates, you have to put them into some deliberative playing field with defined boundaries. That may be easier to do in the US where we have left and right, but the world is full of so many different ideologies and ideas of how ideologies should be defined.
Becoming informed is not only about understanding a subject, but it is also about understanding how other people view the subject from many different angles. That knowledge alone breaks down the boundaries required to make some of these assertions.
As for the rape trial study, I'd have to do a little reading to respond, but from my personal experience on a murder trial jury, his conclusions are not what I saw. Our biggest problem was working out what the law actually meant in regards to murder 1 or 2. We sat and stared at 5 lines of text for over an hour and no one had a concrete argument for or against 1 or 2. We decided on 2 because it was the lesser charge in a debate where no one could strongly pick a side.
I would say these findings are more applicable in the US than I previously stated, but “universally”, I still don't agree.
Thanks again for taking the time to write that out.
Like many things, there's quite a variety there. Right now, the mainline churches are taking a beating, but the more independent churches are growing, just not enough to make up the difference. Although belief in God is waning right now, religious convictions, especially among younger people, are probably taking a harder, more lasting hit.
One of my dad's common sayings was that Jesus didn't come here to start a religion. Even if the bible is perfect (another point I don't buy at face value), we aren't.
I still believe that someone who understands their beliefs, whether secular, moral, scientific, religious, or political, is far more useful than someone who only knows how to repeat what they've been told.
I don't lament the fact that young people are veering off the religious course. I applaud it. Doubting is the first step to seeking, to finding and to knowing. Believing the simplistic children's story we're taught does not serve those who honestly seek to know the true nature of reality and of their own deeper identity. I watch the contortions of those who “believe in” the infallability of the Bible but somehow dismiss the parts that are obviously wrong or immoral. It's both amusing and sad. Ultimately, superstition and magical thinking don't help us make decisions, and I hope the day will come when our leaders aren't “praying for our troops” as if that ever does any good, or “praying for guidance” which let's face it, is not forthcoming. No one really hears the “voice of God” or of angels giving them advice unless they are insane.
No one really hears the “voice of God” or of angels giving them advice unless they are insane.”
Just out of curiosity, have you ever had an un-explainable incident, that would be unlikely to be a coincidence or whatever.
P.S. I am an atheist.
dduck, I've had profound spiritual experiences that I knew were not coincidence. Don't confuse my lack of belief in invisible magical beings with a lack of spiritual experience. I assure you, it's the opposite. I know for a fact that the santa claus story of God I reject is not how this place works (ie magic omnipotent Superman makes imperfect beings, gives them an old book and sends them to burning hell if they don't obey all the rules. Oh, except the slavery, misogyny and stoning to death parts. Those are outdated but somehow slipped through on the final edit. But if they obey the ones that still apply, and believe the stories-oh, except the one Gallileo disproved, and maybe a few others-they get to harp with the angels for all eternity.) These are the exoteric parts of the religion, rules for the uneducated masses, parables and morality stories, etc. The esoteric parts, about actually seeking, finding and knowing; those are absent from modern churchianity.
So, just out of curiosity, do you think God or angels speak to politicians or voters in clear words? The Guy is omnipotent, right? How come He can't set us straight on our beliefs and actions?
So, just out of curiosity, do you think God or angels speak to politicians or voters in clear words?”
Focus, I said I was an atheist. My question had nothing to do with religion. I also am disappointed in most religions.
ah. missed that. Sorry. Yes, I've had unexplained experiences. But I have never seen the physical laws of the universe violated, as they are in all the miracle stories. No one parts the Red Sea, raises the dead or walks on water. Not literally. Not here. Anyone who wants to prove these things can actually happen is welcome to show us. But believe it because it's written in a 2,000 year old book? No thanks.
Religion, for all its faults, has also been the main think tank for morality. And statistics, which too often get rejected out-of-hand by the anti- and non-religious, back up that morality quite well. I can also give you plenty of examples of “news” and “education” pieces that are provably wrong, or at least gross distortions or highly unlikely. Learning to question authority, recognize bias, and identify the difference between assumptions and facts, are basic needs for all people, and in all areas of life.