The Backfire Effect
| Mon Sep. 15, 2008 11:22 AM PDT
THE BACKFIRE EFFECT....What happens when you tell people that someone has made a false claim? Shankar Vedantam reports:
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.
Italics mine. Nyhan and Reifler found this "backfire" effect only among conservatives. Refutations had little effect on liberals, but it didn't cause them to actively believe the misleading information even more strongly.
Why? Reifler suggests it's because conservatives are more rigid than liberals. Maybe so. If I had to guess, though, 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.
For more, here is Reifler's online Q&A at the Washington Post this morning.
UPDATE: I should add that these weren't the only two questions Nyhan and Reifler asked. They also asked a question about stem cell research in which it was liberals who might be expected to resist the truth. They didn't find any backfire effect there either, though.
UPDATE: The full paper is here. 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."
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Comments
The football/sports analogy is a good one and one that I have thought about in the past, when thinking on modern political discourse.
Much like any team's fans, members of political parties view all actions and discussions through an us-them perspective. And much like most fans, will overlook, ignore, or excuse moral lapses as long as they are winning (sometimes even when they lose). Yes, they will complain or gripe about their own team(party), but will circle the wagons in a heartbeat, if their nemesis jumps in to point out flaws. Critical or rational thinking goes out the window when the spitting starts. It's all subjective at that point.
Conservatives seem more prone to this behavior. This has probably been exacerbated since the days of Nixon, as the 'base' has been prodded to action with fear and anger toward outsiders (intellectuals, gays, urbanites, minorities, foreigners, ?you get the picture).
The biggest difference seems to be associated with how the two major sides approach issues. Conservatives press for black-n-white solutions or single answer solutions. This single-minded purpose is viewed as a virtue, no matter the cost. Liberals/Progressives are known as wishy-washy, but that is just a simple way of saying nuanced. That they see more complexity involved in major issues and have the capability to 'stand in another person's shoes'. Thus they are less reactive to dissenting opinion. Rather it is acceptable, that there are people who disagree.
The football/sports analogy is a good one and one that I have thought about in the past, when thinking on modern political discourse.
Much like any team's fans, members of political parties view all actions and discussions through an us-them perspective. And much like most fans, will overlook, ignore, or excuse moral lapses as long as they are winning (sometimes even when they lose). Yes, they will complain or gripe about their own team(party), but will circle the wagons in a heartbeat, if their nemesis jumps in to point out flaws. Critical or rational thinking goes out the window when the spitting starts. It's all subjective at that point.
Conservatives seem more prone to this behavior. This has probably been exacerbated since the days of Nixon, as the 'base' has been prodded to action with fear and anger toward outsiders (intellectuals, gays, urbanites, minorities, foreigners, ?you get the picture).
The biggest difference seems to be associated with how the two major sides approach issues. Conservatives press for black-n-white solutions or single answer solutions. This single-minded purpose is viewed as a virtue, no matter the cost. Liberals/Progressives are known as wishy-washy, but that is just a simple way of saying nuanced. That they see more complexity involved in major issues and have the capability to 'stand in another person's shoes'. Thus they are less reactive to dissenting opinion. Rather it is acceptable, that there are people who disagree.
This may not have been shown
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue Jul. 21, 2009 2:59 AM PDT.
This may not have been shown during this particular test, but this sort of thing does happen on both sides. I will say that it wouldn't surprise me to find that it is more common on conservative lines though. The boon & bane of the internet is that people tend to gravitate to places & individuals that reinforce their opinions whether or not these things tend to be true or not. As such, this survey makes liberals feel they are right and/or better, in an environment where liberals tend to dominate: the internet.
I'm a libertarian living in the bastion of the democratic state, just try refuting certain finds with alternative evidence. Not even saying it is outright wrong, just bringing up counterpoints.
Just ask about repealing gun control because legally owned guns save more lives than they take(also, concealed carry permit holders are less likely than police officers to commit crimes),
if 'global warming' suddenly became 'climate change' overnight, maybe we do need to know more before we make huge changes in policy,
or if cell phones distract drivers(obviously it does somewhat, that doesn't mean they cannot be used responsibly), then what about police talking on the car radios?
