When I was a teen and I asked my dad a question about my homework, he would tell me that there was a set of encyclopedias on the living room bookcase and that I should look it up myself. My dad, who had nothing more than high school education, was one of the smartest men I have ever known. He could do complex math in his head; he knew the positions of the stars and planets and could point them out regardless of the time of year. He read books voraciously and was constantly learning. Today, when my son comes to me and asks me a question I tell him, “You have the entire world’s knowledge at your fingertips—use your phone to look it up.” He grumbles and complains but he will look it up.
In 1789 Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” Sadly, many Americans are willfully ignorant, and while they will “look it up,” they tend to seek out information that agrees with their preconceived beliefs. This phenomenon isn’t found solely on the right side of the political spectrum—it impacts the left as well.
Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
On the left, we see this with the primary wars here on Daily Kos between those who support Bernie, and those who support Hillary. We see this with people opposed to vaccines, and various other topics. No matter what facts you produce, you will just cause the opposing side to dig their heels in deeper.
When I wrote my masters thesis, I had to overcome a great deal of preconceived ideas I had about Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Uprising, and how the media worked. I had a lot of opinions that the thesis committee had a difficult time with, one being Wisconsin’s schizophrenic purpleness—i.e. how can we elect Tammy Baldwin as a senator in one election, and then Ron Johnson as a senator and Scott Walker as governor in the next. I was adamant that we were consistently a blue state, even while ignoring the four terms of Gov. Tommy Thompson and Sen. Joe McCarthy. It took the threat of my thesis not being completed for me to admit I was wrong. I had to admit that I was wrong, and that the committee was right. I had to become aware of my bias, and I had to learn how to overcome that bias.
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” — Daniel Patrick Moynihan
A friend of mine recently posted a meme comparing National Socialism and Democratic socialism. This meme, which I will not share here, stated that both National Socialism and Democratic socialism were the same thing. This person has formed an opinion: That National Socialism is the same thing as Democratic Socialism, and believes it to be fact. This is despite the fact that National Socialism (i.e. Nazis) is to right of the political spectrum, and Democratic socialism is more middle left of the political spectrum. This person is steadfast with his facts to support his argument—and if you peruse just a few of the right-wing websites or listen to right-wing talk radio, you know where this argument comes from. Because Nazis used the word socialism, they were socialists. That would be like saying that the former communist East Germany was a democracy because their name was German Democratic Republic or GDR (in German they were Deutsche Demokratische Republik or DDR).
The fact of the matter was that communists, Socialist democrats, and trade unionists were among the first groups persecuted by the Nazis. It does not sound much like the National Socialists and Democratic socialists were on the same page.
How can we overcome our own biases and opinions and focus on the facts? How can we stop the dumbing down of America? One way is to, as my thesis advisor told me, be aware of your own bias and be open to facts that contradict that bias. “Do your research,” a common refrain one hears on social media, doesn’t mean that you should seek out information that confirms your bias. It means that you must be open to facts that contradict your bias.
That does not mean you go to Joe’s website and believe what Joe wrote. It means that you seek out peer-reviewed studies or other trustworthy sources that provide facts with little bias. As Americans, we also need to demand better sources. In other words, we need to hold our media sources accountable. For example:
If you increase the “reputational costs” of peddling bad info, he suggests, you might discourage people from doing it so often. “So if you go on ‘Meet the Press’ and you get hammered for saying something misleading,” he says, “you’d think twice before you go and do it again.”
The movie Idiocracy was not meant to be a documentary. However, unless we change the way we consume and process information, unless we recognize our own biases, we are doomed to be a society that dismisses science, that dismisses facts, and relies on the opinions of quacks, partisans, and hucksters to provide the information we need to make decisions that will impact not only us, but future generations as well.
That is not a world I want to live in.