Politics

If political issues are merely very difficult, then we should expect most people to hold at most tentative opinions, or to suspend judgement altogether. This is what happens with other issues that are intrinsically difficult. The Ignorance Theory fares slightly better, since if people were ignorant, not only of the facts pertaining to the political issue, but also of their own level of ignorance, their confidence in their political beliefs would be understandable. However, it remains puzzling why people would be ignorant of their own level of ignorance—this itself calls for a further explanation. Moreover, the Ignorance Theory has difficulty explaining the following feature of political disputes.

What can we do about the problem?

First: Understanding the nature of political irrationality is itself a big step towards combating it. In particular, explicit awareness of the mechanisms discussed in section 6 should cause one to avoid using them. When learning about a political issue, for example, we should collect information from people on all sides of the issue. We should spend time thinking about objections to our own arguments.

Second: We should identify cases in which we are particularly likely to be biased, and in those cases hesitate to affirm the beliefs that we would be biased towards. (Aside: surveys indicate that most people consider themselves to be more intelligent, more fair-minded, and less prejudiced than the average person—but evidently most of these beliefs are themselves biases.  ) As one particularly striking example, 41% of Americans believe that foreign aid is one of the two largest areas of federal government spending.

Third: We should take account of the irrationality of others, and adjust our confidence in reported information accordingly. We should recognize that much of the information that is presented to us in political arguments is probably .The evidence that individual presents to us is not a random selection from the available evidence; all evidence against the conclusion being defended has been screened out.

Fourth: Should you accuse other people of irrationality, if you suspect them of it? There’s a dilemma here. On the one hand, recognizing one’s irrationality may be necessary to combat it. Merely presenting evidence about the issue in dispute may not be enough, as this evidence will continue to be evaluated irrationally.