X-Message-Number: 32716
Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2010 04:53:18 -0700 (PDT)
From: rr ss <>
Subject: =?utf-8?B?IEZhY3RzIGRvbuKAmXQgbmVjZXNzYXJpbHkgaGF2ZSB0aGUgcG9...



http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/?page=full

How facts backfire
Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains



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.

....


etc

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