What Know-It-Alls Don't Know
[vc_single_image image=”62116″]May 2018
Americans who think their political opinions are superior to others don’t actually know more about politics, according to a University of Michigan study. “Belief superiority” is the researchers’ term for the assumption that one’s opinions are more correct — and more grounded in factual realities — than others.
The researchers first asked participants in the study what they thought they knew about six political issues and then had them take quizzes that tested their knowledge. “Whereas more humble participants sometimes even underestimated their knowledge, the belief superior tended to think they knew a lot more than they actually did,” the researcher who led the study reports.
The researchers also showed participants news stories about political controversies and asked them which articles they wanted to read. Half of the stories supported the participants’ respective belief, while the other half opposed it. The know-it-alls in the study were significantly more likely than their humbler peers to pick the stories whose positions they agreed with — and readily admitted that they picked the stories that supported their opinions, knowing full well that they were doing so.
“We thought that if belief-superior people showed a tendency to seek out a balanced set of information, they might be able to claim that they arrived at their belief superiority through reasoned, critical thinking about both sides of the issue,” the lead researcher says.
Not so: They admitted they preferred information supporting their preconceived notions, which of course indicated that they “were probably missing out on opportunities to improve their knowledge.”
‘Identity,’ Not Issues
A recent study from Public Opinion Quarterly, adds context to this finding. Even people who are really sure of themselves and the rectitude of their political beliefs often do not base their political loyalties on actual knowledge about particular issues.
To a degree, this is understandable, because party loyalties seem to be giving way to ideological loyalties and to “identity politics.” President Trump, without a conventional or even well-defined policy agenda, ran against the Republican establishment; The highly ideological Bernie Sanders — a self-described “democratic socialist”— only became a Democrat to run for the party’s nomination and was also not favored by his party’s leadership.
Those who identify as conservatives and liberals, meanwhile, seem to despise each other, and it is reasonable to assume their mutual animosity is rooted in disagreements over policy. But previous research finds that political identity “does not require values and policy attitudes,” according to Liliana Mason, the University of Maryland professor of government and politics who conducted the study. All it requires is “a sense of inclusion and a sense of exclusion” — a sense, that is, of us vs. them.
What drives today’s worrisome polarization, Mason discovered, is simply the “otherness” of ideological opponents rather than any coherent “issue-based disagreement.”
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Additional Resources
Why You Should Get Smarter About Science
We’re Reasonable, but Everyone Else Is an Extremist
