[extropy-chat] how partisanship skews perception

[Damien Broderick]

What follows is not a party-political broadcast. It is not being posted by 
one of Mike Lorrey's ultra-socialist left loonies. No doubt evidence for 
this sad effect can be drawn from all sides or postures of politics. Still, 
this is striking stuff.

First, the palpable lies that help forge the confusions itemized later:

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[from: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/23/opinion/23sat1.html?oref=login&th ]

The Levin report is a primer on how intelligence can be cooked to fit a 
political agenda. It is another sad reminder of this administration's 
refusal to hold anyone accountable for the way the public was led into the 
war with Iraq.

It focuses on the intelligence operation set up by Mr. Rumsfeld, who had 
been advocating an invasion of Iraq long before Mr. Bush took office and 
wanted more damning evidence against Baghdad after 9/11 than the Central 
Intelligence Agency had.

This operation, run by Mr. Feith, tried to persuade the Pentagon's own 
espionage unit, the Defense Intelligence Agency, to change its conclusion 
that there was no alliance between Iraq and Al Qaeda. When the Defense 
Intelligence Agency rebuffed this blatant interference, Mr. Feith's team 
wrote its own report.

It took long-discredited raw intelligence and resurrected it to create the 
impression that there was new information supporting Mr. Feith's 
preordained conclusions. It misrepresented the C.I.A.'s reports and 
presented fifth-hand reports as authoritative, all to depict Iraq as an 
ally of Al Qaeda.

Bipartisan reports from the 9/11 commission and the Senate Intelligence 
Committee concluded that the intelligence community had been right and Mr. 
Feith wrong: there was no operational relationship between Iraq and Al 
Qaeda, and no link at all between Mr. Hussein and the 9/11 attacks.

For those who were confused before the war, and still are, by all the Bush 
administration's claims - that the hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi 
official shortly before 9/11, that a member of Al Qaeda set up a base in 
Iraq with the help of Mr. Hussein, that Iraq helped Al Qaeda learn to make 
bombs and provided it with explosives - the evidence is now clear. The 
Levin report, together with the 9/11 panel's findings and the Senate 
intelligence report, show that those claims were all cooked up by Mr. 
Feith's shop, which knew that the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence 
Agency had already shown them to be false.

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[Now: how prior biases skew reality to a quite remarkable extent:]

From: Program on International Policy Attitudes

[ PIPA is a joint program of the Center on Policy Attitudes (COPA) and the 
Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), School 
of Public Affairs, University of Maryland.]

Even after the final report of Charles Duelfer to Congress saying that Iraq 
did not have a significant WMD program, 72% of Bush supporters continue to 
believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major program for developing 
them (25%). Fifty-six percent assume that most experts believe Iraq had 
actual WMD and 57% also assume, incorrectly, that Duelfer concluded Iraq 
had at least a major WMD program. Kerry supporters hold opposite beliefs on 
all these points.

Similarly, 75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was provid! 
ing substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63% believe that clear evidence of 
this support has been found. Sixty percent of Bush supporters assume that 
this is also the conclusion of most experts, and 55% assume, incorrectly, 
that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission. Here again, large 
majorities of Kerry supporters have exactly opposite perceptions.

These are some of the findings of a new study of the differing perceptions 
of Bush and Kerry supporters, conducted by the Program on International 
Policy Attitudes and Knowledge Networks, based on polls conducted in 
September and October.

Steven Kull, director of PIPA, comments, "One of the reasons that Bush 
supporters have these beliefs is that they perceive the Bush administration 
confirming them. Interestingly, this is one point on which Bush and Kerry 
supporters agree." Eighty-two percent of Bush supporters perceive the Bush 
administration as saying that Iraq had WMD (63%) or that Iraq had a ! major 
WMD program (19%). Likewise, 75% say that the Bush administration is saying 
Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda. Equally large 
majorities of Kerry supporters hear the Bush administration expressing 
these views--73% say the Bush administration is saying Iraq had WMD (11% a 
major program) and 74% that Iraq was substantially supporting al Qaeda.

Steven Kull adds, "Another reason that Bush supporters may hold to these 
beliefs is that they have not accepted the idea that it does not matter 
whether Iraq had WMD or supported al Qaeda. Here too they are in agreement 
with Kerry supporters." Asked whether the US should have gone to war with 
Iraq if US intelligence had concluded that Iraq was not making WMD or 
providing support to al Qaeda, 58% of Bush supporters said the US should 
not have, and 61% assume that in this case the President would not have. 
Kull continues, "To support the president and to accept that he took the US 
to war based on mistaken assumptions likely creates substantial cognitive 
dissonance, and leads! Bush supporters to suppress awareness of unsettling 
information about prewar Iraq."

This tendency of Bush supporters to ignore dissonant information extends to 
other realms as well. Despite an abundance of evidence--including polls 
conducted by Gallup International in 38 countries, and more recently by a 
consortium of leading newspapers in 10 major countries--only 31% of Bush 
supporters recognize that the majority of people in the world oppose the US 
having gone to war with Iraq. Forty-two percent assume that views are 
evenly divided, and 26% assume that the majority approves. Among Kerry 
supporters, 74% assume that the majority of the world is opposed.

[...]

The polls were conducted October 12-18 and September 3-7 and 8-12 with 
samples of 968, 798 and 959 respondents, respectively. Margins of error 
were 3.2 to 4% in the first and third surveys and 3.5% on September 3-7. 
The poll was fielded by Knowledge Networks using its nationwide panel, 
which is randomly selected from the entire adult population and 
subsequently provided internet access.

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Damien Broderick