The Boston Globe has a frightening article which examines the distressing tendency of misinformed people to resist correcting their misperceptions when given facts that show their beliefs to be false.
It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. . .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.
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.
The last five decades of political science have definitively established that most modern-day Americans lack even a basic understanding of how their country works. In 1996, Princeton University’s Larry M. Bartels argued, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented data in political science.”
People ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote. But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions.
In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s 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 weren’t), and that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell). 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 didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction.
Please go to the Globe link above and read this article. It's a warning siren for our dying Democracy.
Update: Roaster Maynardo (1930's era Brazilian soccer star) refers to this phenomenon as
"the 'Palinisation' of America: the celebration of little, if any, knowledge." Read his entire transcendent comment below.
1 comment:
It was supposed to be "The Truth Shall Set You Free." But apparently that was before (thanks Al Gore) the truth became inconvenient. Indeed, while virtually every brilliant scientific mind in the world lends credence to global warming, so many write it off as some kind of "liberal plot." To think otherwise would be inconvenient. (As if liberals somehow, some way, stand to "gain" if the earth burns up!!!)
Likewise, it would be "inconvenient" to think there were no WMD's because, shit, we already committed/condemned so many of our troops. And what could be more "inconvenient" than having to interrupt one's nightly six-pack and John Wayne flick and "Jersey Housewives in Miami" reality show with thoughts that our president sent us to war for no apparent good reason? That would entail a whole rearrangement of one's thought process - and what could be more "inconvenient" than actually being forced to fucking THINK??
Which leads us, so tragically and frightenly, to the "Palinisation" of America: "the celebration of little, if any, knowledge." The former governor of that state that is constantly under threat of a Russian takeover, can't be bothered by cluttering up her brain(?) with actual facts and information because it would make her glasses fog up and her rifle to misfire. If a reporter asks her a, let's say, policy question and she has no clue, it's, of course, the fault of the elite mainstream media for bringing it up in the first place. Facts are irrelevant: being "one of us" is all that matters. They voted for Bush because "he's the kinda' guy I'd invite to my bar-b-que and have a beer with." And who could be more "one of us" than Saint Sarah, who's grasp of virtually anything that requires actual knowledge is so-o-o non-existent that she actually makes Bush appear to be well read!! What Sarah The Shit DOES do without peer is "MAKE UP SHIT!!!" "Death panels," indeed. To make that up as part of the health care debate shows all you need to know about her moral compass, a compass that is so malfunctioning she couldn't find her way to the freezer from the refrigerator. She, alone, doesn't matter...but that millions virtually worship the likes of her REALLY matters. The dumbing of America is so real and intense that it truly is numbing. What's so scary is that America "likes" being dumb. "Facts" are relevant only if they make us happy, fatter and richer. Otherwise, facts are merely the "tools" of the Evil Elite. How has the word "elite" become so twisted???
So, no, it's not at all surprising that people shun the facts. "Facts" are just so annoying. I mean, next you know some elitist fact-monger is gonna' try and tell us that those hamburgers grilling in the back yard right now aren't very good for us!!!????!!! How fucking annoying is that..........
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