A friend of mine pointed me to this article at the Huffington Post.
Briefly, it quotes from a Washington Post article that refers to a study demonstrating that conservatives, if you present them with hard evidence against the Iraq war, they’ll just dig in their heels and become more opinionated.
Yeah, but there’s very little actually new here. We’ve long known that people in general tend to believe what they want to, regardless of what the facts say, and that presenting them with contrary facts only tends to make them believe the lies more. That’s why political and commercial persuasion (including TV advertising) spends so much money and energy on subconsciously influencing what people WANT to believe (not on convincing them that they were wrong).
In fact, there will be only two candidates in the presidential debates for exactly this reason; because two candidates allows those two to APPEAR more different than they actually are, whereas if there were a third candidate on the stage, he would distinguish himself from them more than they did from each other, and they would actually have to say something meaningful in order to be heard by comparison, and they don’t want to have to do that, so both the Republicans and Democrats have a vested interest in keeping any third candidate out of the debates. It’s all about appearance.
The study also suggests that liberals are not as opinionated as conservatives. For example, the researchers “did not see the same ’backfire effect’ when liberals were given misinformation and a refutation about the Bush administration’s stance on stem cell research.”
I haven’t seen the study of course, but I doubt that liberals are much different, fundamentally, than conservatives, or that Democrats are much different than Republicans. Rather, I suspect that the reactions observed are a product of the specific issues chosen in the study, rather than any real difference between locations on the political map, because people are people are people. If you want to see a stubborn, prejudiced liberal, for example, try to explain the Broken Window Fallacy to him, or quote him almost anything Charles Murray has ever said or written—Remember “The Bell Curve”? More than a decade later, most liberals STILL don’t know what that book was about.—or hand him a copy of “More Guns, Less Crime” or “The Bias Against Guns: Why Almost Everything You’ve Heard About Gun Control Is Wrong,” both by John Lott, a long-time expert in the field.
Pick the right issue, and you’ll get the right response. For conservatives right now, it’s about war. If you present them with evidence that Iraq was strategically unjustified and morally wrong, they’re going to get bent out of shape! (Duh.) Pick the right issue, and you can get the same response from a liberal.
-TimK
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