we have to do more. >> we will be hearing more about other white house policies in about 15 minutes from the hudson institute taking a look at president trump on iran. david parker at our table this morning. he is the author of this book, one nation, two realities. he's the rector of the center for presidential studies. what do you mean by doing facts and perceptions? for americansies to believe different things. forever in some ways and over

the past 50 years during the culture war, americans have become more divided when it comes to policy positions and views towards candidates and values and what kind of cars we buy and all that stuff. increasingly over the past 10 different setsve of facts. fferent sets of facts. we have different perceptions of reality. host: how can you determine this? guest: i started looking at this back in 1999 briefly. i did one research project on it back then. we particular book, collected survey data going back to 2013. we have six different surveys from 2013-2017. we asked people on specific facts as they pertain to the state of the economy, climate change, the role of racism in

determining outcomes, attitudes toward whether sexuality is innate or psychological, whether increasing the minimum wage helped or hurt workers. 15 different things we ask about. the relationship between people's different values, the media they consume, their partisan perspective, their identities and how those things match up to the fact they believe, even after accounting for their partisanship, we find thatincreasing trend people in one half of the country read different things, believe different things, trust different people. they literally see the world differently. host: what is to blame? guest: this is one of the contributions of the book.

from the point of view that thinking the media were to blame. looking at partisan media and whatnot, the effects of partisan media. that was our starting point. week spec to do the dominant factor was the rise in partisan media on the internet and cable and social media. we actually found that those things play a role, but the dominant culprit is really ourselves. basically, this is our own values. we all have experiences, personal experiences, identities and especially value perspectives that we carry with us that are not necessarily based on our understandings of facts but based on our morals. really guidences

our perceptions of reality. certain't help when cheerleaders, partisan opinion leaders in the media egging us -- and the media are egging us on. even if no one ever turned into fox news or msnbc -- host: how do you fix it? guest: our conclusions are pretty pessimistic. we spend a section of the book looking at different possible correctives to this problem. at the potential efficacy of fact checking. there's been a rise in fact checking organizations over the past few years. we are not the only ones who

have found this. fact checking is pretty much ineffective. peopleall percentages of change their beliefs based on being corrected. even if they do, it is temporary and they bounce back. it doesn't affect their behavior. they will continue on with the next step of what believing in this particular fact would mean. one of the more disconcerting findings, especially for a college professor, is that more education doesn't help. in fact, it makes it worse. the people who are most inclined to project their own values and identities onto factual beliefs are the people at the highest levels of education, including people with phd's.

how can that possibly be? supposedly, one of the points of higher education is that we become t exposed to different points of view. turns out that that doesn't really happen. what we get through higher atcation is we become better linking up our beliefs to our values. we become better counter arguers. whate better able to rebut conflict with our point of view -- conflicts with our points of view. host: what's the outcome? guest: we can hope that we will outgrow it.

that overility is time, the value divide in the united states becomes narrower. there is some indications of that. the differences between left and right or red and blue america are not that great when you look at people in their 20's and 30's. they are more likely to agree on climate change, agree on gay-rights, agree on different types of things, certainly agree when it comes to the role of women in society or civil rights types of issues. at least when it comes to those sorts of issues, the tendency to values one's cultural ontoorals and identities

one's beliefs may become narrower. the divide will be narrower. however, when it comes to other stuff like differences on taxes and spending and the consequences of a national debt or whether socialism leads to positive outcomes for working , we've seen no reason to believe that people will stop taking an objective look at the scientific evidence on this. host: what are your thoughts? democrats, 202-748-8000. republicans, 202-748-8001. independents, 202-748-8002. you can join us on twitter as well or go to facebook.com/c-span.

would it help if we had a presidential candidate or a president in the white house that talked in a way that said there is middle ground here? guest: it couldn't hurt. who wentve a president out of his way to do that. the entire basis of the obama candidacy in 2008 was trying to find common ground. the first administration tried to reach that common ground. what we saw over the course of eight years is these divides becoming greater. arguably, those divides have become even greater since 2016 with a president who takes a different approach.

presumably, it wouldn't hurt, but i don't think history suggests we would get back to a state of kumbaya either. host: james in virginia. independent. caller: thanks for taking my call. there's one thing we don't consistently consider. that is the reason we have a constitution. it's to maintain and promote domestic tranquility. that is the environment that promotes the evolving of the neocortex. promoting thegan toning of the limbic brain sales. butecame not homo sapiens, consumprex.

that has matured into the organic chemistry of the brain. proteins result in the buildup of confirmation bias the belief tribe, ort the quantities availabilities of materials are limited, so you must fight for them. we've become social darwinians. survival of the fittest, an animalized condition. what do we have in the white house now? social is right darwinian taking over a onstitutional republic based the maintenance of domestic tranquility. we are on the precipice of converting to a feudal state.

whether we are going to stop ont conversion depends whether people recognize that pain killing enabled the neocortex has been going on since time began. guest: i don't agree with what especially the, biochemistry as it relates to bias -- as it relates to the rest of it, i certainly understand and appreciate the caller's pessimism. i feel pessimistic like that on many days as well. on other days, i choose to feel hopeful. host: battle creek, michigan. democrat. about: i want to talk

obstructionism. say the to me -- let's climate issue -- exxonmobil did their own study of climate change in the 1970's. they found that the science was correct, the scientists were correct that there was likely going to be climate change. they obstructed it and hid it. there's been obstruction from the scientific -- of the scientific communities from the oil companies ever since. george bush thought global warming was an issue. there's beenh era, far right obstructionism. unwillingness to compromise,

certainly among republicans in the senate. obstructionism is a problem. so is unwillingness to copper mice. guest: that's another area of research we are pursuing. -- so is unwillingness to compromise. over the course of the past longer, we've seen a reduced willingness for folks to compromise. it is not a partisan statement to say that in the house and senate, we have indeed seen more of that historically on the republican side. haven't beencrats guilty of it at times as well. there are many contextual reasons why that might be the case. what we are talking about here with respect to the dueling fact

perceptions, that contributes to all event. the oil and gas industry did their own research on this, reached their own conclusions and hid them, that's true. more recently, in the past year or so, we are seeing more oil and gas companies coming on supportxpressing their for increased funding for new technologies, increased funding to support new energy sources. increase ineen an the percentage of americans who believe climate change is real and caused by humans. in the coming years, perhaps in the next administration, there may be opportunities for progress on that front. down the dueling fact perceptions into three

categories. polarization, information environment, and demise of trust and authority. let's talk laura's asian. -- let's talk polarization. what do you mean? starting inve seen the late 1960's and then spiking in the 1990's this so-called culture war, polarization between the parties. we talk about three different types of polarization. --re's partisan polarization we are talking about this in congress and the mass public. we just mean then democrats and >> find this in all our "washington journal" segments online at c-span.org as weigh take you live now to the hudson institute in washington, d.c., for a discussion about the trump administration's iran policy.