Red ‘Facts,’ Blue ‘Facts’: The Psychology of Truthiness
New research finds our moral convictions strongly influence what facts we choose to believe regarding a given issue.
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous assertion that “You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts” seems increasingly quaint today, at a time when one person’s self-evident truth is dismissed by another as fabrication or myth.
New research provides a sobering reason why we can’t even agree on what we’re arguing about: We align our perception of reality to comfortably coexist with our moral convictions.
“In the realm of moral reasoning, at least, a clean separation of opinion and fact may be difficult to achieve,” write psychologists Brittany Liu and Peter Ditto of the University of California, Irvine. “Our data consistently show that evaluations of an act’s inherent morality are strongly associated with factual beliefs about both its positive and negative consequences.”
The researchers illustrate this point with three experiments, which they describe in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.
One study featured 1,567 people who visited psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s website yourmorals.org. Participants were presented with four moral issues in random order—two generally seen as acceptable by conservatives (capital punishment, and forceful interrogation of suspected terrorists), and two usually seen as acceptable by liberals (embryonic stem cell research, and promoting condom use as part of sex education).