What Data Would It Take to Change Your Mind?

A recent article in the Boston Globe starts:

‘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

The rest of the article is at:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/

and the original research paper by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler  is in PDF at:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf

And this is Thomas Jefferson, no doubt turning in his grave at this research:

This is one of the reasons that the Conflict Model of this blog suggests a starting over in conflict to try to find out/re-research the basic facts of the situation with a fresh perspective, and the surfacing of our assumptions and paradigms and that of the other side to ‘get real’. Not an easy task, but a necessary one if you want a higher level solution to the conflict that stands a chance of meeting both sides interests. And of course I like my reverse Bayesian question: ‘what data would it take to change your mind?‘ Don’t initially ask whether such data exists; it is really a test of your positional fundamentalism: if not data will change your mind. If you can imagine some data that would change your mind, you can go and look for it and at least you are now self-aware of some mental flexibility on the issue that could be very useful.

Whether in the Middle East or in our personal lives, delusions about the reality we face send us off course. The risk is of course greatest where we have strong existing belief systems: political, religious or even scientific, that act as lenses through which we view the world, so that as the Torah says: ‘we don’t see the world as it is, but as we are‘.

I was sent this article as part of an interesting debate about climate change in a UK newspaper, where I managed to get some of the two sides beginning to think about the meta question of how to debate civilly and what constituted a good methodological approach to the topic, rather than shouting ya boo at each other. Of course, this was only possible 134 posts in when attention deficit had winnowed the field and the ranters were hoarse. 🙂 And no sooner had I written this sentence, than the ya booery returned to the thread.