The biggest thing to keep in mind is that statistics are so easily twisted from carefully defining terms to selecting topic or sample groups. Look past what they're telling you and keep an eye on what they want you to believe, then compare the evidence accordingly.
I don't think you understand
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue Jul. 21, 2009 11:24 PM PDT.
I don't think you understand what the word "evidence" means. Libertarians aren't reality based.
Kevin wrote: "Reifler suggests it's because conservatives are more rigid than liberals."
It's because what is called "conservatism" in America today is not really a political philosophy at all. It is a mental disease.
I'm not being "snarky". I mean that literally: so-called "conservatism" is a mental illness. I have actually observed the process of someone I knew becoming a so-called "movement conservative", and their mental degeneration was very apparent. It was not merely a matter of adopting certain political positions or a political philosophy (and indeed, conservatism has no real content other than hatred of "liberals"). It was a matter of the person steadily losing their ability to think, and becoming a mental slave of idiotic bromides and cliches.
Just look at the self-described "conservatives" who post comments here, or at Kevin's old site. They obviously suffer from severe cognitive impairment, and most of them can barely string words together into a coherent sentence, and even then the most they can manage is "you lefties suck" or something similar.
I also think what's going on here is that conservatives can't believe or accept that their policies have been so wrong. It's sort of like the time you're arguing with someone over a topic only to realize in the middle of the argument that you're wrong, and rather than end the argument by admitting you're wrong, you increase the intensity of your argument.
I've long contended that the only thing holding the Republican party together these days is hatred of Liberals. In this case, I don't think that it's so much an issue of not wanting to be wrong as not wanting "Liberals" to be right. And as we all know, facts these days have a Liberal bias, therefore facts must be disregarded.
Submitted by Carl Nyberg (not verified) on Mon Sep. 15, 2008 11:49 AM PDT.
How do you hold the country together as a political entity when one side is so hostile to good-faith discussion of policy?
I mean, other than have a terrorist attack and a war and do everything the conservatives want?
See Bob Altemeyer's work on the RWA (right wing authoritarian) for a full description of this personality group (wikipedia has a good summary). While the RWA is a scale, at its extreme, the RWA personality is indeed cognitively impaired, as well as extremely prejudiced. And unfortunately for the rest of us, they are easily roused by fear and hate, just the sort that is suseptible to the unscrupulous advertiizing unleashed in Nixon's "southern strategy".
It has been decades now, and with each election I get angrier at the Republican party for aggrandizing this group of impaired individuals into a voting block. Any decent society would marginalize all the crazy Christianists like Hagee and the hateful bigots like Limbaugh.
Republicans really stink. Big time.
Submitted by The Pop View (not verified) on Mon Sep. 15, 2008 11:54 AM PDT.
In this case, isn't the strategy for Obama/Biden not a refutation, but a counter-charge? In other words, not the subtleties of being for the Bridge before being against it, but just that she's a liar. Not the details of the sex ed plan, but that McCain no longer has morals and will say anything to win.
Just asking...
Submitted by Lucia (not verified) on Mon Sep. 15, 2008 12:01 PM PDT.
There's a book that came out a couple of years ago called Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) that addresses this very subject, although it suggests that the phenomenon isn't confined to conservatives. In a nutshell, when you're confronted with info that conflicts with your preconceived ideas/worldview, the result is cognitive dissonance; you can resolve that dissonance either by changing your ideas or by disbelieving the info. I'll give you one guess which is easier, and the more severely the new facts undermine your worldview, the greater your incentive to disbelieve them. The bigger the challenge, the greater the investment in holding fast to the incorrect idea.
Why could this be more common among conservatives? I don't know, but some possibilities I can think of offhand: because they've been taught to distrust the "liberal media" and/or "research'; because their worldview is further from reality and thus they're more likely to be presented with facts that challenge it (the Colbert hypothesis); because they place more emphasis on faith than on data; because they've never been taught in school to think analytically -- no, that last one would apply to anyone who's been through what we like to call our education system.
To paraphrase the late Carl Sagan: Just what do conservatives think they are conserving?
