Answer? With humility. Tania Lombrozo writes at NPR's "Cosmos and Culture" blog:
From a NYT op-ed Fernbach co-authored:
Plenty of people have strong opinions about complex policy issues ... But few people have the detailed knowledge of policy or economics that a solid understanding of the issues seems to require. ...
A recent paper by psychologist Phil Fernbach of the University of Colorado and his collaborators, published this May in Psychological Science, [demonstrates that] people overestimate how well they understand the mechanics of complex policies ... The striking implication, for which the researchers find support, is that getting people to appreciate their own ignorance can be enough to rein in strong opinions.
Fernbach pointed me to the following video, which amusingly illustrates the "illusion of political understanding" that he documents in his paper. In this case, people have opinions about the fiscal cliff, and plenty are worried about it, despite having no idea what it is.
The video also illustrates the technique that Fernbach and colleagues used to get people to appreciate their own ignorance: asking them to explain an issue.
From a NYT op-ed Fernbach co-authored:
Why, then, does having to explain an opinion often end up changing it? The answer may have to do with a kind of revelatory trigger mechanism: asking people to “unpack” complex systems — getting them to articulate how something might work in real life — forces them to confront their lack of understanding. ...
Strong opinion and vigorous debate are key parts of democracy and the foundation to American culture. Yet most people would agree that it is not productive to have a strong opinion about an issue that one doesn’t really understand. We have a problem in American politics: an illusion of knowledge that leads to extremism. We can start to fix it by acknowledging that we know a lot less than we think.
