On Monday, a CBC headline declared: “1 in 4 Canadians want Trump-style travel ban, poll suggests.” Sure enough, the poll by the Angus Reid Institute (ARI) showed that 25% of those asked thought, in light of Donald Trump’s executive order limiting travel to the U.S. from seven countries, that Canada “should have adopted a temporary ban similar to the U.S. policy.” This also meant the majority (57%) felt that Canada had “made the right call” to keep its refugee intake goal for 2017 at 40,000 people, and another 18% felt that Canada’s goal was actually too low.

via Angus Reid Institute

As of Thursday, the story had generated nearly 5,000 comments on the CBC News site and had been shared over 16,000 times on social media. And the CBC was not the only outlet to report on the poll. It made headlines everywhere.

To gauge who it was sampling, the same ARI poll asked respondents how much they knew about the ongoing refugee crisis sparked by the Syrian war. Twenty-seven per cent chose “just scanning the headlines” as the option that best described them. Another 38% answered that they were “seeing some media coverage and having the odd conversation,” and another 28% said they were “following it in the news and having discussions with friends and family.”

But is feeling informed still enough? Or has the way we access and share news changed so fundamentally that we have to reevaluate what ‘informed’ actually means?

“We’ve faced the same questions in the past when we did polling on bill C-51, the anti-terror bill, and that type of thing,” Shachi Kurl, executive director of the Angus Reid Institute, tells me. “‘if you’re not asking an informed public, what does it matter?’”

“We’re not Civics 101, we’re not the social studies course,” she says. “Our job is to provide what we think is a fair and, basically, a general level overview of the issue, including what people on different sides of the debate are saying about it. And then we almost always ask it posed in a way that’s based on what you know, what do you think?”

Questions on polls do come with some context. When it came to ARI asking about Canada’s proposed refugee intake for 2017, the full questionnaire noted that, “in 2016, Canada admitted roughly 55,000 refugees and protected persons, including more than 38,000 Syrian refugees. This year, the federal government plans to resettle 40,000 refugees and protected persons of all nationalities, including a significant number from Syria.” (Forty-one percent of people said Canada is taking in too many.)

via Angus Reid Institute

“We work really hard, very sincerely, we sweat over the wording of the questions to provide enough of a base level of information for people to give the opinion that they can without trying to juice or create so much information or context that the answers are then skewed or we’re introducing any possibility of bias,” Kurl says.

As we learn after every election, polling is an imperfect science. But, again, the issue might not lie with polls, but rather with us. As Kurl points out, people answer polls to the best of their knowledge, whatever that might be. Reading poll results, we take that into account. In a poll like this recent one dealing with refugee policy, Kurl notes that, in reference to the amount people said they’d been paying attention to the issue, “awareness is actually quite high.”

But what if even the people who feel they are well informed still can’t be sure they know anything?

Over at the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert highlights three books that explore why people are reluctant, or even incapable, of changing their minds when presented with facts that dispute the opinions they’ve formed.

She points to work by cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernback, which references a Yale study where students were asked to rate their understanding of how everyday items actually worked. “They were then asked to write detailed, step-by-step explanations of how the devices work, and to rate their understanding again. Apparently, the effort revealed to the students their own ignorance, because their self-assessments dropped. (Toilets, it turns out, are more complicated than they appear.)”

Experiments like this reveal that humans are prone to believing they know more than they actually do, and the reason may simply be because we rely on one another so much to fill in information gaps. So, we don’t know how a toilet works, but we can call someone who does, and it feels like we know more. “So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins,” Kolbert writes.

When it comes to public policy, the implications of this are potentially important.

“‘As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,’ Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless,” Kolbert explains. “When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views.”

Sloman and Fernbach tested this theory. In 2012, they asked people to rate how strongly they agreed or disagreed with things like single-payer health care and merit-based pay for teachers. “Next, they were instructed to explain, in as much detail as they could, the impacts of implementing each one,” Kolbert writes. “Most people at this point ran into trouble. Asked once again to rate their views, they ratcheted down the intensity, so that they either agreed or disagreed less vehemently.”

Back to that CBC headline, and the social media shares it generated, because — remember — people are sometimes asked by polling firms to rate their knowledge based on the media they read.

What did people read?

No doubt they read the headline. If they accessed the story via CBC’s Facebook page they would have also seen an unattributed quote, referring to the number of refugees people think Canada should accept: “Certainly in terms of that ‘too many, too few’ debate, a lot more people think it’s too many than too few.”

That quote was Kurl’s, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at the Facebook post. To read the story would be to see that quote in context — it came after she pointed out that “41 per cent is not the majority voice but it is a significant segment of the population” — but to merely see the Facebook post would be to miss it entirely.

That might matter a lot. Abacus Data’s recent Matters of Opinion study found that 61% of Canadians check Facebook at least once a day. Forty percent of Canadian Facebook users follow news organizations, and 21% of Canadians overall say they learn of breaking news from that platform. We are, to say the least, heavy Facebook users.

And the important thing to remember is how infrequently people actually click through to read a whole news story. The number of times people click through to a news story is very often only a small percentage of all the other activity generated around that story on Facebook. That is to say, way more people will click around the story — on the ‘like’ or ‘heart’ or ‘frown’ buttons, or to expand the comment threads, or (importantly!) on the share button, for instance — than on the story itself. Which means the information presented with the story up front like quotes or headlines counts for a lot. That’s likely what will generate a reaction, not the content of the story itself. If this weren’t the case, Facebook would be a lot less successful.

In his latest manifesto about where he sees Facebook going, Mark Zuckerberg suggested he believes a bigger problem than ‘fake news’ is sensationalized news: “Social media is a short-form medium where resonant messages get amplified many times. This rewards simplicity and discourages nuance. At its best, this focuses messages and exposes people to different ideas. At its worst, it oversimplifies important topics and pushes us towards extremes.”

How to solve it?

“We noticed some people share stories based on sensationalist headlines without ever reading the story. In general, if you become less likely to share a story after reading it, that’s a good sign the headline was sensational,” Zuckerberg wrote. “If you’re more likely to share a story after reading it, that’s often a sign of good in-depth content.”

Maybe that will work to curb the desire to write eye-popping headlines — Facebook is only starting to work that out. Maybe it will dissuade people from making posts people want to react to on Facebook. But it can’t dissuade them too much, otherwise Facebook would begin to undermine its own (very successful) business model, which is based in large part on those reactions.

“I don’t necessarily agree with the hypothesis that, if people don’t know a lot about the issue, we shouldn’t be polling about it or shouldn’t be asking about it,” Kurl says. “Because, what if you had a local government — a mayor — who said 100% of the people in my town like jelly beans, and his name is Mayor Candy, well, how do you know if that’s true? The point is how do you measure, how do you really get a sense of what people are thinking or what they believe or what they feel about an issue?”

It’s a good point.

But suppose that mayor tweeted that erroneous jelly bean statistic and news organizations immediately wrote stories topped with his assertion, and those headlines were shared across a social media platform where more and more people are getting their news — that is, where they become informed about the world and critical issues — and everybody saw everyone they know sharing those headlines through this addictive medium that, by design, eliminated the context and depth needed to fully appreciate that the comment was not backed up by things like anecdotal evidence or recent jelly bean sales or even past polling data.

Few people might know the true state of things, but because they were briefly exposed to this jelly bean news, they might feel as if they do. And then a pollster might call and ask for their informed opinion.

Colin Horgan is a journalist and writer in Toronto.

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