In what ways is factual evidence sometimes used, abused,dismissed and ignored in politics?
Answers
Answer:
Our ability to reason did not develop simply to help us find the truth. Instead, reasoning evolved to fulfill fundamentally social functions, like cooperating in large groups and communicating with others.
This is one of the arguments advanced in “The Enigma of Reason,” a book by cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. According to their theory of reasoning, reason’s primary strengths are justifying beliefs we already believe in and making arguments to convince others. While this kind of reasoning helps us cooperate in a social environment, it does not make us particularly good at truth-seeking. It also makes us fall prey to a number of cognitive biases, like confirmation bias, or the tendency to search for information that confirms what we already believe.Their ideas also help explain why politics seems to make us so bad at reasoning. If most of reasoning is for social cohesion instead of truth-seeking, then belonging to a particular political party should distort our reasoning and make us pretty bad at finding the truth.
A number of studies document the many ways in which our political party distorts our reasoning. One study found that people who had strong math skills were only good at solving a math problem if the solution to the problem conformed to their political beliefs. Liberals were only good at solving a math problem, for instance, if the answer to that problem showed that gun control reduced crime. Conservatives were only good at solving this problem if the solution showed that gun control increased crime. Another study found that the higher an individual’s IQ, the better they are at coming up with reasons to support a position—but only a position that they agree with.
Belonging to a particular political party can also shape our perception. In one study, researchers were asked to watch a video of protestors. Half of the participants were told the people in the video were protesting the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. The other half were told that the people were protesting an abortion clinic. Liberals reported saying the protestors were more violent and disruptive if they were told they were watching abortion clinic protestors, and the opposite was true for conservatives—even though everyone was watching the same video.
Why does political identity shape our thinking and perception so dramatically? NYU psychology professor Jay Van Bavel explains the results of studies like these with his “identity-based” model of political belief: Oftentimes, the actual consequences of particular party positions matter less to our daily lives than the social consequences of believing in these party positions. Our desire to hold identity-consistent beliefs often far outweigh our goals to hold accurate beliefs. This may be because being a part of a political party or social group fulfills fundamental needs, like the need for belonging, which supersede our need to search for the truth.