Political Roles: Who Needs to Know?

Up to this point in the book, we have established that educators’ ability to develop and defend claims about the benefits of conveying certain types of information depends on the logic of competence, a prospective learner’s values, and framing decisions. For the purpose of this chapter, I proceed as if an educator has developed such a defense and turn attention to an important procedural question. To increase a competence, who needs to know what? For example, citizens have opportunities to vote for other people (i.e., candidates) who then make decisions on their behalf. If an educator is seeking to increase a competence using a criterion that produces particular kinds of policy outcomes, then competence depends not only on citizens’ direct actions, but also on the subsequent actions of those whom they elect. Suppose, for example, that an educator’s goal is to increase math proficiency among second-graders in a given school district. If a citizen votes for a school board candidate who voices the same desire, this vote is not sufficient to produce the desired outcome. That candidate must actually win the election—which requires votes from other voters. If elected, the candidate must work with other school board members to write the desired policies and then must count on others, such as school district employees, to enforce the policies. If we evaluate a citizen’s school board voting competence by whether it makes increased math proficiency more likely, many decisions other than her vote affect the evaluation. As a result, the kinds of information that can increase this competence depend on how the voter can use them. Variations in political roles affect who needs to know what. By political role, I mean a person’s opportunities to affect political outcomes. Some individuals, like a president or governor, have roles with great authority. Their singular actions can change important social outcomes. Other roles carry less political authority—such as being one of several million voters in a two-candidate election whose lone vote is unlikely to affect who wins the election.

The Politics of Competence

To increase another person’s knowledge or competence, it is necessary to attract attention to the information and for attentive persons to find the information credible. What attributes of information induce an audience to respond in these ways? To answer this question, I offer a framework called the politics of competence. This framework offers a way to organize and use information about psychological and contextual factors that affect how prospective learners think about what information is worth learning. The politics of competence has four components: value diversity, issue complexity, political roles, and learning costs. Individually and collectively, these four components affect what educational strategies are feasible, unfeasible, successful, and unsuccessful. They have this power because they produce divergent views of what strategies, knowledge, and competence are beneficial. They lead people to reach different conclusions about educational strategy questions such as “What information should educators convey?” and “Who should know what?” Educators can benefit from understanding the politics of competence. To see how, consider that a necessary condition for an educational endeavor to increase knowledge or competence is that prospective learners choose to participate. Some educators also need people to support their educational endeavors with money or labor. To draw the needed participation, potential learners, partners, and supporters must perceive that the endeavor will produce sufficiently positive net benefits. That is, all who are asked to sacrifice something of value as a means of advancing an educational endeavor must see the newly created knowledge or competence as providing benefits that are large when compared to the personal costs of achieving these goals. If sufficiently few people perceive an educational venture in this way, they will not participate. When success depends on producing outcomes that offer substantial net benefits from the perspective of essential participants, educators can benefit from understanding how the politics of competence affects the kind of information that different people find valuable. Designing educational endeavors that can deliver such benefits can be difficult. People who have gone a lifetime without knowing much about a particular issue may wonder why they need to learn about it now.

Attracting Attention

Educators seek to convey information that increases knowledge and competence. A necessary condition for accomplishing these goals is to attract attention to their information. Attracting attention can be difficult. Other people, nature, and many variations of consumer society and pop culture compete for a prospective learner’s attention. People can also pay attention to things that are not “in the room” when an educator is presenting potentially important information. Prospective learners can think about events that happened in the past or events that could happen in the future. At any moment, there are many things to which people can pay attention. In this chapter, we will review basic facts about how people direct their attention. To this end, I establish simple principles that educators can use to make their presentations more memorable to more people. Individually and collectively, these principles are not an automatic recipe for success, but they can help educators avoid common mistakes in how they convey information to others. . . . The chapter’s main lessons are as follows: Learning requires attention. Human attentive capacity is extraordinarily limited. For an educator to get a prospective learner’s attention, the prospective learner must perceive the information as something they can use to achieve highly valued aspirations. These aspirations can include making bad things go away. A phenomenon called motivated reasoning sometimes leads people to pay attention to information because of how it makes them feel, rather than basing their attention on the information’s true relationship to their aspirations. Educators can benefit from considering the concept of motivated reasoning when choosing how to convey information. Many educators overestimate the amount of information to which prospective learners are willing or able to pay. Correcting these estimates can help educators increase knowledge and competence more effectively. . . The chapter reaches these conclusions in the following way. Section 7A offers basic definitions that clarify attention’s role in learning. Section 7B shows how challenging earning attention can be. Section 7C explains how to make information more memorable for more people. Section 7D concludes.

