Last-minute notice for an interesting webinar:
POLITICAL EXTREMISM IS SUPPORTED BY AN ILLUSION OF UNDERSTANDING
Thursday, December 5
12:00 – 1:00 PM
CIRES Building, 2nd Floor, Room S274
12:00 – 1:00 PM
CIRES Building, 2nd Floor, Room S274
This Noontime seminar will be available via live webcast. To view the live webcast please click here and login as a guest.
Log in: https://cirescolorado.adobeconnect.com/_a1166535166/fernbach/
Info: http://cirescolorado.adobeconnect.com/fernbach/
Huh? Fail to see the relevance to this blog.
But I tried to click every link in the post Steve and when you do that you really don’t get any additional information at all.
If you want to skip the webinar, you can read the study here.
Bottom-line: “We propose that generating mechanistic explanations leads people to endorse more moderate positions by forcing them to confront their ignorance.” Findings were robust for both left and right extremist political views. Also confirmed what every NGO (left and right) knows already: “Mechanistic-explanation generation also influences political behavior, making people less likely to donate to relevant advocacy groups.”
Sorry about this info link. This is it:
http://cires.colorado.edu/calendar/events/index.php?com=detail&eID=691
Relevant? I think so. Description:
“People often hold extreme political attitudes about complex policies. We hypothesized that people typically know less about such policies than they think they do (the illusion of explanatory depth) and that polarized attitudes are enabled by simplistic causal models. Asking people to explain policies in detail both undermined the illusion of explanatory depth and led to attitudes that were more moderate (Experiments 1 and 2). Although these effects occurred when people were asked to generate a mechanistic explanation, they did not occur when people were instead asked to enumerate reasons for their policy preferences (Experiment 2). Finally, generating mechanistic explanations reduced donations to relevant political advocacy groups (Experiment 3). The evidence suggests that people’s mistaken sense that they understand the causal processes underlying policies contributes to political polarization.”
Yeah, just read any in-depth fundraising letter from Earthjustice…..
Honestly, Dave, do you think the authors of the study would put Earthjustice and their fundraising letter in the “political extremism” category?
Yes, I do, Matt. It would be fun to do a random knowledge base testing series on EJ donors.