Many years ago, I
was working my way along Barry Road in Barry, canvassing door to door in a
local council election. I remember a
conversation with one particular voter, who told me that he could never vote
Plaid because ‘that Gwynfor Evans’ had a secret guerrilla army in the hills. I tried to reason with him, pointing out that
Gwynfor was, in fact a renowned pacifist and had always argued for a peaceful
approach to politics. The response was
swift: ‘that’s just a front to hide the fact that he has an army in the hills’
was the gist of it. It’s a classic
example of the way in which, once an idea is firmly implanted in the brain,
mere facts are not only never going to shift it, they are themselves
interpreted in ways which actually reinforce the idea that they should be
enough to dispel. I brought the
discussion to an end and moved rapidly on, marking him down as a definite ‘no’
for the election in question, and probably all future ones to boot. It was a frustrating experience, of course –
but sometimes further debate is pointless.
‘Confirmation bias’
is something that we all suffer from to a greater or lesser extent; evidence supporting
our own priors is preferred over evidence which challenges them. We’ve seen a great deal of the same thing in
relation to Brexit, and recent
work has revealed that, for instance, 42% of the UK electorate still
believe that infamous message on the side of the big red bus to be true,
despite all the rebuttals that have been widely publicised. The same survey also revealed how far away
from the factual truth people’s beliefs are on other issues, including the
impact of migration.
For those who
believe that the EU is an undemocratic front for German imperial ambitions,
intent on punishing and bullying the UK for having the temerity to try and
escape its clutches, imposing on us its straight bananas, expensive light
bulbs, and underpowered vacuum cleaners, and demanding that we submit to its
every whim, contradictory facts merely ‘prove’ how right they are. All forecasts of problems are just bad losers
refusing to accept the result, and all obstacles are just an attempt to
frustrate democracy. Whilst there is
some evidence that opinions are shifting slowly, I am far from confident at
this stage that a new referendum would produce a wildly different result, and I
fear at times that those of us who wish to avoid the damage which Brexit will
cause are only speaking to each other – and, even worse, only hearing our own
voices.
It’s a common
misconception that campaigners canvassing in an election are like missionaries,
out to convert others to their own point of view. It isn’t really true, though – the main aim
is to identify supporters with a view to then ensuring that they vote, in the
hope that achieving a favourable differential turnout will facilitate electoral
victory. In the context of that
conversation in Barry all those years ago, marking the individual down as a
‘no’ was enough. Political canvassers
are not the same thing as the door-to-door callers from some religious groups –
the latter truly want to save your soul, the former merely want to know how
you’re going to vote. I don’t know how
many people the missionaries convert; I suspect that the answer is very, very
few, but their absolute conviction that they are doing the right thing somehow
keeps them going in the face of multiple and repeated rejection. (That last part, at least, is something that
they do have in common with political canvassers!)
For those of us
who’d like to change the decision on Brexit, the way in which facts are
dismissed as ‘fake news’ is one indication of the way in which faith in the
true path of Brexit has become akin, in some ways, to a cult, and that is part of
what makes it so hard to change opinions.
There’s nothing particularly new about the fact that confronting cult
members with hard facts and evidence has never been a spectacularly effective
way of changing their minds, but what is, perhaps, new in the past decade or
two is the extent to which ‘alternative’ facts and evidence are so readily
available to reinforce any beliefs when they are challenged. As the director of
the policy institute at King’s College London put it in the newspaper article: “Attempting to change people’s views of
Brexit solely with a more evidence-based description won’t land, because it
misses a large part of the point: our allegiances affect our view of reality as
much as the other way round”. One of
the problems with the anti-Brexit campaign from the outset has been the absence
of any attempt to present a positive case for European unity; it has always
been mostly based on presenting the negatives of Brexit. Changing the underlying allegiance is much, much harder than merely presenting facts and evidence.
The scientific
approach to analysis of evidence is by no means as deeply ingrained in the
human psyche as many of us have optimistically chosen to believe, and we are
seeing the consequences of that, not just in relation to political questions,
but also on issues such as climate change.
None of this is an argument for ceasing to promote facts and hard
evidence; after all, if some of the great minds of the past had simply given
up, we would all still ‘know’, with absolute certainty, that the Earth was the
centre of the universe and everything else revolved around it. We should, though, be a bit more circumspect
about the impact that we are having, and accept that, to coin a phrase, the Enlightenment
is a continuing process not just a historical event.
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