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In the mid-20th century, the two major political parties were ideologically diverse. Democrats in the South were often more conservative than Republicans in the North. The strange jumble in political coalitions made disagreement easier. The other party wasnt so threatening because it included lots of people you agreed with. Today, however, the parties have sorted by ideology, and now neither the House nor the Senate has any Democrats who are more conservative than any Republicans, or vice versa. This sorting has made the tribal pull of the two parties much more powerful because the other party now exists as a clear enemy.
One consequence of this is that Washington has become a machine for making identity-protective cognition easier. Each party has its allied think tanks, its go-to experts, its favored magazines, its friendly blogs, its sympathetic pundits, its determined activists, its ideological moneymen. Both the professionals and the committed volunteers who make up the party machinery are members of social circles, Twitter worlds, Facebook groups, workplaces, and many other ecosystems that would make life very unpleasant for them if they strayed too far from the faith. And so these institutions end up employing a lot of very smart, very sincere people whose formidable intelligence makes certain that they typically stay in line. To do anything else would be upend their day-to-day lives.
The problem, of course, is that these people are also affecting, and in some cases controlling, the levers of government. And this, Kahan says, is where identity-protective cognition gets dangerous. Whats sensible for individuals can be deadly for groups. "Although it is effectively costless for any individual to form a perception of climate-change risk that is wrong but culturally congenial, it is very harmful to collective welfare for individuals in aggregate to form beliefs this way," Kahan writes. The ice caps dont care if its rational for us to worry about our friendships. If the world keeps warming, theyre going to melt regardless of how good our individual reasons for doing nothing are.
To spend much time with Kahans research is to stare into a kind of intellectual abyss. If the work of gathering evidence and reasoning through thorny, polarizing political questions is actually the process by which we trick ourselves into finding the answers we want, then whats the right way to search for answers? How can we know the answers we come up with, no matter how well-intentioned, arent just more motivated cognition? How can we know the experts were relying on havent subtly biased their answers, too? How can I know that this article isnt a form of identity protection? Kahans research tells us we cant trust our own reason. How do we reason our way out of that?
The place to start, I figured, was talking to Dan Kahan. I expected a conversation with an intellectual nihilist. But Kahan doesnt sound like a creature of the abyss. He sounds like, well, what he is: a Harvard-educated lawyer who clerked for Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court and now teaches at Yale Law School. He sounds like a guy who has lived his adult life excelling in institutions dedicated to the idea that men and women of learning can solve societys hardest problems and raise its next generation of leaders. And when we spoke, he seemed uncomfortable with his findings. Unlike many academics who want to emphasize the import of their work, he seemed to want to play it down.
...
At one point in our interview Kahan does stare over the abyss, if only for a moment. He recalls a dissent written by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in a case about overcrowding in California prisons. Scalia dismissed the evidentiary findings of a lower court as motivated by policy preferences. "I find it really demoralizing, but I think some people just view empirical evidence as a kind of device," Kahan says.
But Scalias comments were perfectly predictable given everything Kahan had found. Scalia is a highly ideological, tremendously intelligent individual with a very strong attachment to conservative politics. Hes the kind of identity-protector who has publicly said he stopped subscribing to the Washington Post because he "just couldnt handle it anymore," and so he now cocoons himself in the more congenial pages of the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal. Isnt it the case, I asked Kahan, that everything hes found would predict that Scalia would convince himself of whatever he needed to think to get to the answers he wanted?
The question seemed to rattle Kahan a bit. "The conditions that make a person subject to that way of looking at the evidence," he said slowly, "are things that should be viewed as really terrifying, threatening influences in American life. Thats what threatens the possibility of having democratic politics enlightened by evidence."
The threat is real. Washington is a bitter war between two well-funded, sharply-defined tribes that have their own machines for generating evidence and their own enforcers of orthodoxy. Its a perfect storm for making smart people very stupid.
The silver lining is that politics doesnt just take place in Washington. The point of politics is policy. And most people dont experience policy as a political argument. They experience it as a tax bill, or a health insurance card, or a deployment. And, ultimately, theres no spin effective enough to persuade Americans to ignore a cratering economy, or skyrocketing health-care costs, or a failing war. A political movement that fools itself into crafting national policy based on bad evidence is a political movement that will, sooner or later, face a reckoning at the polls.
