Facts, as the old saying goes, are “stubborn things.” But what about our attitude towards facts? When one’s feelings about facts drive a decision, the facts themselves can quickly take a back seat. Say you and a friend see a neighbor’s two-year old son toddling nude across the backyard. Although you may find it “cute,” your friend may find it “utterly immoral.” While there is no disputing the fact that the child was outside and naked, the disagreement stems your feelings or attitude towards the fact—yours being positive, your friend’s negative.
While attitudes towards facts may divide us, no one likes to be lied to. This is why part of the country is shocked by Donald Trump’s extraordinary record of false or misleading claims—the Washington Post counts 7,645 since he became president—and another part of the country is angry about efforts to hold him to account for his words. Given the astonishing tally of falsehoods, why do so many Americans still believe what Trump says? Why do they seem to care so little about facts? If we direct our attention not to facts, but to our attitude towards facts, it might help us understand why a segment of the American population is seemingly unconcerned about Trump’s dishonesty. It might also offer us a clue how to use competing attitudes to convince them that they should be concerned.
In the logic classes I teach at Northern Kentucky University, our feelings about facts tend to elicit the most discussion in what is otherwise a muted, nuts-and-bolts critical thinking course. Students already know that normal cognitive processing is not purely logical, but emotional. Often times our initial reaction to a statement may stir our passions before we have had a chance to really consider it. These cognitive factors serve to either shape our belief about the statement or help provide a rationale for it. In A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume argued that in the great “combat of passion and reason,” passion often wins out. More recently, Jonathan Haidt has made this a central theme in moral psychology, particularly neuroethics. The crucial issue, however, is how likely we are to move beyond the feeling. Regardless how your belief makes you feel, how open are you to the possibility that it could be wrong?
Offering fact-based evidence to combat false statements is not always enough to change a person’s belief. How then might we convince someone that the belief he/she holds is incorrect? It seems a possible point of entry might be to get them to look at other equally important statements that rouse emotions. Supporters of the president think that because he says it, and because they already have a positive feeling about him, what he says must be true. But what if we were to offer a competing claim here, nothing fact-based, but a statement brimming with opposing feelings? Consider the recent story NPR ran on evangelical pastors “preaching a message that pit Trump campaign slogans against quotes from the Bible.” With an emphasis on feeling rather than truth, the pastors argued that this is a more effective way to “get through” to supporters of the president. (“GOP Jesus” accomplishes the same idea, albeit in an acerbic, witty way.)
Engaging in an irregular form of Socratic dialogue with Trump supporters might be one way of appealing to their emotions—not in an effort to establish truth, pace Socrates, but in an effort to highlight how they feel when juxtaposing the president’s words with a quote from the Bible, or a quote from Reagan, Lincoln, Washington (or anyone else they claim to hold in high esteem). Another way to “get through” might be to ask them to put themselves in the shoes of those that Trump attacks and then think about how they would respond. The hope is that they will see such harsh policies towards minorities, immigrants, and other nations, only contribute to our problems with regard to migration, trade disputes, crime, etc.
In September, a USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll found that under 20% of the American public considers Donald Trump to be a source of unbiased and trustworthy information. While this is certainly welcome news, if we ever hope to get through to supporters of the president, my advice as an instructor of logic is to ignore logic, ignore reason and appeal directly to their emotions.
An earlier version of this article first appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer, December 3, 2018.
Robert Greenleaf Brice
Robert Greenleaf Brice is an assistant professor in the department of Philosophy at Loyola University New Orleans, and the author of Exploring Certainty: Wittgenstein and Wide Fields of Thought. He is currently working on a guidebook to Wittgenstein’s On Certainty for Springer Publishing.
Actually, people often love to be lied to… as long as it makes them feel good… or less bad.
One has to realize that facts are epiphenomenons. Emotions and moods are the really deeper structures, and the computations they effect give rise to neural networks themselves (where the ideas are!)
See: “Emotion plans logic” in author’s website
This article might serve as a good reminder why many non-academics (especially if they are Republicans) do not trust the judgment of academics, seeing their views as steeped more in arrogance & a sense of their own superiority to the common rabble instead of being based on facts or logic.
