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Author Topic:   Evidence based smear campaigns
Modulous
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Posts: 7801
From: Manchester, UK
Joined: 05-01-2005


(1)
Message 8 of 49 (558927)
05-05-2010 3:10 PM
Reply to: Message 6 by slevesque
05-05-2010 2:22 PM


The left wing
I don't see how this shows the phenomenon applies only to right-wing people
If we accept the results, then it shows that the phenomenon is significantly more pronounced with those of the right wing. The full paper can be read here.
But it does not show that doing the same thing with a reverse example aimed more at liberal and left people would not show the exact same thing.
The paper refers to a misconception among the left wing about stem cell politics:
quote:
In the experiment, subjects read a mock news article attributed to either the New York Times or FoxNews.com that reported statements by Edwards and Kerry suggesting the existence of a stem cell research ban. In the treatment condition, a corrective paragraph was added to the end of the news story explaining that Bush’s policy does not limit privately funded stem cell research. The dependent variable is agreement that President Bush has banned stem cell research in the United States on a scale ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5).
After doing their statistical stuff to it the result,
quote:
shows that the stem cell correction has a negative and statistically significant marginal effect on misperceptions among centrists and individuals to the right of center, but fails to significantly reduce misperceptions among those to the left of center. Thus, the correction works for conservatives and moderates, but not for liberals. In other words, while we do not find a backfire effect, the effect of the correction is again neutralized for the relevant ideological subgroup (liberals). This finding provides additional evidence that the effect of corrections is likely to be conditional on one’s political predispositions.
In standard English: In the right wing, seeing a correction to a position they held as true there is a tendency to agree with that position more strongly when asked about it. In the left wing seeing a correction has very little effect either way. That is - their bias prevents them from changing their views, but it doesn't cause them to say they agree with their view more strongly than before.

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 Message 6 by slevesque, posted 05-05-2010 2:22 PM slevesque has replied

Replies to this message:
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Modulous
Member
Posts: 7801
From: Manchester, UK
Joined: 05-01-2005


(1)
Message 9 of 49 (558928)
05-05-2010 3:16 PM
Reply to: Message 5 by Phage0070
05-05-2010 2:18 PM


Observe for instance the reviews of the "Global Warming" studies used by the UN. The left wing reacted similarly by strengthening their support of the positions they had already taken, as opposed to examining the controversy around the studies and possibly revising their conclusions. It doesn't matter what your political leanings, we are all subject to this behavior.
This isn't like getting defensive. This is something different. So it goes that if you present a left wing person with a counter piece of evidence for Global Warming and then ask them how strongly they agree that Global Warming is occurring and humans are a cause you will find the same results if you didn't start with the counterevidence. The counterevidence has no effect on reported strength of agreement. For example.
In the right wing, seeing counter evidence to a position you hold increases the magnitude of your reported agreement with it!
This is not cognitive dissonance. This, if the results are to be followed, suggests that there appears to a psychologically different reaction to people of different political viewpoints when presented with corrections.
As the paper concludes:
quote:
The experiments reported in this paper help us understand why factual misperceptions about politics are so persistent. We find that responses to corrections in mock news articles differ significantly according to subjects’ ideological views. As a result, the corrections fail to reduce misperceptions for the most committed participants. Even worse, they actually strengthen misperceptions among ideological subgroups in several cases. Additional results suggest that these conclusions are not specific to the Iraq war; not related to the salience of death; and not a reaction to the source of the correction...
It would also be helpful to test additional corrections of liberal misperceptions. Currently, all of our backfire results come from conservativesa finding that may provide support for the hypothesis that conservatives are especially dogmatic (Greenberg and Jonas 2003; Jost et al. 2003a, b). However, there is a great deal of evidence that liberals (e.g. the stem cell experiment above) and Democrats (e.g., Bartels 2002, pp. 133—137; Bullock 2007; Gerber and Huber 2010) also interpret factual information in ways that are consistent with their political predispositions. Without conducting more studies, it is impossible to determine if liberals and conservatives react to corrections differently.