Actually today's "conservatives" are for the most part not conservatives at all...if the words mean "prudent, tradition-minded, thoughtful, etc.". These people are mindless radical reactionaries; to understand them I think needs a deep psychological inquiry, e. g. "The Authoritarian Personality" (T. Adorno) or a little book whose author I can't remember but which is called "The True Believer". The latter, if I remember rightly, was much concerned with the radical leftists of the '60s...but the personality type is more a matter of style than content...witness the trek of so many Trotskyists to the neocon side, or David (shudder!) Horowitz.
One outstanding characteristic that is shared by neocon, Christianist, Stalinist, and Maoist alike is the desire NOT to think, to doubt, to adapt to changing circumstance. Whether this is stupidity or rigidity based on sheer inner terror I can't say, but I'm inclined toward the latter. After all, paranoid logic is supremely logical...more so than the chaos of reality in fact...but is worse than useless if based on false premises. The panic that ensues when such a mind is unsure of itself quickly gets covered up by anger, which in turn becomes hatred and even progresses to violence.
Maybe the most flagrant example of where this can lead was the reaction of many die-hard Nazis as the Third Reich was going down in flames (talk about reality intruding!!!). That was an explosion of self-destructive nihilism, taking down what was left after Allied bombing and Russian invasion. Hitler himself, in his final testament, rejected the German people as deserving of their fate because they had shown themselves unfit.
It is a long way from today's Republican living dead to the Nazis...but there is a well-traveled road between them.
Interesting, but if the implication is to somehow soft-peddle the truth to conservatives in the hopes of easing them away from Bushism, forget it. It's them not the rest of the world that has comes to terms with reality.
To avoid a fact-based argument won't work because at some point you have to ask these nimrods to choose against Bush et al, and the 64% who rejected the Duelfer report will never do that. Instead they take comfort in Rush Limbaugh's assurance that despite the critics they are right.
This part of the Right will never go away, but they can be driven back to the margins.
I tend to think of conservative as being like football fans. Let's say the Cleveland Browns have a 2-12 record. If you ask most football fans, they'll say the Browns suck, because they do. But no amount of statistics will ever convince a Browns fan that they suck. In football, we root for our team and rarely acknowledge reality. If fact, we get angry and fight back when someone say our team sucks. And as fans, we don't really have any consistent philosophy. If we have a great quarterback, then we insist that passing is very important. When we have a great linebacker, we say that defense matters more. The only principle we concern ourselves with is wanting our team to win.
Why does Kevin, or Obama, or anybody else care what "conservatives" think? They're going to vote for troglodytes whatever we do.
What I want to know is, How do independents or the undecided view these things? They and the Democrats make up about 60-65% of the population. That's good enough for me.
James Fallows, in a fascinating 2003 Atlantic essay, notes that Israeli investigations into the death of Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Dura, suggesting that he may not have been killed by Israeli fire, simply reconfirmed Palestinian beliefs that he had. Entrenched beliefs are entrenched further by expert debunking precisely because the entrenched believer suspects the debunking as biased, conspiratorial, or worse.
Kevin wrote: "Reifler suggests it's because conservatives are more rigid than liberals."
I tune out whenever I encounter the following claims:
A) Group X is just a bunch of haters!
B) Group X is more intellectually rigid than
C) Group X are faggots!
D) Group X are warmongerers!
E) Group X is more intellectually flexible than
F) Group X is more empathetic than
G) Group X don't have the temperament to run companies, wars, countries
I tune out since these arguments are largely ad hominem and any research is almost always dubious and interpreted over broadly.
This being an investigative journal, you may wish to learn how to examine these claims....
Then you explain republicans
Submitted by americanadian (not verified) on Sun Jul. 19, 2009 4:13 PM PDT.
Then you explain republicans how??
I have seen this phenomenon in my parents who, sad to say, only trust Rush Limbaugh and whoever fills in for him. (when he is out of drugs?)
I hate to have to say this and insult my own folks -- but this study proves comedian Ron White's claim:
"You can't fix stupid. There ain't a pill you can take."
Submitted by Stewart Dean (not verified) on Mon Sep. 15, 2008 12:54 PM PDT.
It isn't backfire, it's that the neo-conservatives have a faith: they believe and rational discourse does not apply.
I'm not saying this sarcastically or dismissively; I am stating a fact.