While few sensible person hold that facts don’t matter whatever our opinions about them, there is plenty of room for disagreement over what the facts are & who has them, especially as regards the election of an outsider such as Trump. This is the issue that presently has the country as divided as I have ever seen it.
First, if I wanted to sustain an argument that Trump is a liar, I think I’d rely on a source other than The Washington Post, whose bias is palpable: I don’t think you had to be a Trump supporter to have noticed that the WP collectively hated Trump’s guts from the get-go, or suspected that their writers’ (& billionaire owner’s) deep & abiding hatred for the man & whatever it was they believed he stood for might have colored their judgment somewhat. Has anyone actually compiled a list, for evaluation purposes, of at least some those supposed 7,645 lies Trump has told, or are we supposed to believe a number like that because the WP said it?
The WP is hardly free of its own brand of dishonesty. If you need an example, the obvious one is the story that basically started both the (still unproven) allegation that the Trump campaign colluded directly with Russians working under Putin & the “fake news” meme that has been with us ever since. This story appeared under the title “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,” November 24, 2016.
The “experts” mentioned in the title turned out to be an anonymous group called PropOrNot, relying on unsourced “information” about 200 or so “alternative” news & commentary sites on the Internet. This article left me with three realizations: (1) The WP would publish anything anti-Trump, even allegations about his victory & supporters backed up with no evidence whatever (a few Russian trolls on Facebook do not count as evidence of Russian collusion, sorry); (2) we are supposed to believe that what the WP publishes is factual simply because they said it, i.e., they appeal implicitly to their own authority; & (3) such articles, via their strong emotional appeal to Democrats who doubtless felt blindsided by the Trump upset, absolved them of the need to hold their Party (especially the DNC) responsible for the fact — for fact it is — that they blew it, big time! The 2016 election was theirs to lose, after all!
People who earn their paychecks teaching logic ought to be interested in this kind of perspective … even if they’ve awakened to the fact that the human masses are moved more by emotion than logic (Hume was right, after all).
Trump is a symptom, not the problem as most Trump haters seem to assume. He’ll be gone in a few years, whatever happens. Were he removed from office tomorrow, the things that got him elected would still be there.
What “things” are we talking about, that others aren’t?
(1) Trump rose to the top of the heap amidst a 17-candidate pile-up as an outsider because the mainstream Republican narrative had collapsed. I don’t think any of the corporate-sponsored insiders even knew what it was anymore. If the neoconservative narrative was about something other than war, money, & Israel, it was well-hidden. The billionaire class initially wanted Jeb Bush. Voters did not. So for the first time in our lifetimes, a non-politician who had never held elected office before got into the White House!
This has not changed.
(2) Trump knew how to use both traditional media & Internet-based social media to his maximum advantage. He understood instinctively how today’s masses worship celebrities, & played the part. More than that, he knew how to turn the slings & arrows of those who hated his guts against them. He understood that the louder and nastier their insults, the greater his support from his “base” out in “flyover country” which, similarly, was sick & tired of being insulted when not simply dismissed out of hand by wealthy, arrogant, big-city media elites who want to tell everybody how to behave & who they should associate with (see (4)).
All of this should have been clear even before the debates with Hillary Clinton. I don’t think major media were even trying to hide their pro-Clinton bias. But no matter what they did, Trump came out on top. His supporters loved it! His haters were already getting violent, physically assaulting supporters outside rallies, blocking traffic at major intersections, & then dishonestly trying to blame Trump or his supporters for the violence they started!
(3) Speaking of Hillary, the Democrats misplayed their hand from the get-go. Are there really any grounds for doubt that Clinton had the DNC in her pocket; that she’d cheated (with “superdelegates”) to nudge Bernie Sanders aside when he, not she, had the support of the Party’s progressive base; & that she had the full backing of powerful banks such as Goldman Sachs & others of the globalist Wall Street cartel? But she came across as a cold, calculating technocrat who believed herself entitled to be the First Woman President. And she’d simply stopped campaigning in states filled with “baskets of deplorables” (her infamous phrase) even though some of those states had gone to Obama just four years before! In other words, her campaign was — may I steal a line from Trump? — a “complete & total disaster.” Did it ever dawn on her — or on whoever wrote her speeches — that if you insult people on national television, they’re just apt to pull the lever in the voting booth for the other candidate whether they like him personally or not?
