Estimating Political Expertise and Fearing the "Passionate Fool"

When we think someone knows what they're talking about, we quite logically pay more attention to what they say. 

Guess someone's expertise correctly and we benefit from good advice.  Guess wrong, we're screwed.  This goes for health information, this goes for car repairs, and according to a new Political Behavior article, this goes for guessing the political expertise of people we speak to most often about politics.

Turns out, we're only so-so at guessing the expertise of others.  According to the author:

This study presents a mixed picture of the public’s ability to identify credible information sources among those with whom they discuss politics. The good news is individuals are able to recognize expertise, but people do make mistakes and systematically overestimate the knowledge of some types of individuals and underestimate it in others.

When someone is passionate about politics we tend to overestimate their actual expertise.  That's an understandable bias on our part.  If someone cares deeply, they must be knowledgeable, right?  Not necessarily. 

We can also be overwhelmed by someone's emotion.  The downside, writes study author John Barry Ryan, is "individuals do run the risk of believing those who are constantly talking, but without any real understanding of the topics about which they speak. It is the passionate fool who may disrupt effective political discussion."

So when it comes to who to trust about politics and public affairs, the message here seems to be to fear the passionate fool.

Full Study Cite:  Ryan, J. B.  (2011).  Accuracy and bias in perceptions of political knowledge.  Political Behavior, 33, 335-356.

Correcting an Outrageous Comment

As someone fascinated by misperception -- when people think something is true when obviously it isn't -- I find this study to be a useful addition to the literature.  In the March issue of Political Behavior, the authors conducted experiments to test whether a politician's correction of having said something untrue had any real effect.

The answer?  This is important, so pay attention: 

Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group. We also document several instances of a ‘‘backfire effect’’ in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.

Whoa.

The authors created mock news stories about various topics and found conservatives (the focus of this study) use motivated reasoning to create even stronger misperceptions after a correction.  It's likely liberals will do the same, authors suggest, a tendency to interpret factual information to fit political predispositions.  The motivated of reasoning, in this case, is fitting the data to fit our pre-existing theories of how the world works.

Take this into the real world, outside the lab.  We often have politicians forced to "correct" themselves after saying something outrageous.  Turns out, even this correction may push people who want to believe something further into that belief.  Obama a Muslim?  Obama not American?  Suggest and correct, that's the way to fix an idea -- even an incorrect one -- in people's minds.  It's fascinating, and depressing, stuff.

I'd never thought of "corrections" in quite this way before.  There's a lot of room for further study, budding political communication scholars researchers.

Classrooms and Political Engagement

An "open classroom environment" can have positive effects on adolescent "civic knowledge and appreciation of political conflict," according to this study in the academic journal Political Behavior.

Okay, the first question from you budding methodologists is -- what's an open classroom environment? 

Table 1 of the study (page 443) outlines what is basically a classroom environment where kids feel comfortable asking questions, expressing opinions, and where teachers respect student opinion (or at least, I suppose, don't beat the crap out of the brats for mouthing off).  But yeah, I can buy this.  So does it make a difference?

Table 2 includes a monumentally long regression analysis to support the argument.  Classroom environment, even after all these statistical controls, does explain some unique variance -- PhDweebspeak for it is still a significant factor despite controlling for lots of other explanations (beta a mere .06, but significant despite all the other controls).  So what predicted civic knowledge among kids?  Classroom environment, obviously, but also significant factors were: expected education (how far you think you're going to go on in school), race, reading of books, discussing politics at home, and perception of the classroom environment, which is apparently different from actual environment.

What drops out as predictors of civic knowledge?

• Sex.  That's interesting given sex becomes a predictor for adults, with men scoring higher than women on tests of political knowledge (I've blogged on this research here and here).  But at this early age, no gender effect.  So the differences may emerge later.  Worthy of further investigation.
  
• News Media use.  At this age, less surprising.  Kids, even older ones, don't consume all that much news.  More meaningful would be the media habits of parents or guardians, but the data probed student use of media.
  
• Income and Free Lunch.  These essentially measure the same thing, which makes me worry about multicollinearity.  You can't get a free lunch at public schools unless your family is under the federal poverty level, so these two variables measure basically the same thing.  I would have taken out one from the model, gone with just the other. Or perhaps combine them in some way.
  
• Social studies.  Gasp!  Taking social studies has no effect?  Bad news for those who hope classes like these, which have largely disappeared due to No Child Left Untested, will save the day. 

In all, an interesting peek at kids versus the jillion of studies that examine U.S. adults.  I think there is some stuff above that make for interesting follow-up studies, in particular a further investigation of the sex differences in political knowledge scales.  Some good alternative explanations for that one have emerged of late (the kinds of questions asked, social learning, etc.).  More needs to be done.