The Ignorance of Voters
- By Jonah Lehrer
- April 27, 2011 |
- 11:04 am |
- Categories: Frontal Cortex, Science Blogs
What a sad day for American political discourse. It’s more than a little pathetic that the President of the United States had to release his own long form birth certificate just to prove what every serious person already knew. Once a rumor starts, it’s really hard to stop, especially when a quick Google search can rummage up evidence for nearly any belief.
And yet, it’s not entirely fair to blame Trump, Drudge or the information age for our persistent idiocy. Rather, the fault is really our own: The human mind is simply terrible at politics. Although we think we make political decisions based upon the facts, the reality is much more sordid. We are affiliation machines, editing the world to confirm our partisan ideologies.
Consider a recent study by the Public Policy Institute of California. They polled voters shortly after the most recent election, in December 2010. Quite rightly, the majority of Californians said they had little confidence in their fellow voters to make public-policy decisions at the ballot box. That, unfortunately, is where the wisdom ends. While most voters believed that other voters were uninformed, they expressed no such skepticism about their own knowledge.
That was a mistake. It turned out that only 22 percent of voters could identify the largest category of state spending (public schools) when presented with a list of four options. In other words, they performed below random chance. Voters performed even worse when it came to state revenues, with many identifying car registration fees as the leading source of funding. (In reality, those fees account for 2 percent of state revenue.) As the Institute concluded, ?Californians? views about the budget are not based on an understanding of where the money comes from and where it goes.?
Like most voters, I assume that such ignorance only applies to other citizens, those people who don’t read The New York Times on their iPad while sipping single-origin coffee. But my self-confidence is probably wrong. The Economist summarizes some new research by Kimberly Nalder, of Cal State Sacramento, who quizzed people about Prop 13, a voter initiative that applies a tax cap to all property, both residential and commercial:
Ms Nalder found that the best-educated (those with more than a master?s degree) were most likely to answer incorrectly that Proposition 13 applies only to residential property. Those with the least education (high-school dropouts) were most likely to get it right. Similarly, those who were already of voting age when Proposition 13 passed were most likely to answer incorrectly and the youngest correctly. The same pattern held for income, with wealthier respondents being more likely to be misinformed. Perhaps most intriguingly, the largest group among homeowners (who directly benefit from Proposition 13) were misinformed, whereas the largest group of renters (who do not benefit) answered correctly.
These results are puzzling and troubling. As Ms Nalder suggests, perception (as opposed to knowledge) of issues such as Proposition 13 appears to have more to do with ?self-interest and a potential blindness to issues outside of one?s own experience? than with the content of the legislation. This would explain why those respondents who were ?non-citizens? or ?registered elsewhere? (probably recent arrivals) were more likely to give the correct answer than voters who are registered where they live.
Why does more education lead to less accurate beliefs? The answer returns us to the difference between rational voters (what we think we are) and rationalizing voters (what we really are). It turns out that the human mind is a marvelous information filter, adept at blocking out those facts that contradict what we’d like to believe. Just look at�this experiment, which was done in the late 1960?s, by the cognitive psychologists Timothy Brock and Joe Balloun.�They played a group of people a tape-recorded message attacking Christianity. Half of the subjects were regular churchgoers while the other half were committed atheists. To make the experiment more interesting, Brock and Balloun added an annoying amount of static – a crackle of white noise – to the recording. However, they allowed listeners to reduce the static by pressing a button, so that the message suddenly became easier to understand. Their results were utterly predicable and rather depressing: the non-believers always tried to remove the static, while the religious subjects actually preferred the message that was harder to hear. Later experiments by Brock and Balloun demonstrated a similar effect with smokers listening to a speech on the link between smoking and cancer. We silence the cognitive dissonance through self-imposed ignorance.
Unfortunately, the same process also applies to our political beliefs. It doesn’t matter if we’re holding forth on birth certificates or tax policy – we can’t help but discount and disregard facts that contract what we’d like to believe. The Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels analyzed survey data from the 1990?s to prove this point. During the first term of Bill Clinton?s presidency, the budget deficit declined by more than 90 percent. However, when Republican voters were asked in 1996 what happened to the deficit under Clinton, more than 55 percent said that it had increased. What?s interesting about this data is that so-called ?high-information? voters – these are the Republicans who read the newspaper, watch cable news and can probably identify their representatives in Congress – weren?t better informed than ?low-information? voters. According to Bartels, the reason knowing more about politics doesn?t erase partisan bias is that voters tend to only assimilate those facts that confirm what they already believe. If a piece of information doesn?t follow Republican talking points – and Clinton?s deficit reduction didn?t fit the ?tax and spend liberal? stereotype – then the information is conveniently ignored. ?Voters think that they?re thinking,? Bartels writes, ?but what they?re really doing is inventing facts or ignoring facts so that they can rationalize decisions they?ve already made.?
Long story short: I don’t expect the release of Obama’s birth certificate to end this ridiculous “debate.” In fact, it might even make things worse. We really are ridiculous creatures.
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