Some memes just don’t die. Okay, memes about McCain and Palin stay alive because they repeat them even after they’ve been debunked. But what about Obama being a Muslim? What about that creationist on your blog who gets slapped down every week, but who keeps coming back with the same arguments?

There’s an interesting study out of Duke University (PDF here) about how some people resist correcting bad information.

They gave some conservatives and some liberals bad information about politics, and saw how it changed their opinions. When they then gave correct information, liberals adjusted their opinions back, but never quite all the way back to their former level.

When conservatives got the facts, however, they didn’t adjust their views at all. In fact, they actually believed the wrong information more.

Details:

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.

In a paper approaching publication, Nyhan, a PhD student at Duke University, and Reifler, at Georgia State University, suggest that Republicans might be especially prone to the backfire effect because conservatives may have more rigid views than liberals: Upon hearing a refutation, conservatives might “argue back” against the refutation in their minds, thereby strengthening their belief in the misinformation. Nyhan and Reifler did not see the same “backfire effect” when liberals were given misinformation and a refutation about the Bush administration’s stance on stem cell research.

False ideas spread quickly when people like them, and they’re incredibly difficult to quash.

Since conservatism is currently the view of choice for the most extreme reality-denying Christianists, I think it’s fair to say that religious (non-)thinking bears more than a smidgeon of the blame for this. Religious thinkers (with whom I have had many discussions) don’t change their minds easily. They think it’s good to live in a fantasy world, and anything that would dissuade them from it is actually a trick from the Crafty One. Add in all the good ol’ folks who don’t trust those fancy-pants ‘experts’ who ‘know things’ and present you with ‘facts’, and you’ve got a sizable group of conservatives.

I find this result unsurprising, but incredibly depressing. How can we have government and consensus in a country where half the people in it won’t accept accurate information, and insist on remaining delusional? And I’m not too sure about you guys in the other half, either.

Thank goodness our Democratic candidates are aware of science and reason, and aren’t trying to pander to the… the… um…


Never mind.