Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Saturday 25 March 2017

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

9 comments:

  1. My guess is it is influenced by what the subjects want to believe, just like religion.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wilco Roos It's roughly related to emotional investment, which is itself, a tad hard to estimate.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The fact that Donald Trump started questioning the media, has changed many peoples thinking patterns world wide. this type of change does not surprise me, and if it were not so, I would wonder what happened.

    Since Donald Trump started calling the media out on their biased reporting, many folks now look at life from a differ entangle.
    just saying that this may have been an influence in the out come of the study....

    the intro says it all....

    ReplyDelete
  4. Frank Gainsford​ The only reason Trump calls the media liars, and 'fake news' is because he can wave away journalism about his incompetence and outright lies as fake and such. It is just a smokescreen..

    ReplyDelete
  5. As noted in regard to WMDs, word choice does have an effect. I suspect if you phrase the evidence in a respectful manner, people will accept it.

    But, if you choose phrasing that is rude or arrogant sounding, people will reject the new info.

    ReplyDelete
  6. "First described in 2010"?? Try 1957 or so. It's not a new idea, and it is one that (apparently) has been validated by multiple studies, however weird it sounds. Color me a tad dubious when one recent study claims to overturn the whole apple cart.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Greg Roelofs Well, "original 2010 study" is my lazy wrong way of saying, "study from 2010 that everyone seems to refer to". I don't doubt the idea can be traced back much further. I'd be surprised if no-one had noticed it well before the 20th century. As I said, anecdotally I'm certain the effect is real, and the article's weak point is in not discussing the reasons why this study found little or no evidence of the backfire effect when many other studies have.

    I just briefly read the text of the paper discussing why they found that statements about WMDs apparently did produce the backfire effect but not if the wording was changed. In the earlier study (where backfire was found) the corrective statement was :

    Immediately before the U.S. invasion, Iraq had an active weapons of mass destruction program, the ability to produce these weapons, and large stockpiles of WMD, but Saddam Hussein was able to hide or destroy these weapons right before U.S. forces arrived.

    And in the current study where there was no backfire, the corrective statement was :

    Following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, US forces did not find weapons of mass destruction.

    It seems to me that the earlier correction is much more open to misinterpretation by its more complex nature and phrasing. One could easily use the first half of the statement to support a belief in WMDs in Iraq, and the second section makes a claim about what happened to the weapons. That's much more complex than the blunt fact about what US forces found.

    Since the study is still under peer review, it would be interesting to see if they expand on this and discuss other possible reasons why backfire is not found. It's hard to believe it could only be due to phrasing.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Rhys Taylor phrasing, as well as framing of the content discussed are also major issues here, and so is the public attitude to the research team, including who asked the questions and in what medium the qusetions were asked.

    just saying .... also think about how the media is being used and manipulated by them folks who are at the top of the political ladder ...

    ReplyDelete

Due to a small but consistent influx of spam, comments will now be checked before publishing. Only egregious spam/illegal/racist crap will be disapproved, everything else will be published.

Dune part two : first impressions

I covered Dune : Part One when it came out, so it seems only fair I should cover the "concluding" part as well. I'm gonna do ...