(4) Trigger warning: extreme political incorrectness in this paragraph. Trump appealed not just to working men & women whose jobs have been outsourced to third world countries for cheap labor, but to middle class white men who, to put it bluntly, are sick of identity politics. Most of us, like it or not, are sick & tired of being demonized as history’s villains just because no major organizations, universities or corporations, have been able to fill their quotas of blacks & women. Point of logic: the concept of “under-representation” depends on an unstated concept of “correct representation” (or perhaps “ideal representation”). This latter is why it is actually accurate, if not politically correct, to use a word like “quotas.” We are sick & tired of being called “racists” or, these days, “white supremacists,” for pointing all this out. Fortunately I do not work for a university that can terminate my employment for noting this particular logical-linguistic relationship. Triggered minorities cannot threaten me or disrupt my classes because I no longer teach any classes. So I can speak here for the many, many people, not all of them straight white “cis” males by any means, who wonder if identity politics will destroy higher education before it runs its course. Trump represents opposition to identity politics that has no other voice, simply because people do not want to see their lives upended & their careers in ruins, so they censor themselves. “Diversity is our strength” is arguably academia’s religion, adhered to with a fervor (& a will to punish dissidents) no less extreme than that of any religious fundamentalist. It is another belief without a scrap of evidence to back it up.
(5) Finally, as a member of the billionaire class himself (although hardly one of its insiders), Trump was able to self-fund his own campaign, in its early stages, anyway. It is kind of a shame that one has to be a billionaire to pull off that kind of stunt, but that’s a different comment. The fact that Trump was not on the take from the usual cadre of corporate insiders impressed a lot of working people who then went out & voted. Trump was, & is, an outsider. He came in lacking knowledge of how Washington works (or sometimes doesn’t work). One wishes he was more focused, that he would read more & tweet less, that he could articulate a few guiding principles (but he’s surely no worse at this than anyone else in Washington) … but guess what, boys & girls, we didn’t get to choose! There was a profound uneasiness for what the U.S. was becoming, not just under Establishment Democrats (the Clintons, Obama) but Establishment Republicans as well (the Bushes, McCain, Romney, that whole ilk).
This unease was not about “left” versus “right” even though it is usually portrayed as such. Everyone with a functioning brain is aware of worsening inequality, the disappearance of decent-paying jobs, & the rise, almost like a counterpoint, of theatrical agendas being forced down everyone’s throats (think of “transgenderism”). Behind the theater: wealth & power is being consolidated into the hands of a tiny global elite, centered in central banks & the leviathan corporations that have grown up around them, with national governmental Establishments bought & paid for. This is not the “one percent” but a point-zero-zero-zero one percent. This is not limited to the U.S. Rejection of EU elites & their open borders agenda was reflected in Brexit, & has since exploded worldwide into increased rejection of elitism & its collective vision of wealth-uber-alles, mass importation of unassimilable Muslim immigrants, & “global governance” to manage it all. Witness the yellow vest movement occurring in France right now. Major media, who answer to those in power, would like to portray national uprisings as resurgences of “fascism.” They are not. They are visceral demands, more felt than articulated, by many, many peoples to be left the hell alone, to not have to answer to policies they never signed off on (such as those of pro-EU globalist Macron) that hurt them economically & leave their cultures in ruins.
So what contributions do professional philosophers have to make to what may become the major conversation of the 2020s: nationalism versus globalism. So far as I can tell, few professional philosophers are even at the table (hell, they’re not even in the room!). This doesn’t stop them from hating Trump, denouncing him at every turn, verbally attacking those who voted for him or who visibly support him by wearing a MAGA hat, all the while pushing agendas that haven’t worked, & believing narratives that have not a scrap of evidence behind them.
