Cecilie1200
Diamond Member
What is striking is how liberals vs conservatives fared.(emphasis added)Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. Its this: Facts dont 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.
How facts backfire - The Boston Globe
In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigans Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there werent), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.
For the most part, it didnt. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic a factor known as salience the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didnt backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administrations restrictions werent total.
So basically, they devised a test in which they gave out conservative-oriented misinformation, and then they and you crowed about how "smart" leftists are for not believing something they're predisposed to disbelieve anyway. How utterly, completely NOT astounding or shocking.
Show me the study where the researchers gave both groups misinformation on how a cure for a disease using embryonic stem cells has been found, that the Obama stimulus actually benefited the economy, etc. and then we'll talk.