Reality Increases the belief in the Lie.

I always thought that if you had a story that was told to you and that story was later concretely refuted you would not believe that story. It seemed like the only rational way to live your life. If you have a belief and that belief is proved totally wrong by reality then you should stop believing in that thing. Apparently that might not be how the world works. If we are to believe a series of studies performed on the topic of debunking misinformation. The findings were synthesized in an article by the Washington Post.

The post article discusses what happens when people are informed that things they thought true were lies. The experiments point to a strange phenomenon where presenting proof of the lie actually increases support for the false claim. The findings were not limited to one group but the effect seemed to be most pronounced in Republicans-

Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.

A similar "backfire effect" also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.

That paper is available in pdf here. There have been several speculations and musings about this effect in the blogosphere. Kevin Drum put forth a very common sense theory that makes sense given the common wisdom about the feelings about the "liberal media" and "ivory tower" academics and those damnlibruls in conservative circles.

I'd say it's because right-wing talkers have spent so many years deriding "so-called experts" that they now have negative credibility with many conservatives. The very fact that an expert says a conservative claim is wrong is taken as a good reason to believe the claim. This could probably be tested by doing a study of factual information outside the realm of politics and seeing if conservatives react the same way. If they do, maybe that's support for the generic rigidity theory. If not, it's support for the theory that conservatives simply distrust political elites.

It is something that sounded eminently reasonable to me. Spend over two decades telling people that a group is biased against them and you should start to build up a distrust or hostility to that group through socialization. In accordance with this theory that it is prejudice against the librul elites that causes a distrust of the facts dday over at Hullaballo advanced the idea that this would make fox news an especially powerful tool in combating the lies and smears. As a blatantly conservative outlet it should have much more credibility with the GOP. This led to an elevated importance of the Meghan Kelly's demolition of Tucker Bounds today on Fox News.

...Meghan Kelly's demolition of Tucker Bounds today on Fox News is arguably more important than the independent analyses or comprehensive takes from sources that ought to be trusted more.



You see that Bounds falls back on "you can't trust what Obama will say because he voted to raise taxes 94 times," etc. He's trying to delegitimize anything that comes out of Obama's mouth. And for some wingers, that will be enough. But seeing this argument play out on conservative media is far more likely to be impactful to those who have seen traditional sources trashed and conservative sources elevated and made trusted over the years. "Why is John McCain saying Obama will raise taxes on the middle class when he’s not?" is a pretty compelling argument coming from an embedded conservative trusted source, I would imagine. And Bounds had no answer for it.

We all have the power to be trusted sources in our spheres of influence. Instead of passing around links to the New York Times saying something or Time saying another, the only way to persuade in an environment of diminishing trusted sources is to create your own arguments. Cracks in the facade like Meghan Kelly showed today are not going to be plentiful, important as they may be.

What is interesting though is that Kevin Drum followed up after receiving an email,

Via email, Nyhan tells me that they tried to test my proposition that conservatives don't trust elite experts by varying the source of the refutations. Sometimes it was the New York Times, other times it was Fox News. "Surprisingly," he says, "it had little effect."

Yes it was very surprising to me. What are we to make of this then? Fox News fails to get through to conservatives? The paper actually needs more analysis as the first experiment that showed such strong back lash was not the only experiment that the pair conducted. They followed up to that first experiment and found results that were very different.

However, we again add an interaction between the correction and
ideology in Model 2 and find a statistically significant result. This time, however, the interaction term is negative – the opposite of the result from Study 1...

Unlike the previous experiment, the marginal effect of the correction is negative for individuals who placed themselves to the right of center, meaning that the correction made conservatives more likely to believe that Iraq did not have WMD.

They link this shift to a shift in the Bush policy on Iraq and the movement away from WMDs as a rationale for war. That line became a political liability as the 2006 campaign heated up. If we theorize that the main source of the response was the assault on something the believed to be true, ie a reliance on Bush and belief in his correctness, then the change does make sense as people became less invested in protecting the WMD angle.

It is this separate aspect of psychology discussed in the paper that seems to be getting overlooked. How committed a person is to a particular idea is playing a big factor.

there is a positive, statistically significant interaction between ideology, the correction, and issue importance (p < .02), indicating that the correction failed for conservatives who viewed Iraq as most important. Thus, even an effective correction may be resisted by highly committed subgroups.

The predicted probability that conservatives who chose other issues as most important would “somewhat agree” with the misperception that Iraq had WMD before the invasion decreased from .46 to .25 (p < .05). However, the predicted probabilities of responding “somewhat agree” among those who viewed Iraq as most important increased from .25 to .47 (p < .01) – another backfire effect. Thus, while the correction was more effective than in Study 1, its effects were reversed for the most strongly committed subjects.

People's emotional investment in the topic is increasing their resistance to the facts. They cant bring themselves to admit that they were wrong. That i think is the general thrust of the study. The general republican is more willing to believe that they are right. It is something we see all the time, instead of admitting that something is not working and changing the GOP doubles down. They cannot be wrong so then something else must be at fault.