Lost in the Woods

Chapter 5 offered a logic that clarifies the kinds of information that can increase knowledge and competence. In the coming chapters, I explain how educators can more effectively communicate this kind of information to others. From this point forward in part I, I focus on the time after an educator has identified information that can increase desired knowledge and competences. An educator in this situation faces an important challenge: Just because information can increase knowledge and competence does not mean that it will do so. For information to have these effects, prospective learners must think about the information in certain ways. For example, if a piece of information is to increase another person’s competence, that person must pay attention to the information. If the prospective learner ignores the information or processes it in ways that an educator did not anticipate, then the information may not have the educator’s desired effect. In chapters 6 to 8, I use insights from research on information processing to describe two necessary conditions for persuading an audience to think about information in ways that increase knowledge and competence. These conditions are gaining an audience’s attention and having sufficient source credibility. I focus on these conditions not only because of their logical necessity, but also because they are two factors over which educators often have some degree of control. “Not so fast!” This is a reaction that I sometimes get when suggesting that we base educational strategies on basic facts about attention and credibility, rather than continuing to rely on often-faulty intuitions about how others learn. Indeed, I have met many educators who initially argue that: “Being an expert in (say, deliberative democracy) makes me persuasive. Citizens and policymakers should respect me and be interested in what I have to say.” This is an attractive notion. It is also an illusion in many cases. Learning is a process that has knowable biological and psychological properties. A fundamental implication of these properties is that people ignore almost all of the information to which they could attend and people forget about almost all of the information to which they pay attention.

The Logic of Competence

This chapter clarifies the logical relationship between the types of information an educator can convey and competence at the types of tasks that people perform. Here is a short summary of the chapter’s main claims: . . . Knowledge of many things does not require recalling “all the facts.” Competence at many tasks does not require knowing “everything.” Trying to give “all the facts” to an audience is usually a sign of inefficiency. Cues and non-declarative memories facilitate competence even when they leave people unable to answer certain fact-based questions about a task. The effectiveness of attempts to increase competence depends on what information is given to whom. For example, when the competence of a group is being measured, not all members of that group must have the same knowledge for the group as a whole to be competent. . . . To improve efficiency, educators should understand what kinds of information are most relevant for increasing knowledge and competence. To reach these conclusions, I rely heavily on two terms: necessity and sufficiency. These terms describe logical relationships between two or more items. Educators who understand these terms can better distinguish information that increases desired competences from information that has no such power. X is a necessary condition for Y if Y can happen only after X happens. For example, suppose that earning at least a million votes is a necessary condition for a candidate to win an election. Two implications follow. First, any candidate who does not earn at least a million votes cannot win the election (which means that there may be no winner). Second, any candidate who earns at least a million votes has the potential to win the election. X is a sufficient condition for Y if X happening means that Y must also happen. Suppose that earning a million votes is sufficient to win the election. Two implications follow. First, any candidate who earns at least a million votes wins the election (which implies that multiple candidates could win). Second, any candidate who does not earn at least a million votes retains the potential to win the election.

