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well, firstlyAny comments?
so I'm not surprised at all, and my experience is that is the same thing which drives religion or football team worship.A timely piece of research from a professor of politics in the United States may throw some light on just why election campaigns tend to be vacuous, fact free zones and why political manipulation is so effective.
Georgia State University's Professor Jason Reifler conducted a series of experiments that looked at whether citizens changed their views when they were presented with the correct facts.
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So we know that our ignorance about certain issues makes it easy for us to be misled but your research shows that we don't necessarily change our minds even when we have the facts
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So not only did they not believe the facts that you were putting before them; they actually reinforced the incorrect views they originally had.
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When you believe something about the political world or even about the non-political world and it's really important to you, when you're told that you're wrong that can be a pretty threatening experience.
People don't like being wrong. They have trouble adjusting to it and incorporating new information.
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The downside of the research that my co-author and I have done to date is that it's very depressing. We don't have a terribly good understanding yet of ways to try and improve public debate, to try and improve political dialogue.
If it's any consolation the reason that we got into this line of research is that we actually someday hope to be able to suggest ways that will improve public debate.
But so far in all honesty we're a bit discouraged.