Abstract
Political discourse often seems divided not just by different preferences, but by entirely different representations of the debate. Are partisans able to accurately describe their opponents’ position, or do they instead generate unrepresentative “straw man” arguments? In this research we examined an (incentivized) political imitation game by asking partisans on both sides of the U.S. health care debate to describe the most common arguments for and against ObamaCare. We used natural language-processing algorithms to benchmark the biases and blind spots of our participants. Overall, partisans showed a limited ability to simulate their opponents’ perspective, or to distinguish genuine from imitation arguments. In general, imitations were less extreme than their genuine counterparts. Individual difference analyses suggest that political sophistication only improves the representations of one’s own side but not of an opponent’s side, exacerbating the straw man effect. Our findings suggest that false beliefs about partisan opponents may be pervasive.
Highlights
Condemn me if you will, but condemn me by other witnesses than Theodore Roosevelt.I was a man of straw; but I have been a man of straw long enough
We report two studies of the straw man effect on an issue in U.S politics that was timely, contentious, important, and which involved a variety of reasonable policy beliefs and priorities on both sides of the political spectrum—the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
Our results suggest that partisans are not accurate at detecting imitations of genuine positions either
Summary
Condemn me if you will, but condemn me by other witnesses than Theodore Roosevelt.I was a man of straw; but I have been a man of straw long enough. Every man who has blood in his body, and who has been misrepresented as I have, is forced to fight. In any diverse society, the occasional disagreement is inevitable. It is concerning when the very nature of that disagreement is misrepresented by the parties mired within it. President Taft’s experience is shared among all sorts of partisans who have seen their true position reduced to a “weak, defenseless” straw man (Safire, 2008). Why is it that people engage with straw men, rather than with their opponents’ true
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