Most issues in politics are more
complicated than most partisans think. It is usually hard to know enough to
make a truly informed decision among competing policy choices. To make matters
more complex, competing policy choices are almost always backed by either by
(i) different sets of facts and spin,
and/or (ii) insufficient information for a reasonably informed decision.
Most voter opinions on most issues
are based on a combination of false facts and personal political ideology or
morals. Personal political ideology-morals, e.g., liberalism and conservatism,
fosters false
fact beliefs in most people. That is an inherent aspect of the largely intuitive
biology of human cognition. Most policy choices are therefore overwhelmingly
subjective-emotional and error prone relative to what's best for the public
interest.
To be more objective-rational than subjective-intuitive,
personal policy choices need to be based as much or more on unbiased, unspun facts
and reason, than on subjective personal ideology or morals. Unfortunately for
average citizens there are several major barriers that make access to unbiased
facts difficult or impossible. Two barriers are fear and fairness.
The fear barrier
For people with deeply
held political beliefs or ideology-morals, it can be frightening or
impossible to honestly face facts. Unbiased facts are independent of personal
beliefs and they often undermine personal beliefs. An excellent way to avoid
facing facts is to block the work or research needed to obtain relevant facts
about an issue. That is a tactic that conservatives have used, sometimes to
great effect. It is not clear if liberals resort to this fact-blocking method.
Examples of research killing include
a very successful effort by pro-gun politicians, mostly conservatives, gun manufacturers
and the pro-gun lobby to squelch
federal funding for research into the public health impacts of gun
ownership. That coordinated effort began in 1996, three years after an article
in The New England Journal of Medicine
showed that gun ownership was a risk factor for
homicide in the home. Groups
such as the NRA continue to block federal funding for research.
Conservatives
have also blocked or tried to block federal funding for (i) independent,
objective analysis of various technical issues to inform congress and (ii) NASA’s
research on climate science based on false arguments.
Efforts to block research that
conservatives believe would undermine their ideology are based more on fear of
what unbiased facts would show than anything else. There is no other obvious credible
explanation.
The fairness barrier
Obtaining unbiased data often
requires controlled experiments with different groups, control and/or
experimental groups, being subject to different conditions. Controls are usually
needed for comparing the effect of one test condition with another. Without
controls, it is hard or impossible to objectively measure and compare one
condition or policy choice with another. Despite the need for controls in
experiments or policy option tests, resistance sometimes crops up because it is
perceived to be unfair to treat different groups of people differently.
The Wall Street Journal reported an example of fairness
barrier interference with research and how it can be overcome at least sometimes.
A researcher was interested in seeing if there would be academic and attendance
differences between students attending an urban high school who received a free
lunch compared to students who didn’t. The researcher wanted to randomly pick
students who would get the free lunch but the school blocked the research
arguing it was unfair to not give all students a free lunch. Fairness blocked
research.
A few months later the researcher
went back to the same school but informed administrators that he had only
enough money to give half the students a free lunch and the administrators
could pick who got the free lunches. The administrators suggested randomly picking
which students got the free lunches and which didn’t. The researcher got his
experiment because it was framed as sufficiently fair from the point of view of
the people with the power to allow or block the research.
Again, the relevance of the subjective-intuitive
nature of human cognition to politics makes itself abundantly clear. The open
question is whether American society is ready to accept the basic nature of how
our brains see and think about the world and conclude it is time for a
different, smarter way of doing politics.
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