Here Are 5 Infuriating Examples of Facts Making People Dumber

[n2doc]

—By Chris Mooney

On Monday, I reported on the latest study to take a bite out of the idea of human rationality. In a paper just published in Pediatrics, Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth and his colleagues showed that presenting people with information confirming the safety of vaccines triggered a "backfire effect," in which people who already distrusted vaccines actually became less likely to say they would vaccinate their kids.

Unfortunately, this is hardly the only example of such a frustrating response being documented by researchers. Nyhan and his co-author Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter have captured several others, as have other researchers. Here are some examples:

1. Tax Cuts Increase Revenue? In a 2010 study, Nyhan and Reifler asked people to read a fake newspaper article containing a real quotation of George W. Bush, in which the former president asserted that his tax cuts "helped increase revenues to the Treasury." In some versions of the article, this false claim was then debunked by economic evidence: A correction appended to the end of the article stated that in fact, the Bush tax cuts "were followed by an unprecedented three-year decline in nominal tax revenues, from $2 trillion in 2000 to $1.8 trillion in 2003." The study found that conservatives who read the correction were twice as likely to believe Bush's claim was true as were conservatives who did not read the correction.

http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/03/brendan-nyhan-backfire-effects-facts

[get the red out]

1. theory of "motivated reasoning"

WOW, this puts a new perspective on a lot of inconsistencies I've noticed in people on any number of topics.

[Scuba]

2. This is why, when debating wingers, ridicule and sarcasm are often better tools than facts.

[Xyzse]

3. They had a similar story about this in NPR. The focus is on vaccination but, it still applies

http://www.npr.org/2014/03/04/285580969/when-it-comes-to-vaccines-science-can-run-into-a-brick-wall

Excerpts:

BRENDAN NYHAN: It's much harder to change people's minds than we might have thought. Giving people corrected information is often ineffective with the people whose minds we'd like to change, and in some cases it actually can make the problem worse.

VEDANTAM: Well, I think, David, what Nyhan seems to be finding is that when you're confronted by information that you don't like, at a certain level you accept that the information might be true, but it damages your sense of self-esteem. It damages something about your identity. And so what you do is you fight back against the new information. You try and martial other kinds of information that would counter the new information coming in. In the political realm, Nyhan is exploring the possibility that if you boost people's self-esteem before you give them this disconfirming information, it might help them take in the new information because they don't feel as threatened as they might have been otherwise.

All I can say is that, people would create quite a bit of fallacies just to support a point of view that does not hold up.
Also, by acting combative about it, sometimes it is counter productive in spreading a message.