by Joe Miller,
Director of Development
“Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”
These lines open Hard Times, Charles Dickens’ novel about industrialization in Victorian England. The lines are uttered by Thomas Gradgrind, Dickens’ caricature of education reformers.
Memorizing facts feels a little pointless these days. After all, we all walk around with computers in our pockets. Why memorize the atomic number of boron when the answer is just a Google search away. (Boron’s atomic number: 5.)
But there is a downside to not memorizing facts. We’re really bad at guessing them.
A recent poll asked Americans to estimate the size of different minority groups. The poll asked participants to estimate the percentage of Americans who have a particular income distribution (e.g., earn over $1M per year), sexual orientation (e.g., transgender), religion (e.g., Muslim) or ethnicity (e.g., Native American).
The median estimates: 10% (earn over $1M), 12% (transgender), and 20% (Muslim and Native American).
The actual figures: around 1% for each.
We’re just as bad at guessing the sizes of large groups, too. Respondents underestimated the percentage of Americans who are Christian (estimate: 57%; actual: 70%), those who have read a book in the last year (estimate: 50%; actual: 77%) and those who have at least a high school degree (estimate: 68%; actual: 89%).
Our bad guessing skills aren’t limited to demographics.
When asked what sorts of federal spending cuts Americans support, only one category consistently receives majority support: foreign aid.
That answer makes some sense, given that a poll found that Americans think 31% of the federal budget goes toward foreign aid. Actual spending on foreign affairs (which includes both foreign aid and funding for all our embassies and diplomats): about 1%. For context: the entire foreign affairs budget would fund Social Security for about 22 days.
Every couple of years, political campaigns exploit the, er, fact that we are both (reasonably) reluctant to memorize a lot of facts while being bad at guessing them.
If you happen to get your television from stations in Pennsylvania or Virginia, you’ve no doubt been bombarded by political ads. An awful lot of them play fast-and-loose with facts.
I should know. I wrote political ads for the 2006 midterms.
I atoned for those sins by writing for FactCheck.org, whose mission is to debunk false and misleading claims made by people running for various offices.
Our small team worked late nights tracking down every claim uttered in debates. We then returned each morning to find hundreds of requests to check claims being made in 435 House races, 33 Senate races and an uncountable number of local races.
I looked into everything from the F-22 fighter jet to hunting wolves in Alaska to the roots of the 2007-8 financial crisis. At one point, I held Barack Obama’s birth certificate in my very own hands. (Yes, he was born in Hawaii.)
There are a lot of reasons voters get taken in by false or misleading political claims. But perhaps the most common owes to something called confirmation bias.
That’s a fancy way of saying that we tend to believe claims that confirm what we already think.
Those who lean to the right politically might uncritically accept a claim about violent crime in the US because it supports the view that citizens need to be armed. Those leaning to the left might accept a statistic about mass shootings because it supports the view that certain types of firearms should be more restricted.
The facts show that homicide rates have steadily declined since the early 1990s and have done so at about the same rate in areas with both strict and loose gun regulations. Mass shootings may dominate news coverage, but they account for only about 1% of all homicides. Most gun deaths in the US are via suicide, not homicide.
So how do we avoid getting taken in by false and misleading claims that sound like we believe should be true?
My general rule of thumb: The more I want to believe a claim, the more scrutiny I give it. I go looking for reputable sources that can confirm it. Reputable is important here. If the only sources you consult are those that also confirm your worldview, then you’re not combatting confirmation bias; you’re just shifting it around.
I recommend starting with my former colleagues at FactCheck.org. You can also try Snopes, Politifact and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker.
And, of course, you can always visit the original home of fact checking—your local library.
