It’s refreshing, really, to see this ravenous appetite for “facts” amid all the scandals roiling through multiple governments in Canada these days.
We appear to be convinced that once all the facts are revealed, the public will know the truth on everything, ranging from senators’ expenses in Ottawa, to gas-plant cancellations in Ontario, to the extra-curricular habits of Toronto’s mayor.
But new research in the United States shows that we may be going about this the wrong way — that if you want to settle a partisan argument, money talks more loudly than facts.
The study comes from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in the U.S. and came to media notice this week in a report by the Nieman Journalism Lab.
The NBER researchers wanted to explore the sad truth, exposed in countless controversies in the U.S., that facts aren’t enough to change the minds of hard-core partisans. Some Republicans will continue to believe that President Barack Obama was born abroad, for instance, and some deluded Democrats will persist in believing that George W. Bush somehow engineered 9/11 to boost his political fortunes.
This facts-be-damned phenomenon is not limited to American partisans either.
A few years ago, with a straight face, a serious cabinet minister named Jim Prentice (now a VP with the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce) went on television to explain how the Liberals were reckless spenders in office and how his boss, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, had balanced the budget.
(Not that facts are material in this case, but Canada’s budgets were actually in surplus during most of the Liberals’ last years in office, from 1997 to 2006, while Conservatives have run successive deficits since 2008. Whatever.)
I had a memorable conversation with a PMO adviser soon after Prentice made his bizarre TV appearance and was told that the facts were less important than belief in this case — that it was still possible to get the public to believe that Liberals were “tax-and-spenders.” Apparently, the reckless 1970s had seared more memories into the public consciousness than the more recent, fiscally prudent Liberal past.
It was an echo of that now-infamous quote that a senior Bush official (widely believed to be Karl Rove) uttered in a 2004 interview with journalist Ron Suskind, dismissing the media as the “reality-based community.”
“That's not the way the world really works anymore,” the official boasted to Suskind. “When we act, we create our own reality.”
Most of us watching Canadian politics over the past decade or so have any number of examples, from all parties, to bolster that view. Watch those political panels on the nightly talk shows, for instance, and on any evening you can see politicos of all stripes doing the equivalent of plugging their ears and saying “la-la-la, I can’t hear you” when faced with factual challenges to their talking points.
In the U.S., the NBER researchers wanted to see what it would take to get partisans to see facts — to return these people to the reality-based community, you might say.
So they came up with a novel idea: what if you paid people to give factual answers? The experiment is detailed at length in the research paper, complete with charts and graphs, but here’s the surprising conclusion:
“We find that small financial inducements for correct responses can substantially reduce partisan divergence, and that these reductions are even larger when inducements are also provided for “don’t know” answers.”
In plain language, the researchers are saying that fierce partisans will climb down from their absolute, facts-be-damned convictions if you offer them money to see the black-and-white reality or simply to get them to say “I don’t know.”
The report in the Nieman Lab suggests that this sheds a whole new light on how people respond to surveys and how journalists go about presenting facts to their partisan readers.
For what it’s worth, it tells me that people who are staunch partisans may see some reward, not necessarily financial, in clinging to beliefs despite contradictory evidence.
Loyalty, and belonging to a group, may be incentive enough for some to defy the facts sitting in front of their faces. Throw in the incentives of cabinet posts, promotions, exposure on TV, and you see why facts and evidence would take a back seat to partisan beliefs.
It’s hard to see how this new research could be put to practical use, though it’s fun to imagine some scenarios, such as TV hosts offering MPs $20 to rip up their talking points on air.
More seriously, and optimistically, though, the research does show those of us in the shrinking “reality-based community” that it is possible to shake people out of fierce, truth-defying partisanship.
We just have to come up with the right incentives for them to do it.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Susan Delacourt
We appear to be convinced that once all the facts are revealed, the public will know the truth on everything, ranging from senators’ expenses in Ottawa, to gas-plant cancellations in Ontario, to the extra-curricular habits of Toronto’s mayor.
But new research in the United States shows that we may be going about this the wrong way — that if you want to settle a partisan argument, money talks more loudly than facts.
The study comes from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in the U.S. and came to media notice this week in a report by the Nieman Journalism Lab.
The NBER researchers wanted to explore the sad truth, exposed in countless controversies in the U.S., that facts aren’t enough to change the minds of hard-core partisans. Some Republicans will continue to believe that President Barack Obama was born abroad, for instance, and some deluded Democrats will persist in believing that George W. Bush somehow engineered 9/11 to boost his political fortunes.
This facts-be-damned phenomenon is not limited to American partisans either.
A few years ago, with a straight face, a serious cabinet minister named Jim Prentice (now a VP with the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce) went on television to explain how the Liberals were reckless spenders in office and how his boss, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, had balanced the budget.
(Not that facts are material in this case, but Canada’s budgets were actually in surplus during most of the Liberals’ last years in office, from 1997 to 2006, while Conservatives have run successive deficits since 2008. Whatever.)
I had a memorable conversation with a PMO adviser soon after Prentice made his bizarre TV appearance and was told that the facts were less important than belief in this case — that it was still possible to get the public to believe that Liberals were “tax-and-spenders.” Apparently, the reckless 1970s had seared more memories into the public consciousness than the more recent, fiscally prudent Liberal past.
It was an echo of that now-infamous quote that a senior Bush official (widely believed to be Karl Rove) uttered in a 2004 interview with journalist Ron Suskind, dismissing the media as the “reality-based community.”
“That's not the way the world really works anymore,” the official boasted to Suskind. “When we act, we create our own reality.”
Most of us watching Canadian politics over the past decade or so have any number of examples, from all parties, to bolster that view. Watch those political panels on the nightly talk shows, for instance, and on any evening you can see politicos of all stripes doing the equivalent of plugging their ears and saying “la-la-la, I can’t hear you” when faced with factual challenges to their talking points.
In the U.S., the NBER researchers wanted to see what it would take to get partisans to see facts — to return these people to the reality-based community, you might say.
So they came up with a novel idea: what if you paid people to give factual answers? The experiment is detailed at length in the research paper, complete with charts and graphs, but here’s the surprising conclusion:
“We find that small financial inducements for correct responses can substantially reduce partisan divergence, and that these reductions are even larger when inducements are also provided for “don’t know” answers.”
In plain language, the researchers are saying that fierce partisans will climb down from their absolute, facts-be-damned convictions if you offer them money to see the black-and-white reality or simply to get them to say “I don’t know.”
The report in the Nieman Lab suggests that this sheds a whole new light on how people respond to surveys and how journalists go about presenting facts to their partisan readers.
For what it’s worth, it tells me that people who are staunch partisans may see some reward, not necessarily financial, in clinging to beliefs despite contradictory evidence.
Loyalty, and belonging to a group, may be incentive enough for some to defy the facts sitting in front of their faces. Throw in the incentives of cabinet posts, promotions, exposure on TV, and you see why facts and evidence would take a back seat to partisan beliefs.
It’s hard to see how this new research could be put to practical use, though it’s fun to imagine some scenarios, such as TV hosts offering MPs $20 to rip up their talking points on air.
More seriously, and optimistically, though, the research does show those of us in the shrinking “reality-based community” that it is possible to shake people out of fierce, truth-defying partisanship.
We just have to come up with the right incentives for them to do it.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Susan Delacourt
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