To subscribe, click here. To submit a letter to the editor, click here. To pitch a ‘My Turn’ guest column, email jdalessio@news-gazette.
com . Want to purchase today’s print edition? Here’s a map of single-copy locations. Sign up for our daily newsletter here Every week, higher-ed beat writer Luke Taylor will go one-on-one with a faculty member on the University of Illinois campus.
Today’s expert: JEFFERY MONDAK, chair of the Department of Political Science. His research interests include personality and political behavior, as well as fact-opinion differentiation. There are a few prominent models of personality trait structure used in academic research.
In political science, the Big Five model — openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism — is the most widely used. Some of the most consistent findings include links to ideology and political participation. People with higher values on openness and lower values on conscientiousness have a higher likelihood of being ideologically liberal, whereas people lower in openness and higher in conscientiousness tend to be conservative.
Regarding political participation, extraversion is related to more social forms of behavior, such as working on campaigns and talking with other people about politics. Openness is related to information acquisition — monitoring the news, maintaining interest in politics, knowing more about politics. In addition to research on politics and personality in the mass public, many studies have explored personality differences among political candidates and public officials.
That research shows, among other findings, that legislators with high levels of openness to experience thrive at the actual work of legislating, such as attending committee hearings and drafting new bills. People high in extraversion exhibit greater progressive ambition, meaning they tend to keep seeking opportunities to run for higher office. As a general matter, we see value in unpacking what goes with what because doing so sets us on the path of improved understanding.
One example would be Donald Trump’s emergence as a presidential candidate in 2016. Why did Republican primary voters support Trump over more experienced — and, in some cases, more conservative — candidates such as Ted Cruz, John Kasich, and Marco Rubio? Research shows that personality may provide a partial answer. Compared with the others, Trump would score higher on extraversion and lower on agreeableness, and, due to his tough law and order focus, he was perceived as being more rigidly dogmatic, a perception that corresponds with conscientiousness.
Republican primary voters in 2016 who shared that personality profile — they were set in their ways and had a stark black-and-white view of the world, they were loud and brash, and they tended to be verbally combative — flocked to Trump partly because they saw their own traits in him. They didn’t want another politically correct president, they wanted someone decidedly politically incorrect. Consonance on personality between Donald Trump and a portion of the Republican primary electorate helps explain how he won out over his more mainstream competitors.
Understanding correlations is valuable, but perhaps the greatest utility of incorporating personality in research on politics is that it helps us see how other effects we observe may vary for different groups of people. For example, if a candidate is caught up in a scandal, we might observe a clear but modest decrease in how favorably voters view that candidate. If we follow up by exploring how weakly or strongly people tend to respond to negative information in general, we likely will find that the overall modest effect is actually the sum of two effects: strong negative reactions among people with high dispositional negativity, and weak or null reactions among people who are psychologically prone to shrug off bad news more easily.
The point is that personality can help us understand the nuances and variability that might be present in other relationships social scientists have been studying for decades. We can move past one-size-fits-all views of those relationships and move toward understanding the psychological bases for why those effects can be stronger or weaker across individuals and circumstances. You’ve also recently completed some research on differentiating fact and opinion.
Why are Americans finding it difficult to tell the two apart? For the past six or seven years, several students and I have been researching how and how well Americans navigate the information environment. We find that people struggle at many basic information tasks, such as being able to tell the difference between a statement of fact and a statement of opinion, being able to differentiate between true and false claims, and even recalling under which presidencies important social and political events — one example is the 9/11 attack — took place. Matt Mettler and I published research on fact-opinion differentiation earlier this year.
We asked survey respondents whether 12 statements were statements of fact or statements of opinion, and we found that 47 percent of respondents did no better than chance. Fact-opinion differentiation is taught in schools, but, at least when it comes to statements about politics, the lessons didn’t take root for many people. Part of the problem is that people simply struggle to understand the difference between a statement that can be proved true or false with objective evidence (e.
g., the color green can be produced by mixing the colors blue and yellow) and a statement that cannot be proved true or false with objective evidence because it depends on personal values and preferences (e.g.
, green is the most beautiful color). But another part of the problem is political bias. We found that both Democrats and Republicans tended to mark statements they liked or agreed with as statements of fact and statements they disliked as statements of opinion.
That’s potentially highly problematic because it means the two sides will be tempted to dismiss one another outright (“that’s just your opinion”) rather than engaging one another. The line gets blurred all the time. Political candidates certainly have an incentive to blur the distinction.
For the mass public, Matt Mettler and I currently are exploring some ways to improve fact-opinion differentiation skills. Simply encouraging people to pause and think about what a statement actually means and whether it is conveying a factual claim or an interpretation surely would help in reducing random mistakes. The tougher problem is overcoming political bias.
Such bias can strongly motivate people to mentally construct an alternate information world in which only their party has facts on its side. That, unfortunately, is likely a path toward greater misinformation and polarization..
