Is an election based on facts possible?

Ineed to tell you something you might not believe. We’re emotional creatures who overestimate our own capacity for dispassionate reasoning and don’t change our behaviour in response to facts.

The second half of that paragraph is meant to double as both an intro to this column and a disclaimer: being human, I’m almost certainly reacting emotionally to the information I’m trying to convey and in the process imparting a personal twist to it. Please factor that into your deliberations.

That intro is, however, based on careful research. Not my own, by actual scientists. I went looking for it after a senior colleague commented that research had found people don’t change their opinions when presented with facts that contradict their views. People respond to appeals that hit them at an emotional level.

Not only did that immediately resonate, based on how I personally work, on the way the world seems to have worked over the last few years, and on the way it increasingly seems to operate with social media’s algorithms dogging our digital footsteps, but it seemed such a valuable pointer to what may lie ahead this year.

Is anyone else already starting to feel election fatigue? Apart from those political nerds fizzing at the thought of our general election followed immediately by a United States presidential showdown, is anyone else just about over it?

Not that I don’t think they’re important – here at home, I steadfastly believe a three-year electoral cycle is at least a year too short – but I feel a little overwhelmed by what the material I’ve read suggests is coming up.

The electoral landscape already seems littered with emotional halftruths. How many more will we have to endure, and process, before September 19? And then before November 3?

What I quickly found on my search was a lengthy article published by The New Yorker in early 2017, not long after Donald Trump took office, which dealt with a couple of psychological studies conducted at Stanford University in California.

One involved two groups of undergraduate students being presented with pairs of suicide notes, in which one had been composed ‘‘by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life’’, and asked to distinguish between them.

Some students were initially told they’d been remarkably accurate, correctly identifying 24 out of 25 genuine notes, and others that they’d been poor, identifying only 10 correctly.

Then they’d all been told the results were fabricated, the test was really about gauging ‘‘their responses to thinking they were right or wrong’’, and asked to estimate how many they’d identified correctly, and how many they thought an average student would get.

Guess what? Those initially told they’d scored high thought they had done significantly better than the average student, while the lowscore group thought they’d done demonstrably worse.

‘‘Once formed, impressions are remarkably perseverant’’ researchers observed. The old scenario about first impressions lasting.

A second, related study traversed by the New Yorker story, conducted years later with a different set of Stanford students and different subject matter, produced a similar outcome, leading researchers to observe that even when evidence for their beliefs ‘‘has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs’’.

I’m sure the first reaction of many participants was to feel they weren’t that suggestible, and we may be the same, but take a look at the tribally entrenched political positions, and huge gulfs between them, that have become evident in the last few years. There seems to be precious little common ground, or potential for compromise.

There are times when I have the impression of politicians, even here in New Zealand, that, with a few shining exceptions, the whole point of wanting to be in government is simply to be in government, not a genuine desire to serve.

It seems surprisingly easy to appeal emotionally to people, without having much of substance to say, providing confirmation bias for those already on your side, and potentially also influencing those undecided about their position but unlikely to do the mahi of examining policy in detail. It’s swing voters who win elections, after all.

It’s no surprise to me that fake news is flourishing against that background. Social media is fertile ground for this. Soundbite-style sniper attacks are simple; Trump does it all the time. The information doesn’t have to be accurate but it helps if it’s emotive. Every one of Trump’s absurd tweets attracts massive opposition, but also thousands of likes and retweets. Bulls..t and bluster though they may be, they land with his base and reinforce their irrational loyalty, and through that resonance, have the potential to sway the uninformed too.

Such sniping at the Government, or the PM, from a whole range of opposition MPs, right up to the leader, is common here. It seems easy in Opposition to attack anything and everything. The attacks don’t have to be fair, or completely accurate. They just have to be out there, emotion-laden. Government MPs occasionally push back, but it’s nothing like what seems a concerted National campaign.

Emotions are powerful. Think about falling in love, possibly the most enduring theme of human history. Intense emotions overcome plenty of obstacles, especially when matches are problematic.

So how do we end up with an electoral process that responds to the genuine needs of a society and all its people? Has there ever been one? If so, I’m not sure it’s possible in the 21st century. Maybe a little understanding of how suggestible we are can help us separate fact from emotion, and examine policies dispassionately. But I’m afraid that’s a massive maybe.