Does the backfire effect even exist ?

Apparently, the backfire effect - where people tend to believe more strongly in something when presented with opposing evidence - just doesn't exist, or at least has been hugely overstated. I find it unlikely that it doesn't exist at all, because anecdotally it most certainly does. Overstated is much more plausible - as the article describes, there are other reasons why simple fact-presenting may still not work in (political) practise. E.g. if you hear the facts once but the lies a dozen times; the power of a fact to reduce belief may not necessarily translate into changing votes; I suppose there could also be a "hard core" who do suffer the backfire effect and then go on to promote lies more vigorously as a result, etc.

Still, it's tough to argue with this given that the authors of the original 2010 study are on board with it. But what this article doesn't address is why the studies produced such very different results. Did the original have some methodological flaw or suffer some unintended selection effect ? Was the sample size just too low ? Could it simply be due to how the information was presented ? Intriguingly :

“Across all experiments,” the researchers write, “we found only one issue capable of triggering backfire: whether WMD were found in Iraq in 2003.” Even there, changing the wording of the item in question eliminated the backfire effect.

See also : https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/ct66PL7rdW7


First described in a 2010 paper by the political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, the idea is simple: If someone believes something that’s false, and you present them with a correction, in many situations rather than update their belief they will double down, holding even tighter to that initial belief.

Two new upcoming studies of the backfire effect call into question its very existence. These studies collected far more subjects than the original backfire study, and both find effectively no backfire effect at all. And unlike the original study, the subjects in these new ones weren’t just college students — they were thousands of people, of all ages, from all around the country.

If this new finding holds up, this is a very important, well, correction: It suggests that overall, fact-checking may be more likely to cause people, even partisans, to update their beliefs rather than to cling more tightly to them. And part of the reason we now know this is that Nyhan and Reifler put their money where their mouths were: When a team of two young researchers approached them suggesting a collaboration to test the backfire effect in a big, robust, public way, they accepted the challenge. So this is partly a story about a potentially important new finding in political science and psychology — but the story within the story is about science being done right.

As the paper notes, the experiments were set up in ways designed to maximize the chances of a backlash effect being observed. Many of the issues the respondents were asked about are extremely politically charged — abortion and gun violence and illegal immigration — and the experiment was conducted during one of the most heated and unusual presidential elections in modern American history. The idea was something like, Well, if we can’t find the backfire effect here, with a big sample size under these sorts of conditions, then we can safely question whether it exists.

And that’s what happened. “Across all experiments,” the researchers write, “we found only one issue capable of triggering backfire: whether WMD were found in Iraq in 2003.” Even there, changing the wording of the item in question eliminated the backfire effect.
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/11/theres-more-hope-for-political-fact-checking.html