Slashdot Mirror
Given Truth, the Misinformed Believe Lies More
SharpFang writes "In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that misinformed people, particularly political partisans, rarely changed their minds when exposed to corrected facts in news stories. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger."
There's something called the Kruger-Dunning effect which is kinda interesting as well Dunning-Kruger effect. The premise is the following one:
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes.
Can be found here http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf. The statistical correlations found were weak, in some cases not even statistically significant. Also, for some questions they didn't see any backfire effect (where corrections make people believe the lies more) for all questions. For example, when dealing with liberals, there was no backfire effect when correcting the misconception that George Bush banned stem cell research (he in fact restricted it to a specific set of cell lines). However, in this case, correction did not alter the belief level although it didn't create a backfire result. Clearly, more research is needed. There's also a relevant older article which shows that uninformed people are more likely to think they are informed. http://ann.sagepub.com/content/560/1/143.abstract. This connects with the Dunning-Kruger effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect where incompetent individuals generally overestimate their own competency.
oblig xkcd http://www.xkcd.com/765/
rewriting history since 2109
First, The Boston Globe has an article that explains the same details, though not in question & answer interview format.
Second, the adult human brain is engineered to actually dismiss information that it does not agree with. There was a very good article I read (that I think was posted a while ago on /.) that explained the situation very well. In summary, the prefrontal cortex of the adult human brain is the "information filter" that is responsible for filtering out "unnecessary" information. For example, ask yourself how many people you walked by today. Then ask yourself how many of those peoples' faces do you remember vividly? Though your eyes most likely saw many, many faces, your prefrontal cortex filters out that information before it even is stored in short-term memory. I know there's an article out there that explains the science more thoroughly, but sadly I failed to find it.
Anyways, the same information filter that filters out unnecessary information also is also responsible for blocking any information that it determines to be dissonant from accepted information, i.e. cognitive dissonance. In this previously mentioned misplaced article, scientists hooked up participants to an MRI in an experiment analyzing how their brains processed conflicting information. The participants were sorted into two groups: physics majors and non-physics majors. The video was a recreation of Newton's gravity experiment, where a person drops a tennis ball and a bowling ball, both hitting the floor at the same time. When the physics majors saw the experiment, their brain did not register much activity, because what they saw was already what they knew to be true. But when the non-physics majors watched the video, the "WTF" section of their brain went crazy. In short, they believed that the bowling ball would hit the ground first, and when it didn't, their brain had a difficult time processing the information that conflicted with previously held beliefs. When faced with this confliction, adult minds must either reclassify what they know (a very difficult task for the adult brain), or filter out what they have just witnessed (a very easy task for the adult brain). In the end, I'm sure most of those non-physics majors ended up rationalizing what they saw with excuses such as, "Video editing" or "lead weight inside tennis ball."
As difficult as it is, the only way to prove to someone the truth is to first prove to them that their accepted beliefs are false. The only way this is possible is to take what they believe to be true, then show them how their own "facts" are inconsistent with one another. Only by creating cognitive dissonance within their own thoughts, rather than introducing it from an external stimulus, can you create the conditions necessary for them to be willing to listen to truth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
He could have had his birth certificate lost or destroyed (fires do happen, things get lost in traveling, etc).
If he doesn't actually have a birth certificate, he can't show it, can he? The best he can do is go back to the hospital and ask for a replacement. However, as Hawaii and other states don't give out copies of Birth Certificates, the best he can do is have a Certificate of Live Birth.
Further, as others have repeatedly pointed out, there is the birth announcement in the Hawaiian newspaper. It's a bit hard to claim that 40-some-odd years ago, someone placed a fake birth announcement in a newspaper so some black guy could be elected President.
As to the proof of his birth, which Birthers repeatedly deny isn't valid despite it being used by several states (and which goes back to the heart of this story):
Snopes
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The era of objective journalism was a lot shorter than most people tend to think. The very idea that journalism was different from politics really only emerged around WWII.
Go look up some revolutionary era newspapers, some Jacksonian era newspapers, some antebellum newspapers, some reconstruction newspapers, some gilded age newspapers ... you'll see bias not even fox news would stoop to.
That is a really twisted interpretation of the word "progressive".
A progressive believes that the current system not working as well as it should, and that it must be improved from within.
Compare to revolutionary that believes that change is needed, but the system can not be changed from within.
Compare to a conservative who approves of the current state of government.
A Regressive believes that recent changes have been for the worse and seeks to repeal them.
None of these infer as to what direction they believe the change should be in. These are the meanings of these words untwisted by any personal and political agenda. Other political terms like liberal, right and left are somewhat more open to interpretation.
You're confusing competence with ideology. You can be a liberal (or a conservative, or a libertarian, or a Marxist, etc) and still be incapable of getting things done. "Ram it down their throats" isn't a characteristic of any one ideology, necessarily (though some, like Communism, use it to full effect). No matter how popular a politician is, "ram it down their throat" is usually bad bad bad. FDR was popular, but when he tried to pack the Supreme Court, the public started threatening to impeach him, and he never went near the subject again. So the fact that he failed means that he wasn't a liberal, by your reasoning?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Fact: Obama himself thinks that continuing to spend is the answer to the economic problems we face.
Well, yes it is. The economic problems are because you need a certain minimum level of cashflow for a market economy to work. Either you have to re-inflate the economy or abandon the capitalist system. You can't have capitalism without capital.
(Which, interestingly, means that Republicans are anti-capitalist and anti-market at the moment. You cannot believe in market forces if you do not believe in the right of a market to exist.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
But on the subject of truth and lies, Hitler never started World War II, either. Britain and France had decided that Germany had to be taken down long before the actual Polish invasion. In fact Chamberlain said, in May 1939 "the fate of Poland depends on the final outcome of the war, which will depend on our ability to defeat Germany rather than to aid Poland at the beginning.".
I would not come to the conclusion based on prior events. From 1933 Hitler abolished democracy, re-militarized, tore up the Treaty of Versailles and reintroduced conscription. By 1935 Russia, the UK and others were trying to build pacts with each other because they could see where this was going! In March 1938 Germany annexed Austria then just before your quote of Chamberlain, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939.
In my view Hitler had started the road to WW2 probably by 1935 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland were the final straw. But because of Germany's head start France, UK, Russia and others were not willing to put their unprepared countries on the battlefield.
The most dangerous drug
There is. For instance Germany has the ARD, which in turn consists of broadcasting entities in each federal state, controlled by the respective state.
The broadcasting entities are producing their own magazines and news broadcasts, but all are broadcasted via the same network. Because different states lean differently, you have pretty leftist magazines sharing time slots with pretty conservative magazines, you have rather green magazines running one week and at the same time the next week very pro business magazines, depending on the broadcasting entities which produces them.
The system is not perfect, but at least it gets somewhat more balanced than just having one controlling entity for everything.
Yes. It's disappointing, but the way to sway people is to use anecdotes instead of data, and use appeals to emotion instead of reason.
So don't talk about a million sick children dying of a vaccine-preventable disease, just pick one kid and talk about him. And don't talk about how our purpose is to save lives and increase human prosperity, just say how that kid sure is sad and sick and it's such a shame and wah wah.
Yes, I'm serious, that's the way to do it. Take all of your nerdy intuitions and do exactly the opposite.