by Andrew Brokos

The 2016 US presidential election prompted a lot of concern about “bubbles” and “echo chambers,” two metaphors for a media environment in which people are exposed primarily to opinions with which they already agree and have little exposure to opposing ideas or viewpoints.

At this point, it’s practically a cliché to say that democracies are healthiest when citizens routinely challenge their beliefs by engaging with perspectives that differ from their own. More than 150 years ago, John Stuart Mill recognized that, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination.”

Research confirms the benefits of exposure to diverse perspectives. A recent study published in the journal American Politics Research (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1532673X17725864) found that, “incongruent information increases thought quality as measured by thoughts’ integrative complexity, volume of thoughts, and frequency of arguments.” That’s a fancy way of saying that even when it doesn’t change your mind, encountering conflicting information produces a better understanding of your own beliefs and makes you a better advocate for them.

What much of the discussion about “bubbles” ignores is that it matters a great deal what kind of opposing information you consume. Even worse than an echo chamber – and, frankly, a better description of the contemporary mediascape – is an environment in which individuals are exposed to a combination of passionate advocates for beliefs they already hold as well as unsavory representatives of opposing viewpoints.

This is why it is so important to take responsibility for your own information diet. Genuinely challenging yourself is important, and you cannot rely on a partisan to provide you with a reliable representation of opposing points of view.

Selecting for Strawmen

Not all perspectives that differ from your own will have a salutary effect on your thinking and understanding. The aforementioned study also found that, “defensive thoughts are significantly more negative and less positive about the incongruent information.” In other words, not only does encountering opposing viewpoints not generally change people’s minds, it actually increases their confidence in their prior beliefs and causes them to hold a more negative opinion towards the ideas they disagree with.

A conservative who watches highly partisan television or listens to highly partisan radio will be exposed to liberal viewpoints, but these will typically be deliberate caricatures passed through the prism of conservative hosts. A liberal who follows many like-minded pundits on Twitter and reads their essays on partisan websites will hear plenty about what conservatives think and do.

The danger is that what they hear may well be distortions crafted deliberately to make opposing viewpoints seem ridiculous or even evil.

There are two primary ways in which people are exposed to unflattering portraits of opposing viewpoints. The first and better understood is the strawman, where a partisan advocate deliberately misconstrues an opposing argument in order to make it look foolish or even abhorrent and then “demonstrates” the superiority of his own viewpoint by comparison.

A similar but more nefarious method is to seek out the most repellent advocates of an opposing viewpoint and then hold them up as representative of everyone who shares that viewpoint. These individuals can even be invited to participate in a partisan program as guests, creating the illusion that the program is presenting its audience with a balanced take on an issue, when in fact the “debate” is functionally rigged from the start because the representative of the opposing viewpoint was handpicked to be unappealing.

This isn’t precisely a strawman, because it is a real argument that someone somewhere is advocating. However, it is also not a fair or ingenuous way to represent an opposing viewpoint, and it certainly does not advance the quality of political dialogue or the depth of anyone’s understanding. In fact, it has exactly the opposite effect of simplifying complex issues and polarizing conversation.

Resistance Training

In order to build muscles, you must challenge them. In the gym, resistance training takes the form of lifting heavy weights, which literally tears down your muscles so that they regrow stronger than ever.

Ideally, challenging your beliefs will have a similar effect on your mind. Like muscles, your beliefs must be at least temporarily torn apart in order to grow back stronger. That is, the material you’re consuming must actually challenge you. There’s no real chance of being persuaded by someone you already believe to be a poor or disingenuous advocate.

Your goal should be to watch, read, and listen to material that causes you to say, “Hmmmm, I never thought about it like that.” Ideally, you will be forced to reconsider your initial beliefs in light of this new perspective. That doesn’t have to mean abandoning them, but it should mean learning more about them and thinking about them in new ways.

It is your job to seek out the best advocates of viewpoints that are opposed to your own. If all you do is point out, “Look how stupid this liberal is” or “Look how evil this conservative is”, and then use those examples to shore up your confidence in your own beliefs, you aren’t doing resistance training. It’s the equivalent of going to the gym to walk twenty minutes on a treadmill while scrolling absent-mindedly through your Facebook feed; your results will be equally mediocre.

