An experimental study of rationalization in politics

by Massimo Pigliucci

[This is a partial excerpt from my forthcoming book: The Intelligent Person’s Guide to the Meaning of Life, BasicBooks, New York]

Every skeptic worth her salt knows about the basic logical fallacies, both of the “formal” kind (e.g., affirming the consequent) and of the “informal” variety (e.g., straw man). It rarely happens, however, that we get empirical studies on how many types of bad reasoning people actually deploy in everyday life, and how often. In preparation for a chapter of my forthcoming book on the meaning of life (as you know, I have usually tackled small and highly focused subject matters), I came across a fascinating study by Monica Prasad’s and colleagues at Northwestern University. The subjects in Prasad’s study were people who believed — against all evidence to the contrary — that there was a link between the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 on American soil.

The researchers focused on this particular politically based belief because, as they put it, “unlike many political issues, there is a correct answer,” and because that belief was still held by about 50% of Americans as late as 2003 — despite the fact that President Bush himself at one point had in fact declared that “this administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and Al Qaeda.” This isn’t a question of picking on Republicans, by the way, as Prasad and her colleagues wrote that they fully expected to find similar results had they conducted the study a decade earlier, targeting Democratic voters’ beliefs about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

The hypotheses tested by Prasad’s group were two alternative explanations for why people hold on to demonstrably false beliefs: the “Bayesian updater” theory says that people change their beliefs in accordance to the available evidence, and therefore that a large number of people held onto the false belief of a connection between Hussein and 9/11 because of a subtle concerted campaign of misinformation by the Bush administration (despite President Bush’s statement above).

The alternative theory tested by Prasad and collaborators was what they called “motivated reasoning,” a situation in which people deploy a battery of cognitive strategies to avoid having to face the fact that one of their important beliefs turns out to be factually wrong. The results of the study are illuminating well beyond the specific issue of Hussein and 9/11, as the same “strategies” are deployed even by well informed and educated people in a variety of circumstances, from the political arena to the defense of pseudoscientific notions such as the alleged (and non-existent) link between vaccines and autism.

The first thing that Prasad et al. found was that, not surprisingly, belief does translate into voting patterns: interviewees who answered the question correctly (i.e., who knew that there was no demonstrated connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks) were significantly less likely to vote for Bush and more likely to vote for Kerry during the 2004 Presidential elections. I will leave it up to you to consider whether the a priori likelihood of this fact may in any way have influenced the Bush campaign’s “equivocal” statements concerning said link.

Of the people who did believe in the connection, how many behaved as Bayesian updaters, changing their opinion on the matter once presented with President Bush’s own statement that there was, in fact, no connection? A dismal 2%. The rest of those who stuck with their original opinion, evidence to the contrary be damned, deployed a whopping six different defensive strategies, which Prasad and her colleagues characterized in detail. Here they are, in decreasing order of importance:

Attitude bolstering (33%): or, as Groucho Marx famously put it, these are my principles, if you don’t like them, I’ve got others. This group simply switched to other reasons for why the US invaded Iraq, implicitly granting the lack of a Hussein-9/11 connection, and yet not being moved to change their position on the actual issue, the Iraq war.

Disputing rationality (16%): as one of the interviewed put it, “I still have my opinions,” meaning that opinions can be held even without or against evidence, simply because it is one’s right to do so. (Indeed, one does have the legal right to hold onto wrong opinions under American law, as it should be; whether this is a good idea is an entirely different matter, of course.)

Inferred justification (16%): “If Bush thinks he did it, then he did it,” i.e. the reasoning here is that there simply must have been a rationale for the good guys (the US) to engage in something so wasteful of human life and resources as a war. The fact that they couldn’t come up with what exactly that reason might have been did not seem to bother these people very much.

Denying that they believed in the link (14%): these are subjects who had said they believed in the link between Iraq and 9/11, but when challenged they changed their story, often attempting to modify their original statement, as in “oh, I meant there was a link between Afghanistan [instead of Iraq] and 9/11.”

Counter-arguing (12%): this group admitted that there was no direct evidence connecting Saddam Hussein and the terrorist attacks, but nevertheless thought that it was “reasonable” to believe in a connection, based on other issues, such as Hussein’s general antipathy for the US, or his “well known” support of terrorism in general.

Selective exposure (6%): finally, these are people who simply refused to engage the debate (while still not changing their mind), adducing excuses along the lines of “I don’t know enough about it” (which may very well be true, but of course would be more consistent with agnosticism on the issue).

How is any of the above possible? Are people really that obtuse that they will largely fail to behave as “Bayesian updaters,” i.e. to take the rational approach to assessing evidence and belief? There is no need to be too hard on our fellow humans — or indeed ourselves, since we likely behave in a very similar fashion in a variety of circumstances. What is going on here is that most of us, most of the time, use what cognitive scientists call “heuristics,” i.e. convenient shortcuts or rules of thumb, to quickly assess a situation or a claim. There is good reason to do this, since on most occasions we simply do not have the time and resources to devote to serious research on a particular subject matter, even in the internet and smart phone era of information constantly at your fingertips. Besides, sometimes we are simply not motivated enough to do the research even if we do have the time — the issue might not be important enough compared to our needs to get the groceries done or the car cleaned.

Unfortunately, it is also heuristically efficient to stand by your original conclusion once reached, no matter how flimsy the evidence you considered before reaching it. Again, this is simply a matter of saving time and energy. As a result, we use politicians we trust, political parties, or even celebrities as proxies to make up our mind about everything from the war on Iraq to climate change science — and once we adopt a position on any of these subjects, if challenged we deploy our cognitive faculties toward deflecting criticism rather than engaging it seriously.

This has been demonstrated on a variety of occasions well before the Prasad study. For instance, following the heuristic “if someone who seems to know what he is talking about asks me about X, then X likely exists, and I should have an opinion about it,” people volunteer “opinions” (i.e., they make up stuff out of thin air) concerning legislation that does not exist, politicians that do not exist, and even places that do not exist! Which is what happened in the Prasad study: many people apparently used the heuristic “if we went to war against country X, then country X must have done something really bad to us,” i.e. there must be a reason (even if I can’t think of one)!

There is serious doubt whether humans are — as Aristotle maintained — the rational animal, and we may not be the only political animals either (another of Aristotle’s characterizations of humanity), considering the mounting evidence on the politics of chimpanzees and other social primates. Nonetheless, both politics and rationality play a very important part in defining what it means to be human, and hence in giving meaning to our existence. The next time we find ourselves vehemently defending a political position, though, we may want to seriously ponder whether we are behaving as Bayesian updaters or whether — possibly more likely — we are deploying one of the six rationalizing strategies highlighted above. If so, our internal Bayesian calculator may require some tuning up. It would be good for us, and it would be good for our society.