The Silver Lining

There are many things that people do not know about politics, policy, and government. In some cases, this ignorance prevents them from making competent choices. It prevents them from making decisions that they would have made had they known certain facts and sought to act consistently with certain values. Such circumstances are why effective education is so important. Educators of all kinds are this book’s protagonists. Educators seek to help people make better decisions—where better refers to the decisions that people would have made had they known certain facts and sought to act consistently with certain values. All educators, however, face important constraints. There are limits on their time and energy. Money can be scarce, as can the labor of coworkers or volunteers. Also limited are prospective learners’ motivation to pay attention to new information. If educators seek to develop effective and efficient informational strategies in the face of such constraints, what information should they provide? Standing between many educators and the educational successes to which they aspire are their perceptions of learning’s net benefits. Over the years, I have met educators, or aspiring educators, who energetically imagine the benefits of conveying their expertise to others. They have strong beliefs that teaching certain facts will improve important outcomes. Many, however, have a difficult time articulating the costs that their educational endeavors will impose. Over the same period, I have met many citizens who are asked to participate in these endeavors. They have a different perspective about these endeavors. For citizens, the costs of becoming informed (e.g., money paid for tuition, the struggle to reconcile new information with old beliefs, time spent away from other activities) are real and tangible—while learning’s benefits are often perceived as uncertain. Many citizens as a result tend to be less enthusiastic about learning than educators imagine (and want) them to be. A key to increasing socially beneficial types of knowledge and competence is to become more knowledgeable about these perceptions. Politics is but one aspect of life to which citizens can devote time and energy.

All in Good Measure

This chapter is about how to word recall questions effectively. An example of why this topic matters occurred just days before the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. At that time, a New York Times headline proclaimed that “1 of 5 in New Survey Express Some Doubt About the Holocaust.” The Times article’s lead paragraph described the finding in greater detail (emphasis added): . . . A poll released yesterday [sic] found that 22 percent of adults and 20 percent of high school students who were surveyed said they thought it was possible that Nazi Germany’s extermination of six million Jews never happened. In addition to the 22 percent of adult respondents to the survey by the Roper Organization who said it seemed possible that the Holocaust never happened, 12 percent more said they did not know if it was possible or impossible, according to the survey’s sponsor, the American Jewish Committee. . . . Reactions to this finding were swift. Benjamin Mead, president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, called the findings “a Jewish tragedy.” Elie Wiesel, a Nobel Laureate and concentration camp survivor, conveyed shock and disappointment: “What have we done? We have been working for years and years … I am shocked. I am shocked that 22 percent … oh, my God.” Similar headlines appeared across the country. In the months that followed these reports, many struggled to explain the finding. Some blamed education, as a Denver Post editorial described: . . . It’s hardly surprising that some Americans have swallowed the myth that the Holocaust never happened… . [E] ither these Americans have suffered a tragic lapse of memory, or they have failed to grasp even the rudiments of modern history… . Such widespread ignorance could lull future generations into dropping their guard against the continuing menace of ethnic intolerance, with potentially devastating consequences… . To this end, the public schools must obviously do a better job of teaching 20th century history, even if it means giving shorter shrift to the Civil War or the Revolution. . . .

Assessing Information Assessments

While many analysts use PK scales to make claims about what people know and why it matters, others use subjective interviewer assessments. The ANES is a common source of these assessments. The ANES asks its interviewers to offer “a five-level summary evaluation of each respondent’s level of information level.” Interviewers rate each respondent as “very high,” “high,” “average,” “fairly low,” or “very low.” Data from these assessments appear in widely cited academic articles on political ignorance. In one such article, Bartels (1996: 203) argues that this variable’s use is preferable to PK scales. He claims that interviewer assessments are . . . no less (and sometimes more) strongly related than factual information scales are to relevant criterion values such as political interest, education, registration, and turnout (Zaller 1985: 4). Given the added difficulty of making comparisons from one election year to another using scales based on rather different sets of available information items of variable quality, the simpler interviewer ratings seem preferable for my purposes here. . . . Other scholars have augmented the case for using interviewer assessments in attempts to understand the relationship between knowledge and other factors. As Claassen and Highton (2006: 415) write: . . . To measure political information, we rely on NES interviewer ratings of respondents’ levels of political information. This indicator has two primary virtues. First, it is present in each of the surveys we analyze providing a consistent measure across survey years. Second, it has proven to be a valid measure. Bartels used it to provide important insights into public opinion toward … information effects in presidential voting (Bartels, 1996). Given our focus on changing information effects over time, we share the view that because of the “added difficulty of making comparisons from one election year to another using scales based on rather different sets of available information items of variable quality, the simpler interviewer ratings seem preferable.” . . . In a footnote (2006: 415n), they continue the argument: . . . For the purposes of this paper, we also prefer the interviewer rating to measures of policy specific information. . . .

