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Are conservatives blind to reality


MichaelWeston

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Or am I, as a liberal, blind to reality and just view the other side as blindly.  

 

Here are a few examples from mother jones and a study that show absurd things that conservatives still believe. 

 

http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/03/brendan-nyhan-backfire-effects-facts

 

1. Tax cuts for the rich lead to revenue. Essentially trickle down economics works. 

2. Obamacare has death panels 

3. Obama is a Muslim and or born in Kenya

4. We needed to go into Iraq because of WMDs and or Al Qaeda

5. Global Warming is a myth perpetuated by the global warming research industry. 

 

The article is below. My questions. 

Is there a disproportionate amount of these type of things on the right or am I just blind to them because of my stance?

Do most conservatives really believe this craziness or are we cherry picking the crazies and lumping them all into a group. Is Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman really their leader or are moderate conservatives really the norm but they just are not cooky enough to get on TV?

 

On Monday, I reported on the latest study to take a bite out of the idea of human rationality. In a paper just published in Pediatrics, Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth University and his colleagues showed that presenting people with information confirming the safety of vaccines triggered a "backfire effect," in which people who already distrusted vaccines actually became less likely to say they would vaccinate their kids.

Unfortunately, this is hardly the only example of such a frustrating response being documented by researchers. Nyhan and his coauthor, Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter, have captured several others, as have other researchers. Here are some examples:

1. Tax cuts increase revenue? In a 2010 study, Nyhan and Reifler asked people to read a fake newspaper article containing a real quotation of George W. Bush, in which the former president asserted that his tax cuts "helped increase revenues to the Treasury." In some versions of the article, this false claim was then debunked by economic evidence: A correction appended to the end of the article stated that in fact, the Bush tax cuts "were followed by an unprecedented three-year decline in nominal tax revenues, from $2 trillion in 2000 to $1.8 trillion in 2003." The study found that conservatives who read the correction were twice as likely to believe Bush's claim was true as were conservatives who did not read the correction.

2. Death panels! Another notorious political falsehood is Sarah Palin's claim that Obamacare would create "death panels." To test whether they could undo the damage caused by this highly influential morsel of misinformation, Nyhan and his colleagues had study subjects read an article about the "death panels" claim, which in some cases ended with a factual correction explaining that "nonpartisan health care experts have concluded that Palin is wrong." Among survey respondents who were very pro-Palin and who had a high level of political knowledge, the correction actually made them more likely to wrongly embrace the false "death panels" theory.

3. Obama is a Muslim! And if that's still not enough, yet another Nyhan and Reifler study examined the persistence of the "President Obama is a Muslim" myth. In this case, respondents watched a video of President Obama denying that he is a Muslim or even stating affirmatively, "I am a Christian." Once again, the correction—uttered in this case by the president himself—often backfired in the study, making belief in the falsehood that Obama is a Muslim worse among certain study participants. What's more, the backfire effect was particularly notable when the researchers administering the study were white. When they were nonwhite, subjects were more willing to change their minds, an effect the researchers explained by noting that "social desirability concerns may affect how respondents behave when asked about sensitive topics." In other words, in the company of someone from a different race than their own, people tend to shift their responses based upon what they think that person's worldview might be.

4. The alleged Iraq-Al Qaeda link. In a 2009 study, Monica Prasad of Northwestern University and her colleagues directly challenged Republican partisans about their false belief that Iraq and Al Qaeda collaborated in the 9/11 attacks, a common charge during the Bush years. The so-called challenge interviews included citing the findings of the 9/11 Commission and even a statement by George W. Bush, asserting that his administration had "never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and Al Qaeda." Despite these facts, only 1 out of 49 partisans changed his or her mind after the factual correction. Forty-one of the partisans "deflected" the information in a variety of ways, and seven actually denied holding the belief in the first place (although they clearly had).