Dear Steven,
Thank you for your comment on our site. As the editor on the above piece and someone interested in politics in general, I am hoping you will take the time to answer a follow-up question to your response here. Specifically, I am worried that you are doing the same thing you criticize, as you claim academics have a bias that makes them untrustworthy, and then make numerous claims in your comment that (from my perspective at least) indicate bias. The examples that stuck in my mind are your question “Has anyone actually compiled a list, for evaluation purposes, of at least some those supposed 7,645 lies Trump has told…”, the claim “Are there really any grounds for doubt that Clinton had the DNC in her pocket…”, and the argument “Most of us, like it or not, are sick & tired of being demonized as history’s villains just because no major organizations, universities or corporations, have been able to fill their quotas of blacks & women.” (I have my own thoughts on these topics, and don’t wholly disagree or agree with the points you’re making; but I’m going to leave them aside since they don’t relate to my question.)
These are valid questions and claims to raise, but no evidence is given to support them. In fact, your insistence upon them seems to illustrate the author’s point: that we often make judgments about facts using emotion, not logic. I think it is fair to challenge academics for their privilege and blindness. But are you sure you’re doing it in the name of an open discussion (which would involve asking questions and trying to delve deeper into the basis for the author’s claims while sharing the basis for your own) rather than, as it seems to me, the desire to deny the validity of the authors views and institute the universality of your own? I look forward to your response.
Hello, Nathan. Thank you for reaching out to me. This could be the beginning of a dialogue, assuming you are interested. (We might want to continue any further conversation we have on my blog, where you’ll find a slightly lengthened version of my comment, or just in email, as this site might not be appropriate.)
I must admit a little confusion. I am unsure what you are claiming I did not support with evidence that needed it, or why you judge my observations as biased. When taking note of the allegation that Trump had told 7,645 lies as reported by the WP, I was not making the claim that this is false. I was asking a question, How do we know this is true? Surely the difference is clear. Perhaps this is my fault, for not making my intentions clearer. I would have liked to link to the WP article that made the claim so readers could assess for themselves whether the WP backed up their claim with evidence, but see no features in here that enable commenters to link directly to articles.
As for the claim about Clinton having the DNC in her pocket, this was not my charge but that of numerous Bernie Sanders supporters who cried foul about “superdelegates” and efforts to shut them down during the 2016 convention. Their view, correct in my opinion, was that Clinton was not a real progressive but a neoliberal globalist technocrat who’d made a few insincere overtures to real progressives and cultural lefties to get votes, in the midst of one of the worst run presidential campaigns of our era.
But back to the WP. I did provide direct evidence for my skepticism about the paper’s reliability and possibly its honesty. I cited an article that appeared in the WP, “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,” November 24, 2016:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f25b5d639a30
I noted that this bizarre article relied on unsourced material from an anonymous group no one had ever heard of before, but were nonetheless portrayed as “experts.”
Where is my bias? Because I’ve saved this article as a textbook exemplar, and can use it to illustrate the biases of a media outlet with a lot of social power? (Everybody, after all, cites the Washington Post as a authority!)
But this article speaks volumes about the prevailing lack of critical thinking skills in such media, both in that it was published at all and in its effects. Or it reflects an agenda; take your pick. When academics cite the WP and then “move on,” they demonstrate their biases, or at least their unreliability (“untrustworthiness” was the term I used).
FWIW, that article badly damaged “alternative” (i.e., not corporate-leviathan-controlled) news and commentary platforms, nearly all of whom saw their web traffic drop precipitously in a fashion not explained by the election being over (source: Alexa analytics), but also saw donations fall off as well.
