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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."
Seriously, this looks like a weak rehash of Festinger's (1957) Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, only without the data or depth of study. People change their opinions to suit their convictions, and shown by Festinger's study of the reactions of doomsday cults' reactions to the fact the the world didn't end on the expected date (c.f., "When Propheshy Fails"). Really, what am I missing here?
Yes. To quote Jon Stewart, to Bill O'Reilly, "You're the sanest voice on this entire network. And that's a little scary sometimes."
To be honest I am surprised that on Slashdot this article hasn't resulted in a full-blown trash-the-conservatives-fest. I'm impressed actually... perhaps the group here has matured. Although I am considering that the perceived difference is due to the fact that the 10:00AM EST Slashdot is different from the 4:00PM EST Slashdot.
In any case, reading through the article I found that it was a nice conversation, but really didn't tell us much of what we don't already know: people are social animals, and love to congregate in tight, defensive groups. In politics, this often means that they adopt a wholesale party line, without either thinking about the facts involved, or considering each tenet independently (what does denying gays the right to receive the benefits of marriage have to do with a policy of financial conservatism, that at this point exists only as a hypothetical construct?).
On the other side of the political spectrum, I've repeatedly seen those who identify with the liberal ideology come up with varying excuses for restricting gun ownership, who became rather aggressive when confronted with statistics about the level of violent crime among legal firearm owners.
I'm not even going to get started on the 9/11-Truth or Vaccines-Autism movements, because they attract the deeply delusional, but extremely aggressive and assertive members of the population.
Unfortunately I think that within the last 15 years I have seen this behavior worsen significantly, as the Internet has made it possible for people to interact exclusively with those who share their delusions, no matter how inane and obscure. As such, they can keep bouncing between the various websites and forums that support their point of view until it is so firmly cemented in their consciousness, that even when faced with overwhelming facts, they absolutely refuse to accept reality.
The only way we would be able to reverse this trend, is through educating the new generation about rational skepticism and the scientific method. Unfortunately, many of the deeply deluded members of my own political party (sigh... the party I joined in order to have a say in which candidates get through the primaries) have decided that a scientific education would be immoral for the children, while the other party has decided that it would be too hard. As a result, I can only see the current divides getting deeper, and the political spectrum becoming even more polarized than it is right now.
This is where American politics gets weird. The party that proports to be populist is on the wrong side of public opinion for almost all the one-issue voters: guns, abortion, gay rights, creationism, etc. etc. I guess the exception was the Iraq War, but as a issue that had the poer to decide a vote, it had a shelf life of about 18 months, whereas for the right guns and abortion have been going strong for decades.
I guess that you didn't see where they said "political partisans"?
Take a look in the mirror dude. It is the same on both sides.
My rule of thumb. Never trust anybody that has a political bumper sticker on their car or claims to be a "supporter".
To give you an example from the other side. I didn't like Obama's space policy before the election. I still don't. When I showed people his policy they said that it wasn't so. When I showed it to them on his own website they said that they are sure he wouldn't do it.
When I told the same partisan that it was a Republican president and not Kennedy that put forth not just the first but the first and second Civil Rights acts I was again called a liar. When I showed him that it was true and showed him that by percentage more Republicans supported Kennedy's Civil Rights reforms than Democrats did he went into a fit of rage!
By the way my point was that one shouldn't support or vote for parties but individuals. I was trying to show that that there are good people as well as scum in both parties.
You how ever are every bit as much of the problem as the people you dislike so much. Two sides of the same coin.
And I do not like Presidents Obama's space policy. His health care reforms are not terrible but he didn't do enough about drug costs. His energy policy is a nightmare. I do not think he is a good president.
But he was born in Hawaii and what people seem to forget is it doesn't matter if he wasn't!
You do not have to be born on US soil to be born a US citizen. If one of you parents is a US citizen you are a US citizen!
If not then any US living abroad for work, school, or military service that has a child would have issues!
That isn't the way it works so no it doesn't matter even if he wasn't born in Hawaii.
And being a Muslim doesn't mean you can not be president. Just as being Catholic, Mormon, or Jewish means you can not be a US president.
So there!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It would sound like the perfect troll: find out how timid a kid was at age 3, that tells you how conservative he'll be at 23.
As it goes, it's completely backed up by research. And the researchers weren't looking for that info, it just sat there in the data.
In 1969, Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block embarked on a study of childhood personality, asking nursery school teachers to rate children's temperaments.
They weren't even thinking about political orientation. And why would they? They're psychology professors researching personality theory, personality development, research methodology, and stuff like that.
Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects' childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. Why? Who knows. Maybe for craps and giggles. Maybe because they had a column blank on their spreadsheet and wanted to fill it with one more metric to see if there was a link between voting and eating the erasers on the tops of pencils.
