How facts backfire

Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains
By Joe Keohane

It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

These findings open a long-running argument about the political ignorance of American citizens to broader questions about the interplay between the nature of human intelligence and our democratic ideals. Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas, and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence. In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we vote.

This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers — alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right.

“Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be,” read a recent Onion headline. Like the best satire, this nasty little gem elicits a laugh, which is then promptly muffled by the queasy feeling of recognition. The last five decades of political science have definitively established that most modern-day Americans lack even a basic understanding of how their country works. In 1996, Princeton University’s Larry M. Bartels argued, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented data in political science.”

On its own, this might not be a problem: People ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote. But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)

Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”

What’s going on? How can we have things so wrong, and be so sure that we’re right? Part of the answer lies in the way our brains are wired. Generally, people tend to seek consistency. There is a substantial body of psychological research showing that people tend to interpret information with an eye toward reinforcing their preexisting views. If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn’t. This is known as “motivated reasoning.” Whether or not the consistent information is accurate, we might accept it as fact, as confirmation of our beliefs. This makes us more confident in said beliefs, and even less likely to entertain facts that contradict them.

New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.

For the most part, it didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.

It’s unclear what is driving the behavior — it could range from simple defensiveness, to people working harder to defend their initial beliefs — but as Nyhan dryly put it, “It’s hard to be optimistic about the effectiveness of fact-checking.”

It would be reassuring to think that political scientists and psychologists have come up with a way to counter this problem, but that would be getting ahead of ourselves. The persistence of political misperceptions remains a young field of inquiry. “It’s very much up in the air,” says Nyhan.

But researchers are working on it. One avenue may involve self-esteem. Nyhan worked on one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.

There are also some cases where directness works. Kuklinski’s welfare study suggested that people will actually update their beliefs if you hit them “between the eyes” with bluntly presented, objective facts that contradict their preconceived ideas. He asked one group of participants what percentage of its budget they believed the federal government spent on welfare, and what percentage they believed the government should spend. Another group was given the same questions, but the second group was immediately told the correct percentage the government spends on welfare (1 percent). They were then asked, with that in mind, what the government should spend. Regardless of how wrong they had been before receiving the information, the second group indeed adjusted their answer to reflect the correct fact.

Kuklinski’s study, however, involved people getting information directly from researchers in a highly interactive way. When Nyhan attempted to deliver the correction in a more real-world fashion, via a news article, it backfired. Even if people do accept the new information, it might not stick over the long term, or it may just have no effect on their opinions. In 2007 John Sides of George Washington University and Jack Citrin of the University of California at Berkeley studied whether providing misled people with correct information about the proportion of immigrants in the US population would affect their views on immigration. It did not.

And if you harbor the notion — popular on both sides of the aisle — that the solution is more education and a higher level of political sophistication in voters overall, well, that’s a start, but not the solution. A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong. Taber and Lodge found this alarming, because engaged, sophisticated thinkers are “the very folks on whom democratic theory relies most heavily.”

In an ideal world, citizens would be able to maintain constant vigilance, monitoring both the information they receive and the way their brains are processing it. But keeping atop the news takes time and effort. And relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can be exhausting. Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts — inference, intuition, and so forth — to avoid precisely that sort of discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done. Unfortunately, with them, we’re easily suckered by political falsehoods.

Nyhan ultimately recommends a supply-side approach. Instead of focusing on citizens and consumers of misinformation, he suggests looking at the sources. If you increase the “reputational costs” of peddling bad info, he suggests, you might discourage people from doing it so often. “So if you go on ‘Meet the Press’ and you get hammered for saying something misleading,” he says, “you’d think twice before you go and do it again.”

Unfortunately, this shame-based solution may be as implausible as it is sensible. Fast-talking political pundits have ascended to the realm of highly lucrative popular entertainment, while professional fact-checking operations languish in the dungeons of wonkery. Getting a politician or pundit to argue straight-faced that George W. Bush ordered 9/11, or that Barack Obama is the culmination of a five-decade plot by the government of Kenya to destroy the United States — that’s easy. Getting him to register shame? That isn’t.

© Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

China breaks into Supercomputing league

BEIJING — A Chinese supercomputer has been ranked the world's second-fastest machine in a list issued by U.S. and European researchers, highlighting China's ambitions to become a global technology center.

The Nebulae system at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen in southern China came in behind the U.S. Department of Energy's Jaguar in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, according to the list released Monday.

Supercomputers are used for complex work such as modeling weather systems, simulating nuclear explosions and designing jetliners.

The semiannual TOP500 list highlighted Beijing's efforts to join the United States, Europe and Japan in the global technology elite and its sharp increases in research spending, driven by booming economic growth.

It also reflected China's continued reliance on Western know-how: Nebulae was built by China's Dawning Information Industry Ltd. but uses processors from Intel Corp. and Nvidia Corp., both American companies.

