Like it or not, it is a basic fact of human cognition that we think and act politically as members of social groups.
This post on the blog of the American Philosophical Association (APA) talks about political epistemology. Samuel Bagg is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of South Carolina and argues that the reason presenting people with facts doesn’t change their political opinions is due to our social identities.
This resonates with me more than the usual framing where in which we’re told that we need to appeal to people’s emotions. Social identity makes much more sense, and so (as Bagg argues) the way out of this mess isn’t to “ensure every citizen employs optimal epistemic practices” but instead to strengthen our “broadly reliable collective practices.”
I’ve often said that one of the reasons for Brexit was the [attack on expertise by Michael Gove]9www.ft.com/content/3…). Attacking institutions which are proxies through which people can know and understand the world is corrosive, divisive, and ultimately, a cynically populist move.
On the individual level, we are right to worry about the epistemic impact of motivated reasoning, cognitive biases, and “political ignorance.” And at the systemic level, we are right to lament the rise of talk radio, cable news, social media, and the attention economy, along with the corresponding decline of local news, professional journalism, content standards, and so on. Trends in our political economy have indeed conspired with underlying human frailties to undermine the epistemic foundations of a stable and functioning democracy—even in its most minimal form.
Yet this diagnosis is also crucially incomplete, in ways that distort our search for solutions. When we understand the problem in epistemic terms, we naturally seek epistemic answers: better fact-checking, more deliberation, better education, greater media balance. We aim to develop the “civic” and “epistemic virtues” of unbiased, fair-minded citizens. And indeed, such projects are surely worth pursuing. The epistemic failures they aim to address have deeper roots in our political psychology, however—and overcoming them requires grappling with those roots more directly.
In short, decades of research have demonstrated that our political beliefs and behavior are thoroughly motivated and mediated by our social identities: i.e., the many cross-cutting social groupings we feel affinity with. And as long as we do not account for this profound and pervasive dependence, our attempts to address the epistemic failures threatening contemporary democracies will inevitably fall short. More than any particular institutional, technological, or educational reform, promoting a healthier democracy requires reshaping the social identity landscape that ultimately anchors other democratic pathologies.
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We do not generally decide which groups to identify with on the basis of their epistemic credentials regarding political questions. And even if we were to use such a standard, our judgments about which groups satisfy it would be inescapably colored by our pre-existing identities, formed on other bases or inherited from childhood. Developing certain “epistemic virtues” may mitigate some of our blind spots, finally, but it is hubris to think anyone can escape such biases entirely. Like it or not, it is a basic fact of human cognition that we think and act politically as members of social groups.
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The trouble is not that reliable collective truth-making practices no longer exist, but that significant portions of the population no longer trust them—and that as a result, the truths they establish no longer constrain those in power.
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What best explains contemporary epistemic failures… is not the decay of individual epistemic virtues, but the growing chasm between reliable collective truth-making practices and the social identities embraced by large numbers of people. And as a result, the only feasible way out of the mess we are in is not to ensure every citizen employs optimal epistemic practices, but to weaken their social identification with cranks and conspiracy theorists, and strengthen their identification with the broadly reliable collective practices of science, scholarship, journalism, law, and so on. The most visible manifestations of the problem might be epistemic, in other words, but its roots lie in social identity. And the most promising solutions will therefore tackle those roots.
Source: Blog of the APA
Image: Steve Johnson