The paper is consistent with that conclusion, but can't say that it is certain: only that corrections can cause 'backfire' reactions among the political extremes which helps explain the misconceptions that the public have.
Edited by Modulous, : added the paper's conclusion to clear up what might well be a liberal misconception about the paper's content

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Modulous
Member
Posts: 7801
From: Manchester, UK
Joined: 05-01-2005


Message 15 of 49 (558936)
05-05-2010 3:34 PM
Reply to: Message 11 by slevesque
05-05-2010 3:22 PM


Re: The left wing
The situations taken are hardly comparable.
They are comparable. Not equal. But as I said up above - the paper isn't really concentrating on left vs right stuff and is only consistent with that conclusion.
A reverse situation that would maybe be on the same scale would be the global warming issue, and the 'extra-added' information would have to be an official article contradicting the usual ALGore line of thinking of the left.
Yeah - they only asked a few questions because of time constraints (they basically performed one study per question) and they put in a call for more liberal issue related questions to discover what backfire issues they might have (perhaps fishing for a grant a little there ).

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Modulous
Member
Posts: 7801
From: Manchester, UK
Joined: 05-01-2005


Message 17 of 49 (558941)
05-05-2010 4:00 PM
Reply to: Message 16 by Larni
05-05-2010 3:36 PM


But the article does say that this effect does function more or less with right wingers.
The backfire effect functioned on Conservatives more in the question regarding WMD possession.
A stubbornness from the left did occur in a question about Stem Cell bans but not backfire.
However the article's conclusion, and the paper's conclusion both indicate this is not necessarily a left vs right phenomenon. It's just that smears work well because people either ignore corrections or corrections serve to entrench them even further.

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Modulous
Member
Posts: 7801
From: Manchester, UK
Joined: 05-01-2005


Message 28 of 49 (558992)
05-06-2010 1:51 AM
Reply to: Message 26 by Trae
05-05-2010 10:30 PM


Re: The left wing
If the 'correction' only appeared with the FoxNews label mightn't it be that liberals are more likely to just ignore FoxNews?
quote:
In the experiment, subjects read a mock news article attributed to either the New York Times or FoxNews.com...
If the 'correction' only appeared with the FoxNews label mightn't it be that liberals are more likely to just ignore FoxNews?
Again the paper mentions this effect:
quote:
As we briefly mention above, the news source manipulation used in the experiments in Study 2 did not have significant effects. These manipulations, which randomly attributed the articles to either Fox News or the New York Times, were included in order to determine if perceived source biases were driving the results observed in Study 1. However, Wald tests found that including news source indicator variables and the corresponding two- and three-way interactions with the correction treatment and participant ideology did not result in a statistically significant improvement in model fit for any of the experiments in Study 2 (details available upon request).
How should we interpret these results, which differ with previous research on source effects in the persuasion literature? One possibility is that the news source manipulation, which consisted of changing the publication title listed at the top of the article (see Appendix), was simply too subtle. Perhaps a more visually striking reminder of the source of the article would have had a more significant effect. Similarly, the sources quoted within the news stories (e.g. President Bush, the Duelfer Report) may be the relevant ones for the purposes of comparison with previous findings. If we had manipulated the sources of the competing claims rather than the source of the news article, our results would likely have been different. Finally, it is possible that the lack of significant source effects is a more general property of two-sided message environmentsHartman and Weber (2009) find that the source framing effects observed in a one-sided message environment were no longer significant in a two-sided message environment.

