Since it is the political silly season and much of the
silliness is only possible because of the foibles of human cognition, I thought
I would dedicate this post to our repeated inconsistencies when it comes to
information processing about our preferred candidates and issues.
Some of this is based on a recent
Timemagazine article that got me thinking about it.
I think this is a particularly important topic because of the
growth industry in fact checking. Most
of the mass media now have their cadre of fact checkers rating political ads,
sound bites, and debate speeches. “Four Pinocchios”
or “misleading” or even “liar, liar, pants on fire.”
So why hasn’t all of the fact checking led to more honest
politicians? Aren’t they worried about
being called a liar on the national news?
No, actually they are not. And
with good reason. Precious few in the
electorate is swayed by it. Why not? It is the usual culprits – cognitive dissonance,
loss-aversion, self-identity, and confirmation bias.
Here is just a simple example of what I am talking
about. In 2006, researchers at Georgia
State conducted a study where they brought in liberal and conservative
voters. They gave them an article outlining
how President Bush claimed his 2003 tax cuts increased government tax revenue
and then the proof that it hadn’t. So
what happened in the minds of the voters?
Of course the liberal voters accepted that President Bush’s claim was
false. But not only were the conservative
voters unswayed, they were even more sure that he was right after reading that he
wasn’t. The same thing happened in
reverse for an article about a John Kerry claim that Bush had banned stem cell
research.
So what happened? These
are not opinions - these are facts!! And
yet we disregard them to our own ignorance. The process is actually
straightforward. Take the first case –
the conservative voter and the Bush tax cuts.
1. As a conservative
voter, I like Bush and the tax cuts. It
becomes part of my self-identity.
2. I hear something I
want to believe. It is easy to
incorporate this into my worldview and strengthen its contribution to my
self-identity.
3. I hear that the
claim is false. This is not only
contradictory to what I thought, it is threatening. It goes how I thought the world worked
(cognitive dissonance). It goes against
who I am (self-identity). It implies
that my previous opinions, statements, and votes were wrong (loss-aversion).
4. So I engage in
some simple self-protection counter-arguing.
I can either change my world view and my self-identity or I can find a
reason not to believe the counterfactual.
It is a biased media. Their data
is flawed. They didn’t report the whole
story.
Some mediating variables:
1. Ironically, the
more informed the voters were, the more susceptible they were to this. They had more ammunition to counter-argue
with.
2. Perhaps not
ironically, the more self-confidence the voters had, the less susceptible they
were. When the researchers (in a follow
up study) made their participants feel good about themselves before asking, they
were more likely to believe the falseness of the original claim.
3. It also depends on
who is making the counterclaim. When it
was Fox News that reported the claim was false, the conservative voters had a
harder time counter-arguing. So they
were more influenced by the report.
