Fact-Checking Can’t Do Much When People’s “Dueling Facts” Are Driven by Values Instead of Knowledge

As PG has mentioned more than one time before, The Passive Voice is not a blog about politics and PG intends to keep it that way. There is no shortage of online locations that will provide political commentary in all shades from the darkest Blue to the brightest Red to some other color PG has not yet learned about.

However, TPV is about writing and a great deal of writing these days is either comprised of or about misinformation. Public or private debate about the meaning or impact of facts that each side agrees are real is, to PG’s way of thinking, a useful exercise.

However, debate in which each side has a different set of facts about the same events may not be so useful. As Daniel Moynihan said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”

Yesterday’s post on this issue generated a lot of detailed and, at least for PG, interesting comments.

As to the connection of the following article to writing, PG suggests that the Internet has vastly increased both reading and writing by a far wider range of individuals than has been the case in times before the Internet.

A tweet is not a novel, but it definitely is writing with its own style and impact.

Twitter reports that more than 6,000 tweets are sent each second. Each tweet may be read by no one or thousands of people (sometimes more). In Q1 2019, Twitter reported that an average of 134 million people used Twitter every day and could see Twitter ads.

In its financial reporting, Twitter reports Average monetizable DAU (mDAU), Monetizable Daily Active Usage or Users. Monetizable means users who access via means that permit Twitter to show them advertisements. Many more tweets are read by people who see the tweet copied to a website or email, but are not included in mDAU.

It seems that almost everyone is a news reporter in some way and, when it is impossible for an individual to know everything that is happening in the worlds, real and virtual, she/he has to choose who and what to consume.

Because it is impossible to read everything, of necessity, everyone can and does curate their information by eliminating the overwhelming majority of the words floating around the Internet, regardless of whether those words describe true things or not. In some places online, white is white. Elsewhere, white is black. It’s all about the words.

In former times, large cities supported multiple daily newspapers that were well-known for their political leanings. In Chicago, The Chicago Tribune was known for its conservative views. In New York, The New York Times was reliably liberal. Someone who wanted to examine what would likely be a balanced view on a topic might read both newspapers to understand the arguments of each side.

There were other publications which promoted more extreme views on the left or right (or some other side) of such issues, but a great many people believed, rightly or wrongly, that such publications could not be trusted to report facts accurately or base their opinions on facts at all.

From The Nieman Lab:

The Mueller report was supposed to settle, once and for all, the controversy over whether the Trump team colluded with Russians or obstructed justice. Clearly, it has not. Reactions to the report have ranged from “Total exoneration!” to “Impeach now!”

Shouldn’t nearly 700 hundred pages of details, after almost two years of waiting, have helped the nation to achieve a consensus over what happened? Well, no. As Goethe said in the early 1800s, “Each sees what is present in their heart.”

Since 2013 — long before Donald Trump was even a candidate — we have been studying the “dueling facts” phenomenon: the tendency for Red and Blue America to perceive reality in starkly different ways. Based on that work, we expected the report to settle…next to nothing.

The conflicting factual assertions that have emerged since the report’s release highlight just how easy it is for citizens to believe what they want — regardless of what Robert Mueller, William Barr or anyone else has to say about it.

Our research has led us to several conclusions about the future of political discourse in the U.S. The first is that dueling fact perceptions are rampant, and they are more entrenched than most people realize. Some examples of this include conflicting perceptions about the existence of climate change, the strength of the economy, the consequences of racism, the origins of sexual orientation, the utility of minimum wage increases or gun control, the crime rate and the safety of vaccines.

This has serious implications for American democracy. As political scientists, we wonder: How can a community decide the direction they should go if they can’t agree on where they are? Can people holding dueling facts be brought into some semblance of consensus?

To figure that out, it’s important to determine where such divergent beliefs come from in the first place. This is the perspective we began with: If dueling fact perceptions are driven by misinformation from politicians and pundits, then one would expect things to get better by making sure that people have access to correct information — via fact-checking by news organizations, for example.

We envisioned the dueling facts phenomenon as being primarily tribal, driven by cheerleading on each side for their partisan “teams.” We assumed, like most other scholars, that individuals are simply led astray by their team’s coaches (party leaders), star players (media pundits), or fellow fans (social media feeds).

But it turns out that the roots of such divergent views go much deeper. We found that voters see the world in ways that reinforce their values and identities — irrespective of whether they have ever watched Fox News or MSNBC and regardless of whether they have a Facebook account.

For example, according to our data from five years of national surveys from 2013 to 2017, the most important predictor of whether a person views racism as highly prevalent and influential is not her partisan identification. It is not her general ideological outlook. It is not the amount or type of media that she consumes. It isn’t even her own race.

It is the degree to which she prioritizes compassion as a public virtue, relative to other things like rugged individualism.

Values not only shape what people see, but they also structure what people look for in the first place. We call this “intuitive epistemology.”

Those who care about oppression look for oppression — so they find it.

Those who care about security look for threats to it — and they find them.

In other words, people do not end up with the same answers because they do not begin with the same questions.

For example, the perception that vaccines cause autism — against all available empirical evidence — is now shared equally by Democrats and Republicans. Partisanship can’t account for that dueling fact perception. But when we looked at the role of core values and their associated questions, we found the strongest predictor.

If someone we surveyed ranked this question highly — Does it appear that people are committing indecent acts or degrading something sacred? — they were by far the most likely to believe that vaccines are dangerous. Partisan identity had no relationship at all with those beliefs. Because the starting points for different groups of citizens are deeply polarized, so are their ending points. And the starting points are often values rather than parties.

The stronger those commitments to their values are, the stronger the effects. Those with extreme value commitments are much more certainthan others that their perceptions are correct.

Perhaps the most disappointing finding from our studies — at least from our point of view — is that there are no known fixes to this problem.

Fact-checking tends to fall flat. The voters who need to hear corrections rarely read fact-checks. And for those who might stumble across them, reports from distant and distrusted experts are no match for closely held values and defining identities.

Link to the rest at The Nieman Lab