Right on, Professor Zimmerman! Keep up the great work! Wrong again, Professor Zimmerman! Get a real job! Welcome to the wacky and wonderful world of op-ed writing. For the past decade, I’ve published two opinion pieces a month in newspapers around the country. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, meanwhile, I’ve received thousands of e-mail responses from my readers. And here’s what I’ve learned: Opinion pieces rarely change opinions. If this column confirms what you believed before, you’ll praise it. But if it contradicts your preconceived ideas, you’ll condemn it. By the end of the column, you’ll have pretty much the same viewpoints as you did at the start.

It’s also the conclusion of Drew Westen, an Emory University psychologist who conducts brain scans of Democrats and Republicans. No matter what your party, Westen has shown, your brain doesn’t let mere facts get in the way of opinions. When you are confronted with evidence that contradicts your point of view, the parts of your brain that regulate emotion — not reason — light up. And instead of changing your former opinions, you actually experience a happy sensation by rejecting the information that doesn’t fit them. Westen’s research reminds us how little of our political behaviour reflects conscious thought, judgment, or deliberation. And he brings us back to the granddaddy of American political commentators, Walter Lippmann, who anticipated Westen’s findings nearly a century ago.

As America grew in size and complexity, Lippmann wrote, the average citizen lacked the time, inclination, and ability to understand important public questions. Specifically, Lippmann urged, Americans must abandon “the intolerable and unworkable fiction that each of us must acquire a competent opinion about all public affairs.” Most people made political judgments on a whim, without real information or consideration. Better to cede complex issues to a “specialized class” of experts, Lippmann argued. Of course, this solution spawned questions of its own. Who would

select and certify these experts? Wouldn’t the experts possess their own biases and blinders? And what would happen when they disagreed with one another?

Like Blaise Pascal, who believed in God because the dangers of disbelief were greater, I place my faith in the wisdom of the American people. And I try to do my own small part in enhancing that wisdom, by writing op-eds that challenge readers to look anew at what they see. Does it work?

Now and again, I do receive messages from readers who tell me that my piece changed the way they think. The majority of respondents remain squarely in the “Right On” or the “Wrong Again” zone, writing to confirm what they believed all along. But maybe they, too, are doing more thinking. After all, our history is replete with examples of collective moral progress. In my heart, I believe in the ability of everyday citizens to deliberate public questions with reason, fairness, and intelligence. — The Christian Science Monitor