Few “alternative” sites have much money. They don’t get funding from the Koch brothers or other big foundations. They rely on small donations from us “little people.” They can seldom pay writers (I know, having been such a writer in the past). Some are barely surviving. I am not referring to Alex Jones types. Jones is a blowhard. I am referring to sites that try, honestly, to deliver hard-hitting commentary and fact-based critiques of real power. They report, as best they can (not being insiders) what is going on behind the scenes in government, business, academia, including what corporation-controlled media will not report unless forced to by circumstances. “Alternative” sites, incidentally, range across the left-right spectrum. Alternet, Truthdig, and Counterpunch are left-of-center. WorldNetDaily, NewsMax and TakiMag are on the right. Others, such as The Intercept and Global Research, are harder to pigeonhole, as are the many personal sites out there (e.g., that of Nomi Prins, ex-Goldman Sachs, who understands the global power elite very well, and how they couldn’t care less about “left” or “right”!). Most such sites have not shied away from verboten topics or politically incorrect points of view. Their writers (and I concur) see such trendy issues as how many genders there are as utterly ridiculous: academic equivalents of keeping up with the Kardashians!
Those of us who associated with these sites knew a counterattack was coming. We just couldn’t anticipate what form it would take.
Apologies for the long digression. The point is, if anyone is biased, it is not me. At least I try. The WP is not even trying.
Going back to the original article, what I was asking: why single out Trump supporters for basing (some of) their opinions on emotion instead of on evidence? (The entire “Russia collusion” narrative is lacking in hard evidence, but my going into that would make this comment even longer, so I will save it.)
Lastly: are straight white Christian males being demonized today? Is this a result of identity politics which sees them as history’s villains and everyone else as their victims? This is a question we are clearly not supposed to ask in polite company!
To my mind, we had relevant evidence pushed in our faces just last week, with the incident at the Lincoln Memorial with the Catholic school boys from Covington, Ky.
A short clip of a much longer video “went viral.” The clip appeared, superficially, to portray the group of white kids wearing the easily-demonized MAGA hats taunting a Native American man.
All of a sudden, and without much in the way of attempts by their own school administration to discern what really happened, the kids found themselves threatened with being kicked out of their school. They received death threats, some of which spilled over onto their parents!
All based on a social media driven portrayal that turned out to be bogus, to anyone who watched the entire video. See for yourself (warning: extreme language!).
Some continued to portray the false narrative even after this video surfaced.
What it revealed was white kids doing nothing except chanting school-spirit type chants while being taunted, insulted, and even threatened by the group of blacks (the so-called Black Hebrew Israelites or whatever they call themselves). The blacks had started by taunting the Native Americans, and it is curious and interesting that the latter’s leader Nathan Phillips chose to confront a white kid (because he understood that whites rarely stand up for themselves because of their justifiable fear of being demonized as racists, while the blacks would not have hesitated to beat the crap out of him?).
My take on that incident: both social and corporate media ran with a bogus narrative because it confirmed their larger worldview informed by identity politics (confirmation bias is the right term, I think), based on emotion, not fact (based, that is, on visceral hatred for straight white Christian men and boys, especially those daring to wear that despised MAGA hat in public!).
Major media tried to maintain their narrative as long as possible in the face of hard evidence that something quite different happened. Many outlets repeated the narrative even after it had been proven false, or so I was told (I am not a TV watcher; I value my sanity).
I have seen academics maintain it on their Facebook pages and blogs. I hope I can get away with not naming names.
We’ll see how many people recant and admit that they believed something false, based on identity-politics and confirmation bias, rather than having made an intellectually honest effort to learn the truth. A few have. More need to come forward and admit they screwed up.
Again, and in sum, why single out Trump supporters for basing convictions on emotion instead of on fact and logic (assuming they do; the academic-cultural left seems far more skilled at this, but maybe that’s just me)? Especially when fact and logic often go against the dominant narrative. As Hobbes once said, “When reason goeth against a man, the man goeth against reason.”
Dear Steven, thanks for your response. I appreciate your respect and willingness to engage; let me respond in kind.
Your bias comes from believing your sources are wholly unbiased while The Washington Post and other mainstream sources are irreducibly biased. We agree that The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and many other mainstream news sources need to do a better job publishing news in the public interest and providing healthy context to understand it. We don’t agree that the WP, NYT, CNN, and others are–in your words–“willing to publish anything anti-Trump” (in fairness, you only make that claim regarding the WP, but you seem to be using them as a stand-in for mainstream news as such).
