The significance of ‘duelling facts’ in US

THE Mueller Report was supposed to settle the controversy over whether the Trump team colluded with Russians or obstructed justice. Clearly it has not.

Reactions to the report have ranged from “total exoneration” to “impeach now”. Since 2013 – long before Donald Trump was even a candidate – we have been studying the “duelling facts” phenomenon: the tendency for Red and Blue America to perceive reality in starkly different ways.

The conflicting assertions that have emerged since the report’s release highlight just how easy it is for citizens to believe what they want, regardless of what Robert Mueller, William Barr or anyone else has to say about it.

Our research has led us to several conclusions about the future of political discourse in the US. Duelling fact perceptions are rampant, and they are more entrenched than most people realise.

Some examples of this include conflicting perceptions about the existence of climate change, the strength of the economy and the safety of vaccines.

This has serious implications for American democracy. It is important to determine where such divergent beliefs come from in the first place.

This is the perspective we began with: if duelling fact perceptions are driven by misinformation from politicians and pundits, then one would expect things to get better by making sure that people have access to correct information. We found that voters see the world in ways that reinforce their values and identities.

For example, according to our data from national surveys from 2013 to 2017, the most important predictor of whether a person views racism as highly prevalent and influential is not her partisan identification. It is the degree to which she prioritises compassion as a public virtue, relative to other things like rugged individualism.

Values not only shape what people see, but they also structure what people look for in the first place. We call this “intuitive epistemology”.

Those who care about oppression look for oppression, so they find it. In other words, people do not end up with the same answers because they do not begin with the same questions.

When we looked at the role of core values and their associated questions, we found the strongest predictor. If someone we surveyed ranked this question highly, “Does it appear that people are committing indecent acts or degrading something sacred?”, they were by far the most likely to believe that vaccines are dangerous.

Partisan identity, on the other hand, has no relationship at all with those beliefs. Perhaps the most disappointing finding from our studies – at least from our point of view – is that there are no known fixes to this problem.

Fact-checking tends to fall flat. Education is another possible means of encouraging consensus perceptions, but it actually makes things worse.

In our data, those with higher levels of education are more, not less, divided. We conclude that duelling fact perceptions (or what some have labelled “alternative facts”) are probably here to stay, and worsen.

We suspect that the Mueller Report would have been rejected by roughly half the country, even if its conclusions had been definitive. If a respected prosecutor like Mueller can’t offer a firm conclusion after two years of document dumps and interviews, what are the rest of us to do?

Barker is professor of Government and Director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies, American University School of Public Affairs, and Marietta is associate professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell. This article first appeared in The Conversation