5. Global warming. On the climate issue, there does not appear to be any study that clearly documents a backfire effect. However, in a 2011 study, researchers at American and Ohio State universities found a closely related "boomerang effect." In the experiment, research subjects from upstate New York read news articles about how climate change might increase the spread of West Nile Virus, which were accompanied by the pictures of the faces of farmers who might be affected. But in one case, the people were said to be farmers in upstate New York (in other words, victims who were quite socially similar to the research subjects); in the other, they were described as farmers from either Georgia or from France (much more distant victims). The intent of the article was to raise concern about the health consequences of climate change, but when Republicans read the article about the more distant farmers, their support for action on climate change decreased, a pattern that was stronger as their Republican partisanship increased. (When Republicans read about the proximate New York farmers, there was no boomerang effect, but they did not become more supportive of climate action either.)

Together, all of these studies support the theory of "motivated reasoning": The idea that our prior beliefs, commitments, and emotions drive our responses to new information, such that when we are faced with facts that deeply challenge these commitments, we fight back against them to defend our identities. So next time you feel the urge to argue back against some idiot on the internet…pause, take a deep breath, and realize not only that arguing might not do any good, but that in fact, it might very well backfire.

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There's a huge difference between traditional fiscal conservatives and the bible-thumping social conservatives.

 

Secondly, Mother Jones is hardly an unbiased source of information.  This coming from someone more-or-less in line with their politics, btw.  If I find myself agreeing with a news story, however, I am no longer reading a news story and try to be aware of that fact. You can't agree with a news story. Some shit happened and this is what - that is news. If there's something to agree with you're reading an editorial or, more likely, propaganda. But hey traditional journalism is pretty much dead anyway so whatever.

 

Lastly, the idea that people can be sorted into one of two groups is simplistic in the extreme and only serves to keep the peasants squabbling amongst ourselves so the oligarchs can go on shitting on everyone.

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There's a huge difference between traditional fiscal conservatives and the bible-thumping social conservatives.

 

Secondly, Mother Jones is hardly an unbiased source of information.  This coming from someone more-or-less in line with their politics, btw.  If I find myself agreeing with a news story, however, I am no longer reading a news story and try to be aware of that fact. You can't agree with a news story. Some shit happened and this is what - that is news. If there's something to agree with you're reading an editorial or, more likely, propaganda. But hey traditional journalism is pretty much dead anyway so whatever.

 

Lastly, the idea that people can be sorted into one of two groups is simplistic in the extreme and only serves to keep the peasants squabbling amongst ourselves so the oligarchs can go on shitting on everyone.

 

:41:

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I think I remember a study came out a few years ago that showed there are physiological differences in the brains of conservatives and liberals.

 

Liberals were found to be more reason and logic motivated whereas conservatives tended toward fear and paranoia.

 

So maybe they aren't blind to it, maybe they literally can't see it.

 

That and less educated people tend to be conservative and less educated people are much easier to manipulate.

 

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups!

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I think I remember a study came out a few years ago that showed there are physiological differences in the brains of conservatives and liberals.

 

Liberals were found to be more reason and logic motivated whereas conservatives tended toward fear and paranoia.

 

So maybe they aren't blind to it, maybe they literally can't see it.

 

That and less educated people tend to be conservative and less educated people are much easier to manipulate.

 

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups!

I cannot agree that less educated people tend to be conservative. As T-Dub points out, there's a swath the size of the Grand Canyon between a fiscal conservative and a social one. The problem is the pandering that politicians do to get votes, support lobbyists or to appear sympathetic to a loud, but minority opinion within their constituency. 

 

I am a fiscal conservative with liberal social leanings. The problem is that Republicans aren't real Republicans anymore.

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I have always said.. Libertarianism is the winged Unicorn of American politics.  It doesn't really exist, and what it means is in the eye of the beholder.

 

If I gathered 20 "libertarians" in a room and asked them what the Libertarian party represented I would get 20 different answers, many the polar opposite of others.

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Means on social issues im not a fan of government involvement

On a very basic level I feel exactly the same. The government should not have mandates that involve my sexuality, race, creed, etc. Gay marriage is a huge stumbling block STILL in 2014 for conservatives that reminisce about how the 1950's were when "men were men and blacks knew their place and nobody used potty language" or some similar garbage.

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Means on social issues im not a fan of government involvement

 

 

Ah.  Yeah, ideally I guess I'm not either but in reality I am of the opinion that we would all collectively revert to being complete monsters to one another in every way imaginable without that government involvement.  Without that involvement we'd still be in a bad way, hamfisted as the solutions may be at times.

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