To use your example from above, to know that the DNC stole the Democratic primary from Sanders you need to trust the source you named, “Bernie delegates.” Similarly, your criticism of the WP necessarily relies on sources that convincingly call into question the WP’s use of the unnamed source as an expert. I’m sympathetic to your views, but do admit that the sources I use to ground my skepticism of the DNC’s actions and direct collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia are themselves biased. In other words, the same logic you use to discredit the WP could be used to discredit the sources you trust (Bernie delegates aren’t neutral observers of what happened in the primary). Don’t just take my word for it; many of the Alternatives you cite are ones I’m familiar with, and they say the same thing. The Nation readily admits it is biased in favor of democracy, and trusts advocates of it over advocates of neoliberalism. Alternet was established to provide an outlet for alternative views not found in corporate-owned media, meaning its bias is towards such views. These sources admit to their bias (which, coincididentally, is how bias should be handled; rather than that pretend we have none, be upfront about it and open to hearing critiques of it). If you’re using them as the basis of your views, it would be reasonable to say you’re biased as well.
Before we go too far down the “everyone’s biased so we can’t trust anything” or “if everyone’s biased I can believe whatever I want” paths, I argue that you can trust the WP, CNN, NYT, and even Alex Jones for some things. The WP, for all their faults, does tend to operate with the practices journalism was established on (checking sources, getting confirmation before publishing something, calling people you’re criticizing for comment, making their ownership–Jeff Bezos–clear, etc.). When they tell me a bill passed Congress, I trust them. When they say that Brazil has thrown it’s support behind the current leader of the National Assembly, I believe them. Their bias is ideological, and rarely operates on the level of getting facts wrong. It comes from not mentioning certain facts (e.g. the USA’s interest in Venezuela’s oil) or foregrounding certain views (those of Democrats or Republicans) over others (blacks, poor, socialists, environmentalists). In short, the WP “is trying,” but is dealing with a whole host of other concerns and considerations that push them towards being biased in favor of those in power (e.g. to get access to elected officials, you can’t regularly publish things that embarrass them). It’s up to us in civil society to push the WP and other sources back in a more democratic direction.
My approach to news collection is to read from a variety of sources: mainstream, alternative, independent, international, right-leaning, left-leaning, etc. I use my critical thinking and, on occasion, direct research into the claims these news sources make, to decide what to believe. I also use my own bias, though I try to regularly challenge that too, since I’ve been wrong before. I don’t want to become trapped in an “alternative news” bubble any more than I do a “mainstream news” bubble.
Finally, it’s interesting that you bring up Convington, as several sites that ran with the initial narrative were independent or alternative ones like those you mention (e.g. Deadspin published an article saying that in spite of the longer video, the original narrative was correct). Your example, in my mind, isn’t indicative of a mainstream/alternative division, but one that accepts quick and easy judgments vs. one that thinks critically. (As a side note, I hold a somewhat different opinion of the event than you. While I don’t agree with the original narrative, I do believe that the ways in which the boys acted perpetuated a harmful narrative about race. That said, my desire is to have a dialogue with them, not attack them on social media, and certainly not send death threats. Again, I am going to leave this issue aside now, since it is beside the point.)
In short, I maintain you are biased, but that this is not a problem if you are honest and open about it, and if you challenge that bias regularly. I also argue that the WP and other sources are trustworthy if you know how to read them critically, and that you should read the alternatives you mention with the same level of scrutiny. As I see it, while we may quibble with the exact number of lies Trump has given, the above author’s use of the WP’s number is acceptable because multiple other news sites (especially media watchdogs) have often followed up on the judgments Glenn Kessler (the WP’s fact checker) has made, and regularly confirmed them as accurate. Since the post wasn’t about whether the WP is biased as such, but about how emotion plays a role in our judgments, I saw no reason for the author would spend several paragraphs arguing for that point. While the article singled out Trump, the same principle could apply to anyone who uses emotion more than reason (and such people exist across the spectrum). The only difference, as I see it, is in a society where Trump is president, that’s who should be singled out. I argued similarly when Obama lied, and will again no matter who is President next.