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How Facts Backfire
• boston.comIt’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an
informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the
people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own
government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down
through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets
to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may
be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance
and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the
best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be
clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will
enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.
In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?
Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. 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.
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4 Comments in Response to How Facts Backfire
With all due respect for the wisdom of Sharon, I believe it is why liberals tend to believe they can continue to commit future generations to spend money for programs that fiscally unrealistic in order to buy votes at the expense of our grandchildren (touted to be humanitarian)---in order to build overpaid corpulent bureaucracies with lavish benefits.
My dad once told me, in reference to scientists: "Son, often times scientific progress happens one funeral at a time"! I believed him then and I believe him now.
This is not surprising at all given the ebook I read about the authoritarian personality, whose link I found on this site months ago.
Here's the link for conenience - http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
It's fascinating.
This explains why conservatives prefer to remain incredibly stupid and vote against their own interests.