Reality is about to give the Brexiters a painful smack

There are friends of mine who have stopped watching the news altogether – sensitive liberal internationalists, they simply find round-the-clock reports on the Brexit juggernaut too depressing. It's a familiar instinct. As a boy, I would hide behind the sofa from the terrifying parts of Doctor Who. Now the Daleks of Remainer adulthood are Theresa May, the UK prime minister, and her Brexit secretary David Davis.

For a passive consumer of news – or science fiction – there is no great harm in covering the eyes during the scary bit. But when there are practical lessons to be learnt and yet we’re still cringing behind the nearest piece of furniture, trouble lies ahead.

Does anyone actually behave in this way, actively avoiding valuable information? It seems that we do. Behavioural economists even have a name for it: the “ostrich effect”.

Two economists, George Loewenstein and Duane Seppi, have been publishing research on the subject with various colleagues. In one study, the researchers examined the use of online retail investment accounts.

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They noted something curious: when the markets were rising, people were more likely to log in and admire their winnings; when the markets were falling, people avoided checking their portfolios. Bad news may be useful but it is also painful, so these retail investors decided – as real ostriches do not – that they would rather put their heads in the sand.

As with much of behavioural economics, some people seem to exhibit an opposing tendency. In this case, it’s checking the news every 20 seconds when things are going badly. There is a name for this, too: the “meerkat effect”.

Unwelcome information

Sometimes we cannot be ostriches, and find ourselves forced to confront unwelcome information. Even then, we have considerable scope to see things as we prefer to see them. In 2006 two political scientists, Milton Lodge and Charles Taber, examined the way Americans reasoned about two politically contentious issues: gun control and affirmative action.

They asked their experimental participants to read a number of arguments on either side of the debate, so they could evaluate their strengths and weaknesses and explain them to other people. One might hope that being asked to review all these pros and cons might give them more of a shared appreciation of opposing viewpoints; instead, the experience actually made political polarisation worse.

People mined the information they were given for ways to support their existing beliefs. When invited to search for more information, they would seek out data that backed up their preconceived ideas. This confirmation bias is the flip side of the ostrich effect. And when required to assess the strength of an opposing argument, they would spend no small effort thinking up ways to shoot it down.

So we avoid unpleasant information, even when it might do us some good. We actively seek out information that supports our preconceptions. And when standing face to face with an inconvenient fact or claim, we muster every counter-argument we can find.

All this would be worrying enough if I was merely describing the voters, but what makes me want to hide behind the sofa is the sense that the British politicians leading the Brexit negotiations may be equally keen to keep their heads in the sand.

Ostrich tendency

Certainly, public statements suggest an ostrich tendency. The foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, notoriously, has said that "our policy is having our cake and eating it". Meanwhile the prime minister has declared that "no deal for Britain is better than a bad deal for Britain", yet Mr Davis has admitted that no formal analysis has been done of what the costs of "no deal" might be. This looks like a damaging case of wishful thinking.

One can only hope that Mrs May and her team don’t believe a word of these wishful statements. Some cheerleading is forgivable, and perhaps inevitable. If our politicians were to express an excessively realistic view about the challenges ahead, that would implicitly criticise the voters who decided to leave the EU. Ms May can hardly tell us we’ve been fools, any more than the waiter can shake his head despairingly when we order the seafood pasta. This was a referendum, which means that “the customer is always right” defines the debate, at least for now.

The question is what will happen when the going gets tough, as it inevitably will. Any sort of deal will require a monumental effort of co-ordination. The EU would benefit from a deal, but the UK needs one desperately. There are many stumbling blocks and the clock is ticking. France and Germany have elections to attend to. There is certainly a deal to be done, but wishful thinking will not deliver it.

Last year, many Remainers were faced with a string of opinion polls that either put Leave ahead or within touching distance – and closed their eyes to what was happening. Now it is the Brexiters who have their heads in the sand and backsides in the air as danger approaches. At some stage, reality is going to give them a painful smack.

I’m going to cover my eyes.

– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017