This commentary was published earlier in “Phronesis in Pieces” at billschmitt.substack.com. Please consider subscribing to the publication, whose contents include a Bookshelf of resources for the avocational student of phronesis, or practical wisdom, as described by Aristotle.

Here’s a recent survey result that made me think—only after I chuckled and shook my head in bewilderment. The news made me wonder not about a particular politician or pollster, but about the messages we send via the boxes we check.

Among Republican voters planning to vote for a certain candidate (we won’t name him, but we’ve heard his weight is 215), 71% said they “hold him as a source of true information,” as reported by MSNBC.

This CBS News/YouGov poll of those likely primary voters found the believability rating for this politician exceeded the respondents’ trust in friends and family members (63%), conservative media figures (56%), and even religious leaders (42%).

The poll gave these participants three possible answers about how they “feel.” A candidate either speaks what’s “true” in the sense of “accurate,” or is “mistaken” while “trying to be accurate,” or is a liar, “intentionally saying false things to mislead.” Within the broad pool of GOP respondents, only 22% said the candidate in question intentionally lies.

My first reaction: This survey’s principal finding is that our “post-truth” culture cultivates disenchantment, isolation, and blurred judgment. Yes, we need to think, read, and speak more precisely!

I wanted to see more verisimilitude in these poll pronouncements about feelings, about sensing a candidate’s intentions. The results were about a loose concept of “truthiness.”

This quirky allocation of trust seemed to reflect a gamesmanship of ideas that can degrade public affairs. Something smelled rotten in the state of democracy, so I figured I should check what was in the refrigerator.

MSNBC, which might be expected to greet the reliability scores with a bit of snark, decided the respondents were more or less deplorable. Many supporters of the Republican front-runner “chose to believe that the former president’s lies simply don’t exist,” wrote commentator Steve Benen.

For my part, I stopped short of such a tight-fisted judgment. Could a candidate really lure masses of people into a lockbox of artificial reality as cyborg-like fans?

My fear, rather, was that these poll participants were saying, especially in the polarized, strategic ecology of politics, it’s okay for them to lie, or exaggerate, if the candidate they favor does the same.

In a culture where everything is becoming politicized, I said to myself, it’s an unsettling irony if more and more folks now see politics as a free-for-all where “nothing really matters” in our constant exchanges of fact-bombs.

This concern is in no way a vote for censorship or cancellation. But we must be aware of temptations to manufacture “findings” which then can be weaponized by proponents and opponents alike.

A dynamic marketplace of ideas will still allow reality to win. But habits of bending reality can erode hope and cause much collateral damage—to our personal integrity, as well as the social institutions (such as families, media, and religious leaders) being downgraded in their trust scores.

Trustworthiness among leaders does seem tragically low to me, across the partisan spectrum and spanning sectors like business and education.

Indeed, this poll reminded me of the Wall Street Journal’s March 2023 report which discovered “patriotism, religious faith, having children, and other priorities that helped define the national character for generations are receding in importance to Americans.”

That collection of data suggesting moral decay could be used by the GOP as a “culture war” talking point, just as Democrats could cite the trust-ranking poll as proof of brainwashed Republican voters. This competitive wordplay cuts both ways.

I respected the CBS/YouGov poll, but I felt free to chuckle and shake my head because voices it uncovered seemed performative. Not problematic, as in Kool-Aid being served. In any event, it was time to ask two follow-up questions.

First, are pollsters striving to avoid opinion research that caters to impressions, not facts? Second, what can we do, for the sake of virtuous behavior in the public square, to defend a kind of credibility which unites us as citizens?

The first question sent me to an old friend whose career included years as a conscientious pollster. He offered details that gave me hope:

• “Can polls reveal valuable insights into views by the general public? My short answer is a qualified yes—depending on a lot of things,” he said.
• The quality of research is often high, although it varies. Consider the wording of questions, the data collection methods (i.e., phone calls vs. online), and the resources expended on the project.
• The topics being explored make a difference. A poll that asks about sensitive, personal subjects might merit interpretation different from one about a basic Election Day choice.
• How well are the results described? How well are the polling methods disclosed? [This is a factor both the polling firm and news reporters can fine-tune.]
• In the case of pre-electoral polls, the data must be “weighted,” or statistically adjusted, to model key characteristics of the expected electorate.

Of course, a poll’s “margin of error” is also crucial.

According to an essay about present-day election polling posted in 2020 by the Pew Research Center, that margin, often cited as plus or minus 3%, may be closer to 6%.

The official margin “addresses only one source of potential error—the fact that random samples are likely to differ a little from the population,” Pew pointed out.

So, here’s the answer to my first question: Professionals work hard to make their surveys as accurate as possible, and they keep getting better. But their craft is both a science and an art, as my pollster friend put it.

