Wired Reports: Facts and Pundits Can Actually Ruin Political Discourse

According to Wired contributing editor Jonah Lehrer, today’s political discourse has become “one big study in cognitive dissonance.” In a blog post yesterday, Lehrer expanded on a fascinating recent article in the Boston Globe that examines how cold hard facts often bolster misinformed opinions rather than correct them, especially in the political sphere.

The original Globe article details what is becoming known in psychology and political science as the “backfire” effect. In essence, people don’t like being wrong and, consequently, have the tendency to entrench themselves further in an opinion when confronted with facts that don’t conform to their pre-established beliefs:

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.

Lehrer’s recent book, “How We Decide,” deals with this “backfire” effect, though he explains the phenomenon in terms of the human brain wanting to maintain a consistent narrative rather than deal with “cognitive dissonance.” As a result, we tend to assimilate only the facts that confirm our beliefs rather than those that challenge them. In politics, that means already partisan voters have the tendency to become even more partisan.

Lehrer admits that this is simply the way our brains are wired and that there’s little we can do to minimize this effect. He does, however, single out over-exposure to political pundits as a key factor in the recent rise of this factual cherry picking. Lehrer cites a study by UC-Berkeley psychologist Philip Tetlock who, analyzing the opinions and predictions of a few hundred political pundits beginning in the 1980s, determined that these supposed experts managed to accurately predict events only 33% of the time, worse than random chance. “In other words,” Lahrer writes, “a dart-throwing chimp would have beaten the vast majority of professionals.”

This poor prediction record isn’t what concerns Lahrer the most, however. What worries him more is how, despite these inaccuracies, pundits have “become the model for political discourse,”

We now associate political interest with partisan blowhards on cable TV, these pundits and consultants and former politicians who trade facile talking points. Instead of engaging with contrary facts, the discourse has become one big study in cognitive dissonance. And this is why the predictions of pundits are so consistently inaccurate. Unless we engage with those uncomfortable data points, those stats which suggest that George W. Bush wasn’t all bad, or that Obama isn’t such a leftist radical, then our beliefs will never improve. (It doesn’t help, of course, that our news sources are increasingly segregated along ideological lines.) So here’s my theorem: The value of a political pundit is directly correlated with his or her willingness to admit past error. And when was the last time you heard Karl Rove admit that he was wrong?

As great as it would be to have more open, intellectually curious pundits, it’s unlikely. Ratings and the entertainment value of partisan prime time programs have made it such that the media industry is increasingly fond of outrageous opinions from either side of the political spectrum, as detrimental as that might be to the American public.

Also, incidentally, having more agreeable pundits would probably put us here at Mediaite out of a job.