Evidence is no match against the belief in false rumors concerning the proposed Islamic cultural center and mosque near Ground Zero in New York City, a new study finds.
Researchers at Ohio State University found that fewer than one-third of people who had previously heard and believed one of the many rumors about the proposed center changed their minds after reading overwhelming evidence rejecting the rumor.
The false rumor that researchers used in the study was that Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Imam backing the proposed Islamic cultural center and mosque, is a terrorist sympathizer who has refused to condemn Islamic attacks on civilians.
There is no evidence that this statement is true, according to FactCheck.org, a fact-checking service run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and Politifact, the Pulitzer-Prize winning service of the St. Petersburg Times. ...
While providing a definitive rebuttal helped dispel belief in this rumor under two conditions, researchers found that it was easy to neutralize the positive effects of the rebuttal, simply through the use of certain photos or the addition of unrelated text.
“We didn’t have much success in shaking people’s beliefs in false rumors,” said R. Kelly Garrett, co-author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State.
Garrett conducted the study with Erik Nisbet, also an assistant professor of communication at Ohio State.
The researchers used Survey Sampling International to recruit 750 Americans and have them participate in the online survey....
Overall, only 35 percent of the participants who previously encountered and believed the rumor held more accurate beliefs after reading a rebuttal, and even fewer – about 28 percent – were moved to reject the rumor. ....
Recent studies by other researchers have suggested that when people are presented with facts that go against their beliefs, they may actually become even more confident in their false beliefs. ....
via Learning The Truth Not Effective In Battling Rumors About NYC Mosque, Study Finds.
Pride is an extreme stupidity drug:
... 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.
This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They 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.
“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study.
...
via Boston
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