The Nebulae is capable of sustained computing of 1.271 petaflops - or 1,271 trillion calculations - per second, according to TOP500. It said the Jaguar was capable of sustained computing of 1.75 petaflops.

The Chinese computer ranked first in theoretical computing speed at 2.98 petaflops, the group said. The list was compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

The communist Beijing government wants China to evolve from a low-cost factory into an prosperous "innovation society." A 15-year government plan issued in 2006 promises support for areas ranging from computers to lasers to genetics.

Boosted by Nebulae's performance, China rose to No. 2 overall on the TOP500 list with 24 of the 500 systems on the list and 9.2 percent of global supercomputing capacity, up from 21 systems six months ago.

The United States held onto its overall lead with 282 of the 500 systems and 55.4 percent of installed performance.

Europe had 144 systems on the list, including 38 in Britain, 29 in France and 24 in Germany.

Elsewhere in Asia , Japan had 18 supercomputers on the list, up from 16 six months ago, and India had five.

A second Chinese computer also made the Top 10. The Tianhe-1 at the National Super Computer Center in the eastern city of Tianjin, at No. 7, uses processors made by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., another American company.

The list also reflected breakneck advances in supercomputing speeds.

No. 1 on the June 2008 list was the Roadrunner system at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, capable of 1.04 petaflops, or about two-thirds of Jaguar's level. In the latest list, Roadrunner dropped to No. 3.

Which Is Worse for Your Brain: Texting or Pot? (Hint: Pass the Pipe)

It’s a challenge of modern life: email, Twitter feeds, instant messaging, text messages, and other snippets of information are coming at us so fast that it’s hard not to feel under digital attack. Sure, some of it’s important — and that’s precisely the problem. Turn it all off and you might as well quit the workforce. But read it all and your mind becomes so drained that it’s a challenge to get anything else done.

In some ways, technology has evolved in a way that puts mere humans in a bind. Consider the email conundrum. From the moment you wake up, it seems the inbox is calling your name. And if you’re like most of us, you answer its call pretty quickly.

“The brain hates uncertainty,” says David Rock, the CEO of Results Coaching Systems and author of “Your Brain at Work.” “It’s literally painful to not download your email the moment you arrive at your desk in the morning. But once you’ve processed 30 or 40 emails, you’ve ruined your brain chemistry for higher level tasks that are going to create value.”

In fact, a University of London study done for Hewlett-Packard found that “infomania” — a term connected with addiction to email and texting — can lower your IQ by twice as much as smoking marijuana. Moreover, email can raise the levels of noradrenaline and dopamine in your brain by constantly introducing new stimuli into your day. When those levels get too high, complex thinking becomes more difficult, making it harder to make decisions and solve problems — key roles for all managers.

In short, the brain’s capacity for decision-making evolved at a time when people had less to think about. Great, so now you have an excuse for not keeping up. But you still need a game plan.

1. Take control of email.

Don’t start your day with email. Set your email so it doesn’t download new mail automatically or, at the very least, turn off any alert system. Instead, set a time to check for messages manually — preferably later in the day, after you’ve used your brainpower for more important things.

Equally important is that others at your business know how you want email used. “Emails should be short, concise, and used only when a conversation is not an option,” says Adrian Moorhouse, managing director of executive coaching firm Lane4. “The easier communication is to digest, the more likely it is that the messages will be delivered effectively.”

Some colleagues seem unable to help themselves. We all know the type. They send too many emails; they gossip or forward jokes. Get them to divert their personal chatter online by allowing them to use social media at work (even if it’s just at set times of the day). Or talk to the worst offenders one-on-one. Peter Taylor, the director of the project management office for Siemens and author of “The Lazy Project Manager,” says when he’s cc’d on emails, he tells the senders to cut it out. “If people had to produce single sheets of paper and hand them out every time they wanted to communicate, they’d be a lot more conscientious. I educate everyone who I communicate with and as a result, the emails I do receive are pertinent to me. I restructure those emails, copy them into ongoing documents, and keep my inbox very small.”

If you’re reaching a breaking point, do the email equivalent of filing for bankruptcy. Simply wipe your inbox to start afresh. It seems drastic, but it can work. Send a message to all contacts letting them know what you’re planning, select all emails, and delete or archive them. If you’re planning a new regime of folders, rules, filters, and information-sharing disciplines, starting from scratch isn’t so crazy.

2. Prioritize your prioritizing.

To help you prioritize, start by setting clear goals. We all tend to do this subconsciously, according to Lane4’s Moorhouse, but writing them down helps you actually achieve them. Here, too, time of day really matters. Prioritizing is one of the brain’s most energy-hungry processes,” writes Rock in his book. That means it’s best done when your mind is fresh and well rested. Allocate time to order your thoughts — dashing off a to-do list of tasks that are “front of mind” is easy, but it won’t break the back of the work you need to cover.

