I found this article in the Guardian by Ben Goldacre (The Guardian, Saturday 1 May 2010) that essentially says that right wing people will strengthen their views as a result counter evidence to their position.

A new experiment published this month in the journal Political Behaviour sets out to examine the impact of corrections, and what they found was far more disturbing than they expected: far from changing peoples’ minds, if you are deeply entrenched in your views, a correction will only reinforce them.

Evidence based smear campaigns – Bad Science

This means that right wingers have very little chance of changing their minds; especially when provided with evidence to the contrary to their beliefs.

Is it then pointless arguing with right wing people because any evidence that is presented that is counter to their beliefs will actually strengthen them?

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Larni

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Message 10 of 49 (558929)
05-05-2010 3:21 PM

Reply to: Message 5 by Phage0070
05-05-2010 2:18 PM

It's not really cognitive dissonance.

What it means is that once a right winger makes up his their mind they will not change it: even when they are corrected they cleave to their original conclusions; evidence be damned.

Sticking to ones initial conclusions is indeed common to all people as selectively ignoring contradictory evidence but the interesting thing here is that right winger's belief in their erroneous conclusions are strengthened by contradictory evidence.

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Larni

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Message 16 of 49 (558937)
05-05-2010 3:36 PM

Reply to: Message 12 by Phage0070
05-05-2010 3:28 PM

But the article does say that this effect does function more or less with right wingers.

Lefties won't change their conclusions and liberals are very evidence based in their thinking.

Maybe that's where we get the term 'right wing nut jobs' from: an intuitive sense that the conclusions of the very right wing are indeed difficult for normal people to understand?

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Larni

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Message 19 of 49 (558954)
05-05-2010 5:19 PM

Reply to: Message 18 by Phage0070
05-05-2010 4:02 PM

What tickles me is that the back fire effect only seems to work for right wingers...

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Larni

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Message 30 of 49 (559002)
05-06-2010 4:13 AM

Reply to: Message 20 by Phage0070
05-05-2010 5:50 PM

Funny, the study does not indicate that. You appear to just be pulling it out of your ass.
Funny, the study does not indicate that. You appear to just be pulling it out of your ass.

But for people who placed themselves ideologically to the right of center, the correction wasn’t just ineffective, it actively backfired: conservatives who received a correction telling them that Iraq did not have WMD were more likely to believe that Iraq had WMD than people who were given no correction at all. Where you might have expected people simply to dismiss a correction that was incongruous with their pre-existing view, or regard it as having no credibility, it seems that in fact, such information actively reinforced their false beliefs.

Seems it does say that.

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Larni

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Message 32 of 49 (559005)
05-06-2010 4:44 AM

Reply to: Message 31 by Modulous
05-06-2010 4:39 AM

Ya got me.

I'll apologise to Phage.

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Larni

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Message 33 of 49 (559006)
05-06-2010 4:45 AM

Reply to: Message 20 by Phage0070
05-05-2010 5:50 PM

My apologies, Phage.

I was pulling your chain a bit too much, I think.

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