i think this is kinda interesting:
Quote:
The Backfire Effect
— By Kevin Drum | Mon September 15, 2008 12:22 PM PST
THE BACKFIRE EFFECT....What happens when you tell people that someone has made a false claim? Shankar Vedantam reports:
Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.
A similar "backfire effect" also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.
Italics mine. Nyhan and Reifler found this "backfire" effect only among conservatives. Refutations had little effect on liberals, but it didn't cause them to actively believe the misleading information even more strongly.
Why? Reifler suggests it's because conservatives are more rigid than liberals. Maybe so. If I had to guess, though, I'd say it's because right-wing talkers have spent so many years deriding "so-called experts" that they now have negative credibility with many conservatives. The very fact that an expert says a conservative claim is wrong is taken as a good reason to believe the claim. This could probably be tested by doing a study of factual information outside the realm of politics and seeing if conservatives react the same way. If they do, maybe that's support for the generic rigidity theory. If not, it's support for the theory that conservatives simply distrust political elites.
For more, here is Reifler's online Q&A at the Washington Post this morning.
UPDATE: I should add that these weren't the only two questions Nyhan and Reifler asked. They also asked a question about stem cell research in which it was liberals who might be expected to resist the truth. They didn't find any backfire effect there either, though.
UPDATE: The full paper is here. Via email, Nyhan tells me that they tried to test my proposition that conservatives don't trust elite experts by varying the source of the refutations. Sometimes it was the New York Times, other times it was Fox News. "Surprisingly," he says, "it had little effect."
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The Backfire Effect | Mother Jones
you can get to the paper this is a summary of & other stuff cited by chasing the link above.
i think the findings here are interesting, but i am not sure about the psychological interpretation that drum basically dismisses either. nor do i think his own interpretation goes quite far enough...
i think this is an ideological effect which has the curious effect of making conservative political statements seem non-falsifiable amongst conservatives--at least amongst the group that participated in the study. i think it linked to collective dispositions which are shaped by the way conservative ideology operated---"experts" were assimilated into a cluster of signifiers of persecuting Others, which of course stage conservatives--at least populist conservatives--as Victims. it enables a reprocessing of dissonant information as an aspect of this Persecution, which seems quite central to the construction of conservative identity at the level of how the ideology works in general.
contemporary conservatism used a form of identity politics---the device was what a french theorist called interpellation--which refers to the way a sequence of images or statements positions you as a spectator/part of the audience/part of the political demographic. the idea runs that if you find a sequence of statements or images compelling, you typically do so not only on the basis of the content, but also on the basis of how you are placed in relation to others & to the world by them. so it refers to the ways in which statements are (or are not) processed by folk and positions it as a social phenomenon rather than as a psychological one (in the end, it's a mix of both in the way most social phenomena are---if people didn't invest in them psychologically, they wouldn't be particularly social phenomena...but anyway)
i think we got to see alot of examples of this effect about in the world during the bush period, and you still see some of it around. it's continuous, happens all the time.
but what do you make of this piece?
if you have time to look at the paper, what do you make of that?
if you accept the argument/analysis, what do you see as it's consequences?