How do you get people to not like Obama? You give them nonbiased, factual information that shows Obama's policies helped the economy and improved the country.
There's this logical fallacy called confirmation bias where people prefer to read information that supports their point of view over information that doesn't. And by people, I mean you. I know, you're sitting there thinking "Yeah, confirmation bias is really bad, it's horrible, I hate that everyone else does it, but I would never do it, I'm a fair and balanced human being who carefully weighs the pros and cons of every option." Well, bad news: You're not. You are just as susceptible to confirmation bias as anyone else.
To make matters worse, there's another thing called disconfirmation bias where if you read information that doesn't agree with your point of view, you are far more likely to argue against it, see faults in it, think it's bad evidence, not pay attention to it, and so on. Again, you may think you don't do this. You are wrong.
As we learned in political psychology, this leaves us in a lose lose situation: Either (a) You are informed, but extremely biased, or (b) You are not biased, but horribly uninformed. Almost everyone falls into one of these two groups. This, to put it as succinctly as I can, sucks.
A simultaneously scary and hilarious example of this was a political experiment wherein at the onset of the 2003 Iraq war some conservatives were asked if they believed there were WMDs in Iraq. About 30% of these people said yes, they believed there were WMDs in Iraq. Then, they were given a nonbiased, 100% factual investigation showing the extreme lack of evidence the Bush administration had re: WMDs in Iraq. The investigation demonstrated, in a nonpartisan, evidence-based fashion, that Iraq probably never had WMDs.
After reading the report, 60% of them believed there were WMDs in Iraq.
My response to this was slackjawed bewilderment. And this isn't a pocket case, either. Psychologists repeated the experiment with the Bush tax cuts (34% believed the cuts helped the economy, they were given nonbiased, factual information showing that the cuts did no such thing, then 60% believed the cuts helped the economy).
They did another experiment with vaccination, showing groups of anti-vaccinators several kinds of pamphlets: A story about a kid who didn't get vaccinated and got measles, scary pictures of kids with measles, and factual information that showed vaccines do not cause autism. In the former two groups, the opinions didn't really change much. In the final group, the one with factual information, people more strongly resisted vaccination. It's a situation that parodies itself.
We were given a final dose of this when our professor brought up the issue of pandas vs. koalas. This is a pretty unimportant issue. I didn't care about it. She even told us not to care about it. Then she brought up information on why pandas are cuter than koalas, and koalas just sleep all day and do nothing, and pandas are great, there are movies about them (Kung Fu Panda), bamboo is awesome, etc.
As she was talking I started to really, honestly think that koalas are better than pandas. This issue that had been profoundly unimportant a minute ago, an issue I had been explicitly told not to care about, had suddenly become something I cared about. We even had a mini debate in class on which species is better. I put up a valiant fight. But why? Why did I so passionately defend koalas, a species which I now realize is pretty bad?
Because I, too, am pretty bad. But it's okay, because so is everyone else.
-Me
