I had a brief story (link) come out last week in Miller-McCune that I’ve been meaning to post about.
Some political scientists polled a bunch of people about schools — half of respondents they gave a couple basic facts, half they gave nothing. One finding, that people know very little about education, schools, and costs, isn’t surprising to me at all. But another finding was pretty interesting: if you give people even small amounts of information, it can really change their views.
This isn’t an entirely new insight, but there don’t seem to be many studies that show the extent to which it’s true. What’s more interesting to me (and something I didn’t get into in the story, largely because the researchers were afraid of drawing conclusions on it) is that most policy wonks have this grand dream that if we could just turn everyone into data-consuming technocrats, society would be better. But some dreamers are also secretly worried that they’re wrong — in other words, that people aren’t smart enough to look at the data and see that they (the wonk) are 100% correct on any given issue.
The researcher (Howell) was encouraged by the findings. He was sort of like, “Hey, this proves that if you give people facts, they alter their views intelligently.” But to me, it may imply the opposite: that if you give people certain leading facts, you can influence them, even without any emotional appeal. In some ways, the study is a nice little microcosm of how push polling works: Take someone who doesn’t know much about an issue, give them a tidbit of one-sided information, and watch them change their uninformed view. What’s scary is how easily this can be done.