The Republican Brain (28 page)

So much for attempts to challenge the topics chosen in this study. And even if you were to throw out the study entirely, the other six remain, and the weight of the evidence barely shifts.

On the subject of Fox News and misinformation, PolitiFact simply appeared out of its depth. The author of the article in question, Louis Jacobson, only cited
two
of the studies above—“Iraq War” and “2010 Election”—though six out of seven were available at the time he was writing. And then he suggested that the “2010 Election” study should “carry less weight” due to various methodological objections.

Meanwhile, Jacobson dug up three separate studies that, understanding the political mind, we can dismiss as irrelevant. That's because these studies did not concern misinformation, but rather, how informed news viewers are about basic political facts like the following: “who the vice president is, who the president of Russia is, whether the Chief Justice is conservative, which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives and whether the U.S. has a trade deficit.”

A long list of public opinion studies have shown that too few Americans know the answers to such basic questions. They are insufficiently
informed
about politics, just as they are about science, economics, and American history. That's lamentable, but also off point at the moment. These are not politically contested issues, nor are they skewed by an active misinformation campaign. As a result, on such issues many Americans may be ill-informed but liberals and conservatives are nevertheless able to agree.

Jon Stewart was clearly talking about political misinformation. He used the word “misinformed.” And for good reason: Misinformation is by far the bigger torpedo to our national conversation, and to any hope of a functional politics. “It's one thing to be not informed,” explains David Barker, a political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh who has studied conservative talk-radio listeners and Fox viewers. “It's another thing to be misinformed, where you're confident in your incorrectness. That's the thing that's really more problematic, democratically speaking—because if you're confidently wrong, you're influencing people.”

From the point of view of the political brain, the distinction between lacking information and believing misinformation is equally fundamental. Whether you know who the president of Russia is—that's one type of question. It's a question where there's no political stake and someone who doesn't know the answer can accept it when it is provided, because it doesn't require any emotional sacrifice to do so. However, whether global warming is human caused is fundamentally different. It's a question that is politicized, and thus engages emotions, identity, and classic pathways of biased reasoning. So to group together the lack of information with misinformation is, from this book's perspective, the most flagrant of fouls.

And it gets even worse for PolitiFact: There are reasons to think that Fox News viewers are both more
informed
than the average bear, and yet, simultaneously more
misinformed
on key politicized issues. In other words, many of them are classic “smart idiots” engaging in motivated reasoning to support their beliefs. “They're an active group, that actually knows a fair amount of political facts,” explains Barker. “They can tell you who the members of the Supreme Court are, and things like that. But when it comes to political information that has any kind of a partisan element to it, where a correct answer helps one side politically, or hurts one side politically, [being misinformed is] very typical of them.”

Thus PolitiFact's approach was itself deeply
un
informed, and underscores the ignorance about psychology that pervades mainstream politics. Indeed, after I refuted its analysis in a much read blog post, PolitiFact failed to correct its error, or even to mention that it had missed
four
relevant studies in its analysis.

Almost entirely missing in the PolitiFact-Stewart flap was any weighing of the truly interesting and important question:
Why
are Fox News viewers so misinformed?

To answer it—thereby showing the interaction between media change on the one hand, and conservative psychology on the other—we'll first need to travel once again back to the 1950s, and the pioneering work of the psychologist and Seekers infiltrator, Leon Festinger.

In his 1957 book
A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
, Festinger built on his study of Mrs. Keech and the Seekers, and other research, to lay out many ramifications of his core idea about why we contort the evidence to fit to our beliefs, rather than conforming our beliefs to the evidence. That included a prediction about how those who are highly committed to a belief or view should go about seeking information that touches on that powerful conviction.

Festinger suggested that once we've settled on a core belief, this ought to shape how we gather information. More specifically, we are likely to try to avoid encountering claims and information that challenge that belief, because these will create cognitive dissonance. Instead, we should go looking for information that
affirms
the belief. The technical (and less than ideal) term for this phenomenon is “selective exposure”: what it means is that we
selectively
choose to be
exposed
to information that is congenial to our beliefs, and to avoid “inconvenient truths” that are uncongenial to them. Or as one group of early researchers put it, in language notable for its tone of wrecked idealism:

In recent years there has been a good deal of talk by men of good will about the desirability and necessity of guaranteeing the free exchange of ideas in the market place of public opinion. Such talk has centered upon the problem of keeping free the channels of expression and communication. Now we find that the consumers of ideas, if they have made a decision on the issue, themselves erect high tariff walls against alien notions.

