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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."
It's nothing but lies designed to obscure the fact that Barak Hussein Obama is a Muslim terrorist who wants to entrance our children with commie healthcare. The sooner he goes back to his hometown in Kenya the better.
And my facts are just fine. Bill O'Reilly told me so.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
... when exposed to corrected facts in news stories.
Perhaps because we have learned to distrust the news providers?
Including this
Well people (and by people I mean you and me as well) believe a whole lot of things just because that's the way we were brought up. We have never really dug into our beliefs thoroughly.
When it comes to politics it really is some sort of emotional connection, not fact based, facts can't change our minds when this is the case. Politicians like to play on our innate sense of belonging, our fears, not however our minds.
Hah, you sir are truly delusional. *Every* political party has its share of disinformation and lies. To single out a specific party as being the culprit of misinformation only serves to show just how ignorant and naive you are.
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.
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?
After all, we know that the truth has a liberal bias.
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*Every* political party has its share of disinformation and lies.
I'll go one further and say that *every* political party actively engages in pastisanship, fearmongering, and disinformation - with the explicit intent of making the electorate less rational and less able to make clear choices. The study in TFA (correctly) paints this phenomenon as a bad thing, but for political hucksters it's not a bad thing; it's a good thing - a great thing - when you can turn people into mindless partisan zombies just by throwing a few lies around.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
For most people, Politics, like Sports and Religion is all about having an emotional attachment to something - they're for/with/believe a group/ideology because they feel like "one of the group" and one cannot be against oneself.
A high level of intelectual abilities (i.e. IQ) is no defense against it: just look at all the religious-like flamewars around things like editors and operating systems.
In order to do trully informed judgements one must first be aware of one's inner-self, one's drives and fears and be capable of analysing one's motives. One must be capable of separating the "logic" from the "feelings" and the "habits" in the way things are perceived, interpreted and reasoned about.
Unfortunatly this requires a level of inner maturity that seems to be far above that of most people ...
I just read this a while back. There are larger ramifications than political sniping, and beyond politics altogether.
It's a perfect illustration of why this phenomenon matters to all of us.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
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.
The saddest part of this story for us, nerds, is that our strongest weapon - our knowledge, superior understanding of facts, digging deeper into matters than cheap news stories, is in fact totally inefficient against "joe average". The more you argue your case the worse your chance to -really- win the argument, convince the other side. More often they will admit defeat to get you off their neck and keep believing their falsehood even stronger.
That is why John Hodgeman's punch line "Glen Beck makes a lot of sense if you think about it. If you don't think about it, he makes even more sense" makes me quite sad.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This is one of the reasons that I dislike discussing/arguing issues in person. They will bring up some information I hadn't heard before, but I have no idea whether it is reliable or not. I try not to be set in my beliefs, but 90% of the "facts" that people spout usually had some foundation in truth originally but have become so misinterpreted by the time they heard it that it is almost complete crap. I like to look into things before I accept them, but that isn't an option in person. If you can't immediately refute any random thing they bring up and won't just accept what they say as gospel truth then you are pegged as a ignorant stubborn idiot. Furthermore, when I am pressed like that I do feel a strong desire to dig in and defend myself, when otherwise I would just take in the information and have one more thing to mull over while I continue to read about the issue.
Why is this flamebait? Religions provide no objective evidence that they are true, yet require belief. When the facts contradict the dogma, they claim that the facts are just there to test your faith and that a true believer will see through them to the real underlying truth. Sounds like exactly the mindset that TFA is describing.
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oblig xkcd http://www.xkcd.com/765/
rewriting history since 2109
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.
There is a difference between diversity and ignorance. Diversity would be people's views on abortion or whether there should be prayer in schools.
Ignorance is claiming Obama isn't an American because he's never shows his birth certificate even though Hawaii has repeatedly indicated they do not give out copies of such. They only give Certificates of Live Birth, similar to what other states do.
Yet, we have people like Senator Vitter (R, LA) continuing to trot the misinformation about Obama's citizenship despite evidence to the contrary.
P.S. Once again Slashdot has me typing this in a 2"x3" box.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The experience of the last century shows that fanatics can remain hermetically sealed from the truth until the fabric of their society collapses around them, and there is literally rubble in the streets.
I think that education is the only hope to fix this, but that means that this will be a problem for the rest of our lives, if not a lot longer.
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.
You, sir, are very delusional if you don't think the Republicans far outpace the Democrats when it comes to outright lying to their constituents. How many Fox News viewers think Saddam was responsible for 9/11? No, both parties manipulate the truth to their benefit but one party takes it to a whole new and exciting level.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Why should I care about it?
Because sometimes people act on their beliefs, and even if your philosophy is "live and let live", that won't stop *them* from going out of their way to affect you
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
The Republican party depends on a group of deeply delusional voters known as Evangelicals. That's why, in the 21st Century, there are elected officials pretending to be concerned about gay couples, pretending that evolution is a lie that shouldn't be taught as fact, and pretending that a woman's body is the property of the Federal Government.
And if you don't believe me, just look at how pathetic McCain was when he had to prostrate himself in front of these idiots: http://thinkprogress.org/mccain-flip-flops/
The Democratic party has it's fair share of hypocrites, but only one party demands delusion as part of their party platform. They are still demanding God be put back in Government, and pretending the founding fathers wanted the same thing. Their next sentence could be about the dangers of muslim theocracies, but their delusion is thought-proof. They know God chose America to fight Evil, just like their old hero President said himself: he answers to a higher father, even if the father he has in reality fought the same war against the same army only a decade earlier.
