Motivated Reasoning

[carlfense]

Well, this is depressing.

What’s more, correcting peoples’ factual misunderstandings doesn’t seem to help at all. Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth and Jason Reifler of Georgia State ran experimentsmeasuring whether partisans who read news articles with correct information that ran against their ideological views were likelier to hold the right factual beliefs. They found the opposite effect — correcting people, in other words, doesn’t inform them, it creates a backlash.

Telling conservatives that there were no WMDs in Iraq made them more likely to say there were weapons, and telling them that the Bush tax cuts reduced revenue made them more likely to say they increased revenue. Same for liberals — while conservatives and moderates were less likely to think Bush banned all stem-cell research after reading an article pointing out that he only banned federal funding of it, liberals’ stated factual beliefs didn’t change at all. So ream after ream of news articles wouldn’t have done much to help any unfortunate souls who formed the belief that Romney killed bin Laden.

 

Psychologists call the phenomenon on display here “motivated reasoning,” and those of you (which is to say, hopefully all of you) who read my New Yorker piece on motivated reasoning and the conservative turn against the individual mandate will be familiar with the idea. But the Romney-killed-bin Laden finding also fits in with the broader literature on polling generally.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/10/do-15-of-ohio-republicans-think-romney-killed-bin-laden-probably-not/

[knapplc]

This is also a major factor in discussions about religion. People tend to become more entrenched in their opinion rather than becoming more open-minded from the discussion.

 

I posted something about this a while back and I can't find it now. It was from a study or an article or something.

[BigRedBuster]

And, this is why our media is so dangerous right now. So much of our media is entrenched with one party or the other.

 

It never fails. When I post something about our media, it doesn't matter if I post about Fox or MSNBC, the respective side always comes to their rescue. Meanwhile, both media outlets have perfected the art of what is in the OP and once they put something out to the airways, to a certain number of people on each side, they will always believe it.

 

The political conventions are another prime example. They don't give a flying rip if they are proven to have lied because that lie sewed up a certain amount of their base voters.

[carlfense]

edit.

Edited September 10, 2012 by carlfense

[strigori]

The quote that jumped to mind reading that is actually from Chris Rock in Dogma

 

" I think it's better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier..."