Try organizing your thinking visually. One great way is with Mind Maps, diagrams of ideas linked together in a tree system that help you visualise all of them in context to each other. That way you won’t forget any of your ideas when you have to decide which ones are the most important.

3. Blindside the data (approach it from an unexpected direction).

Break down complex information into sub-groups. Once you’ve determined a goal, you can “chunk” your work into groups to achieve it. You can also do this with your to-do lists.

According to an experiment at Wilfred Laurier University, (It’s About Time: Optimistic Predictions in Work and Love, European Review of Social Psychology) people are generally very bad at estimating when they’ll finish their own work, but good at guessing for others. So gauge your timing by using someone else’s experience. You’ll be less stressed if you’re realistic about your workload.

4. Do less.

To do less, you should delegate more. Too many managers can’t resist the temptation personally to get involved in everything that’s happening. But effective delegation means limiting the amount of information you have to process, as well as empowering those around you. Then, ask for regular briefings.

5. Unplug.

Many managers feel they can’t shut off the fire hydrant of information. But they can take a break from it. “It’s tempting to think that more information makes for better decisions,” says Penny de Valk, CEO of the UK-based Institute of Leadership and Management. “But in most cases, it just erodes your focus. You need time to synthesize information and generate real intelligence.”

That takes discipline, of course, but it’s useful to stop thinking when you are stuck on a project so your brain can recover. “You do need to switch off and rebalance your brain chemistry if you’re going to come up with new ideas,” says Rock. Stefan Sagmeister of New York-based design firm Sagmeister says he so much believes in the power of time off that he closes up shop for 12 months every seven years to pursue “little experiments” that he doesn’t have time for in his daily life.

Wireless Elecricity

Witricity might be coming closer to commercial usage as envisaged in this 10 min video clip, courtesy of TED.com.

Wireless Eletricty

Imagine no wires with your PC or phone charger.

In the Internet age, could there be another MJ?

The extravagant mourning for Michael Jackson has some critics wondering whether the pop singer’s global superstardom could ever be duplicated in an Internet era offering endless entertainment choices.

Jackson’s sudden June 25 death caused an outpouring of praise for the singer, whose 1982 “Thriller” album is the best-selling of all time with estimated sales of 50 million copies. In death, Jackson’s personal scandals no longer seemed so important to his fans and those caught up in the moment.

“In the world of YouTube, no one could occupy the worldwide effect of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller,’” said Jonathan Taplin, a University of Southern California professor.

“I was scouting a movie for Walt Disney in 1983 in Congo, Gabon and Ivory Coast. All you heard on the radio was Michael Jackson,” said Taplin, a former television and film producer.

The Internet has joined the world together in new ways and can elevate unknowns to stardom in an instant, as illustrated by Susan Boyle, the dowdy British singer who shot from obscurity to international fame when her performance on a British talent show was posted on YouTube.

But such fame is fleeting and one Internet sensation is quickly replaced by another. “There will be thousands of Susan Boyles, but no Michael Jacksons or The Beatles,” Taplin said.

Before the emergence of cable TV and then the Internet, tens of millions of people regularly tuned into the same hit shows at the same time. Now, the Internet has flooded the world with choice and diluted audiences.

Dubbed the “King of Pop,” Jackson, 50, sang with his brothers in the “Jackson 5” before achieving solo stardom with hits like “Billie Jean” and “Beat It,” which he promoted with boundary breaking videos on cable music video network MTV.


JACKSON WOULD FIND IT HARDER

But MTV no longer plays hours of prime time music videos and the Internet allows anyone to post songs and videos online. The New York Times’s David Segal wrote that this probably spelled the end of fame on the level achieved by Jackson.

“That’s why even Michael Jackson would have a hard time becoming Michael Jackson these days,” he wrote. “There is something sad about our infinite menu of options. It could very well mean the end of true superstardom.”

Jackson won 13 Grammy Awards and during his lifetime sold an estimated 750 million albums.

Susan Ohmer, who teaches modern communication at the University of Notre Dame, likened Jackson’s fame to that of Britain’s Princess Diana, saying that while people may not have known the real Jackson or Diana, the personas they portrayed on camera captured the world’s attention.

“Michael Jackson came of age when music was becoming more international,” Ohmer said “Like Princess Diana, his style and movements seemed to come alive on camera.”

Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, said it would be more difficult for another global icon to be created in a “fragmented era of modern technology,” — but still possible.

“The Internet has allowed a new route to fame,” Thompson said. “But becoming truly famous is still something that happens very rarely.”

Thompson and Ohmer both pointed to US President Barack Obama as one of the world’s new icons, but based on a record of political achievement and real intellectual power rather than songs and dance moves.

“In any new medium, stars emerge,” Ohmer said. “Celebrities become global icons because they interact with media in ways that fascinate the public and because they speak to us in some way about our lives and times.” — Reuters