History News Network | Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About Donald Trump's Am... - 1 views
historynewsnetwork.org/...162131
politics psychology brain science stupid evolution bias context institutions
shared by Javier E on 29 Feb 16
- No Cached
-
Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter. The book is filled with statistics like these:● A majority of Americans don’t know which party is in control of Congress. ● A majority can’t name the chief justice of the Supreme Court. ● A majority don’t know we have three branches of government.
-
suddenly mainstream media pundits have discovered how ignorant millions of voters are. See this and this and this and this. More importantly, the concern with low-information voters has become widespread. Many are now wondering what country they’re living in.
-
The answer science gives us (the title of my last book and this essay notwithstanding) is not that people fall for slick charlatans like Trump because they’re stupid.
- ...19 more annotations...
-
The problem is that we humans didn’t evolve to live in the world in which we find ourselves. As the social scientists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby put it, the human mind was “designed to solve the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. These stone age priorities produced a brain far better at solving some problems than others.”
-
there are four failings common to human beings as a result of our Stone-Age brain that hinder us in politics.
-
why are we this way? Science suggests that one reason is that we evolved to win in social settings and in such situations the truth doesn't matter as much as sheer doggedness
-
Second, we find it hard to size up politicians correctly. The reason for this is that we rely on instant impressions.
-
This stops voters from worrying that they need to bolster their impressions by consulting experts and reading news stories from a broad array of ideological viewpoints. Why study when you can rely on your gut instinct?
-
First, most people find it easy to ignore politics because it usually involves people they don’t know. As human beings we evolved to care about people in our immediate vicinity. Our nervous system kicks into action usually only when we meet people face-to-face
-
This has left millions of voters on their own. Lacking information, millions do what you would expect. They go with their gut
-
most of the time we return to a state of well-being by simply ignoring the evidence we find discomforting. This is known as Disconfirmation Bias and it afflicts all of us
-
We evolved to show empathy for people we know. It takes special effort to empathize with people who don’t dress like us or look like us.
-
long-term we need to teach voters not to trust their instincts in politics because our instincts often don’t work.
-
Teaching this lesson doesn’t sound like a job for historians, but in one way it is. Studying history is all about putting events into context. And as it turns out, voters need to learn the importance of context.
-
Given the mismatch between our Stone-Age brain and the problems we face in the 21st century, we should only trust our political instincts when those instincts are serviceable in a modern context. If they aren’t (and most of the time they aren't), then higher order cognitive thinking is required.
-
Just why mass ignorance seems to be afflicting our politics at this moment is a complicated question. But here again history can be helpful. The answer seems to be that the institutions voters formerly could turn to for help have withered.
-
We don't want the truth to prevail, as Harvard's Steven Pinker informs us, we want our version of the truth to prevail, for in the end what we're really concerned with is maintaining our status or enhancing it.
-
don’t have much confidence that people in general will be willing on their own to undertake the effort.