Information and Rationalization

The Gaines, et al. reading for this week had several important take-away points: even partisans update their opinions based on changing facts, there was no evidence of fact avoidance even among strong Republicans during the Iraq War, and several others. The most interesting and possibly problematic point in their entire article, however, is contained in a single sentence at the end of their conclusion.

"Indeed," they claim, "in what may be a central paradox of mass politics, those who acquire the most information about a policy and its consequences are also the most likely to rationalize their existing opinions." The only evidence in their article I can find to support such a claim is that strong Republicans and strong Democrats change their original opinions only slightly based on the developments in Iraq. This interpretation, however, assumes that a strong partisan identification is linked with having more information about policies and their consequences. There is no measure that compares knowledge of the casualties in Iraq across groups, making the claim made in the conclusion ungrounded. It does, however, raise an interesting question: do we all interpret new, dissonant information in a way that simply serves to strengthen our pre-existing opinions, or is this simply the behavior of an smaller group? If the former is the case, it throws into question one of the central premises of democratic debate: that if people are exposed to more information and viewpoints, they will end up with a "more informed," better opinion about a possible public policy. If the latter is the case, is there a way to identify this group? Should they be separated from public policy discussion so they don't contaminate the rest of the citizenry and cause them to begin to interpret facts in order to justify their pre-existing opinions?

Either way, Gaines, et al. probably should not have made such a claim. Depending on how their data is broken down, they could provide some evidence for this claim if they saw that the people who had the most accurate responses for objective facts (such as the level of troop casualties in Bosnia and Iraq) were strong partisans, the groups that had the most evidence of meaning avoidance and rationalization of pre-existing opinions in the two cases examined in the article.