The study is probably measuring this visceral reaction to the confrontation. People are having their views assaulted and instead of persuading them it is hardening them in the face of that opposition. It is not really a reaction to the media or the information presenter it is a reaction to someone telling you that what you believe is wrong. The more committed you are to a proposition the harder you will cling to that proposition even in the face of overwhelming opposition.

So i must concur with Reifler in that the main effect that appears here is a dogmatism prevalent in the GOP. Taxes and support for Bush and by extension his claims on wmds were two of the core beliefs of the GOP for a significant period of time. Tax cuts still are. Assaulting those appears to have caused a reaction where people reaffirm there beliefs more strongly than before. It is a no, "that cant be right" response. If they hold a belief then any challenge to that belief, no matter the source, draws a strong protectionist response.


There are contemporary political implications to all of this. They involve Sarah Palin and John McCain. We have to watch the foll trends in the favorable unfavorable categories to see if people are adjusting their opinion as the facts about the lies come out. It is very possible we see McCain and Palin solidify their support among the conservatives because of this. They have a strong emotional investment in their beliefs about McCain and Palin and will be very resistant to changing them.

Thus the entire spectacle around the bridge lie may end up Backfiring if the indy's who like palin are too emotionally invested to accept the facts. The conservatives are most likely a lost cause on this front and i do expect that any attacks will only increase their support of the two regardless of their corruption. How committed are the middle indy voters to McCain-Palin? If the answer is not very then the facts will play a huge part other wise we better hope the issues can overcome the personality and lies of McCain.

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A Test of the Media

John McCain lies. A lot. So does Sarah Palin. I know it, you know it, they know it, and the media knows it. Palin and McCain continue to brazenly lie in the faces of millions of Americans. They feel that they can do so with impunity. When the the lies became egregious and the idea of calling them out as liars came up i was someone who thought that tactic would not work. The main reason for this was Biden and Obama's continued insistence on what an honorable guy John McCain is. It was really cutting into that point. Since i wrote that Obama and Biden seem to have stopped with this and are instead calling a lie a lie. So now it becomes a test of the media.

For most of his career the media has loved McCain. As Chris Mathews once said, they are his base. There comes a point however when even the base is going to walk away from you. If the media and the people who populate it have any integrity now will be that time. It is a true test of their willingness to adhere to ethics and morals. John McCain is lying around the clock on every subject under the sun. When confronted he refuses to admit they are lies. So the media has a choice. It can do the correct thing and develop a meta narrative that paints mccain as a serial liar willing to say anything to get elected or it can do nothing and let McCain castrate it.

That is really what this comes down to. It has been building to this for years as the GOP pushes the envelope a little farther each election cycle. They try and get away with more an more, becoming less and less discreet about the lies. They are at the point now where they will say anything with the belief that they can get away with it. The media has so far facilitated this type of blatant falsehood tactic by adhering to the strict "balance" idea of journalism.

The balance idea is really the crux of the issue. Right now the press is bending over backwards to find it. Creating false equivalences between the McCain lies and some minor Obama overstatements. They treat the facts as though they are subject to debate. News paper reporters try to avoid including the actual truth at all costs when it would clearly go against McCain. Instead they will couch the article in the classic he said she said terms. They rely on third party fact checks to carry the truth burden.

Now they are in a place where they are ridiculed from both sides. They have ever shrinking credibility. The McCain campaign is hoping to prove that the press is willing to just take anything in order to preserve the current system. McCain is counting on the dedication to formalism, tradition to keep the media from simply hammering him day after day on his tuzla like lies.

The flip side of this is that here the press has a chance to really redeem themselves and to make a statement about their commitment to democracy. Really thats what they fail when they refuse to simply get the truth out there without the caveats and false balance. By making sure that people know, unequivocally, that McCain and Palin lie about everything they can take a big step back towards being a venerable institution.

This situation tests the media in another way. If they do choose to go after McCain we should be able to see the changes in a number of places. His poll numbers are very high right now, including his personal favorable unfavorables. If the media hits him, and hits him hard, those numbers should drop if you think that the media cycle is really important. If they launch a sustained barage on McCain's honesty and the polls don't move then we know that the media cycle is not that important. That would really benefit the Obama campaign as their strategy is not based on the media cycle.

So the media has the test in front of them, passed out by the McCain campaign. Will they take it and Get an A by jettisoning this fake balance and bringing truth to the masses? Or will it be an F continued capitulation to McCain on his numerous and abhorrent lies? My own prediction is a D+. Some media people will discover integrity but the vast majority will continue the path to media impotency.

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The “McCain is a Liar” attacks will not work.

An unrebutted lie becomes the truth and a rebutted lie is quickly forgotten. That is the operating principle of the McCain campaign. Lie, lie, lie about anything and everything. Get those lies into all available media. Saturate the market with them until they become received wisdom. Force Obama to defend against them all the time. It is a strategy that may be without honor, but it is a strategy that wins. Understanding this, progressives become irate. The blogosphere cries, “Liar, liar, pants on fire!!” Barack Obama says, “you can’t just make stuff up”. Well, with all due respect to Sen. Obama, yes you can. Yes, you can just make stuff up.

