The Facts of Democracy
How facts backfire - The Boston Globe, by Joe Keohane:
Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”
Even more incredible than seeing a scientific verification of how obstinate people can be is the apparent relationship to how the person is currently feeling. If they’re happy, confident, at peace… they’ll consider new ideas:
Nyhan worked on one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.
I believe that facts can eventually make a democracy head in the right direction, but their dissemination sure isn’t the catalyst for efficient change one would expect.