Politics, Misinformation, and Psychology

The Boston Globe published an article explaining how research subjects with strong political affiliations responded to information. Misinformation was first presented to subjects. Once correct information was provided, if contradictory to the subjects beliefs, the subjects actually strengthened their political stance, using the misinformation instead of mentally correcting it. The Globe article explains:

"This bodes ill for a democracy...[Voters] 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." -- Joe Keohane, How Facts Backfire, The Boston Globe, 7/11/2010

Although the research alone is pretty scary, it gets worse. The study was conducted at the University of Michigan between 2005 and 2006. For every Psychology class that I took as an undergrad, as well as a few Political Science classes too, to get enough credits to pass each class we had to participate in three studies conducted by professors and grad students. I probably participated in 10-20 different studies over the course of my time as a Wolverine. In one study I scarily recall answering questions about Bush and the Iraq War, questions the Michigan researchers used in their 2005-2006 experiment. So not only does this study suggest that people are inherently ignorant politically, but this also suggests that I, someone who considers himself to have formulated my own strong beliefs based on facts, might just be as ignorant as everyone else. GO BLUE!

Politics, Misinformation, and Psychology