The scientific fact that facts don't matter turns out to be factually wrong.
Sorry, let me try to put that more clearly. In a superb article at Slate, Daniel Engber revisits the research that concluded that blind partisanship and motivated reasoning are pervasive and that everyone seeks out "facts" that comport with what they already believe. Worse yet, those studies suggested that when highly ideological people are provided simultaneously with misinformation—that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, that vaccines are unsafe, that Barack Obama is a Muslim—and with corrections to the falsehoods, that paradoxically reinforces their prior belief in the false information. In other words, the correction "backfires."
But as Engber reports, scientists have had trouble replicating the research that purported to reveal a post-truth world. Facts turn out to matter after all.
Engber cites a new study, "The Elusive Backfire Effect," soon to appear in the journal Political Behavior. The researchers tested more than 10,000 subjects for backfire responses to corrections of 52 factually wrong statements made by various politicians. The factually wrong statements included Hillary Clinton's claim that gun violence is spiraling; Barack Obama's assertion that discrimination is the sole cause of the gender wage gap; Donald Trump's charge that Mexican immigrants engage disproportionately in criminal behavior; and Ted Cruz's declaration that violence against police officers is rising.
After running their experiments, the researchers report:
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