
Political Extremism Is Supported by  an Illusion of Understanding (2013) [pdf] - mirajshah
http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/todd_rogers/files/political_extremism.pdf
======
canjobear
Here are the actual results in this paper.

When you ask people on Mechanical Turk how well they understand a political
issue on a scale of 1-7, the mean of their ratings is 3.82. But if you ask
them to explain the issue first, then the mean of their ratings is 3.45.

If you ask them to rate whether they are in favor of some policy on a scale of
1-7, their average ratings are 1.41 away from 4. After asking people to
explain the policy, their average ratings are 1.28 away from 4.

These are tiny effects. The effects in the second experiment appear to be just
as small, judging by the figures.

The third experiment finds that, for people who rate how much they are in
favor of a policy as 6 or 2, if asked to list reasons for their opinion, they
are about 70% likely to donate 20 cents to that cause, and if they are asked
to explain their opinion, they are about 30% likely to donate to that cause.
At last, a non-minuscule effect! But it's about people's willingness to donate
20 cents, a negligible amount of money.

The overall finding seems to be "people slightly underestimate how well they
understand things, and if you ask them for an explanation, they get confused
and become slightly less confident."

How strong are the generalizations we can draw from such small effects? Are
changes of this magnitude really informative about what determines people's
behavior? Personally I suspect not.

------
kazinator
I don't think you can dismiss all political extremists this easily.

Political extremists sometimes disagree with the _morality_ of the individual
transactions contained within a policy.

"If you only understood the complex effects of the policy, you would agree" is
not a valid counter-argument to somehow who thinks it has immoral
underpinnings, because you are asking that person to basically cave in to the
idea that the end justifies the means: _" If only your thinking wasn't clouded
by a naive illusion of understanding, you would see that desirable ends are
achieved, and therefore you would accept the means."_

Moral shortcuts in reasoning are in fact valid, and we see examples of this in
law. A judge can hand down a sentence in a complex case which contains 2500
pages of evidence, without knowing the entire contents. He or she just has to
know about specific law-breaking actions. That judge does not have an
"illusion of understanding", and is not ignorant of that the crime had some
benefits to someone. Those benefits were improperly achieved through the
perpetration of a crime so they do not matter.

This is a useful analogy. A political extremist sees him or herself as a
judge, and the proponent of a policy he or she disagrees with as wrongdoers,
and the benefits of the policy (whatever they are, complexity being
irrelevant) as being the result of wrong actions.

~~~
baddox
> "If you only understood the complex effects of the policy, you would agree"
> is not a valid counter-argument to somehow who thinks it has immoral
> underpinnings, because you are asking that person to basically cave in to
> the idea that the end justifies the means: "If only your thinking wasn't
> clouded by a naive illusion of understanding, you would see that desirable
> ends are achieved, and therefore you would accept the means."

Doesn't that show the fundamental weakness of moral arguments? If Bob opposes
a policy on moral grounds, but you convince Bob that the consequences of the
policy would be overwhelmingly good by both of our standards (e.g. a reduction
in crime or poverty), wouldn't you expect Bob to change his opinion about the
policy (and perhaps concoct some moral justification)?

I find that most people who hold a moral position also have (what they believe
are) strong arguments for why the consequences of breaking that moral position
will be bad. And yet, most of them are not consequentialists, and are very
resistant to consequentialism. Doesn't that seem too convenient?

~~~
kazinator
Rather, I think the problem is that some moralists have odd or outright bad
morals.

What I mean by bad morals is ones that have to do with controlling aspects of
other people's lives that don't affect others.

For example, say, opposition to two people of the same sex being married,
which is purely their business. One justification is that it takes away from
the "sanctity" of marriage, which somehow takes something away from the
marriage of some opposite-sex couple who don't even know those two men.

Another example is appeals to traditions. Doing something is right because
it's "always" been done that way.

On a related note, some moralists simply oppose change as a kind of moral.
Change is bad. Lack of change is good! Anything that forces me to make an
effort and learn something new or adjust is immoral; things staying the same
is moral.

~~~
jmnicolas
Since when being against same sex marriage is political extremism ? I'm under
the impression that for liberals, everything that is against their views is
extremism ...

------
anigbrowl
...and the illusion of understanding is sadly supported by politicians who
mischaracterize complex issues in order to activate partisan support. As we
are bombarded with more and more information over the internet, and the
competition for attention seems to outpace the quality of filtering and
analytical tools as far as the general public is concerned, I worry that this
problem will only get worse.

Personally speaking, I end up feeling very politically marginalized because
political group dynamics tend to value consistency over diversity, so if (for
example) you're generally conservative but support the idea of socialized
medicine, or generally liberal but not supportive of teachers' unions, then
the more partisan the political environment you are in the more likely you are
to be treated as a heretic. So in the US we see primary contests within the
parties wherein candidates are subjected to punishing ideological 'purity
tests', to the point that the primary season has increasingly come to look
like an internal struggle to see which version of the two main parties will
get to compete in the general election. While it appears that Hillary Clinton
may have a pretty smooth path to the nomination on the Democratic side this
time (to the dismay of the ideological left), over in the GOP the competition
for the nomination increasingly looks like internecine warfare between wealthy
paternalism and eschatonic populism.