What was interesting to them was the arresting patterns they found.
As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient.
People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3.
Don't forget: the Blocks had NO IDEA what political affiliation any of the three year-olds would have when they did the survey in 1969. But go forward twenty years, and there it is. Everything that people say they want their kids to be: kids just like that became Libs. Everything that makes short-tempered parents scream and beat their kids: future applicants for a CPAC pass and an EIB golf shirt request on the Christmas list.
The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics. The article doesn't say if Professor N.S.Sherlock lit his pipe and smiled knowingly to himself upon hearing the results, but I wouldn't die of surprise if it happened.
Pure science: sometimes, the truth just hurts. Especially if you've been easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable all your life.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys...
... he's just an entertainer like any other news or talk media figure.
Then there's the case of Jon Stewart, who keeps reminding people that he's a professional comedian, and still so many people treat him as a serious journalist. The same thing happens repeatedly to his other people. No matter that they identify themselves as being from Comedy Central, their interviewees still often take them seriously.
It's all part of why the folks who do satire and parody keep saying how difficult their job is, especially when Real World people keep doing things that are even crazier than anything they'd dare write as comedy.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
In the end, the only difference between the educated and the uneducated with regards to facts is the source of their beliefs.
Absolutely nobody has time to research everything they accept as factual, which means that they have to accept on trust.
The educated ideally have a system by which that trust can operate effectively. One part is the scientific method, the other part is peer review. We delegate bullshit detection to specialists in the appropriate fields.
The problem with this is that many specialists are, these days, financed by special interest groups who want specific answers to be asserted as true whether or not they actually are. Even if this had no actual impact (it actually does but that is unimportant), it destroys the entire web of trust.
If there is no web of trust that you can feel safe in relying on, then you have no alternative but to use the method used by the uneducated, which is to opt in to the mob mentality.
This is because the human condition will not permit a void. Where there is a gap in awareness, the brain will fill it with something. Anything. The brain abhors a void far more than nature ever did.
If you can delegate awareness (be it to some system, some radio station, some religion, or some political belief), then the void is filled by that system. You don't have to know the answer as you have assigned the problem of knowing elsewhere.
In the case of the scientific method and peer review, this substitution actually works remarkably well - provided there is no failure within that system.
In the case of religion, etc, the substitution has some value in that it permits an uninformed society to function. We could never have developed civilization without such a substitution. It may not be the only reason for religion to have existed, but it is definitely a function religion served.
(Even in the early days of civilization, delegation to superstition was essential. The Hippocratic Oath was a splendid method of creating a codified standard of conduct and a method of enforcement in a society that neither understood standards nor recognized enforcement. Modern society also lacks these, but also lacks any backbone for the Hippocratic Oath, hence the abuse of medicine.)
Those who do not delegate anything and try to be totally self-reliant -- bad mistake. Those who don't end up addicts end up schizophrenic. It is a factor in why I reject utterly the popular American ideal of the self-reliant person. The people who actually achieve such an ideal do so by entering the nuthouse or the grave. Doesn't sound very ideal to me.
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)
Fascist doesn't mean ruling by corporations. The economic component to fascism is underdeveloped and relatively nonspecific - trying to reduce it to that gives you a notion of fascism that's almost empty. Fascism is more of an attempt to use nationalism and a myth of peoples to reject rationalism and use a spirit of the people to achieve greatness. It never said much about economic policy ; its only real commitment is to a strangely warped version of conservativism. Unlike the socialists who were trying to sweep across europe and throw off old oppressive social structures, fascists didn't really have a clear idea where they were going, they just had this idea of reclaiming the greatness of the roman empire.. somehow, and fighting off the socialist movements. It'd probably be best to consider fascism to be a state of mind - an ambition and delusion that desires to be shared by an entire injured society on its way "up".
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Are you just making up definitions or is that Beckian? Glenn Beck has been railing against progressives so I'll guess the latter.
The definition of progressive is really simple, it just isn't anything that you think: progressives believe that society can be improved for all through organized action, including government policy.
Liberals are people who value personal liberty, the rights and well being of the individual person.
Conservatives are people who place importance on laws, tradition and hard learned lessons.
The kind of person your describing might be properly called a Statist, or even Authoritarian.
So the Iraq war for instance, killed tens of thousands of innocent people, so it's not liberal, violated national and international law, had not prospect of completing it's objectives, and was a stupid move, so it's not conservative, and it's not progressive because it destroyed a whole chunk of society, but it's surely statist.
Gun control ain't liberal, it's not conservative, but it is statist and progressive (if it really improves society).
Social action to end segregation was liberal, wasn't conservative, was anti-statist, but was still progressive.
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