What Learning Theory Has To Say About Current Politics

About 9  years ago I wrote a post entitled, Is reasoning taking a beating?  It describes the following example, which is about a more general issue.  What happens when a person confronts evidence that contradicts the person's prior held world view?  Many people tend to discard the evidence.

In the book, What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain teaches us that students don't know what to do when they confront evidence that contradicts their prior held world view.  Perhaps it is surprising to learn that the initial student reaction is to deny the evidence.  The world view has sanctity and deep down the student wants to preserve it.  The excellent teacher understands the tension the student is under.  With patience and persistence, the instructor nudges the student to reconsider his position.  It would be good for that position to account for the evidence that is observed.  Of course, in this case Bain is referring to an academic matter.  When looking at circular motion the students are apt to have an Aristotelian view.  A Newtonian perspective appears unnatural.  There is a getting used to period necessary to take on the new perspective.  There is leadership in helping students make the transition.

So, in physics class, it seems clear that the instructor needs to challenge students in their prior held beliefs and then nurse them through their cognitive dissonance when those beliefs run counter to the facts. How long it takes for the students to embrace a different explanation, one that is consistent with the facts, I can't say.  But I would suspect that the students may be angry with the teacher during that time interval, because the teacher is forcing them out of their comfort zone.  

Now, I won't push this much further, but I'm sure that people my age recall the criticism of liberal bias in the news, which was heard frequently prior to Fox News becoming an important force.  If people get their news exclusively from one source, and if that news has non-factual information, that surely is how the viewers form their prior world view when confronting the facts.  (It's possible that the news organization is simply mistaken, but it's also possible that the news organization deliberately obfuscates the facts.)   Who then plays the role of the patient teacher, who educates the audience to accept the facts, by changing their prior held worldview?  Conversely, it seems possible that with nobody to play the role of patient teacher, that people get so locked into their world view they then treat it as absolute truth.  

Here is one last point and then I'll close.  One role of education that is quite important, though many people tend to ignore it, is for the learner to develop a healthy skepticism about whatever new ideas come along.  The scientific method is based on such skepticism.  The skepticism allows the person to consider the evidence without seeing it as an undo threat. True Believers (a term I first heard from Eric Hoffer) don't have such skepticism.  A lot has been made as of late about non-college Whites versus Whites with college.  But I haven't seen anything said about how that distinction maps into the skepticism (or not) of the individual.  I think that connection needs to be drawn out.