How the Community of Knowledge Creates Opinion

People have some crazy opinions. Generally, these are the opinions that we disagree with. The standard view in both academia and the wider culture is that people have such opinions due to knowledge deficits; they lack critical understanding. On this view, providing information and critical reasoning skills is the best way to get people to accept your view; i.e., to accept the truth. I discuss some reasons to doubt this deficit model. First, I show that attitudes toward mask-wearing, social distancing, and vaccination in the US during the pandemic are not predicted by health or risk status, but rather by political ideology. Second, people’s sense of understanding is influenced by what others understand, even when those others share no information of substance. We outsource our judgments to others. I will also show how we can take advantage of this tendency to outsource to induce people to bring evidence to bear on policy.

Please email admin@brownuk.org for the zoom link.