Apparently, receiving facts that dispute an initial political prejudice doesn't make the prejudice go away. It actually reinforces it, according to a recent study: ---- Evidence based smear campaigns May 1st, 2010 by Ben Goldacre in bad science .... A new experiment published this month in the journal “Political Behaviour” sets out to examine the impact of corrections, and what they found was far more disturbing than they expected: far from changing peoples’ minds, if you are deeply entrenched in your views, a correction will only reinforce them. The first experiment used articles claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction immediately before the US invasion. 130 participants were asked to read a mock news article, attributed to Associated Press, reporting on a Bush campaign stop in Pennsylvania during October 2004. The article describes Bush’s appearance as “a rousing, no-retreat defense of the Iraq war” and quotes a line from a genuine Bush speech from that year, suggesting that Saddam Hussein really did have WMD, which he could have passed to terrorists, and so on. “There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks, and in the world after September the 11th,” said Bush: “ that was a risk we could not afford to take.” The 130 participants were then randomly assigned to one of two conditions. For half of them, the article stopped there. For the other half, the article continues, and includes a correction: it discusses the release of the Duelfer Report, which documented the lack of Iraqi WMD stockpiles or an active production program immediately prior to the US invasion. After reading the article, subjects were asked to state whether they agreed with the following statement: “Immediately before the U.S. invasion, Iraq had an active weapons of mass destruction program, the ability to produce these weapons, and large stockpiles of WMD, but Saddam Hussein was able to hide or destroy these weapons right before U.S. forces arrived.” Their responses were measured on a five-point scale ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”. Continue reading at the above link. Summary of results: Conservatives were more likely to agree with the statement than liberals. (No surprises.) More knowledgable people were less likely to agree (no surprise). Liberals who received the correction information were less likely to agree with the statement than liberals who did not receive it (no surprise). The correction had no effect on centrists either way. Conservatives who received the correction were more likely to believe that Iraq had WMDs than conservatives who weren't given the correction. In other words, in this example, being corrected actually worked to reinforce false beliefs. And... All the studies found exactly the same thing: if the original dodgy fact fits with your prejudices, a correction only reinforces these even more. If your goal is to move opinion, then this depressing finding suggests that smears work, and what’s more, corrections don’t challenge them much: because for people who already agree with you, it only make them agree even more.
Surely most of the people involved in this experiment (whether deemed 'knowledgeable' or not by whoever is making these distinctions) would already have an opinion on the Iraq war. It's a controversial topic and one that has been discussed in the media for years now, which is why it seems strange to me that they wouldn't have presented the participants with an unfamiliar news story. The experiment's conclusions are also very convenient to the people who conducted it. For example, Conservatives are willfully stubborn and pig-headed, whilst Liberals are more accepting of new, correct, evidence?
Liberals want everything done for everyone without having a way to pay for what they want. If push comes to shove they always add more taxes somewhere to try and get something to pay for some of what they want. Conservatives also want to get certain things like the military to have the latest and greatest equipment that money can buy as well as lowering the tax burden on businesses so they too are doing the same thing the liberals are doing only for their agendas. All of the time while this is happening the taxpayers are caught in the middle getting screwed from both directions at the same time and no one pays for anything except by borrowing more money from wherever it can. Talk about a dooms day scenario that is fast approaching, well this is it.
Well, I assume you're not susceptible to this kind of thing, SAM. Neither am I. Of course. Because we're not American. Yes, that must be it. The example given was one where the people who were "resistant" to correction happened to be conservatives, but the study was not about liberals being "better" than conservatives. From what I can gather, liberals were equally susceptible to the same effect when presented with facts that contradicted their prior biases.