~~~
HillRat
_[T]he GOP ... increasingly looks like internecine warfare between wealthy
paternalism and eschatonic populism._

I've taken to calling the modern right-wing movement "post-Voegelinian
conservatism" \-- as bad as old Buckley was when it came to, oh, all the
critical social movements of the 20th century, at least he wasn't into
immanentizing the eschaton as the new radical right are wont to do.

Incidentally, if you haven't read Lowi's _End of the Republican Era_ , do
check it out. He was about two decades early on his diagnosis, but he
accurately sets up the conflict between the Mark Hanna business-friendly
versus the Falwell-inspired culture war wings of the party.

~~~
tomohawk
Left and right are just an illusion - a kind of very expensive theater to
distract and make people think they have a choice.

All that smoke and mirrors just hides the fact that the incumbents run
everything and don't really care what anyone else thinks as long as they
continue in power.

------
Crito
> _" Rozenblit and Keil (2002) have demonstrated that people tend to be
> overconfident in how well they understand how everyday objects, such as
> toilets [...]"_

I'd be really interested to see what misconceptions people had about flush
toilets, but Rozenblit and Keil's paper doesn't seem to really expand on this.
(Assuming I found the right paper:
[http://www.yale.edu/cogdevlab/aarticles/IOED%20proofs.pdf%20...](http://www.yale.edu/cogdevlab/aarticles/IOED%20proofs.pdf%201.pdf)
?)

I've personally assembled and installed a toilet so I am confident that I have
an accurate view of how toilets work, but that experience wasn't exactly
illuminating; I already knew how they worked. Toilets are pretty simple,
anyone who has ever opened the tank of one and looked at it for a minute or
two probably has it figured out.

Edit: When other questions from that study include things like _" How the
liver removes toxins from blood"_, I don't doubt that they found an overall
trend, but it bothers me that a paper like that could include mention of
asking questions about toilets, not actually say what people got wrong about
toilets, and then because of that paper it is taken as truth that people don't
know how toilets work.

~~~
asadotzler
I think that most people who look inside the tank and spend a few seconds
analysing what happens when you flush have a pretty good idea how that part
works. But it's the other end that's more opaque (literally.) What makes the
bottom half of the toilet work, where the real magic happens? I think that's
the part that most people would struggle with since few of us have transparent
toilets and the internal structure isn't always obvious from the external
shape of the stool.

~~~
asadotzler
Self-reply with link to siphon explanation:

This explains how the siphon works to keep the bowl at the same level and to
create the force of a "flush". Until I saw a toilet that had the siphon shape
visibly exposed on the outside, I don't think I ever thought question how it
worked. Once I saw the shape, I immediately thought about it working like a
siphon I'd used to pull gas out of my car. For people who have never seen a
toilet with the siphon shape exposed, they'd probably have to have siphon
experience in some other area to make the leap, or I think how the bowl stays
full and flushes would just naturally stay a mystery. Believing that it all
happens in the tank might also be enough of an explanation for most to stop
thinking about it.

[http://home.howstuffworks.com/toilet2.htm](http://home.howstuffworks.com/toilet2.htm)

~~~
pimlottc
As someone who just suffered through a clog recently, I liked this explanation
from an MIT student better. It starts out the same, with a good diagram and a
description of the basic principle, but then goes the extra mile with actual
physic equations.

[http://web.mit.edu/2.972/www/reports/toilet/toilet.html](http://web.mit.edu/2.972/www/reports/toilet/toilet.html)

