Ezra Klein wants to know how.
Epistemic closure,” Julian Sanchez writes, is the toxic result of “confirmation bias plus a sufficiently large array of multimedia conservative outlets to constitute a complete media counterculture, plus an overbroad ideological justification for treating mainstream output as intrinsically suspect.” … we’d all agree that it’s certainly theoretically possible for partisans of one party to embed themselves inside an echo chamber and become systematically more hostile to outside evidence than partisans of the other party. And given that this country has only two serious political parties, that would clearly be a troubling state of affairs. So the relevance of this discussion and the potential need to have it are not, I imagine, in doubt. The question is how do you measure epistemic closure? The easy answer is you test for its product: Misinformation. What you’d want to do, I guess, is continuously poll a standard set of questions based on empirical facts. “Has GDP grown since President X’s inauguration?” “Have global temperatures been rising or falling in recent decades?” “Does the United States have longer life expectancy than other developed nations?” “Do a majority of Americans approve of the president’s job performance?”
An alternative approach seems to me to be more promising. Take levels of political awareness (i.e. respondents’ ability to answer questions about which party has more members in the House etc) as a proxy for exposure to political information (both biased and unbiased). Divide the population according to the most appropriate metric for capturing the putative cocooning effect you are interested in (i.e. liberals v. conservatives; Democrats v. Republicans or whatever). Then test to see whether increased exposure to political information makes respondents more or less likely to give the right answer to politically salient questions where you know the right answers.
Best of all, Larry Bartels has done this already. In Unequal Democracy, Bartels examines how better informed and worse informed liberals and conservatives respond to a question asking whether economic inequality (as measured by income differences) had increased or decreased over time. The differences (see the graph below) between liberals and conservatives are striking. The better informed that liberals are about politics in general, the more likely they are to answer (correctly) that income inequalities have increased over time. The better informed that conservatives are about politics (in general), the less likely they are to give the correct answer. In other words, greater exposure to political information makes conservatives less likely to be right. This strongly suggests that conservatives face epistemic closure, at least on this issue. The more conservatives ‘know,’ the more likely they are to be wrong.
To be clear – one indicator on its own is insufficient evidence that one side of the ideological divide faces worse problems of epistemic closure than the other in any general sense. One could plausibly argue that liberals face their own epistemic closure on this and other questions – the fact that their policy elites are right on this may be purely accidental. This does not mean that conservatives do not have a problem of epistemic closure on this question – they almost certainly do – but we do not know whether liberals are better informed or merely lucky in this particular instance. One would like to see evidence across a variety of politically controversial questions (including some questions where liberals’ policy preferences potentially conflict with what we know to be correct or incorrect) before drawing any substantive conclusions. Still – at the least – this offers one way for actually figuring out the extent of epistemic closure – and some initial evidence that it is, indeed, a problem.
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Does it say that? This claim cannot be distinguished with the evidence given from the hypothesis that liberals and conservatives both listen to their elites but conservative elites are lying or misleading the conservative masses on this matter.
That may not sound any better but might not have anything to do with closure. If everyone listens to their elites without learning the objective facts then the body of neither group have open minds.
Yes. But this was more or less stated above:
In other words – we have good evidence of epistemic closure among conservatives – the more political information they consume (if political awareness is a good proxy for information) the less likely they are to be right. But we do not have good evidence that liberals are right for the right reason. In other words, epistemic closure clearly exists on this question among conservatives – but we do not know enough to be able to say that liberals are any better off.
I wonder who was in the sample as the percentage correct responses seems very high for those with low information if it was a general population sample and a yes/no question.
“conservatives face epistemic closure, at least on this issue.”
This issue (inequality) being one where the “right” answer is inimical to conservative ideology. Is there a similar issue where the accurate perception would discomfit leftist ideas? And if so, does epistemic closure still prevail more on the right with that issue as well?
One could plausibly argue that liberals face their own epistemic closure on this and other questions – the fact that their policy elites are right on this may be purely accidental. This does not mean that conservatives do not have a problem of epistemic closure on this question – they almost certainly do – but we do not know whether liberals are better informed or merely lucky in this particular instance.
May I suggest a type of agenda bias? I would think that liberals are likely to be a lot more conscious of the details of income distribution and (more excitingly!) re-distribution than conservatives.
Purely off the top of my head, I’ll bet there are questions in other topical areas where the typical lib would be helpless – since gun control is often in the news, the characteristics and availability of different handguns and rifles might be an example (I’d be helpless too, but not if I could use one lifeline to dial a family member.)
Here is more from Bartels from a Wilson Quarterly article:
For one thing, voters’ perceptions may be seriously skewed by partisan biases. For example, in a 1988 survey a majority of respondents who described themselves as strong Democrats said that inflation had “gotten worse” over the eight years of the Reagan administration; in fact, it had fallen from 13.5 percent in 1980 to 4.1 percent in 1988. Conversely, a majority of Republicans in a 1996 survey said that the federal budget deficit had increased under Bill Clinton; in fact, the deficit had shrunk from $255 billion to $22 billion. Surprisingly, misperceptions of this sort are often most prevalent among people who should know better—those who are generally well informed about politics, at least as evidenced by their answers to factual questions about political figures, issues, and textbook civics. If close attention to elite political discourse mostly teaches people to believe what the partisan elites on “their” side would like to be true, the fundamental premise of books such as Rick Shenkman’s—that a more attentive, politically engaged electorate would make for a healthier democracy—may be groundless.
Great – better informed voters may simply have a better mastery of their sides talking points.
It seems to me that Bartels is stacking the deck a bit, though, by picking that particular question. Income inequality as a concept is important to the left’s philosophy, but not to the right’s. The left would say that’s due to callousness on the right, while the right would say that it’s due to a commitment to different values, but I think both would agree that it’s true as a descriptive statement. There’s thus incentive for the left to learn this figure, while the right would consider it irrelevant.
It’s as if Bartels polled Jews and Christians over the cost of a Bar Mitzvah party, and from there concluded that Christians were ignorant about the economy.
Bartels isn’t “stacking the deck” – his book is about inequality and party politics, that’s why he picks that question.
As Henry points out above, this finding only gets at epistemic closure on the right – it tells us nothing at all about the left. But _especially_ if the right doesn’t care about inequality we should expect better informed people to know more about it, all other things being equal.
Doing the same thing for the left might be harder – maybe racial politics? The % of violent crimes committed by African Americans?
But even there – I’d expect better informed liberals to be better informed.
As for guns – there is no reason we would expect that knowing details about guns is correlated to political knowledge among anyone, so that seems a poor measure.
psychologists have been talking about closure and conservativism for years. look up jost’s work on need for closure.
“In other words, epistemic closure clearly exists on this question among conservatives – but we do not know enough to be able to say that liberals are any better off.”
My understanding is that in order to know that epistemic closure is present we need to know that the opportunity to facts has taken place _and_ that a procedure for integrating them in a rational manner is present. The evidence is the result after passing through both their information gathering phase and their information integration phase. It could well be that conservatives are doing the latter but not the former but the evidence can’t distinguish them.
I don’t see how you’d know the real answer to this until you find a subject without a clear ideological slant but with preconceived notions, educate conservatives and liberals about it, and then ask them if they changed their minds.
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