Joe Keohane writes in the Boston Globe about “How Facts Backfire”, looking at a fascinating study that sheds light on how we learn and absorb new information. Or not…
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.
As the article points out there are potentially important if not stark implications for democracy. At the same time the study does not appear to cover the practice of dialogue, which could be interesting to investigate as another source of learning about new facts. Does a conversation directly with someone with a different perspective change the way we react to new information compared to exposure to other data sources such as news articles or sound bites?