To answer why you can “just make stuff up” I answer the question of why calling McCain a liar will not work. There are multiple factors at work that ultimately make it unworkable to attack McCain in this way. The first is that John McCain still has a vast army of water carriers and tire swing riders to excuse him at every turn.

His legion of admirers in the press, while shrinking, is still vast. He benefits from the well known conservative bias in the media. Look what happened when Keith Olbermann decried the politicization of 9/11 at the RNC, he was demoted. Tom Brokaw still calls McCain a Maverick despite all the evidence to the contrary. In addition to the conservatives who populate the networks he also has Fox, a ready made propaganda wing. These groups are almost always willing to propagate his falsehoods without challenge. Calling McCain a liar will just get the person skeptical criticism and questions about why you wont admit the surge worked.

The second reason beyond the press is that Obama has already undermined any character attacks against John McCain. He and Joe Biden do this constantly in a number of ways that are constantly carried about the press. Obama declares,

I have never suggested that Senator McCain picks his positions on national security based on politics or personal ambition. I have not suggested it because I believe that he genuinely wants to serve America's national interest.

Biden does the same thing only a lot worse.

"John McCain is my friend," said the loquacious Blue Hen. "I admire John McCain. I know of no man or woman I have ever met that has more personal courage than John McCain. We have been friends for over 33 years. We have traveled together. When John was Navy liaison he staffed me for three or four years everywhere I traveled in the world.

"Jill and John are good friends," Biden said, referring to his wife Dr. Jill Biden, who had just introduced him. "Matter of fact there’s a best-selling book written about us called The Nightingale's Song about John and some of his graduating class from Annapolis that references Jill and John in the book as good buddies.

"She doesn’t like the reference,'" Biden added, "but John, John’s a great guy. John was staffing me in Greece. I was meeting with the Prime Minister Papandreou and we were supposed to go to this fancy dinner and Jill said 'Do we have to go to this dinner?' And John said, 'No, no, no I know this great place for dinner.'

"And there was a place literally down on the docks, where Zorba lived I think, and so I had to go to the fancy thing and I come back down and I find it, and we’re wandering through these alleys on the dock -- you’re gonna get very angry at this Jill -- but I walk around the corner and there’s these cement tables like down at the shore you know, the cement base ,the cement table, and I walk in and Jill and John are standing up on the table drinking ouzo dancing with one another, and I’m thinking, 'I’ve never trusted John since then, Jillie.'

"But he’s a great guy," Biden said, "and if John called me today and said 'Joe -,' like when they went after John McCain, when Bush went after him in South Carolina with the scurrilous comments they made about his character, I called him and said, 'John, where do you want me? I’m an Al Gore man but where do you want me? I will show up anywhere in America to testify to the kind of man you are.' And he is a good man, he is a good man."

Now there is a school of thought that says you can say nice things about someone then come in and kneecap them. Except, that to do that, you have to say, “Bless his heart” when you compliment the opponent. There are certain signals you have to send to let people know what is coming. Biden does way too much of the soft stuff up front. It effectively makes John McCain immune to character attacks. You cannot call your friend a political opportunist and a liar. Who admits to those types of friends? It just does not fit and people will reject it.

Think about the logic you are asking people to engage in,

Preface I: John McCain is honorable and my friend.
Preface II: Liars are not honorable or my friends.
Result: John McCain is a liar and my friend.

Something is wrong in that construction. It does not make sense. Obama has restricted himself to working with policy. He does this to try and win a mandate to govern with. John McCain knows he cannot fight on policy and has no problems with doing things to get elected. He will just apologize later. Therefore, Obama has unilaterally disarmed himself.

The new politics he advocates restricts Obama. As he freely admits, personal attacks are not a part of it. McCain and the press will hammer Obama on all sides if he deviates from the narrow line of policy. He is boxed in by self created rules and in doing so boxed in everyone else.

Obama will be forced to answer for any of the attacks that others launch on McCain that call him a liar. The press will ask Obama if he believes that McCain is a liar and he will dodge the question or say no. The latter is more probable based on my own observation of how Obama operates and the new politics rules. The effect of this is that 527 style attacks are totally ruled out. Everything has to come from Obama and it is very limiting.

While I believe that John McCain is a political opportunist and that he is lying on an almost constant basis in this campaign, calling him a liar will have limited effect. Obama and team should stop telling people how honorable McCain is. McCain will run from any policy discussion. If Obama is counting on the debates to engage in the policy talk I think he has sorely miscalculated. We know how stupid and inane debates can be and trusting that the moderators will be able to push back against McCain effectively is a huge risk. What is Obama going to do when McCain lies in front of his face to the country during the debate? Will he be able to call such an upstanding, honorable patriot, a liar then? I don’t know.

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