To Be Right or Liked? Evaluating Political Decision-Making

In the era of Twitter mobs and polarizing pundits, it seems like we care a lot about figuring out the truth and expressing it – resoundingly. Ideological battles are constantly being waged in the halls of Congress, on our news channels, and in our Facebook feeds. We can share our worldview like never before, yet we often feel worlds apart when assessing our shared reality.

But if we care so much about being right, why do we argue so much when facts about contentious topics are readily available? If the data are gathered, shouldn’t we all be reaching the same conclusions?

Recognizing biases in how we attend to information

Unfortunately, we don’t care about the truth as much as we typically think. A large body of evidence suggests people will attend to political information in incredibly biased ways. Our highly social brains make discerning truth more difficult than we might hope because we often protect our previous beliefs rather than face inconvenient truths.

For instance, Kahan et al. (2013) tasked a nationally representative set of participants with a difficult numeracy problem. Quickly looking at the data could easily lead participants to the incorrect interpretation, for the intuitive answer was designed to be incorrect. Reaching the correct answer required participants think carefully about the data. Interestingly, people were less accurate in interpreting the same data when they believed the information came from a study on gun control than when it was about the supposed efficacy of a new skin cream.

(From Kahan et al., 2013)

In the skin cream conditions, accuracy was best predicted by participants’ previously established quantitative abilities: those with better numeracy skills were more likely to interpret the results correctly. Yet for those in the gun control conditions, interpretive accuracy was significantly predicted by whether or not the data affirmed participants’ previous beliefs. Conservatives were more accurate when the correct interpretation suggested that banning concealed guns increased crime, and liberals were more accurate when the correct interpretation suggested that banning concealed guns decreased crime.