Misinformation is Just a Click Away

Here's a story about some fascinating research near and dear to my heart, the study of misinformation and myths people pass on to others (Obama seems to be the top target of this stuff, from birthers to whether he's Muslim).  I've not read the study myself, published in the April 2011 Human Communication Research, but the point seems to be that an old friend -- email -- may be more to blame than all those crazy web sites and partisan talking heads.  Why?  “rumors e-mailed to friends and family are more likely believed and shared with others,” writes the author, R. Kelly Garrett of Ohio State.  Makes sense.

Think of this as the two-step flow of mythmaking.  How often have you gotten emails with dire warnings and had to reply with a link to Snopes or some other mythbusting site to point out the world is not going to end tomorrow?  Get an email from a friend and, if they're not seen as completely kooky, it apparently carries a little more weight.  I'll read the full article this weekend and discuss further because this is an important step in understanding how these misperceptions emerge and grow.

Persistent Misperceptions: The Death Panels

When you mess with people's health care, there's always going to be trouble.  And misperceptions.  Take, for example, the death panel myth, the notion pushed by Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, and others that death panels would decide the fate of older folks if the Obama health care proposal made it through Congress.  A new paper published in The Forum gets at this health care myth.

There is an excellent Table 1 on page 9 that attempts to trace the history of the death panel myth.

If you don't want to follow the link, it begins with Betsy McCaughey on Fred Thompson's radio show (is there a Republican without a show?) on July 16, 2009, followed by a column by McCaughey in The New York Post a day later.  Sean Hannity picks up on it that same day, as does Laura Ingraham on her radio show.  Limbaugh arrives a few days later, and so on, including our future Speaker of the House on July 23 in a press release.  Palin is often credited for the myth, you betcha, but she doesn't repeat the myth until the following month, as does U.S. Rep. Paul Broun (my own congressional representative, and a bit of a fruitcake).  But Palin really ran with this one, despite two fact-checking web sites that point out she was wrong.  Never let pesky facts get in the way of a good narrative, I always say.

But there is no excuse for outright lying in an important debate, at least not in a perfect political world.  Or, as the paper's author argues:

As a result, until the media stops giving so much attention to misinformers, elites on both sides will often succeed in creating misperceptions, especially among sympathetic partisans. And once such beliefs take hold, few good options exist to counter them—correcting misperceptions is simply too difficult.

Recent research, for example, found that even when a news organization corrects a misperception, the result is to push some folks, based on their partisan predispositions, even further in the wrong direction and acceptance of an outright myth.  In other words, fixing it doesn't work, so partisans and journalists alike need to keep debate to the facts, not the myths.  And yeah, that's not gonna happen, especially from partisans who have air time to fill and are more than accepting of a certain moral flexibility when it comes to facts.

I blogged the other day about this interesting study on whether a politician correcting himself or herself can influence attitudes.  See my original post for study details, but here's a bit of the results I just reread and found fascinating.

The dependent variable is belief in whether weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were in Iraq when the U.S. invaded.  The authors, using multiple regression, found no main effect for a correction embedded in a news report about WMDs.  But when they looked at (geek stats warning!) interaction terms they found some interesting stuff. 

Stay with me. It's worth it. 

The authors found a three-way interaction for correction, ideology, and how important the Iraq war was perceived.   In other words:

... the correction was effective in reducing misperceptions among conservatives who did not select Iraq as the most important issue, but its effects were null for the most strongly committed conservatives...

In other words, a correction in a news story about WMDs seemed to work for conservatives who didn't care much about Iraq -- their misperception went down -- but for those who really cared about the war, the correction led them to a greater misperception about the existence of such weapons.  I'm pushing it a bit because although the authors above called it null effect, but they also note just afterward that the result is awfully close to statistical significance.  So let's run with that.

There's a lot more to get into, but I've mined the study about as much as I plan to.  Got other stuff to write about.  For details about the study, see my previous post.

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.

Obama Apparently Still a MuslimExcept, of course, he's not

A new Pew survey shows that a core group of uninformed Americans believe President Obama is Muslim.

I've written at length on this topic.  An example blog post is here, I've also published research from a panel of folks during the 2008 campaign, work that appeared recently in the Journal of Media and Religion.  Hell, I've even been quoted in The New York Times about my research.  So yeah, I'm interested and somewhat knowledgeable on the topic.  See the graphic from Pew on the left.

Why is the misperception that Obama is Muslim apparently growing?  Andy Kohut of the Pew Center gave a clear explanation this morning on NPR.  In part, the "don't knows" continue to grow, perhaps because Obama does not make a big deal about his Christian beliefs, particularly compared to George W. Bush who did.  I'd also add that politics, wanting to believe "the worst" about a politician you already don't like, also play a part.  Yeah, GOPers are a lot more likely to think he's Muslim, so that suggests a political explanation.  My own research also found conservative Christians (who also happen to be Republicans) are a major factor here.

All in all, a depressing and interesting survey result.  I'd write more but I have class soon, but perhaps I'll do a follow-up posting later today.

Misperceptions and Partisanship

An excellent column in today's New York Times about misperceptions and how difficult it is to change people's minds, even when it's obvious they're wrong.  Here's a telling graph from the column:

Our results indicate that this sort of journalistic fact-checking often fails to reduce misperceptions among ideological or partisan voters. In some cases, we found that corrections can even make misperceptions worse. For example, in one experiment we found that the proportion of conservatives who believed that President George W. Bush’s tax cuts actually increased federal revenue grew from 36 percent to 67 percent when they were provided with evidence against this claim. People seem to argue so vehemently against the corrective information that they end up strengthening the misperception in their own minds.

A pdf of the actual research is here, if you'd like to read the set of experiments that explored this partisan insistence toward non-knowledge (for lack of a better term). 

I roam the same theoretical turf.  The Journal of Media and Religion will publish soon my study on who the people were who insisted at multiple times during the 2008 election that Obama was Muslim.  While the journal article isn't published yet, you can beat the rush and read about it here in my local daily or by the NYTimes here. 

The point is, partisanship drives not only selective attention, exposure, and retention of information, but counterarguing even a fact-check that corrects the misperception can lead to even more incorrect knowledge.  It's a fascinating area, sort of reverse political knowledge, and the ultimate lesson from my study -- and others -- seems to be that nothing journalists or fact-checking web sites can do will correct people's misperceptions, especially when they're wingnuts.