Newsweek: Why We Believe Lies, Even When We Learn the Truth.

[stephendare]

http://www.newsweek.com/id/213625?from=rss

Not being a complete idiot (contrary to the assertion of many readers I've been hearing from), I was not exactly surprised at the e-mails I got in response to my story analyzing why the myths about health-care reformâ€"even the totally loony ones, like death panelsâ€"have gained such traction. One retired military officer called me "nothing more than an 'Obama Zombie' that has lost touch with reality," while a housewife sweetly suggested that I sign up for "socialistic medicine" and die, the sooner the better. (My kids get upset when people wish me dead, but hey, they'll survive.) But now I think I understand people who believe the health-care liesâ€"and the Obama-was-born-in-Kenya lieâ€"even better than when I wrote that piece.

Some people form and cling to false beliefs about health-care reform (or Obama's citizenship) despite overwhelming evidence thanks to a mental phenomenon called motivated reasoning, says sociologist Steven Hoffman, visiting assistant professor at the University at Buffalo. "Rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief," he says, "people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe." And God knows, in the Internet age there is no dearth of sources to confirm even the most ludicrous claims (my favorite being that the moon landings were faked). "For the most part," says Hoffman, "people completely ignore contrary information" and are able to "develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information."

His conclusions arise from a study he and six colleagues conducted. They were looking at the well-known phenomenon of Americans believing that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks. Some people, mostly liberals, have blamed that on false information and innuendo spread by the Bush administration and its GOP allies (by former members of the Bush White House, too, as recently as this past March). (As Dick Cheney said in June, suspicion of a link "turned out not to be true.") But the researchers think another force is at work. In a paper to be published in the September issue of the journal Sociological Inquiry(you have to subscribe to the journal to read the full paper, but the authors kindly posted it on their Web site here), they argue that some Americans believe the Saddam-9/11 link because it "made sense of the administration's decision to go to war against Iraq . . . [T]he fact of the war led to a search for a justification for it, which led them to infer the existence of ties between Iraq and 9/11," they write.

For their study, the scientists whittled down surveys filled out by 246 voters, of whom 73 percent believed in a Saddam-9/11 link, to 49 believers who were willing to be interviewed at length in October 2004. Even after the 49 were shown newspaper articles reporting that the 9/11 Commission had not found any evidence linking Saddam and 9/11, and quoting President Bush himself denying it, 48 stuck to their guns: yup, Saddam Hussein, directly or indirectly, brought down the Twin Towers.

When the scientists asked the participants why they believed in the link, they offered many justifications. Five argued that Saddam supported terrorism generally, or that evidence of a link to 9/11 might yet emerge. These counterarguments are not entirely illogical. But almost everyone else offered some version of "I don't know; I don't know anything"â€"that is, outright confusion over the conflict between what they believed and what the facts showedâ€"or switched subjects to the invasion of Iraq. As one put it, when asked about his Saddam-9/11 belief, "There is no doubt in my mind that if we did not deal with Saddam Hussein when we did, it was just a matter of time when we would have to deal with him." In other words, holding fast to the Saddam-9/11 belief helped people make sense of the decision to go to war against Iraq.

"We refer to this as 'inferred justification,'" says Hoffman. Inferred justification is a sort of backward chain of reasoning. You start with something you believe strongly (the invasion of Iraq was the right move) and work backward to find support for it (Saddam was behind 9/11). "For these voters," says Hoffman, "the sheer fact that we were engaged in war led to a post-hoc search for a justification for that war."

For an explanation of this behavior, look no further than the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance. This theory holds that when people are presented with information that contradicts preexisting beliefs, they try to relieve the cognitive tension one way or another. They process and respond to information defensively, for instance: their belief challenged by fact, they ignore the latter. They also accept and seek out confirming information but ignore, discredit the source of, or argue against contrary information, studies have shown.

Which brings us back to health-care reformâ€"in particular, the apoplexy at town-hall meetings and the effectiveness of the lies being spread about health-care reform proposals. First of all, let's remember that 59,934,814 voters cast their ballot for John McCain, so we can assume that tens of millions of Americans believe the wrong guy is in the White House. To justify that belief, they need to find evidence that he's leading the country astray. What better evidence of that than to seize on the misinformation about Obama's health-care reform ideas and believe that he wants to insure illegal aliens, for example, and give the Feds electronic access to doctors' bank accounts?

Obama's opponents also need to find evidence that their reading of him back in November was correct. They therefore seize on "confirmation" that he wants to, for instance, redistribute the wealth, as in his “spread the wealth around” remark to Joe the Plumberâ€"finding such confirmation in the claims that health-care reform will do just that, redistributing health care from those who have it now to the 46 million currently uninsured. Similarly, they seize on anything that confirms the “socialist” label that got pinned on Obama during the campaign, or the pro-abortion labelâ€"anything to comfort themselves that they made the right choice last November.

There are legitimate, fact-based reasons to oppose health-care reform. But some of the loudest opposition is the result of confirmatory bias, cognitive dissonance, and other examples of mental processes that have gone off the rails.

[Sportmotor]

LIES AND PROPAGANDA!!!

[JeffreyS]

The road less traveled is one I would recommend if you are interested in learning more about how hard it is to challenge one's own perception of reality.  It is a frightening proposition to most of us whether our beliefs  are liberal, conservative or something else.

