The Chain of Misinformation

It is evident from the readings for this week that citizens are often misinformed or under-informed rather than uninformed. Is this any better than being uninformed? If anything, it can be argued that a citizen who is misinformed is more dangerous than a citizen who is not informed at all. The misinformed individual may hold on dearly to his or her opinions and end up making poor decisions on the basis of misinformation. The uninformed citizen, however, may not end up participating at all and this might be preferable to misguided participation.

What I really found troubling is the "impression driven" model. I can understand how it may be convenient to link emotions with certain information and recall that emotion later on to make a decision, but to forget on what criteria you made that emotional connection is quite scary to be honest. Consider a friendly debate amongst two neighbors about a candidate's policy. One individual likes the candidate and provides reasons (based on campaign events/information/speeches) to support his stance. The other individual dislikes the candidate, but is unable to explain why. The latter individual is going to appear quite ignorant, since his opinion of the candidate was based off of information he has long since forgotten.

Putting aside the risk of looking ignorant, the impression driven, or on-line model when combined with misinformation looks to be a disastrous duo. Individuals receiving information from the media, interest groups or public officials may be mislead, sometimes unintentionally and other times deliberately. If this same individual proceeds to take this faulty information and develops an impression while forgetting how he arrived at that impression, it is truly unfortunate. Even if later on he receives new, updated, correct information that contradicts the misinformation he already received, it is too late for him to change his stored impression. The damage has been done.

While it may be difficult and in some sense infeasible to expect people to always remember why they came up with a certain impression or opinion, people do need to increase their overall recall of political facts. The last thing we need is a chain starting with misinformation leading to a faulty impression and thus a misguided vote.