The ideal sources will strike you as credible, well-meaning, and intelligent, even if you ultimately disagree with them. If you view a particular source as disingenuous, uninformed, or just plain dumb, then find a better source. Dismissing a perspective as worthless because you don’t like one of its advocates is an intellectually lazy response.

Hate Reading

Have you ever seen a headline so jaw-droppingly infuriating that you simply had to read the article? And then you did read the article, huffing and puffing all the way about how stupid and repellent the author is?

That’s called “hate reading”, and despite what was going through your mind while reading her work, you just did a favor for this vile individual. Your click increased her visibility. She translates those clicks into advertising money, television appearances, and book sales. Her goal as an author is not to contribute anything valuable to the public discourse or to challenge your beliefs, it’s simply to generate as much attention as she can for herself. She doesn’t care what you think and she doesn’t care about changing your mind. She just wants your attention.

A crucial skill in the contemporary media environment is learning to distinguish hate reading from resistance training. The most inflammatory sources are also the most shameless. They will do anything to get your attention, and one of their tactics is to claim that you have a responsibility to pay attention to them, even if you disagree. This claim is often accompanied by high-minded rhetoric about diversity and understanding.

But pay attention to what these people do, not what they say.

Of course they will claim that refusing to pay attention to them makes you close-minded, but ask yourself, how genuinely do they engage with perspectives that differ from their own? If they can’t be bothered to participate honestly in the conversation, then you shouldn’t bother with them.

You should continue to seek out opportunities to learn from folks you disagree with, but that doesn’t have to – and indeed should not – mean taking seriously every source with whom you disagree. Time spent on these folks is worse than wasted; it is downright counterproductive to the goal of challenging your opinions and deepening the quality of your thinking, because it encourages you to caricature and dismiss ideas with which you disagree.

The best sources are generally not the loudest or most visible. There’s a perverse feedback loop where inflammatory sources on opposite sides of the ideological divide amplify each other. The most inflammatory liberals want you to see the most inflammatory conservatives, because they want you to mistake them for legitimate representatives of that ideology as a whole. And the most inflammatory conservatives are happy to play this role, because what they care about most, more so than advancing an ideological agenda, is enhancing and monetizing their own visibility.

These folks have no interest in advancing deep, nuanced dialogue. They profit from exactly the opposite. That means that their incentives are starkly opposed to yours, and you should not look to them as helpful contributors in your search for broader perspective and deeper understanding.

Conclusion

The quality and diversity of the ideas to which you are exposed is your responsibility, as a person and as a citizen. There is tremendous competition both for your attention and for the curation of your attention – for the role of deciding what you will pay attention to. But that’s far too important a role to outsource, especially when there are so many bad actors whose incentives are categorically opposed to your own.

If your primary sources of information also happen to be among the most-watched videos on YouTube or the most-listened-to podcasts on iTunes, challenge yourself to consider whether that’s merely a coincidence or whether you aren’t being a bit lazy in your “research.”

I applaud your interest in broadening your mind and challenging your beliefs. This should be a valuable and rewarding lifelong journey, as long as you choose the right guides.

A Note on Equivalence

For convenience’s sake, I often refer to “liberal” and “conservative” views as though these were clearly defined and diametrically opposed. Of course, most issues are far more complicated than this, with more than two sides, but the point stands: disingenuous people trying to convince you of something will also try to convince you that anyone who believes otherwise is an idiot or a liar.

I also don’t intend to claim that this behavior is equally prevalent on “both sides”. I do have an opinion about which sources have been most responsible for degrading the quality of American political dialogue, but it’s not terribly relevant to this discussion.

The difference is primarily quantitative, and what I am laying out here is a method of balancing your information diet properly, regardless of your political persuasion, rather than an intervention in the ideological fight taking place in our country.

Even if you think your side in that fight is the better behaved, there are still plenty of pitfalls for the unwary. It remains your responsibility to seek out sources that challenge you rather than sources that caricature opposing viewpoints and groundlessly reinforce your existing beliefs.

 

Andrew Brokos is the founder of the Boston Debate League and a former program director of the Chicago Debate League.  He now writes about, coaches, and plays professional poker, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Bay Area Urban Debate League.