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In an interview with CNN after the 2020 election, the former President explained how dueling fact perceptions have become a core problem:
"It's very hard for our democracy to function if we are operating on just completely different sets of facts."
Evidence has left the building
In a separate interview with The Atlantic, Obama went on to describe the perceptual divide:
“If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.”
As our research illustrates, the marketplace of ideas has become a marketplace of realities.
However, Obama did endorse the opposing theory of why citizens hold such opposing perceptions, blaming the situation on media influence: "The power of that alternative worldview that's presented in the media that those voters consume, it carries a lot of weight."
In our research, we have found the opposite—that dueling fact perceptions are driven by internal beliefs rather than external influences. Citizens project their preferred values onto the perceived facts. This process is aided by many psychological mechanisms on both the cognitive and social side, including selective perception (attention, acceptance, rejection, and memory), motivated reasoning, personal knowledge, and group conformity.
Intuitive epistemology
We argue that dueling perceptions are also due to intuitive epistemology—the tendency to ask questions driven by our core values. In this sense, values are not just predispositions about what we want to exist, but also predispositions for how we discern its existence. Values frame the questions we ask, which then determine the observations we make.
In our studies, individuals who hold specific values are more likely to interrogate the world in specific ways. For example, those who prioritize caring for others are more likely to look for harm being done (and hence more likely to observe it). Those who prioritize purity are more likely to ask if sacred values are being violated (and to find violations). Those who value equality are more likely to seek (and find) examples of inequality. In this way, values frame what we end up observing.
Obama is not wrong that different media outlets are likewise driven to ask different questions as well as present different answers, feeding the predispositions of viewers. But those viewers choose the outlets that suit their predispositions.
If dueling fact perceptions were only a matter of elite leadership or media influence, then they could potentially be brought toward consensus by reforms. But no reform will alter our own psychological disposition toward selectively attending to the information that suits our expectations, remembering the information that lionizes our own beliefs, and favoring the information that reinforces our social position.
If evidence, like Elvis, has left the building, while ideologies and identities remain, we have entered the crisis of epistemology that Obama describes.
