By stewartb

Intuitively ‘facts’ should form a key part of informing, rebutting and changing views, but what impact do ‘facts’ actually have on voting intentions?

There are many studies of human behaviour in elections in western democracies – albeit mostly focused on the USA – that, worryingly, question the role played by ‘facts’. As one example, a review of some leading academic studies published in New Yorker magazine in 2017 had this headline: ‘Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds – New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.’

Here are some extracts to give a sense of its content: I’d argue this has general relevance despite the US references (with my emphasis):

‘… what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them. Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the subject of entire textbooks’ worth of experiments.’

The article also refers to the pervasiveness of an “illusion of explanatory depth’: ‘People believe that they know way more than they actually do.’ And “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” And it goes on to suggest: ‘here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.’ (Or continuing support for the ‘precious Union’?)

And: ‘If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views: this “may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.”

(Any chance of Scotland’s pro-Union mainstream media changing their current practices? None! With BBC, STV and certain newspapers still capable of reaching key parts of the electorate against independence – but potentially persuadable – and the capacity these media organisations have for giving out repetitive, negative messaging – the communication challenge is huge.)

There are now emerging many attempts at explaining Trump’s success in the recent US presidential election. Among the reflections offered by Professor Georg Lakoff and his Framelab organisation, there are these:

‘Frames trump facts – Once again, the facts got beaten by the frames. Trump created an alternate reality for his supporters and they bought into it and did not care about the facts. Millions of voters did not consider facts (…) to be relevant.

‘The facts were on the side of the Democrats, but voters accepted Trump’s framing and handed the victory to Trump. Listen, Democrats: Framing matters. This is a matter of human cognition. Democrats need to take human cognition seriously. Policy matters. But policies that help most Americans are not enough. It is how voters (largely unconsciously) frame policy that determines how they will vote.’

Source: George Lakoff & Gil Duran (15 Nov 2024) Some lessons of the 2024 election. Framelab (https://www.theframelab.org/some-lessons-of-the-2024-election/ )