A pair of researchers just did a very interesting experiment involving the question of the size of Trump’s inaugural crowd vs Obama’s. It found that 40% of Trump supporters think that Trump’s was bigger even when they are shown the proof that it wasn’t.





It was actually a two-part experiment. There were two sets of questions, both of them involving those side-by-side pictures of the two inauguration crowds. The first group was shown those images and asked which of them was Trump’s and which was Obama’s. 40% of Trump supporters identified the Obama crowd as the Trump crowd, about five times as high a percentage of Clinton voters and twice as high as non-voters.

A second group was simply shown the two images and asked which one showed a larger crowd. This time, 15% of Trump supporters said that the image of the Trump inauguration showed a larger crowd than the one of the Obama inauguration, something that could only be believed by a blind person. Only 2% of Clinton voters and 3% of non-voters identified that image as showing a larger crowd. The researchers explain these findings.

To many political psychologists, this exercise will be familiar. A growing body of research documents how fully Americans appear to hold biased positions about basic political facts. But scholars also debate whether partisans actually believe the misinformation and how many are knowingly giving the wrong answer to support their partisan team (a process called expressive responding). Our survey question about which photo shows the larger crowd is that an incorrect response to this question could really only arise from that second process. If there were no political controversy, any respondent who took the time to look at the photographs would see more people in the image on the right than the one on the left. Clearly, some Trump supporters in our sample decided to use this question to express their support for Trump rather than to answer the survey question factually. On one hand, some may find it reassuring to discover that at least some Trump supporters may not really believe the misinformation they express in surveys. On the other hand, the Trump administration already accuses others of producing “fake news,” and instead offers its own (false) “alternative facts.” If a significant portion of Trump supporters are willing to champion obvious fabrications, challenging fabrications with facts will be difficult.

In most cases, absolutely futile, I would argue. But before you get too smug about this, you should recognize that this is a pretty much universal problem, it isn’t limited to those we disagree with. This kind of tribalism infects all of us to one degree or another, and the overwhelming majority of us are very good at identifying it in our political opponents but oblivious to our own behavior that mirrors it.

When we hold a strong belief, we tend to defend it to the death. When that belief involves tribal rivals, we almost never set the same standards for out tribe as we do for the other. Liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans (and libertarians too), Christians and atheists. In all of these rival tribes, the overwhelming majority of the members of one tribe will find any rumor or even the tiniest of missteps by a member of the other tribe as proof that they are all corrupt and horrible; at the same time, nothing but absolute proof beyond a shadow of a doubt (and often not even that) is enough when the accusation involves someone in our own tribe.