Conclusion

Chapter 16 summarizes the book’s main conclusions about dueling fact perceptions: the concept is broad, the causes deep, the consequences severe, and the potential correctives ineffective. The book examines a broader range of fact perceptions than previous studies of verifiable misperceptions. It demonstrates that the causes are internal (values) as well as external (partisan leadership and media) and that the consequences are social as well as political—fostering interpersonal disdain and political disengagement. Perhaps most disheartening, the book finds that the most discussed correctives of greater education and more extensive fact-checking are not effective. Citizens employ greater education to cement the connections between values and perceptions more firmly, and the university has lost its status as a bipartisan provider of consensus facts. Not only have facts and values become hopelessly intertwined, but the relationship between education and democracy has become corrupted. The psychology of ordinary citizens, who project their priors onto their perceptions, has created a realignment of trust and a fracturing of facts, which no known reform is likely to repair.

Political Knowledge and Fractured Perceptions

Chapter 12 begins Part IV, Correctives, by examining the role of political knowledge and education in addressing dueling fact perceptions. Contrary to many hopes, both political knowledge and education only increase the prevalence of dueling facts and the abilities of citizens to project their values onto their perceptions. The contemporary university in particular may be limited in its ability to bring fact perceptions into consensus because of the distrust of the institution held by many citizens. Provocative data from 2014 illustrate the deep degree of distrust of university knowledge and its origins in perceptions of the ideology of university faculty. This suggests a realignment of authority and rejection of the university as a provider of consensus facts.

Your Facts or Mine?

Chapter 5 commences Part II of the book, Causes. It reviews the well-demonstrated psychological mechanisms that lead citizens toward perceiving only a specific set of facts, all the while believing in their sophisticated and unbiased appraisal. A constellation of reinforcing mechanisms adds up to citizens projecting their priors onto their perceptions. The chapter provides a detailed review of the psychological foundations of fact perceptions. It begins by describing the power of personal knowledge (highlighting the notorious “dress controversy” of 2015) and continues to discuss the contributions of cognitive psychology, social psychology, the theory of motivated reasoning, and the perspective that “reasoning is for arguing.” It concludes that all of these literatures point to a powerful role for core values as shapers of reality perceptions, noting the lack of empirical studies that directly test that hypothesis.

Let Facts Be Submitted to a Candid World

Chapter 13 considers fact-checking as another possible corrective. After a brief history of the rise and diversity of the fact-check industry, the chapter critiques the epistemology of fact-checking and its limitations in the selection and assessment of facts. It summarizes a study comparing the findings of PolitiFact, factcheck.org, and The Fact Checker of the Washington Post, which reveals meaningful differences in the realities assessed as well as in the conclusions reached. This suggests that for the engaged citizen attempting to sort out the disputed realities of the current political environment, consulting fact checkers will not necessarily be of great service to them in determining which version of competing realities to endorse.

Disdain and Disengagement

The studies in Chapter 11 examine the social and professional consequences of dueling fact perceptions. Through a series of novel experiments, the authors take a look at how citizens react to peers whom they perceive to be factually misguided. Chapter 11 uses survey experiments (designed to mimic a Twitter feed) to investigate how people react to political statements they consider factually inaccurate. The experiments demonstrate that such tweets invite intense social and professional disdain, and they encourage moderate citizens to disengage from politics (thereby warping the electorate in favor of ideologues). Collectively, these results suggest that dueling fact perceptions do not just manifest polarization; they may nurture it as well, with social media serving as an important vehicle.

Polarized Leaders Versus Polarized Values

Chapter 7 draws upon the literature reviewed in Chapters 5 and 6 and uses four years of data to analyze the degree to which core value projection explains differences in fact perceptions—relative to the explanatory power of partisan leadership, social identity consciousness, and partisan media. The authors find that value projection accounts for fact perceptions more consistently than does any other mechanism, which contradicts the narrative presumed by most previous studies of misinformation. Given that value projection does not depend on external forces in the way that partisanship and media effects do, the authors’ findings suggest that reforms aimed at media or parties will not succeed at quelling the dueling fact perception epidemic.

Dueling Facts in American Politics

Chapter 4 culminates the Concepts section of the book. It provides a detailed treatment of three of the most salient factual controversies in American politics, on which many of the empirical analyses that follow in later chapters focus: the reality of anthropogenic climate change, the enduring consequences of racism, and the origins of sexuality. The chapter also provides a brief overview of the various other dueling fact perceptions that the empirical chapters analyze in a more limited way: the harmfulness of the national debt, the prevalence of false convictions, the trajectory of violent crime, the efficacy of gun control and minimum wage increases, the consequences of undocumented immigration, and the danger of vaccines.

Symmetry, Asymmetry, and Durability

Some writers have argued that the dueling facts phenomenon is driven disproportionately by the ideological Right: conservatives and Republicans, so the argument goes, are more likely to engage in motivated reasoning and wind up misinformed. An expanse of scholarship documents the rigidity of the Right, which suggests that conservatives tend to be disproportionately (1) ideological, (2) suspicious of moderation, (3) uninterested in compromise, (4) prone toward authoritarianism, (5) cognitively inflexible, (6) lacking in empathy, (7) socially and informationally insular, and (8) hostile toward outgroups. Chapter 15 evaluates whether one side of “the duel” is more heavily armed than the other. It finds that liberal Democrats are no less likely than conservative Republicans to perceive reality through political lenses. What is more, the Left is actually more likely than the Right to express factual certainty when none is warranted and to reveal contempt for those who perceive the world differently from how they do.

Citizen Reponses to Fact-Checking

Chapter 14 describes a survey experiment conducted ahead of the 2016 California Democratic presidential primary, which examines the manner and extent to which perspective-threatening information from a reputable fact checker might influence mass perceptions of candidates, as well as perceptions of fact checkers themselves. The focus is on how such influence is (or is not) conditioned by (a) partisanship (intra- vs. interpartisan candidate comparisons), (b) intellectual elitism/populism, and (c) education. We find that a candidate’s detractors tend to remain steadfast in the face of evidence painting the candidate in a more positive light but that such evidence dramatically damages people’s evaluations of the fact-checking industry. This is especially, but not exclusively, the case among Republicans. Not only does education fail to temper such resistance to fact-checking; it actually enhances it to a significant degree.

The Democratic Consequences of Dueling Facts

Chapter 10 introduces the Consequences section of the book, providing an overview of the democratic consequences of dueling fact perceptions. The clear consequences include greater public ignorance, more entrenched policy gridlock, and the failure of deliberation. Some more controversial consequences include rising perceptions of mental illness, higher barriers to scandal, and divided perceptions of specific events. The authors examine empirical evidence from the 2013 national survey that suggests that perceptions of the Trayvon Martin incident are strongly connected to value priorities. The chapter concludes by introducing the focus in Part III—the social consequences of how citizens perceive and react to others who hold conflicting perceptions of reality.