At least, thats the hope. But thats not true on issues, like climate change, where action is needed quickly to prevent a disaster that will happen slowly. There, the reckoning will be for future generations to face. And its not true when American politics becomes so warped by gerrymandering, big money, and congressional dysfunction that voters cant figure out who to blame for the state of the country. If American politics is going to improve, it will be better structures, not better arguments, that win the day.
One consequence of this is that Washington has become a machine for making identity-protective cognition easier. Each party has its allied think tanks, its go-to experts, its favored magazines, its friendly blogs, its sympathetic pundits, its determined activists, its ideological moneymen. Both the professionals and the committed volunteers who make up the party machinery are members of social circles, Twitter worlds, Facebook groups, workplaces, and many other ecosystems that would make life very unpleasant for them if they strayed too far from the faith. And so these institutions end up employing a lot of very smart, very sincere people whose formidable intelligence makes certain that they typically stay in line. To do anything else would be upend their day-to-day lives.
The problem, of course, is that these people are also affecting, and in some cases controlling, the levers of government. And this, Kahan says, is where identity-protective cognition gets dangerous. Whats sensible for individuals can be deadly for groups. "Although it is effectively costless for any individual to form a perception of climate-change risk that is wrong but culturally congenial, it is very harmful to collective welfare for individuals in aggregate to form beliefs this way," Kahan writes. The ice caps dont care if its rational for us to worry about our friendships. If the world keeps warming, theyre going to melt regardless of how good our individual reasons for doing nothing are.
To spend much time with Kahans research is to stare into a kind of intellectual abyss. If the work of gathering evidence and reasoning through thorny, polarizing political questions is actually the process by which we trick ourselves into finding the answers we want, then whats the right way to search for answers? How can we know the answers we come up with, no matter how well-intentioned, arent just more motivated cognition? How can we know the experts were relying on havent subtly biased their answers, too? How can I know that this article isnt a form of identity protection? Kahans research tells us we cant trust our own reason. How do we reason our way out of that?
The place to start, I figured, was talking to Dan Kahan. I expected a conversation with an intellectual nihilist. But Kahan doesnt sound like a creature of the abyss. He sounds like, well, what he is: a Harvard-educated lawyer who clerked for Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court and now teaches at Yale Law School. He sounds like a guy who has lived his adult life excelling in institutions dedicated to the idea that men and women of learning can solve societys hardest problems and raise its next generation of leaders. And when we spoke, he seemed uncomfortable with his findings. Unlike many academics who want to emphasize the import of their work, he seemed to want to play it down.
...
At one point in our interview Kahan does stare over the abyss, if only for a moment. He recalls a dissent written by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in a case about overcrowding in California prisons. Scalia dismissed the evidentiary findings of a lower court as motivated by policy preferences. "I find it really demoralizing, but I think some people just view empirical evidence as a kind of device," Kahan says.
But Scalias comments were perfectly predictable given everything Kahan had found. Scalia is a highly ideological, tremendously intelligent individual with a very strong attachment to conservative politics. Hes the kind of identity-protector who has publicly said he stopped subscribing to the Washington Post because he "just couldnt handle it anymore," and so he now cocoons himself in the more congenial pages of the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal. Isnt it the case, I asked Kahan, that everything hes found would predict that Scalia would convince himself of whatever he needed to think to get to the answers he wanted?
The question seemed to rattle Kahan a bit. "The conditions that make a person subject to that way of looking at the evidence," he said slowly, "are things that should be viewed as really terrifying, threatening influences in American life. Thats what threatens the possibility of having democratic politics enlightened by evidence."
The threat is real. Washington is a bitter war between two well-funded, sharply-defined tribes that have their own machines for generating evidence and their own enforcers of orthodoxy. Its a perfect storm for making smart people very stupid.
The silver lining is that politics doesnt just take place in Washington. The point of politics is policy. And most people dont experience policy as a political argument. They experience it as a tax bill, or a health insurance card, or a deployment. And, ultimately, theres no spin effective enough to persuade Americans to ignore a cratering economy, or skyrocketing health-care costs, or a failing war. A political movement that fools itself into crafting national policy based on bad evidence is a political movement that will, sooner or later, face a reckoning at the polls.
At least, thats the hope. But thats not true on issues, like climate change, where action is needed quickly to prevent a disaster that will happen slowly. There, the reckoning will be for future generations to face. And its not true when American politics becomes so warped by gerrymandering, big money, and congressional dysfunction that voters cant figure out who to blame for the state of the country. If American politics is going to improve, it will be better structures, not better arguments, that win the day.