{transcript of a radio broadcast}
Brendan Nyhan is a health policy researcher at the University of Michigan. He recently published "When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions." That was in the June issue of the Journal of Political Behavior, and he joins us now from the studios of WUOM, Michigan Radio, our member station in Ann Arbor. Nice to have you with us today.
Mr. BRENDAN NYHAN (Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research, University of Michigan): Thanks for having me.
CONAN: And when facts are readily available, why are they not enough to change people's minds?
Mr. NYHAN: Well, the problem is, you know, as human beings, we want to believe, you know, the things that we already believe. And so when you hear some information that contradicts your pre-existing views, unfortunately, what we tend to do is think of why we believed those things in the first place.
And, you know, so when, you know, we get these corrections, we tend to say I'm right, and I'm going to stick with my view. And the thing that my research, which is with Jason Reifler at Georgia State University, found is that in some cases, that corrective information can actually make the problem worse.
So some people who read Dana's article about immigration may actually have come away from it more strongly committed to the belief that crime has gone up along the border.
CONAN: And indeed are probably demanding his birth certificate.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. NYHAN: That's right.
CONAN: This is a phenomenon described as backfire. You say it's a natural defense mechanism to avoid cognitive dissonance.
Mr. NYHAN: That's right. You know, it's hard, it's threatening to us to admit that things we believe are wrong. And all of us, liberals and conservatives, you know, have some beliefs that aren't true, and when we find that out, you know, it's threatening to our beliefs and ourselves.
And so what we think happens is that the way people, you know, try to resolve this in some cases is to, you know, buttress that belief that they initially held, and, you know, there's a long line of research showing results like this.
CONAN: And again, we'd like to think of our brain as something that's been trained in, you know, Cartesian logic, when in fact, our brain is sort of hard-wired to leap to conclusions very quickly.
Mr. NYHAN: That's right. And what's interesting is in some of these cases, it's the people who are most sophisticated who are best able to defend their beliefs and keep coming up with more elaborate reasons why 9/11 was really a conspiracy or how the weapons of mass destruction were actually smuggled to Syria or whatever the case may be.
So this isn't a question of education, necessarily, or sophistication. It's really about, it's really about preserving that belief that we initially held.
CONAN: And you define sophistication, as I read your piece, you define it as somebody who is right a lot of the time, but the 10 percent of the time they're wrong, boy, they stick to being wrong.
Mr. NYHAN: That's right. That's right. And, you know, I should note that this isn't just a matter of how you interpret information. It's the information you seek out in the first place.
So some of the people in the case of Dana's article who, you know, are committed to the belief that, you know, immigration has increased crime, may avoid information that contradicts that belief in the first place. So it's not just a matter of how they react to reading the article, it's that they may not even see it in the first place.
CONAN: And Dana, that's even perhaps more relevant in a world where we don't have to read any general-issue newspaper if we don't want to. We can find places where we can go to find people who agree with us.
Mr. MILBANK: I think that's exactly what's happening, and that's what's reinforcing this sort of a psychological predisposition that Brendan's talking about, and that is if you only get your information from, say, Fox News, or you only get your information from the Huffington Post, well, what they're telling you may be accurate, but they may leave out things that might sort of weigh in on the other side of the issue.
So then if you do stumble across something that undermines everything that you've been hearing, well, you get confused, you get angry, and, you know, a lot of the letter-writers in response to this particular story were saying I have my facts wrong. Of course, they didn't furnish facts in contradiction of that, although one did say I was full of whale poop, and I wasn't even sure whales made poop, but I didn't want to get into a factual...
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128490874
and
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/
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