Complexity and Framing

Politics includes issues of varying complexity. By complex, I mean issues that have multiple and possibly interrelated attributes. While it is arguable that all issues have multiple parts, I use the notion of issue complexity to draw attention to the fact that some issues have so many attributes that educators must make decisions about which parts to emphasize. Consider, for example, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which the United States passed in 2010. If you haven’t heard of this bill, you may know it by another moniker: “Obamacare.” One measure of this law’s complexity is its length. It is 906 pages long. The law’s table of contents alone is nearly 12 pages. At 906 pages, and given its frequent use of technical language, it is likely that few citizens, including many candidates for office, are knowledgeable about every part of it. It is inevitable that many, and perhaps most, of the people who express public opinions on this issue base their arguments on knowledge of only a few of the law’s many attributes. (This fact, by the way, does not stop people from labeling as “ignorant” others who disagree with them about this law.) In all such cases, experts, advocates, and interested citizens encourage their audiences to weigh certain attributes of the law more (or less) than others when making decisions about it. Insights from previous chapters can help educators make choices about which of a policy’s or candidate’s many multiple attributes to emphasize when attempting to improve others’ knowledge and competence. From chapter 5, for example, we know that just because an issue is complex, it does not mean that an audience’s decision task is complex. Suppose that the task is whether to vote for a specific candidate for office who promises to defeat the healthcare law in its entirety or a candidate who makes the opposite promise. Suppose that we have consulted the relevant range of values and from that consultation we can define a competent choice in the election as the vote that a person would cast if they understood a specific and large set of facts about the law.

Value Diversity and How to Manage It

Value diversity causes people to give different answers to questions like “What information is most valuable to convey?” and “Who needs to know what?” I define values as do Shalom Schwartz and Wolfgang Bilsky (1987: 551). By values, they mean “(a) concepts or beliefs, (b) about desirable end states or behaviors, (c) that transcend specific situations, (d) guide selection or evaluation of behavior and events, and (e) are ordered by relative importance.” By value diversity, I refer to the different values that people have. This chapter is about how value diversity affects claims about what is worth knowing and, hence, an educator’s ability to get prospective learners and supporters to participate in an educational endeavor. Some critics and educators regard values as a nuisance— particularly the values of those with whom they disagree. These critics want people to teach a particular set of conclusions about a subject that matters to them. They often see others’ values as illegitimate and as getting in the way of a rational conversation about issues that they consider important. These claims manifest as advice for others to focus on “just the facts.” I will show that these critiques often reflect a misunderstanding of how values affect learning. I will also show how to overcome these misunderstandings in ways that enhance educators’ abilities to increase many kinds of knowledge and competence. . . . Here is a short summary of the chapter’s main conclusions: Values affect how people perceive and process information. Values drive individuals to embrace certain types of information and reject others. Values often have these effects before prospective learners are conscious of them, and they have these effects even if prospective learners have trouble describing them. . . . In other words, values affect the types of information prospective learners are willing to pay attention to and regard as credible. As attention and credibility are critical assets for educators to possess, and as political situations often include people with different values, educators who understand how values affect learning can make more effective choices about what information to convey.