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Modulous
Member
Posts: 7801
From: Manchester, UK
Joined: 05-01-2005


(1)
Message 31 of 49 (559004)
05-06-2010 4:39 AM
Reply to: Message 30 by Larni
05-06-2010 4:13 AM


What tickles me is that the back fire effect only seems to work for right wingers
Funny, the study does not indicate that. You appear to just be pulling it out of your ass.
Seems it does say that.
The 'supporting' quote comes from the blog article, and does not support the claim that this ONLY works for right wingers. The actual study explitly states:
quote:
misperceptions. Currently, all of our backfire results come from conservativesa finding that may provide support for the hypothesis that conservatives are especially dogmatic (Greenberg and Jonas 2003; Jost et al. 2003a, b). However, there is a great deal of evidence that liberals (e.g. the stem cell experiment above) and Democrats (e.g., Bartels 2002, pp. 133—137; Bullock 2007; Gerber and Huber 2010) also interpret factual information in ways that are consistent with their political predispositions. Without conducting more studies, it is impossible to determine if liberals and conservatives react to corrections differently
Unless you are just being deliberately funny and deliberately digging in when you received a correction. Because that would be exceptionally well played. But if you are just backfiring, then perhaps you should actually read the actual paper.
Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

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Modulous
Member
Posts: 7801
From: Manchester, UK
Joined: 05-01-2005


Message 39 of 49 (559056)
05-06-2010 10:55 AM
Reply to: Message 37 by Hyroglyphx
05-06-2010 10:03 AM


Re: Blinded by bias
Yes, absolutely. I know people who refuse to believe that Obama has contributed more to the national debt than any U.S. president in history (even more than the bloated whore, Bush, and that's after adjusting for inflation), even when clear evidence proves it.
Seems to me that whether or not your claim is true and whether it is something that reflects poorly on Obama is a matter of what you are actually measuring. Do you have any interesting links to threads on the net where someone has raised this issue and people have refused to believe that so we can see if it looks like it is bias that is at work rather than a disagreement over 'real' terms, % of GDP, or if they are bickering as to who is to blame for that occurring?
The thing we won't be able to do is to see if the people you are talking about 'backfire' regarding the position or whether or not they simply disregard the correction since it is that phenomenon which the study is is addressing: and it is not something that can be detected without a great deal of care.
Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 37 by Hyroglyphx, posted 05-06-2010 10:03 AM Hyroglyphx has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 42 by Hyroglyphx, posted 05-06-2010 11:20 AM Modulous has replied

  
Modulous
Member
Posts: 7801
From: Manchester, UK
Joined: 05-01-2005


Message 41 of 49 (559061)
05-06-2010 11:20 AM
Reply to: Message 40 by Hyroglyphx
05-06-2010 11:08 AM


The purpose of the study
Which should then lead the question what the purpose of the experiment was to begin with if not a smear.
The full paper is available online.
quote:
An extensive literature addresses citizen ignorance, but very little research focuses on misperceptions. Can these false or unsubstantiated beliefs about politics be corrected? Previous studies have not tested the efficacy of corrections in a realistic format. We conducted four experiments in which subjects read mock news articles that included either a misleading claim from a politician, or a misleading claim and a correction. 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.

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Modulous
Member
Posts: 7801
From: Manchester, UK
Joined: 05-01-2005


Message 43 of 49 (559065)
05-06-2010 11:32 AM
Reply to: Message 42 by Hyroglyphx
05-06-2010 11:20 AM


Re: Blinded by bias
The question was raised from a personal perspective. I don't know how the average "leftist" would respond.
Do you mean personal in the fleshy vocal communication thing? You haven't seen the phenomenon online?
I agree, which leads me to question 1. What the political persuasion of the experimenters is and 2. What the purpose of the experiment is.
We cross posted, I addressed this in Message 41. You can hear one of the people involved talk about the study as a podcast on his blog. He says in that interview that 'this is a human problem' and 'We are not targeting conservatives'.
I am not sure what the political persuasion of the authors is. It is a politically neutral study so I don't know why that would matter.
Their names are Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, I suppose you could google them, read their stuff and try and come to a conclusion on that.
I personally have seen much cognitive dissonance coming from the Right to include the most ridiculous instances of protective Bush (which really is them trying to save face for backing him). That is not in question. The question is why this wouldn't apply to the other foot.
It may well do. The paper does not imply that this is ruled out, and cites several other papers that do indicate some political effect in liberals.
Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
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