They will have to spend a long, long time in the wilderness. And then they will say, paraphasing Gus Hall, that neo-conservatism didn't fail, it was never actually tried. The True Believer's faith never falters.
You thought we had a separation of church and state, but the neo-conservatives have created a church of politics.
Here's an underreported aspect of one of McCain's false claims. Not only was the Illinois "sex ed for kindergartners" bill not anything outrageous, it's also current Bush administration policy. The CDC funds an organization which designs guidelines for state boards of education on HIV prevention education, and those guidelines state very clearly that the program should be taught at all levels, i.e., from kindergarten onward. Follow my "here's" link for more info.
It is what esaud said. There is a class of people who are authoritarian followers and one of their 'quirks' is that questioning what they believe causes them to believe it even more.
In addition they cannot really 'reason' in any way like what we usually mean by reasoning. Their compartmentalized minds are very capable of holding two conflicting opinions at the same time, believing them both to be true, and unable to see the contradiction in what they are doing.
For a trivial example, they may believe that 'the early bird gets the worm' and also that 'all good things come to he who waits.'
When they see something that happens they will, after the fact, assign the slogan that fits the event and think they have actually thought things through.
Some of them are fairly bright and may be able to parrot back talking points or the like but once you get past that they break down and are unable to follow any chain of reasoning. At that point the get huffy and defensive and cling to their faulty thinking all the harder.
Right now the make up about half the GOP base, or 25% of the voting population, so when we concede that group to the GOP we are left with needing to get two out of three of each of the remaining voters.
This terminology needs to become common knowledge so we can quit lumping everyone under the GOP group into the same group and using one name such as 'conservative' to describe all of them.
Also, as times get tough the authoritarian streak becomes more predominant in all of us so it seems we are entering a time when the authoritarian followers will be harder and harder to fight.
I've long contended that the only thing holding the Republican party together these days is hatred of Liberals. In this case, I don't think that it's so much an issue of not wanting to be wrong as not wanting "Liberals" to be right. And as we all know, facts these days have a Liberal bias, therefore facts must be disregarded.
Chris,
No, it is not hatred, it is primarily fear. Authoritarian followers have a double dosing of fear which gives them a triple dosing of self-righteousness and together those combine into the righteous wrath which they crave as strongly as any addict.
That is where the hatred of liberals come in. People like Limbaugh pump up their fear and then give them a target for their self-righteous wrath.
I think there was some other leader, someone in history, who would do this kind of thing but I can't seem to recall who that was.
Well, no matter, maybe this is the first time in history this has ever happened.
Hedley,
This is caused by GOPers being selfish, while progressives are more happy to see money going to those lower on the great rungs of life. GOPers think only about lower taxes. Nada mas.
You are talking about the second half of the GOP, the selfish half. The authoritarian followers are actually pretty generous and work very hard for their own causes. The other half of the party is mostly formed on selfishness or, in the case of the top dogs, social dominators who want most of all to rule and are willing to use the others to that reslut.
Submitted by Jassalasca Jape (not verified) on Mon Sep. 15, 2008 1:48 PM PDT.
Sounds like cognitive dissonance at work to me.
The football/sports analogy is a good one and one that I have thought about in the past, when thinking on modern political discourse.
Much like any team's fans, members of political parties view all actions and discussions through an us-them perspective. And much like most fans, will overlook, ignore, or excuse moral lapses as long as they are winning (sometimes even when they lose). Yes, they will complain or gripe about their own team(party), but will circle the wagons in a heartbeat, if their nemesis jumps in to point out flaws. Critical or rational thinking goes out the window when the spitting starts. It's all subjective at that point.
Conservatives seem more prone to this behavior. This has probably been exacerbated since the days of Nixon, as the 'base' has been prodded to action with fear and anger toward outsiders (intellectuals, gays, urbanites, minorities, foreigners, you get the picture).
The biggest difference seems to be associated with how the two major sides approach issues. Conservatives press for black-n-white solutions or single answer solutions. This single-minded purpose is viewed as a virtue, no matter the cost. Liberals/Progressives are known as wishy-washy, but that is just a simple way of saying nuanced. That they see more complexity involved in major issues and have the capability to 'stand in another person's shoes'. Thus they are less reactive to dissenting opinion. Rather it is acceptable, that there are people who disagree.
