Misinformation and Barack Obama
BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, July 13 2010
At Google headquarters in 2007, then-candidate Barack Obama talked about how a President Obama would use the web to counter misinformation.
For the Boston Globe, Joe Keohane has put together a really interesting, if frightening, run-down of scientific research on how tightly humans cling to bad information, even in the face of correcting facts. (via Matt Yglesias)
Now, as it happens, last night I had occasion to re-watch Barack Obama's 2007 trip to Google's California headquarters where the presidential hopeful discoursed on a rather similar thing. (Starting at about the hour mark.) Candidate Obama strongly expressed his belief that part of the power of the American President is an ability to help citizens separate fact from fiction. Generally speaking, said Obama, "if you give them good information, their instincts are good and they will make good decisions." Take passing health care. Obama said that, as President, "if they start running 'Harry and Louise' ads, I'll make my own ads or I'll send out something on YouTube. I'll let 'em know what the facts are."
The crowd at Google loved Obama's confidence. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt had himself a belly chuckle. It probably didn't hurt that YouTube is a Google product. But Keohane has to make you wonder how spot-on Obama's intuition is here. Obama talked at Google about returning facts, science, and research to a centerplace in American life. Well, the scientific research highlighted by Keohane finds that misinformation is actually pretty tenacious. In some cases, in fact, demonstrating to an audience that what they hold to be true is in fact factually inaccurate only serves to reaffirm that wrong understanding:
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.
Of course, there are a number of complicating factors when the "corrector" of bad facts is the President, or the White House. For one thing, in many cases, especially in politics, it's somewhat less relevant what individuals think about the validity of some piece of contested information than it is what certain individuals think about it. Members of the press, for example, are probably properly understood to be the audience for some of the corrective measures that Obama and his team have tried thus far. Fight the Smears, for example, has a component of being a difficult to avoid online check on wrong stories for rushed reporters.
But how well these things work is an open question. Obama's tried other ones, of course. "Harry and Louise" didn't have much of a role in health care reform this time around, but critical emails seemed to. Among the web-based tricks and tools the White House tried in response was something called By the Numbers, which boiled down the health care debate to simple figures. Even the White House blog has been called into service by Obama, for example when administration officials went after the car website Edmunds.com for reporting that Cash for Clunkers had no meaningful effect on the economy.
Someone should do some research on that: what effect, if any, there is on the strength of misinformation when the corrective force is the President of the United States.