How facts backfire
Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains
By
Joe Keohane
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.
© Copyright 2012 Globe Newspaper Company.
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