The Idea of a Utopian Democracy

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The idea that people believe or not believe things purely based on how much ignorance they have about the issue is wrong. The more educated you are, the better you become at rationalizing and justifying whatever it is you already believe. And i think most of us believe deep down, tht it's facts. But it's not facts. It's tribe or identity, more than so many other things, that push us to believe what we believe. This is a psychology of nerosides and other social sciences who have done an incredible amount of research over the last 100 years.

To the Founding Fathers it was free libraries. To the 19th century rationalist philosophers it was a system of public schools. Today it's access to the internet. Since its beginnings, Americans have believed that if facts and information were available to all, a democratic utopia would prevail. But missing from these well-intentioned efforts, says author and journalist David McRaney, is the awareness that people's opinions are unrelated to their knowledge and intelligence. In fact, he explains, the better educated we become, the better we are at rationalizing what we already believe. Listen as the author of How Minds Change speaks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about why it's so hard to change someone's mind, the best way to make it happen (if you absolutely must), and why teens are hard-wired not to take good advice from older people even if they are actually wiser.