People and their opinions are complex. We need responsible gatekeepers among the media, as well as discerning news-consumers, to sort out the most reliable approximations and put them in context.

That led to my second question—about the responsibility we all should feel in consuming information from polls. After all, a democracy must appreciate good polling as grist for the mill of serious national discussions about policies and goals.

If these are to be meaningful, the inputs should be true.

Yes, some respondents will lie. Newsweek reported in 2020 about a poll from The Hill which suggested “two-thirds of all registered voters believe that people lie about their political preferences when taking part in polls.”

I take the point, although this is another opportunity for a chuckle: If a poll finds that people are untruthful in polls, how do we greet this new revelation?

According to a 2011 article written by public intellectual Gad Saad in Psychology Today, an academic study of 1,000 people asked how often they had lied in the past 24 hours. Researchers found the average number of lies was 1.65 per day.

But an average is a complex thing. Half of all the lies tallied were told by only 5% of the study participants. Only about 40% reported telling any lie during the past day. Others had a pristine record—unless they were lying.

Also, assessing the gravity of an untruth or “misstatement” is complicated. In the CBS/YouGov poll, some people probably believed they were sending a truthful message without rigorously defining or comparing trustworthiness. They were asked how they “feel.”

The important “truth” they intended to communicate might have been that their candidate was more honest than his opponents. Or that only he had resonated with them at the level of their lived experience. Or that his candidacy represented an overriding veracity, regardless of his own spontaneous betrayals of accuracy.

Remember, plenty of voters of all political persuasions now see candidates as mere avatars in a meta-battle between big, crusading forces—saints vs. sinners.

It is said that “truth is the first casualty” in a war. What kind of accuracy and trust are we looking for in today’s crusades, including fights over race and gender? If we’re looking only for x, chances are we won’t detect y.

Politics is real, but it’s hardly a game just for empiricists. Robin Williams said it best years ago: “Reality—what a concept!”

This cul-de-sac of mind-reading is a good place to set aside our logical questions before we slide into cynicism or despair.

I recall at least three Star Trek episodes with plot lines where Captain Kirk short-circuited evil computers by confusing them with analysis of reality’s paradoxes and imperfections.

Let’s not go robotic.

Digging for truth—letting the dirt fall where it may while staking one’s steadfast claim on some fertile turf—is a difficult job and great adventure. This is a group project for the informed, engaged, skeptical, virtuous, balance-seeking, and freedom-loving citizenry envisioned by America’s founders.

Dealing with people, as with polls, our mission does indeed require thinking, reading, and speaking more precisely. Add listening and learning more acutely, too.

But one more thing is still lacking, as Jesus told the rich young man (Mark 10:21). It will help if we emulate a patient, loving God who forgives—who understands and redeems our flawed management of the truth, so long as we are pursuing it with diligence, with charity toward our neighbors.

Your thoughts are not my thoughts, God says in Isaiah 55:8. If polls prepare us for conversations about freedom and responsibility, we must acknowledge that civic dialogue, like survey results, will embody a messy mix of facts and feelings, candor and mystery, axioms and unique circumstances, concrete goals and personal perceptions.

Captain Kirk was able to confound his AI enemies because their calculations allowed for no nuance, no higher principles with which to address human illogic and emotions. In one Trek movie, a highly logical Mr. Spock was stumped by the test question, “How do you feel?”

We’re built for relationships, which entail gray areas and compassionate common sense. And we need respectful realism, where sometimes two things can be true simultaneously.

Commentators have said we can adopt one of two modes in our reactions to leaders: taking them literally but not seriously, or vice versa. Either approach may be the correct one in certain circumstances, but all of us should try more often to find a golden mean.

We need to expand such balance, understanding, and practical wisdom to all experiences in the public square, with help from communities and institutions of orderly empathy. Efforts to concoct one-size-fits-all dictums about people will lead to labeling and “canceling.”

Commitment to human dignity and reason—plus a trusting immersion in diverse encounters—will help us discern patterns of “truthiness” that point toward truthfulness. We can use this “art,” alongside science, to surf atop the tides of “liquid modernity” while we journey toward the full explanations we crave.

This is a long way of saying that I have made peace with the unsettling CBS News/YouGov poll. Such surveys should motivate us not to make final judgments, but to keep pondering how our complex society is thinking and what our democracy needs to talk about. We should neither manipulate statistics nor let them manipulate us.

To conclude, please answer this brief survey.

Whom do you consider a source of true information? God? Yourself? Polls? Someone you admire? Someone you don’t really understand or like? You’re right on all counts, so long as you don’t separate them.

Please continue taking part in this exercise—to elevate all our trust scores! Don’t worry, so long as you engage with ongoing questions and answers, you’re allowed a substantial margin of error.

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