How Facts Backfire - Reality Gets In The Way of Truth

Boston Globe
July 11, 2010

It's one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an
informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. "Whenever the people
are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government," Thomas
Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years,
underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential
debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber,
as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but
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.

In the end, truth will out. Won't it?

Maybe not. 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.

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making
decisions about how the country runs — aren't blank slates. They already
have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that
sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false.
And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very,
very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their
minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even
deeper.

"The general idea is that it's absolutely threatening to admit you're
wrong," says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the
Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as "backfire" — is "a natural
defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance."

These findings open a long-running argument about the political ignorance
of American citizens to broader questions about the interplay between the
nature of human intelligence and our democratic ideals. Most of us like to
believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational
consideration of facts and ideas, and that the decisions based on those
opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence. In
reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an
uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our
beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to
twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all,
they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it
reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we're
right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we
vote.

This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers —
alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless rumors,
misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words,
it's never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel
more certain that they're right.

"Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be," read
a recent Onion headline. Like the best satire, this nasty little gem
elicits a laugh, which is then promptly muffled by the queasy feeling of
recognition. 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."

On its own, this might not be a problem: 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. A striking recent
example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential
experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions
about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the
number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who
are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were
confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of
the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more
disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by
and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these
participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)

Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when
addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action,
gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion.
Kuklinski calls this sort of response the "I know I'm right" syndrome, and
considers it a "potentially formidable problem" in a democratic system. "It
implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual
beliefs," he wrote, "but also that the very people who most need to correct
them will be least likely to do so."

What's going on? How can we have things so wrong, and be so sure that we're
right? Part of the answer lies in the way our brains are wired. Generally,
people tend to seek consistency. There is a substantial body of
psychological research showing that people tend to interpret information
with an eye toward reinforcing their preexisting views. If we believe
something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth
any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information
that doesn't. This is known as "motivated reasoning." Whether or not the
consistent information is accurate, we might accept it as fact, as
confirmation of our beliefs. This makes us more confident in said beliefs,
and even less likely to entertain facts that contradict them.

New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month,
suggests that once those facts — or "facts" — are internalized, they are
very difficult to budge. 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), 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 didn't. 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 didn't backfire, but the readers did still ignore
the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration's restrictions weren't
total.

It's unclear what is driving the behavior — it could range from simple
defensiveness, to people working harder to defend their initial beliefs —
but as Nyhan dryly put it, "It's hard to be optimistic about the
effectiveness of fact-checking."

It would be reassuring to think that political scientists and psychologists
have come up with a way to counter this problem, but that would be getting
ahead of ourselves. The persistence of political misperceptions remains a
young field of inquiry. "It's very much up in the air," says Nyhan.

But researchers are working on it. One avenue may involve self-esteem.
Nyhan worked on one study in which he showed that people who were given a
self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than
people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you'll
listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won't. This would also
explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more
threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting
opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.

There are also some cases where directness works. Kuklinski's welfare study
suggested that people will actually update their beliefs if you hit them
"between the eyes" with bluntly presented, objective facts that contradict
their preconceived ideas. He asked one group of participants what
percentage of its budget they believed the federal government spent on
welfare, and what percentage they believed the government should spend.
Another group was given the same questions, but the second group was
immediately told the correct percentage the government spends on welfare (1
percent). They were then asked, with that in mind, what the government
should spend. Regardless of how wrong they had been before receiving the
information, the second group indeed adjusted their answer to reflect the
correct fact.

Kuklinski's study, however, involved people getting information directly
from researchers in a highly interactive way. When Nyhan attempted to
deliver the correction in a more real-world fashion, via a news article, it
backfired. Even if people do accept the new information, it might not stick
over the long term, or it may just have no effect on their opinions. In
2007 John Sides of George Washington University and Jack Citrin of the
University of California at Berkeley studied whether providing misled
people with correct information about the proportion of immigrants in the
US population would affect their views on immigration. It did not.

And if you harbor the notion — popular on both sides of the aisle — that
the solution is more education and a higher level of political
sophistication in voters overall, well, that's a start, but not the
solution. A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook
University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less
open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be
factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it
nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they're totally wrong.
Taber and Lodge found this alarming, because engaged, sophisticated
thinkers are "the very folks on whom democratic theory relies most
heavily."

In an ideal world, citizens would be able to maintain constant vigilance,
monitoring both the information they receive and the way their brains are
processing it. But keeping atop the news takes time and effort. And
relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can
be exhausting. Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts —
inference, intuition, and so forth — to avoid precisely that sort of
discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily
basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done.
Unfortunately, with them, we're easily suckered by political falsehoods.

Nyhan ultimately recommends a supply-side approach. Instead of focusing on
citizens and consumers of misinformation, he suggests looking at the
sources. If you increase the "reputational costs" of peddling bad info, he
suggests, you might discourage people from doing it so often. "So if you go
on 'Meet the Press' and you get hammered for saying something misleading,"
he says, "you'd think twice before you go and do it again."

Unfortunately, this shame-based solution may be as implausible as it is
sensible. Fast-talking political pundits have ascended to the realm of
highly lucrative popular entertainment, while professional fact-checking
operations languish in the dungeons of wonkery. Getting a politician or
pundit to argue straight-faced that George W. Bush ordered 9/11, or that
Barack Obama is the culmination of a five-decade plot by the government of
Kenya to destroy the United States — that's easy. Getting him to register
shame? That isn't.

Joe Keohane is a writer in New York.
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