Misrepresenting facts and lying have long been a part of politics. However, it was claimed facts died on April 18, 2012. On this day Representative Allen West of my adopted state of Florida claimed that about 80 congressional democrats were members of the Communist Party. This was not true, but West decided to stand by his remarks. If facts died that die, one must wonder what has happened since then. Can facts become more dead?
As a gamer, this situation reminds me of the death rules in D&D. While in some versions characters die when they are beaten down to zero hit points, in other versions a character could keep taking damage beyond zero and end up with negative hit points (usually dying at -10). Facts seem to be like that—although they seem to have died in 2012, they kept taking damage and are now very dead. One might even say that Trump and his ilk have turned facts into the undead: horribly distorted versions of once living things. But some people retain hope for facts.
While this might come as something of a shock, people are often not very rational—especially when it comes to politics. When people get information that corrects a false claim they believe, they are even more likely to believe the false claim. For example, if Republicans and Democrats read an article that claims that a Democrat did something bad and then learn that the article was mistaken, the Republics would now be more inclined to believe the original article even though it had been shown to be in error. The Democrats would be more inclined to reject the original article. In short, it seems that corrective information is generally only accepted when it corrects in a way that matches a person’s ideology. This has unfortunate effect that correcting an error in an ideological context will only correct the error in the minds of those who already want to believe it is an error and will probably not change the mind of those who want to believe.
In addition to the obvious problem, this tendency also means that people who are wrong (intentionally or unintentionally) usually will not suffer any damage to their credibility among their own faction, provided that their errors match the faction’s ideology. As such, the consequences of saying things that are not true seem to be generally positive, at least from a pragmatic standpoint. After all, if the claim is properly ideological and is not called out, then it will be accepted. If it is called out and shown to be in error, the criticism will generally serve to incline those who agree with the claim to still believe it. As such, presenting an ideologically “correct” falsehood (which need not be a lie) seems to be a win-win situation.
Since I teach critical thinking, this worries me. After all, a large part of my job as a philosophy professor is trying to teach people that they should base at least some of their beliefs on evidence and rational argumentation. One stock response to my concern is that people are this way “by nature” and there is little point in trying to teach people to be critical thinkers. Trying to overcome this tendency and solve the problem of ideological irrationality would be as futile as trying to solve the problem of teen pregnancy by trying to teach abstinence (after all, people have sex by nature).
On my bad days, I almost agree. After all, I often see people who are rational in non-ideological areas lose this capacity when it comes to their ideology. However, this is not true of everyone. After all, there are clearly and obviously people who can do a reasonably good job of objective analysis. While some of this might be disposition, much of it is due to training. While everyone might not be trainable, most people can learn. To use an analogy, just as natural tendencies can be overcome by other forms of training (such as military training), this allegedly natural tendency to just go with one’s ideology could be overcome. I know this because I have seen it happen. Albeit rarely.
Of course, there is also an artificial barrier. Some bad people benefit from being able to (consciously or not) manipulate people. As such, they have a vested interest in learning how to do this while also ensuring their targets are left as defenseless as possible. While critical thinking skills are in demand, our education system is largely designed to not create such skills. One example is that very basic critical thinking classes are not taught until college. While some educators wonder why students do so badly at critical thinking, this is an obvious part of the answer. Imagine the math skills of students if they took their first actual math class as a college freshman. While it might be countered that critical thinking is too hard for kids, this is not true—the basics could be taught as soon as kids were being taught the basics of math and probably even earlier. In short, I would say that much of what is attributed to human nature is the result of education—or the lack thereof.
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