Correcting an Outrageous Comment

As someone fascinated by misperception -- when people think something is true when obviously it isn't -- I find this study to be a useful addition to the literature.  In the March issue of Political Behavior, the authors conducted experiments to test whether a politician's correction of having said something untrue had any real effect.

The answer?  This is important, so pay attention: 

Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group. We also document several instances of a ‘‘backfire effect’’ in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.

Whoa.

The authors created mock news stories about various topics and found conservatives (the focus of this study) use motivated reasoning to create even stronger misperceptions after a correction.  It's likely liberals will do the same, authors suggest, a tendency to interpret factual information to fit political predispositions.  The motivated of reasoning, in this case, is fitting the data to fit our pre-existing theories of how the world works.

Take this into the real world, outside the lab.  We often have politicians forced to "correct" themselves after saying something outrageous.  Turns out, even this correction may push people who want to believe something further into that belief.  Obama a Muslim?  Obama not American?  Suggest and correct, that's the way to fix an idea -- even an incorrect one -- in people's minds.  It's fascinating, and depressing, stuff.

I'd never thought of "corrections" in quite this way before.  There's a lot of room for further study, budding political communication scholars researchers.

Like the rest of the planet, I blogged earlier this week about the major Pew study on religious knowledge.  I'm filling in the gaps over the next couple of days, working my way through a rather long pdf to get to the news lede -- it isn't so much your religious affiliation, it's your education that matters.

On page 37, we discover:

The survey results are clear: People with higher levels of education tend to be more knowledgeable about religion.

Which makes perfectly good sense.  Education tends to drive most tests of knowledge, from politics to science to health.  Having taken a specific college-level religion course also leads to greater knowledge, at least on the items asked here -- which, by the way, strike me as both comprehensive and fair when it comes to measuring something as difficult as "knowledge" of religion.

There are some fascinating demographic breakdowns deep in the study, though few of them truly surprising.  Indeed, they look a lot like the results you'd get studying political knowledge.  For those who care about such things, Republicans outscored Democrats on religious knowledge, but self-described conservatives and liberals were a statistical tie.  Go figure.

At the end, the fine folks at Pew crank the data through a regression analysis to see what really matters when it comes to what people know about religion.  The results? 

• Education matters.  It dominates the model.
• But religious affiliation still explains some of the variance, which is a fancy way of saying even if you control for education, atheists/agnostics, Mormons, and Jews still outperform everyone else.
• Controlling for all this, having a high religious commitment also adds a bit in performance.

So what can we say?  Well, for one, I can say that in six months I'll be downloading these data and playing with them like a kid at Christmas.  Unfortunately there aren't a lot of other variables to work with here, and no serious media variables.  Too bad.

News Media Distrust Nears Record High

A new gallup survey finds distrust in the news media is nearing a record high. 

Who Knows More About Religion?Atheists and Agnostics

A new survey by the fine folks at Pew finds all kinds of interesting things about what people know and what people think they know about religion.  I can mine this thing for days and I'd love to dig more into it now but I have class soon, so let me just pop out one of the more interesting finds (see below).  On a religious knowledge survey, the least religious do the best, followed by Jews and Mormons. 

Of course it's not this simple.  The table below doesn't include controls for education, and we've not even gotten into how you actually measure religious knowledge (it's broad-based, evangelicals and Mormons, for example, do best on Christian-based knowledge).  I'll write more later, when time allows.  Fascinating stuff.

Take the 15-item quiz yourself, if you dare.

When it Comes to Politics, Cable News Rules

A new poll is out that defines how America gets its political news (cable) and who they like best (Fox News) and which TV personalities have the most influence (Bill O'Reilly, then Glenn Beck, then Rush Limbaugh).  But not all is good news for the Rushmeister:

Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh was the third-most-positively ranked, with 36 percent saying he has a positive impact on the discourse, but his negatives far outweighed his positives, with 52 percent saying he has a negative impact. 

"To some extent, Limbaugh has become almost a caricature in a way, so I don’t know how much influence he has beyond entertainment value,” Arteron said. “Whereas, in some way, the other people on Fox are seen as more legitimate news operations.”

Okay, so cable TV rules, but 72 percent of folks say they read newspapers or their web sites for political news, which is higher than broadcast television news.

Science Knowledge

Like a lot of topics -- politics, health, adult beverages -- it's easy to make an argument on why it's important people know something about it.  The same goes for what people know about science.

There's plenty of evidence out there on how little Americans know.  Just look at the proportion of people who believe in Creationism, or doubt global climate change.  But this study (abstract here, pdf of full study here), published in Advances in Health Science Education, reviews previous work on the long-term retention of science information.  Here's a bit from the abstract:

The results of the review, in the general educational domain as well as in medical education, suggest that approximately two-third to three-fourth of knowledge will be retained after one year, with a further decrease to slightly below fifty percent in the next year.

In other words, knowledge decays.  Rapidly.  Unless, of course, you use it, but that wasn't really an aim of the studies reviewed here.

A number of the studies reviewed are more educational than aimed at the general public, such as how well students in medical school retain scientific information.  Still, there's something to be learned for the rest of us who happen not to be in med school. 

The authors do provide near the end some ways in which to enhance science knowledge, or at least its retention, mostly aimed at how to construct a course and curriculum. 

Twitter Navel Gazing

What was the top topic on Twitter last week?

Twitter.

Narcissistic, much?

See graph below, or read the report here.