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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."
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."
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...