Dan Kahan reports on a study by Brendan Nyhan, Jason Reifler, and Peter Ubel.
Two groups of subjects got a news article that reported on false assertions by Sarah Palin relating to the role of “death panels” in the Obamacare national health plan. One group received in addition, though, a news story that reported that “nonpartisan health care experts have concluded that Palin was wrong.” They then compared the perceptions of the two groups.
…As subjects became more pro-Palin in their feelings, high political knowledge subjects did not merely discount the “correction” by a larger amount than low political knowledge ones. The effect of being exposed to the “nonpartisan experts say Palin wrong” message on high knowledge subjects actually made those with pro-Palin sentiments credit her initially false statements even more strongly than their counterparts in the “uncorrected” or control condition!
My reaction:
1. Just to be fair, I would like to see a study done in which two groups of subjects get a news article reporting on a study that purports to show that a higher minimum wage does not reduce employment. Yes, I know that Krueger and Card did such a study. Then have the experimental group be exposed to the statement that later studies contradicted the Krueger-Card finding (which is what happened). My guess is that, once again, strong partisans would credit the Krueger-Card study even more strongly in the experimental condition.
2. One of the implications of the theory of motivated reasoning and political cognition, which Kahan is discussing here and which I agree is important, is that the correlation between partisanship and knowledge is very high. Therefore, the term “nonpartisan expert” is nearly an oxymoron.
3. If “non-partisan expert” is an oxymoron, then it would make sense for people to view the use of the term with suspicion. It may in fact be rational to react to the statement “non-partisan experts believe X” by reducing your belief in X. Perhaps the experimental subjects intuitively understand the theory of motivated reasoning. They may think, “The article is telling me that some highly motivated reasoners believe X. But it is not giving me any new evidence for X. If there were actual evidence to convince me of X, the article would have shown the evidence, instead of just giving me the views of motivated reasoners. So I should be even more skeptical about X than I was before.”
4. What one seeks in an expert on a politically-charged issue is someone who is a political ignoramus but an expert in the subject at hand. That may not be easy to find.
5. What is most informative is a statement by an expert who is politically motivated one way but who offers testimony in the opposite direction. In fact, when such statements are encountered we give them particularly high credibility.
(3) is a large part in my own dismissal of many news stories. I have quite a quiver of reasons for dismissing news stories…
Definitely good issues to think through. But I think you’re a little too breezy in step 2–are you equivocating on the meaning of “partisan” there? Yes, as a matter of fact, political scientists and psychologists have shown that strong partisans (in the R or D sense) have strong filters for how they view the world; yes, at some level, it’s probably fair to say that disinterested knowing is impossible. I’m not at all sure that it follows that “the term ‘nonpartisan expert’ is nearly an oxymoron,” though. Clearly some people have a much stronger partisan agenda (in the D-R sense) than others, and that some people (e.g., those with a financial stake in answering a question one way rather than another) are likely to be more “partisan” (in the not-at-all-disinterested sense of the word). For those of us who resist being strongly partisan in either of these senses, “nonpartisan expert” is a totally coherent guiding light, even if it’s probably not entirely attainable. No doubt there are lots of Americans who would scoff at this, and think the aspiration to be mere pretension, but so much the worse for them.
I know it’s a side issue from the main point, but was is Palin’s “death panel” description misleading in any way? It was similar to an argument I had already been raising privately, though under a less evocative name. (My phrasing was, “ask who says no” under any given system.)
From a little googling, I find this “lie of the year” article:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2009/dec/18/politifact-lie-year-death-panels/
However, I don’t see where in it they point out Palin being inaccurate. All she points out is that the only realistic way for nationalized medical care to control costs is to sometimes say no. One category of saying no is patients that are likely near the end of their life. And who decides when this happens? A bureaucratic panel.
I would be very interested if anyone can say what I am missing. Not that I am a huge Palin fan, but I think she got this one right.
Well Palin was talking about more than near end of life “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”
In fact the Health care bill “gave incentives to doctors and hospitals for efficiency and improved care.” The incentives may not really lower costs as much as Democrats think, but when other countries have lower health care costs without “death panels’ it is reasonable to think there are some savings available.
Also there was the characterization of payments for optional “appointments for patients to discuss living wills, health care directives and other end-of-life issues” as “required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner” by another Republican.
Even if there are not sufficient savings from ending insurance bureaucracy and other measures, “saying no or later” can start with quality of life services like knee replacements. Then there is the question as to whether savings is even a necessary feature from the Democrat’s point of view or merely nice to have. In most cases Democrats are generally assumed to be more likely to want to raise taxes rather than cut services than Republicans.
So in short I would say that Palin’s death panel description is misleading because she characterizes the health care bill as
one that will set up a bureaucratic panel to decide if some one is “productive” enough to live when there is nothing like that in the bill even by wildly extrapolating possible indirect consequences of the bill.
Death panels in such or another form exist in every country where medical care is socialized. For example, in UK “as a guideline rule, NICE accepts as cost effective those interventions with an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio of less than £20,000 per QALY”.
How one feels about the NICE approach depends a lot on how much one trusts government experts to objectively value a medical procedure.
To my mind, the best solution is Hegel’s Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis process. People don’t want to admit they were wrong, and seldom are they 100% wrong. So, encourage them to develop a more sophisticated view.
For example, with minimum wage:
– Thesis: Minimum wage laws reduce employment.
– Antithesis: Card-Krueger study
– Synthesis: How high the minimum wage is matters. A $100 minimum wage would crush unemployment, but a $1 minimum wage would be irrelevant.
The problem seems to be that so many cite the run of the mill expert opinion as an argument from authority. I found the excerpt below from an old Freshman Rhetoric textbook (1919) on argumentation to be as good an explanation as any:
“The argument from authority is the use of testimony from a witness of such eminence and unquestioned impartiality that his word carries conviction to all.”
The above is almost never the “authority” being appealed to in discussions of maters but rather the ordinary “expert” witness, who do not merit the claim of “authority” and can be countered by other experts holding differing opinions.
“Expert witnesses are good witnesses so long as they confine themselves to facts–provided they can be shown to be reasonably impartial; but when they begin to state opinions, such testimony proves nothing more than that the people who know the most about the subject disagree–which fact we knew already. Little attention need be given in most arguments to testimony as to opinions without facts on which the opinions are based. “