Selective exposure is generally thought to occur on the individual level—e.g., one person chooses to watch Fox News. But when we think about conservative Christian homeschooling or the constant battles over the teaching of controversial issues in public schools—where authoritarian parents seek to skew curricula to prevent their children from hearing threatening things—a kind of selective exposure is also on full display. The only difference is that it's selective exposure of information
for
someone else. It's parents trying to control what their children are exposed to, actively seeking to blind the next generation rather than themselves.

Selective exposure theory grows out of the cognitive dissonance tradition, but the concept of erecting “tariff walls” against inconvenient truths gels with the theory of motivated reasoning as well. As Charles Taber of Stony Brook University explains, motivated reasoning makes us susceptible to all manner of confirmation biases—seeking or greatly emphasizing evidence that supports our views and predispositions—and disconfirmation biases—attacking information that threatens us. In this context, “selective exposure” might be considered a certain breed of “confirmation bias,” one involving our media choices in particular. (As we'll see, the theory of motivated reasoning also implies that “selective exposure” may operate, at least in part, on a subconscious and emotional level that we're not even aware of.)

If Festinger's ideas about “selective exposure” are correct, then I was wise to be cautious, earlier, about whether the chief problem with Fox News is that it is actively causing its viewers to be misinformed. It's very possible that Fox could be imparting misinformation even as politically conservative viewers are also seeking the station out—highly open to it and already convinced about many falsehoods that dovetail with their beliefs. Thus, they would come into the encounter with Fox not only misinformed and predisposed to become more so, but inclined to be very confident about their incorrect beliefs and to impart them to others. In this account, political misinformation on the right would be driven by a kind of feedback loop, with both Fox and its viewers making the problem worse.

Psychologists and political scientists have extensively studied selective exposure, and within the research literature, the findings are often described as mixed. But that's not quite right. In truth, some early studies seeking to confirm Festinger's speculation had problems with their designs and often failed—and as a result, explains University of Alabama psychologist William Hart, the field of selective exposure research “stagnated” for several decades. But it has since undergone a dramatic revival—driven, not surprisingly, by the modern explosion of media choices and growing political polarization in the U.S. And thanks to a new wave of better-designed and more rigorous studies, the concept has become well established.

“Selective exposure is the clearest way to look at how people create their own realities, based upon their views of the world,” says Hart. “Everybody knows this happens.”

The first wave of selective exposure research, much of it conducted during the 1960s, resulted in the drawing of one key distinction that we must keep in mind. Even in cases where the sorting of people into friendly information channels had been demonstrated, critics questioned whether the study subjects were actively and deliberately building “tariff walls” to protect their beliefs. Rather, they suggested that selective exposure might be
de facto
: People might encounter more information that supports their personal views not because they actively seek it, but because they live in communities or have lifestyle patterns that strongly tilt the odds in favor of such encounters happening in the first place.

Thus, if you live in a “red state,” Fox News is more likely to be on the TV in public places—bars, waiting rooms—than if you live in a “blue state.” And your peers and neighbors are much more likely to be watching it and talking about it. Anyone who travels around America will notice this, rendering the distinction between
de facto
and what we might call
motivated
selective exposure an important one.

However, more modern studies of selective exposure are explicitly designed to rule out the possibility of de facto explanations. As a result, by 2009, Hart and a team of researchers were able to perform a meta-analysis—a statistically rigorous overview of published studies on selective exposure—that deliberately omitted these problematic research papers. That still left behind 67 relevant studies, encompassing almost 8,000 individuals, and by pooling them together Hart found that people overall were nearly twice as likely to consume ideologically congenial information as to consume ideologically inconvenient information—and in certain circumstances, they were even more likely than that. That's not to say nobody ever goes seeking what political science wonks sometimes call “counterattitudinal” information—often they do. But it's rarer, overall, than seeking friendly information.