facts are stupid things
2010-07-13 17:00:25.456447+02 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
A bunch of people have been linking to Boston.com: How facts backfire. I don't have time to run the papers it purports to draw from to ground, though it talks about a 2005-2006 study led by Brendan Nyhan at the University of Michigan. It talks about how we process facts and corrections, and it seems consistent with stuff we've talked about here on Flutterby before, but it warrants re-visiting:
.... 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.