look who’s reasoning

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Jean: You have a right to have an ideal. Oh, I guess we all have one.

Charles: What does yours look like?

Jean: He’s a little short guy with lots of money.

Charles: Why short?

Jean: What does it matter if he’s rich? It’s so he’ll look up to me. So I’ll be his ideal.

Charles: That’s a funny kind of reason.

Jean: Well, look who’s reasoning.

— Preston Sturges, The Lady Eve

Randy Stein and Abraham Rutchick:

Why do some people endorse claims that can easily be disproved? It’s one thing to believe false information, but another to actively stick with something that’s obviously wrong.

Our new research, published in the Journal of Social Psychology, suggests that some people consider it a “win” to lean in to known falsehoods. […] 

Rather than consider issues in light of actual facts, we suggest people with this mindset prioritize being independent from outside influence. [Just ignore the bad grammar of that sentence.] It means you can justify espousing pretty much anything – the easier a statement is to disprove, the more of a power move it is to say it, as it symbolizes how far you’re willing to go. 

I’ve looked at the paper, and it seems pretty sketchy to me: a matter of asking people vague questions and then speculating about what their answers probably mean. 

What Stein and Rutchick are overlooking, it seems to me, is what a great many of MAGA folk will tell you straight out: that if loony lefties say that X and Y are “actual facts,” that Z is a “known falsehood” “that can easily be disproved,” it ain’t necessarily so. If President Trump says that crime in Washington D.C. is the worst it’s ever been and the socialist Democrats are at fault, and then some socialist at CNN — they’re all socialists at CNN — says that some “experts” have produced “scientific” research proving him wrong … well, MAGA knows who’s more trustworthy. They say: Look who’s reasoning. 

They’re not thinking, “Yes, we know that you have the Scientific Facts on your side, but our tribal loyalties are more important to us than facts!” They’re thinking, “You claim that you have facts, but we think it’s far more likely that you have cooked the books to generate an outcome that confirms your political preferences. Hasn’t that happened often enough in the past? Haven’t you and your kind been caught in the act?” 

People across the political spectrum do this all the time. Not long ago there was an online kerfuffle stemming from a post by John Ganz called “Against Polling.” When some people declared that Ganz was anti-science, anti-data, anti-fact, he replied, 

Is it so unreasonable to ask, why is it that the data brigade and the positivists are constantly urging a move rightwards, why they happen to be the same faction that wants to mend fences with the business world and Silicon Valley, and why they have the ear (and wallets) of the donors? Why should I grant their pretensions of embodying reason and factuality itself? That’s the very definition of ideology: a tendency that claims not to be a tendency, to be in fact, the absence of tendency and pure neutrality. There’s no such thing. The polling shit is part of an ideology that hides values in value-neutral language. 

You can find similar examples every day: someone says These are the facts and someone else says Those are not the facts, they’re factoids conjured up by people in the grip of motivated reasoning. The latter group are not simply by virtue of their disagreement anti-fact weirdos whose behavior needs some deep explanation. Even when they’re MAGA, they’re often just saying: Look who’s reasoning. 

The Stein and Rutchick argument tells people on the left exactly what they want to hear: that they haven’t failed in the task of persuasion, that the blame lies wholly with those anti-data tribalists in MAGAland. A comforting message, but not, I think, the correct one. Far more people are persuadable on particular questions — like whether the crime rate in D.C. is the worst it has even been, which, for the record, it definitely isn’t — than most partisans think. But persuasion has to be done retail, not wholesale, and you can’t sell everyone instantly on everything in your store. 

Another way to put this point: Most people can be persuaded on many (probably not all) points, but not by a tweet or a link — not online at all. It’s hard work that requires patience. By contrast, dismissing everyone who disagrees with you as irrational doesn’t take any work or patience at all.