It is clear from this report that damaging information, even if refuted, has a lingering effect on those who are predisposed to believe, and that this effect occurs in both liberals and conservatives. The extra finding that on certain issues, refutation has a backfire effect on conservatives, causing them to believe even more strongly, is kind of interesting, but it really isn't clear whether there are a large number of instances of this effect among conservatives, or that there can't be instances of this effect among liberals. So I would hesitate to draw any conclusions. Of course, hesitating to draw conclusions from small sample sizes, or from sketchy newspaper summaries of research reports, probably makes me unqualified to blog, and definitely makes me unqualified to be a blog commentator.
Submitted by elmo (not verified) on Mon Sep. 15, 2008 2:14 PM PDT.
The study proves conservatives are retarded. That's why I call them Retardicans...
For anyone wondering what makes the wingnuts tick, I second the recommendation to Altemeyer.
One other point about it. The personality type Altemeyer spotlights exists in all societies, and probably can't be "cured" any more than lefthandedness or baldness or packrat-ism can be cured. Instead we have to find a way to live with these people while not allowing them to take political control (where they inevitably produce disasters).
Unless the GOP can be reformed so as not to constitute a RWA platform, its continued existence will threaten the well-being of the the nation and the world.
I remember an old definition of intelligence, being the rate that we learn when presented with new facts. I used to think intelligence ran from zero to some positive number. It is clear there is a negative extension of the scale, call it anti-learning.
This "backfire" can be traced historically back to Davy Crockett's time when American's indulged themselves in the ol'Southwest Brag! The more exaggerated and unbelieveable the better.
With such "brags" no expert is necessary. It has become part and parcel our cultural attitudes toward thoughtful engaged "experts." -Kevo
It would be interesting to get some interview data on what was going on in their minds during this backfire process. Maybe ask them to write out why they think whatever they think after they answer the yes/no question.
Perhaps being exposed to the evidence reminds them of other things they have heard from sources they like better hardening their position. Perhaps they would make anti-expert comments. It could be interesting.
I also highly recommend reading "The Authoritarians" to help understand what's going on here:
http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/TheAuthoritarians.pdf
Here's a relevant passage from page 93:
"But if the arguments against you become overwhelming and persistent, you either concede the point--which may put the whole lot at risk--or you simply insist you are right and walk away, clutching your beliefs more tightly than ever.
That's what authoritarian followers tend to do. And let's face it, it's an awfully easy stand to take. You have to know a lot nowadays to stake out an intelligent, defendable position on many issues. But you don't have to know anything to insist you're right, no matter what. Dogmatism is by far the best fall-back defense, the most impregnable castle, that ignorance can find. It's also a dead give-away that the person doesn't know why he believes what he believes."
Fostert beat me to it. There really is a sense of our side vs. their side in the right wing. Moreover, information is not relevant to them. They are driven by some sort of emotional energy. So, to loosen them up we need an anthropologist or psychologist to understand their motivations so that we can speak to them in terms they will understand. Simply giving them facts is not a way to talk to them.
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.
Already been done. See Evolution Denial & Global Warming Denial.
The rigid mindset just causes the eyes to shut, the jaws to be clenched and the buttcheeks to be squeezed together harder. They just, just, just know that certain realities aren't true because they just, just, just can't be true because the verdict needs to be made first. Evidence, schmevidence.
Republicans, like the Southern Religious Right, aren't wrong that there are problems in our society. They see it up close: divorce, child pregnancy, drug addiction, etc. They see it up close and don't think much about why it's happening. They don't connect the dots to learn WHO is causing their problems. They just assume it's naturally occurring or that the "evil Liberals" are the cause. After all, it IS the Liberals who are for Freedom which allows these things to happen. So, their natural instinct is to fear that kind of Freedom and Liberals who support it. They want the restrictions the Bible and Fundamentalism offer and they want politicians who propose strong medicine to restore the kind of America they have always dreamt of. Their American Dream is slipping away and they want their America back.
Given this logic it's impossible for a Liberal to ever become "the answer".
Close to that is the Reagan idea that 'government is the problem'. They then link 'big government' and 'elitist Liberals' and voila there's the enemy.
