Quote Originally Posted by Sasaki Kojiro View Post
To expand, I think the psychological research (which is common sense really) on our reasoning ability shows that it evolved to produce arguments and to evaluate arguments of others. But often when we produce arguments we fit them to a conclusion we already have or want (confirmation bias) and when evaluating the arguments of others we refute them anyway we can. Unless we have an additional motivation for truthfulness or honesty, which is pretty scarce and weak. So fundamentally when you have people saying "I'm a republican/I'm a democrat" they will filter everything through that. And we should delay their identifying with a party until they have a better filter.
If the filter is your problem, playing with voting age isn't going to do anything about it. People still tend have an opinion on dilemma's regardless of whether or not they are actually allowed to affect it; age doesn't really mean that much there.

So if you are lacking in the filters department there is only one freemarket approach possible: throw as many types of them at the wall and see which ones stick. I.e. have more political parties to accelerate political debate and provide people with new insights/reasoning.