As Churchill* once said: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
The tool of a Kenyan plot to take over the US Government
This article in The Boston Globe makes the argument that democracy is actually damaged by the way that people respond to being contradicted by evidence (they dig in rather than adapt to it). It uses this satirical post from The Onion to make the point that the virtue of open-mindedness isn’t a universal one;
Spurred by an administration he believes to be guilty of numerous transgressions, self-described American patriot Kyle Mortensen, 47, is a vehement defender of ideas he seems to think are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and principles that brave men have fought and died for solely in his head.
Kyle Mortensen would gladly give his life to protect what he says is the Constitution’s very clear stance against birth control.
“Our very way of life is under siege,” said Mortensen, whose understanding of the Constitution derives not from a close reading of the document but from talk-show pundits, books by television personalities, and the limitless expanse of his own colorful imagination. “It’s time for true Americans to stand up and protect the values that make us who we are.”According to Mortensen—an otherwise mild-mannered husband, father, and small-business owner—the most serious threat to his fanciful version of the 222-year-old Constitution is the attempt by far-left “traitors” to strip it of its religious foundation.”
The wider article is based on the notion of information ‘backfiring.’ This is the phenomenon that you will be familiar with: if someone has a factoid within a strongly argued argument authoritatively contradicted, it often leads to the host opinion being held more – not less strongly.
One of the key factors here, according to this article, is the question of self-esteem:
“Nyhan worked on one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.”
Personally, I’m particularly wary of this article precisely because it seems to confirm almost every prejudice that I’ve aired on this blog and elsewhere in recent years. It gets worse as well:
“A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong.”
The solution that we’re offered here is also an interesting one: Raise the ‘reputational cost’ of peddling disinformation. Here’s a thought experiment for you: What if we could actually make it very difficult for pundits or politicians to get away with exaggeration of misinformation? Would the result be a better type of politics? This is a question that we’ll be returning to shortly as part of the Political Innovation project.
But here’s a wider point: Does this article show that a more informed public =a poorer democracy? I’d say that it doesn’t, and that this is a category error. A more informed and fanatical public may result in poorer politics, but it’s perfectly possible to insulate democracy from politics to a degree. That fact that we aren’t doing so as much as we used to doesn’t alter the core argument here.
There are also many issues that haven’t slipped into the culture wars and on which The Daily Mail hasn’t got around to terrifying people yet. The design of hospitals, schools and housing schemes – the whole question of co-design is one obvious one. Even issues which – to the cognoscenti are politically charged ones – what is the best structure of ownership and control for public services – is one that a broadly selected citizens jury could be consulted on fruitfully.
The question of presentation and framing is the one that democrats need to focus upon.
*My certainty about that opening quote being attributed to Churchill will only increase the more you insist that it was actually John Maynard Keynes wot said it.
