The straight scoop

As part of our ongoing inquiry into why people believe in irrational, counterfactual nonsense, last week we looked at a study that showed that if people read nasty comments in an online opinion piece, it caused them to hold onto their preexisting opinion more strongly.  Today, we'll consider a study that shows that not only does an obnoxious screed not change someone's mind, facts don't, either.

R. Kelly Garrett, an assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University, recently released the results of an investigation into how people react when they are told that something they'd just read was wrong.  He and his team gave test subjects a story about who has access to private health records, but the story had several false statements inserted into it -- for example, that hospital administrators, health insurers, and government officials had unrestricted access to your medical information.

The group was then split in three.  One-third was given, immediately after reading the article, a second article from FactCheck.org that showed that the inserted statements were wrong.  A second group was given the correction after spending three minutes doing an unrelated task.  The third group was not given the correction at all.

Unsurprisingly, the three-minute waiting period had little effect on whether or not the reader ended up believing the false information, and the people who did not receive correction showed the strongest residual belief in the incorrect statements.  What was interesting, though, was how the data shifted when you looked at the individuals who received correction, and split those into two groups -- ones who at the beginning of the study identified themselves as supportive of electronic health records, and ones that were against them.  The ones who thought that electronic health records were a good idea were very quick to accept correction, and to learn that the scary statements about unrestricted access were false; those who already believed that electronic medical recordkeeping was a bad idea did not budge, even when shown evidence that what they'd been told was false.  Instead, Garrett said, the test subjects doubted the source of the correction itself.

 "Real-time corrections do have some positive effect, but it is mostly with people who were predisposed to reject the false claim anyway," Garrett said.  "The problem with trying to correct false information is that some people want to believe it, and simply telling them it is false won’t convince them."

That doesn't mean we should give up, Garrett said.  "Correcting misperceptions is really a persuasion task.  You have to convince people that, while there are competing claims, one claim is clearly more accurate."  He also said that it provides a cautionary note about rumors in the political arena.  "We would anticipate that systems like Dispute Finder would do little to change the beliefs of the roughly one in six Americans who, despite exhaustive news coverage and fact checking, continue to question whether President Obama was born in the U.S."

He summed up his study as showing that "Humans aren’t vessels into which you can just pour accurate information."

While this is a purely natural result -- it's understandable that it would take a lot of convincing to change someone's mind on an issue (s)he felt strongly about -- it's a little disheartening.  It's no wonder, then, that the conspiracy-theorists seem so deaf to reason, that the anti-vaxers and anti-GMO crowd don't budge even in the face of scientific study after scientific study, and that the woo-woos respond to rational argument with the equivalent of "la-la-la-la-la, not listening."  It makes the job of the people at sites like FactCheck and Snopes that much harder.

Not to mention mine.  And it also explains a good bit of the hate mail I get.

The power of vicarious experience

I find it curious how certain most of us are of our beliefs.  We all like to think of ourselves as basing our views of the world in reality; that we (and others who agree with us) are clear-headed, logical, perceiving the universe as it is -- and that because of that, our views won't change.

In reality, our attitudes are constantly shifting.  That even the most stubbornly doctrinaire amongst us can be pulled around unconsciously was just dramatically demonstrated by a lovely little experiment performed at Ohio State University.  (Source)

In this study, test subjects were given a passage to read, about a fictional character who was enduring adversity.  In one passage, the main character had to fight for his opportunity to cast his vote in an election; in another, a person is presented in a favorable light, and then at the end of the story is revealed to be a different ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation from the reader.  In each case, reading the story had a strong, and measurable, effect on the reader.  In the first instance, the test subjects who read the story about a man who overcame obstacles to participate in an election had a "significantly higher" likelihood of voting in the next election themselves; in the second, assessments given after reading the story resulted in more favorable attitudes toward the group in question, and a lower likelihood of stereotyping, as compared to a control group.

The researchers called this phenomenon "experience-taking."  We read a story, and in some way, we become the character about whom we are reading; we adopt his/her persona.  As a result, it becomes more appealing to do what the character does, and more difficult to stigmatize the members of the group to which the character belongs.

"Experience-taking changes us by allowing us to merge our own lives with those of the characters we read about, which can lead to good outcomes," said Geoff Kaufman, who led the study while he was a graduate student at Ohio State.  He is now a postdoctoral researcher at Dartmouth College's Tiltfactor Laboratory. 

In each case, the effect was strongest when the story was told in first person, and when the main character was of a demographic most like that of the reader; for example, when the man who endured adversity to cast his vote was, like the test subject, a young male university student.  Third person stories, and ones where the demographic significantly differed from that of the reader, showed a lower -- but still measurable -- level of experience-taking.

"Experience-taking can be a powerful way to change our behavior and thoughts in meaningful and beneficial ways," said Lisa Libby, co-author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University.  "(It is) powerful because people don't even realize it is happening to them.  It's an unconscious process."

The findings of the study appear online in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and will be published in a future print edition.

What I find most interesting about all of this is how fluid our perception of the world is.  That memory is plastic, and highly unreliable, has been known for years; the rather alarming discovery that our senses are quite capable of overlooking the obvious followed suit soon after, with such classic experiments as the "Gorilla in the Room" video clip.  But all through this, many of us have clung like grim death to the idea that at least our convictions stay the same; we believe what we believe until we choose, deliberately, to change it.  Kaufman and Libby's experiment show that, in fact, our views of those around us are as mushy as the rest of our brain.

And all of this, of course, has significant bearing on the current kerfuffle over whether or not Mitt Romney bullied a kid in high school.  I'm not going to address the truth or falsity of the claim; predictably, the Democrats say he did it, the Republicans claim it's a slanderous falsehood.  Myself, I don't care.  The idea that a 65 year old man somehow has gone for fifty years with his attitudes about gays, bullying, and fair treatment unchanged is absurd.  We are all, all of the time, adjusting our beliefs based upon those around us, what we see, what we hear, and what we read.  Far from being a sign of flip-flopping -- that dirtiest of the f-words in the political arena -- shifting our stance based upon circumstances is inevitable, and universal.

To be up front: I'm no fan of Romney's politics, for the most part, and anyone who knows me will vouch for the fact that I'm very far from being an Ann Coulter-style apologist for conservatives.  But I much more care about what a political candidate says, does, and believes now than I do about an incident from five decades ago.  Those who focus on such things are implying a patent falsehood -- that humans don't, or can't, change.