Right or left, partisans get expert opinion wrong

Unbiased expert opinion is accepted or rejected depending on reader’s views, CU researchers find

Here’s a riddle: When is an unbiased expert not an expert? For many Americans, the answer is: any time the expert provides information that does not reflect the partisan political beliefs of the target audience.

That’s a key finding of new research by University of Colorado Boulder doctoral candidate William Jaeger and Jeffrey Lyons, who earned his Ph.D. in political science from CU-Boulder in 2014 and now lectures at Denver University.

“(M)any see information as being a potential savior of the electorate … The results from this experiment suggest otherwise,” the researchers write in the July 2014 issue of State Politics & Policy Quarterly. “Information is largely used as a weapon by partisans. When the information confirms their beliefs, they use it, and when it challenges them, they ignore it.”

In exploring how citizens use partisanship to understand the world in which they live, Jaeger and Lyons became interested in how people assign blame for government failures—think the botched response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the manufactured debt-ceiling crisis or the clumsy rollout of the Affordable Care Act.

The first conclusion is a no-brainer: People find ways to blame the other party. But what if they receive non-partisan information from experts?

To answer the question, the researchers provided subjects with fake newspaper articles about a credit downgrade resulting from a state government’s failure to balance the budget, tweaking details to measure whom they blamed for the failure, such as which party was in charge.

Some subjects were given an article in which a spokesperson for a credit-rating agency blamed their party, and others an article in which the non-biased expert blamed the opposition party.

“But rather than using the information to challenge their prior beliefs, when told the rival party was responsible for failure, they used the information to blame the party even more,” Jaeger says. “When told their own party was at fault, they simply ignored the information.”

The results have profound implications for a nation riven by fierce partisan debate and ineffective governance and undermines the widely held notion that if you give citizens and voters unbiased information, they will be more willing to set aside partisan differences and compromise in pursuit of the common good.

"We have shown that rather than consider relevant facts, people are more interested in pointing the finger at the other party.”

“When politicians fail to produce desired outcomes, citizens need to be able to accurately place blame and potentially vote them out of office,” the researchers write. “We have shown that rather than consider relevant facts, people are more interested in pointing the finger at the other party.”

But if providing citizens with expert, unbiased information isn’t an effective lubricant to loosen up America’s political gridlock, what is?

“We want to explore the question further, but there is a lot to be said for social networks and trusted discussion partners,” Jaeger says.

“When they provide information that counters our prior beliefs or assigns blame in a way that cuts across our expectations or partisan identities, that can cause people to consider diverse viewpoints. Bringing an expert voice in is an insufficient strategy.”

Yet with screen-addicted denizens exposing themselves to the constant information bombardment of the Internet age, such interpersonal dialogue is on the decline—interaction on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter doesn’t really qualify.

And the enormous amount of and diffuse information on offer also means people can increasingly hunker down inside partisan walls that reduce their exposure to diverse information.

“Diverse discussion networks are important, but I don’t know if you can really get there online,” Jaeger says. “So that’s an added concern when considering how we can have an informed electorate.”

Clay Evans is director of communications for CU Presents.