But, the Conservatives don't ever cure their ills either. They just pander to them endlessly.
Under Bill Clinton (that Evil Elitist Liberal) there were fewer abortions than under prior Bush administration. How are they going to reconcile with that? They just ignore it. It's an anomaly that doesn't make sense to them. It's their logic or nothing.
So, Democrats, always labeled as Liberal regardless of what they espouse, are always the enemy with these people whose world-view is close to home and manipulated by Republican politicians.
I think conservative values and principles don't function that way we expect them to.
They are not criteria for judgment. They are a filter, with the primary purpose of separating people out: those "we" hate and resent, those "we" identify with.
I've come to this because they are so utterly, transparently, hypocritical.
Cindy McCain has a history as a drug addict and thief. If Michelle Obama had such, he wouldn't be able to run for prez.
Palin has a tiny Down's baby. If she were a Dem, they would be trouncing her morals for running for this high powered job.
Their values, aren't. It's just a filter for hate.
This work suggests, as does Bob Altemeyer's work on authoritarian personality, that the right does not have a mirror image on the left. What we call 'left' and 'right' are actually two different ways of processing information. Perhaps there are more than two camps here; certainly there is a spectrum. When authoritarian tests were given in the old Soviet Union it turned out the so-called right-wing authoritarians were the staunch communists. It is not ideology that matters- if you are for the rich or poor, but one's relationship to orthodoxy and dogma. In the US is just happens to be that capitalism is the orthodoxy. So 'liberals' are just not particularly dogmatic or authoritarian.
Submitted by Cap'n Chucky (not verified) on Mon Sep. 15, 2008 6:45 PM PDT.
I'm sure everybody's left the building by now, but if anybody's still here, it seems pretty clear that right-wingers aren't just stupid: they're stupid because they want to be.
The social psychology literature has a lot on what makes conservatives such, um, problematic people. They have a consistently higher fear of death, they believe those in authority must be right (and those who challenge it are evil) because the world simply must be a just place, etc., etc.
How to apply this: giving them a regular (figurative) beat-down to convince them that liberals are actually powerful.
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."
Of course not. The point is not their suspicion of liberal sources, the point is their suspicion and discounting of anyone who Thinks They Know More Than Me.
The term you're looking for, which is practically a defining element of conservatism (and in its extreme form, of fascism) is "anti-intellectualism." Heard of it before, yes?
Years ago, I was in Pakistan when terrorists attacked the Qaaba in Mecca. At first it was generally assumed that Americans or at least westerners were responsible, but there was no rioting nor much hostility. Then the BBC radio reported correctly that the terrorists were islamic. This sparked a round of anti-american rioting, including the burning of an american library in Rawalpindi. The reason was that the idea that islamic terrorists had desecrated the Qaaba was unthinkable, so the BBC report of islamic terrorists was taken as proof positive that the Americans were behind the attack. Some people will never be convinced by logic. Palin and McCain are trolling for exactly that same reality-resistant mindset with their continued insistent lying.
Conservatives- or at least modern conservatives- are by their nature much more likely to be ideologues than today's liberal. A liberal mindset is more open to new ideas, new interpretations, new explanations, and new facts. An ideologue, on the other hand, can only believe those facts which confirm the ideology. The ideology is the Truth; facts which are inconsistent with this Truth are suspect and cannot be correct, for if they were, the Truth would no longer be true.
Hey look, it's the anonymous OhNoNotAgain, so scared of his viewpoints that he can't even use a first name.
Well, I'll happily have a whose more liberal, who has a more flexible dickfight with you.
To play epsychiatrist, since you feel the need to attack anyone who disagrees with you as an other, (in my case, your silly claim I am either a McCainiac or a Republican), I think it's pretty clear between the two of us, who is more flexible and who is more "rigid."
See, I think everyone should be skeptical, and especially skeptical of some political scientists claim regarding the psychological makeup of Democrats vs. Republicans.
Now you can swallow that shit hook, line, and sinker, and consider that that makes you a good Democrat. Me, I'm from Berkeley where we understand the importance of "Question Authority"
(Besides, you're talking Brendan Nyhan here, why not go back to 2004 and see how he fits in on your scale)
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