NewsBeat

June 2019 NewsBeat 15 Values not only shape what people see, but they also structure what people look for in the first place. We call this "intuitive epistemology." Those who care about oppression look for oppression — so they find it. Those who care about security look for threats to it — and they find them. In other words, people do not end up with the same answers because they do not begin with the same questions. For example, the perception that vaccines cause autism — against all available empirical evidence — is now shared equally by Democrats and Republicans. Partisanship can't account for that dueling fact perception. But when we looked at the role of core values and their associated questions, we found the strongest predictor. If someone we surveyed ranked this question highly — Does it appear that people are committing indecent acts or degrading something sacred? — they were by far the most likely to believe that vaccines are dangerous. Partisan identity had no relationship at all with those beliefs. Because the starting points for different groups of citizens are deeply polarized, so are their ending points. And the starting points are often values rather than parties. The stronger those commitments to their values are, the stronger the effects. Those with extreme value commitments are much more certain than others that their perceptions are correct. Perhaps the most disappointing finding from our studies — at least from our point of view — is that there are no known fixes to this problem. Fact-checking tends to fall flat. The voters who need to hear corrections rarely read fact-checks. And for those who might stumble across them, reports from distant and distrusted experts are no match for closely held values and defining identities. Education is another possible means of encouraging consensus perceptions, but it can actually make things worse. Rather than training people how to think more reasonably, college and graduate school merely sharpen the lenses graduates use to perceive reality. In our data, those with higher levels of education are more, not less, divided. And the higher the level of training, the more tightly values and perceptions intertwine. Education provides the tools to more efficiently match their preferred values to their perceived facts. Based on this evidence, we conclude that dueling fact perceptions (or what some have labeled "alternative facts") are probably here to stay, and worsen. We suspect that the Mueller report would have been rejected by roughly half the country even if its conclusions had been definitive. But with key phrases like "Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him," the report's indecisiveness reinforces how difficult it can be to really know the "truth" about a lot of things. If a respected prosecutor like Robert Mueller can't offer a firm conclusion after two years of document dumps and interviews, what are the rest of us to do? As with so many other things, people will go with their guts, using their heads to feel better about the choices they have already made. Our conclusions are much more definitive than Mueller's: We see clear evidence of collusion and obstruction. Collusion between values and facts. Obstruction of the capacity to observe and accept legitimate evidence. So for the past couple of weeks, the chorus of "I told you so!" has rung out from the country's Blue coastlines and from every Red mile of heartland in-between. And with that, the U.S. continues to inch ever closer to a public square in which consensus perceptions are unavailable and facts are irrelevant. David Barker is a professor of government and director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. Morgan Marietta is an associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Their new book "One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy" is out now. A version of this story appeared on The Conversation. — Reprinted NiemanLab

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