As much as I'd love this to be true, evidence suggests otherwise. We wouldn't be in a lot of this mess in the first place if this were true. In certain settings (e.g. academic) you're absolutely correct, but in public I don't think you are.

We're currently living in the age of misinformation precisely because this isn't true.

The onlookers are the people that generally don't understand the topic that's being discussed, which creates this illusion of making a rational decision, even though it's entirely driven by emotion.