The thing that irritates me the most about the GOP is their attitude toward their OWN people. God forbid you don't do EXACTLY what everyone else does. People mock the dems for not being completely unified, but I think that's a good thing. I think the damn legislators ought to be out there using what brains they have, representing THEIR people.
The state where I live, it's absolutely the worst. The gop at the state level is extremely intolerant of other voices within the party, so if you have an opinion that differs from the majority, you hide it, or the state party will actively campaign against you in the primaries.
My local US rep is a dem...probably the most conservative dem in the entire house...and the republicans have run multi-million dollar campaigns against him for the last 3 election cycles. They can't even effectively campaign against him because he's a morally conservative, anti-tax hawk, so they have to field these whackjob wingnuts...It's ugly. They get crushed every election. And they're gearing up to fight him again, because he has a D after his name, and it drives them fucking MAD.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
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
You mean to tell me they can't make an exception for the president? It would really put all of the questioning to rest if he showed it. It just seems strange to me that he won't.
TFA is all about the fact that, no, it wouldn't. Conspiracy theorists always believe that there's a deeper layer. They demanded to see Obama's birth certificate. So they released the certificate offered by the state of Hawaii. In the minds of the birthers, this only PROVED that he wasn't born in America, because that's not the real birth certificate. He's obviously hiding the truth! He's lying!
That's exactly what the article is pointing out - people who strongly believe something are likely to see evidence against them as a part of the conspiracy, that people are lying to trick them out of their beliefs. Show the birthers the "real" certificate, and they'll probably believe it was a forgery.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Two points here. First, that's a pretty broad brush you paint "religion" with there. It may be an accurate description of typical midwestern Protestant religion (who probably you encounter most often pushing the latest in Creationism) but many modern religions have a more sophisticated view on integrating with Reality than that. Even among Christianity, the Catholics are generally quite willing to consider evolution and the Big Bang - heck, Lemaitre was a Catholic priest! I won't even go into the eastern religions. A more nuanced perspective is in order.
Second, I think that the reason a lot of people react like that is, to take an example, the Guy With The Truth is typically perceived to be not just a guy trying to inform for the sake of Truth, but a guy who's got some ideological agenda to push including a whole suite of objectionable ideas, not just the one, so it's easy to dismiss his statements wholesale. He's probably not just interested in saying "the universe began this way and here's why; interesting, eh?" but he oh so often goes on to make snide remarks about religion and politics and possibly underlying cultural value systems. Just read typical Slashdot comments here and you'll find plenty of examples. Wrap the truth in a turd often enough, and people will think it's smelly.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
"How many Fox News viewers think Saddam was responsible for 9/11? No, both parties manipulate the truth to their benefit but one party takes it to a whole new and exciting level."
Not many. How many people think that global warming is man-made, even though there is evidence to prove otherwise? How many people believe that bush started the war to make himself rich?
As you can see here about 1/3 of the american population believe that saddam was directly responsible for 9/11. I'd say that is pretty significant (and you can bet that the majority of this 1/3 is watching fox)
I joined the Republican Party because I thought there were too many people spreading their "RINO" nonsense. I'm a moderate, but up to this year I was always independent. I want to bring moderation back to the party, as I believe the party was at one time more moderate and aligned to the middle. I also think that Christian right wingers (and i'm a Christian myself) are hijacking the party and turning it into a Jesus-fest. Again, I'm a believer. But that doesn't mean I want a "Holy Priest of the US" for President. The US was founded to escape religious oppression and I follow those tenants to a fault, regardless of my faith.
Barry Goldwater would be rolling in his grave if he knew of how the modern Republican party has been twisted.
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...
It makes for a really neat Catch-22. Because the press is 'free', it is also for sale. There's no way to prevent the corporate/wealthy interests from gaining control over the media without allowing the government to control it instead.
So, pick your evil -
A) Government-run media
B) Greed-run media
There isn't any 'C'. At least not within the reasonable confines of established western civilization.
Humans are neat!
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
Two points here. First, that's a pretty broad brush you paint "religion" with there. It may be an accurate description of typical midwestern Protestant religion (who probably you encounter most often pushing the latest in Creationism) but many modern religions have a more sophisticated view on integrating with Reality than that. Even among Christianity, the Catholics are generally quite willing to consider evolution and the Big Bang - heck, Lemaitre was a Catholic priest! I won't even go into the eastern religions.
A more nuanced perspective is in order.
Second, I think that the reason a lot of people react like that is, to take an example, the Guy With The Truth is typically perceived to be not just a guy trying to inform for the sake of Truth, but a guy who's got some ideological agenda to push including a whole suite of objectionable ideas, not just the one, so it's easy to dismiss his statements wholesale. He's probably not just interested in saying "the universe began this way and here's why; interesting, eh?" but he oh so often goes on to make snide remarks about religion and politics and possibly underlying cultural value systems. Just read typical Slashdot comments here and you'll find plenty of examples. Wrap the truth in a turd often enough, and people will think it's smelly.
Sorry, but the vast majority of religious people base their belief system on an unbelievably over-rated principle called 'faith'. Faith is wishful thinking, wrapped in circular reasoning, inside ignorance, and it is the cornerstone of religion which is inherently hostile to the facts. Catholicism may be a bit more flexible than most and is willing to beat a retreat rather than argue the facts, but the remainder of its belief system still relies on faith. The Catholic 'mysteries' are a prime example, little logical fallacies that are blatant contradictions but the flock are still required to accept them because "it's their faith."
Drill baby drill - on Mars
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.