------
Animats
Psychology used to be described as the study of college students, because too
much research was aimed at that easily available pool. Now it seems that it's
the study of people with enough free time and low enough income to be working
for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

~~~
Yen
I got this impression as well, especially given

>> Participants’ reported political affiliations were 40% Democrat, 20%
Republican, 36% independent, and 4% other

I think that distribution is quite a bit different than a random sampling of
US adults would get you. For a study examining political preference, having
such a bias is pretty harmful.

Perhaps their effect would have been more pronounced with more Republicans, or
maybe it would have been less pronounced. Maybe the unusually high percentage
of independents dampened the precondition of extremism, or maybe it actually
exacerbated the precondition.

------
baddox
It's important to note that "extremism" is defined in this experiment by the
intensity with which one holds a view (according to their own response on a
7-point scale between "strongly against" and "strongly for"), not (for
instance) by how uncommon or unpopular a view is. I would be curious what
results they would get for much broader political questions with the potential
for more "radical" (i.e uncommon) results.

------
deciplex
So thinking about cause and effect gets people to examine their beliefs a bit
more, and reduces extremism. But, why should anyone involved in law and
policy, including voters, care about cause and effect? It has little place in
our legislature and our justice system.

Something I've been thinking about for a little while, that is sort of related
to the topic of this study, is how to tie laws with intent. If we assume that
legislatures make laws for reasons, and that these reasons involve some
desired effect that the laws are intended to cause, then we should be able to
draw some theoretical causal chain between the law and the desired effect.

The trick would be, that if the law does not cause the desired effect, it
would be automatically repealed. So if a Senator wants to draft a bill banning
drinking on Sundays, he would be _required_ to establish some causal chain -
in the text of the bill itself - between the policies that would be enacted by
the new law and the desired effects (e.g. reduce traffic fatalities by _x_ %,
increase church attendance by _y_ %, etc., within _z_ years). If, after the
law is passed, the desired effects do not occur, and the proposed causal chain
therefore _proven_ false, the law simply winks out of existence and ceases to
be. No act of Congress, Supreme Court review, etc. It just ends.

Of course, we're dealing with humans here, and this being politics, there
would have to be some oversight of the process to ensure fair play, and I
imagine it would be similar in design and scope to our existing justice
system, though largely separate from it. You'd have to be sure that
legislators couldn't submit causal chains with time horizons of 1000 years
(without a very good reason), or alleged "causal chains" that don't really
follow (e.g. ban drinking on Sundays so that the sun rises on Mondays). I
don't underestimate the task here - it would be _at least_ as involved as
criminal and civil law already are. However, when it comes to law right now we
mostly just study the impact on people who break the laws, or occasionally
whether the laws conflict with other laws of greater precedence. There doesn't
seem to be any formal approach for evaluating the logical validity of laws:
whether they do what they say, what they're even _supposed_ to accomplish in
the first place, much less _how_ they do it. Should there be?

Perhaps if we implemented this, among other things it would get people
thinking more about _how_ the policies they support do what they are supposed
to do, since it would be ingrained in the system itself.

------
noisense
This could be said about any political actor, extremist or moderate.

~~~
HillRat
The unspoken corollary is that many if not most politicians, like attorneys
conducting a _voir dire_ , actually _depend_ on their constituents having an
unwarranted faith in their comprehension of complex topics, and use their
rhetoric to manipulate voters accordingly. (This is, to anyone who actually
watches the news, an obvious statement.)

Voters with a competent understanding of issues (which sometimes just means
understanding that some topics are too complex for a layman to fully grasp)
have a large number of inflection points that have to be considered when
stumping for votes; voters in the thrall of superficial and ideologically-
driven simplifications of issues are relatively easier to manipulate, because
they have fewer levers for a politician to pull. (There's a reason party
committees love running Three Minute Hates against the ideological enemy of
the moment: the easiest lever of all is to whip up a frenzy against an Obama,
Cruz, Pelosi, Palin, etc. No policy arguments needed!)

The open question is, how long can a republic last that depends on ignorant
(not stupid!) voters electing competent politicians? The recent influx of (I
would argue) actively _incompetent_ politicians (or, worse yet, competent
politicians who support policies they know to be incompetent), many drawn from
fringe voter movements, suggests we may discover sooner rather than later how
such a system ends.

~~~
shusain
^Plato's philosopher kings. Ignorant folks aren't qualified to decide policy
and hence should have no impact on it. I agree to an extant - there needs to
be some sort of minimal qualification for elected representatives. Not sure
how that would work practically.

------
spiritplumber
I wonder what happens if you do the same test on stuff like creationism or
homeopaty...

------
happyscrappy
Does this have any relation to the rise of right wing parties in Europe?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
At least far-right, yes. Also to the rise (and continued existence) of far-
left parties.

~~~
happyscrappy
I can't begin to imagine the difficulty in a governing Greece where there is
far left and far right but no center.

~~~
maxxxxx
The far left and far right there are much closer than you may think.

~~~
dagw
I've always thought it best to think of the left-right spectrum as a circle.

------
IBM
I wonder if this applies to HN's views on surveillance/NSA/Snowden leaks. I
certainly don't see any nuance in the majority of the comments posted on those
topics.