[NotNow]

The problem is not all of these side issues, or who is crazy and who is not, or what the latest Obama rumor is.  The problem is that there is not an articulated plan for the legislation that is proposed.  Instead, promises are made when there is not even a bill ready.  The administration was pushing for August passage of "reform"!  Articulate EXACTLY what the plan is and how it will be funded.  Do a one or two year test run in an agreeable state (New York?) 

The fact is the "plan" being promised hasn't much more credibility than the statements about where Obama was born or "death panels".  Publish a detailed plan, implement it on a test basis, then we can debate the issue with facts and experience.  Until then, we are stuck with the "Obama's not a citizen" along with the "protesters are nutjobs" arguments that don't have any positive effect.

[KenFSU]

Reminds of one JFK's more famous quotes:

"Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."

Just How Stupid Are We? by Rick Shenkman is also a pretty fantastic book dealing with this subject.

On the Saddam 9/11 link, though I completely blame those ignorant enough to still believe the two were connected, I find it rather irresponsible for the author to pin the sole blame on inferred justification, rather than the fact that the President used every single opportunity imaginable after the 9/11 attacks to influence the public by repeatedly relating the tragedy of 9/11, terrorism, Iraq, and Saddam Hussein. Any psychology textbook written after 1800 will tell you that the human psyche is most open to suggestion in the aftermath of great emotional trauma. If 9/11 wasn't great emotional trauma, I don't know what was. And in the days after the attacks, the Bush Administration and mainstream media were already hammering Iraq down the throats of Americans. I can see how a more passive consumer of news -- especially those living below the poverty line -- could develop such an opinion. When Bush is using substance less rhetoric like "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists, Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints," people are bound to get confused.

NotNow, I agree 100%. It's hard to debate fact on health care reform when you aren't even a hundred percent sure what exactly is being proposed. It's farcical.

Though the name of the article is "Why We Believe Lies, Even When We Learn the Truth," I think the bigger problem is that an increasing number of Americans can't be bothered to learn the truth. We've become a nation of headline readers, with complicated issues reduced to Twitter-sized talking points like "death panels" and "bail outs" that 90% of the population seem happy to file away and move on leaving a rapidly decreasing percentage of the population actually interested in discovering the truth.

It's depressing that the average person on the street thinks that Columbus discovered America. The Columbine killers will be forever remembered as bullied, loner teenagers, hopped up on antidepressants, part of a "Trenchcoat Mafia," and hell bent on exacting revenge on jocks, cheerleaders, and Christians, despite the fact that none of this actually, you know, turned out to be true (http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-04-13-columbine-myths_N.htm). The Anthrax attacks that really pushed Americans over the edge in their post Sept. 11 fear/submission are still thought by most to have been from Al Qaeda, despite one hundred percent of the evidence pointing to the fact that attack came from a U.S. military strain in Fort Detrick.

There are so many myths, and so much blame to go around.

I blame American citizens too lazy to fulfill their civic duty.

I blame a shameless, reprehensible mainstream media that has failed America in every way possible over the last ten years.

I blame an education system whose history books often value fairy tail and superpatriotism over truth -- a system that can't even be bothered to make civics a requirement for graduation.

The reliance on myth is just so sad, and I can't see it ending well for this fine nation if the everyday citizen doesn't start taking a more active interest in what's going on around us.

[BridgeTroll]

Outstanding...!!

I blame American citizens too lazy to fulfill their civic duty.

I blame a shameless, reprehensible mainstream media that has failed America in every way possible over the last ten years.

I blame an education system whose history books often value fairy tail and superpatriotism over truth -- a system that can't even be bothered to make civics a requirement for graduation.

[Deuce]

No one else is to blame when a person deliberately chooses to believe what they wish rather than what the facts are telling them.

So then, how do we get them to believe the truth. I'm thinking electro-shock therapy for starters.

[copperfiend]

Tell them that terrorists hate public healthcare options.

[Dog Walker]

Johnathon Swift once said, "You cannot reason a person out of a position that he reached without reason."

Great new book on this very subject is "Bozo Sapiens".  It about how little "reason" goes into our thinking and why.

[Captain Zissou]

I just assumed Fayeforcure started this thread.....Is that bad?

[TPC]

The biggest LIE is in the middle of beLIEve.

[JaxNative68]

this is one more reason to add to the why I believe the majority of americans are stupid, not ignorant, but stupid.  unfortunately the majority of the stupid know they are stupid and choose not to admit it and refuse to educate themselves, but would rather argue their untruths and unfact found ideals because it is easier than self education, and they think it makes them appear smarter than they are, which is completely the opposite of reality.  in general people hear and believe in what they want, no matter how wrong they know it or believe it to be, in order to make them feel better about their own stupidity and self-serving ideals.

unfortunately the movie "Idiocracy" is coming true!
now go away! beatin'!

[JaxNative68]

sorry the last word should have been "batin" . . . but, i'm still trying to unlearn the lies ingrained within . . . what can i say, i'm an american, maybe a little brawndo will help my brain work better.

[Dog Walker]

Please help me start a new voter's campaign:  "Stay home.  Don't vote!"  

All these "get out the vote" drives scare me silly.  Let's herd the ignorant and uncaring to the polls so they can vote for the guy with the nice hair and the smoothest TV ads.  NOT!

If you don't know the issues or candidate's ideas, STAY HOME, DON'T VOTE!  It's your civic duty to let more informed people make the decision about who to represent us.

[Deuce]

(Re: Idiocracy) I can't wait to eat at B**tFu**ers when it comes to the Landing!