Motivated Skepticism or Inevitable Conviction? Dogmatism and the Study of Politics

Taber and Lodge’s 2006 paper provides powerful evidence that one’s prior beliefs shape one’s reception of new evidence in a manner that can best be described as ‘‘inadvertently dogmatic.’’ This is especially true for people who are well informed, which dovetails with findings going back to Converse (1964) showing political beliefs to be ideologically constrained (rigid) among the relatively well informed. What may explain the coincidence of dogmatism and knowledgeability is the very process of learning about politics, which must use theories, schemas, ideologies, or Lippmannesque ‘‘stereotypes’’ to target certain political information as germane by putting it into an interpretive framework. This interpretive process is likely to create for each of us a growing database of information that is congruent with our extant convictions but that excludes incongruent information: in light of the data we have already processed, incongruent information seems increasingly implausible (if not incomprehensible), and is therefore rationally ignored or dismissed. But this does not necessarily mean, as Taber and Lodge follow Robert Abelson in suggesting, that people are ‘‘motivated’’ to be dogmatic rather than being unintentionally closed minded as a result of the plausibility they involuntarily accord to their priors. Recognizing the inadvertent (unmotivated) nature of dogmatism is essential if political science is to take seriously political actors’ beliefs*and to assess the gravity of the problem posed by dogmatism. Jeffrey Friedman, [email protected], Critical Review Foundation, P.O. Box 869, Helotes, TX 78023, a visiting scholar in the Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin, thanks Zeljka Buturovic, James Druckman, and Philip E. Tetlock for comments on earlier drafts, and Milton Lodge and Charles S. Taber for making available the manuscript of their forthcoming book, The Rationalizing Voter. Critical Review 24(2): 131–155 ISSN 0891-3811 print, 1933-8007 online # 2012 Critical Review Foundation http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2012.719663 Critical Review’s republication of Charles S. Taber and Milton Lodge’s ‘‘Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Information’’ (2006), courtesy of the authors and the American Journal of Political Science, is an important step in our ongoing effort to integrate three currents in political science that are not often drawn together: survey research on ideology, experimental research on dogmatism, and normative political theory. When normative theorists occasionally take notice of survey and experimental research, they usually assume that it is relevant only to voting behavior and, therefore, to democratic theory. Taber and Lodge, however*in line with survey research going back to ‘‘The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics’’ (Converse 1964)*point to a pronounced tendency toward dogmatism among those who are relatively well informed. Their findings may therefore be more relevant to policymaking elites than to voters at large. Early on, survey research operationalized ‘‘ideology’’ as the degree of constraint, or predictability, exerted by a ‘‘belief system’’ on the elites who are well-enough informed to understand its meaning and its policy implications (Converse 1964). Normally, someone who predictably expresses opinions that are determined by an ideology might be considered dogmatic. But most scholars in the field came to see ideological attitude constraint as desirable because the citizens who were its victims were among those with the most knowledge about politics, and it was assumed that more knowledge is necessarily better than less. If ideology facilitates knowledgeability, political scientists thought, then ideology is good. By the same token, if attitudinal constraint goes with ideology, then it, too, is good. Yet the conclusion that constraint is good because it is connected to an information-boosting belief system is a non sequitur. This is all the more true if one considers how ideological knowledge and ideological constraint might come together. It cannot just be that an understanding of ideology allows one to understand political discussions that are conducted in ideological terms, since this would not explain why ideological knowledge correlates not only with general political knowledge but with ideological constraint. That is, it is possible to know about ideologies without being an ideologue, yet it seems that ideological knowledge and general political knowledge both tend to coincide with ideological constraint (Friedman 2012, Appendix). Arguably, Walter Lippmann ([1922] 1997) provided the best explanation for this coincidence. In Public Opinion, he maintained that we need 132 Critical Review Vol. 24, No. 2