An article in the Boston Globe caught my attention the other day. It was written by Joe Keohane back on July 11, 2010, and his point was that, contrary to what one might think, an informed citizenry is not necessarily better than one that isn’t. In other words facts don’t play as much a role in citizens voting for the best candidates or helping citizens decide on complex issues. Keohane says “we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts.” In other words cognitive dissonance.
Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson made the case for cognitive dissonance in their book “Mistakes were made (but not by me).” Basically cognitive dissonance is the state of mind where logic and facts dictate one thing but an internal bias says something else. Hence there is an internal conflict or dissonance. An example would be a person who smokes “knows” that smoking is bad for them but justifies their smoking by probably deluding themselves into thinking that they can get away with it and not get lung cancer. This is over and above the addiction issue.
Another example was with George Bush and his decision to invade Iraq. This issue was highlighted in the book by Tavris and Aronson. Bush was convinced that invading Iraq was the right thing to do because Saddam had WMD’s that needed to be taken out. Later after the invasion, and it was shown that no WMD’s existed, Bush just couldn’t admit he was wrong. In the book, Bush is quoted as saying in 2006, “I’ve never been more convinced that the decisions I made are the right decisions.” In other words, even after being shown that WMD’s were not in Iraq, Bush had a case of cognitive dissonance about WMD’s. No WMD’s but we were right in bombing the crap out of Iraq!
In the Keohane article he pointed out that many misinformed people often have the strongest political opinions. Remember the brouhaha over the so called “death panels” when Obama’s health care bill was being debated in Congress? Many stuck by the notion that the government was going to dictate who would live or die if this bill passed. It wasn’t true but the “death panel” story lived on.
I personally know of people who are so convinced of their political views and no amount of logic or facts can change their view of things. What can you do about people like that? Probably not much except to express what you think and present facts and hope that some of it sinks in. Or else we all sink!