Unreported

This is pretty dire news for fans of objective truth. A University of Michigan study (h/t) appears to shows that facts really don’t matter.

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. 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.

The denial is bipartisan, though there is an interesting difference.

The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.

So liberals are less bitchy in the presence of corrected facts, but they’re still dismissive of them. Determine for yourself if that’s really better, or worse, than the frothing-at-the-mouth conservative wrestling with the encyclopedia.

In my opinion, both responses are pretty shameful, so I’m more interested in what causes this behavior, and how society can reverse this intellectually destructive attitude. Our brains are designed to make “cognitive shortcuts” to cope with information over-saturation, but political scientists argue individuals can overcome this stubborn response if we can make everyone feel good about themselves. This may seem like a silly idealistic desire for an unobtainable utopia, but I’m much more sympathetic to the idea.

In the US, students are channeled through social conditioning factories disguised as schools. But in fact, the goal laid out for pupils is not to learn a lot, but rather to succeed and advance to the best college or university possible. The silent direction here is to advance by any means necessary. Teachers, parents, and counselors don’t need to directly instruct students to compete and cheat because they clearly describe what will happen if the students don’t seize upon every imaginable opportunity and fight for their survival. They’ll fail. They won’t get good jobs. They’ll be poor. They will be invisible men and women.

Basically, instructors and parents link failure to weakness, and part of failure is admitting mistakes. No student is rewarded points on an exam after they got a question wrong, but explained to their teacher how they arrived at an answer incorrectly, and have since corrected their thinking. So the motivation becomes to never be wrong, a nearly impossible task for most students, which is why even very good young people (smart, generally honest, kind) cheat.

A study by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln shows most students cheat, and yet many don’t consider some types of cheating inappropriate. These students may consider a certain amount of cheating to be acceptable because so many of their peers engage in the dishonest behavior. And who are the biggest offenders of all? Business students.

A majority of grad students in business—56 percent—acknowledged that they had cheated at least once, compared with 47 percent in other fields. “Some business students have developed a bottom-line mentality,” explains McCabe. “Getting the job done is what matters; how you do it is less important.”

Getting the job done means getting good grades, not being wrong, and advancing. These business students are the leaders of the future – the ones who will more than likely work to reinforce the extremely wrongheaded ideologies of their predecessors, who recently destroyed the world’s economies.

Just look at what happened when Alan Greenspan – the guru running the economy for nearly two decades – admitted he was wrong on regulation. Nothing changed. It didn’t become a mea culpa moment for the Chicago boys and the neoliberal hawks. If anything, the deregulation crew became more entrenched and more driven to prove their ideologies correct.

So it seems the key in reversing this intellectually destructive trend is to change the way we train children to think about failure. Obviously, most teachers know to teach kids to accept their mistakes, and learn from them, but that’s a tough lesson to reinforce when they have to hand out tiered grades. “It’s perfectly okay if you failed your math test because it’s part of the learning process, now suck on this big, fat F, Timmy. Hope your dad doesn’t beat you this time.”

Contrary to popular belief, schools without grading systems don’t encourage students to be lazy. In fact, the opposite is true. Some of the greatest intellectuals of our time have come out of this system, including Noam Chomsky.

CHOMSKY: I was sent to an experimental progressive school from infancy, before I was two, until about twelve years old, until high school, at which point I went into the academic, college-oriented school in the city.

QUESTION: In New York?

CHOMSKY: In Philadelphia. That experience, both the early experience in the progressive school and the later experience in the academically oriented high school, elite high school, was very instructive. For example, it wasn’t until I was in high school that I knew I was a good student. The question had never arisen. I was very surprised when I got into high school and discovered that I was getting all A’s and that was supposed to be a big deal. That question had never arisen in my entire education. In fact, every student in the school I had previously attended was regarded as somehow being a very successful student. There was no sense of competition, no ranking of students. It was never anything even to think about. It just never came up that there was a question of how you were ranked relative to other students. Well, anyway, at this particular school, which was essentially a Deweyite school and I think a very good one, judging from my experience, there was a tremendous premium on personal creativity, not in the sense of slapping paints on paper, but doing the kind of work and thinking that you were interested in. Interests were encouraged and children were encouraged to pursue their interests. They worked jointly with others or by themselves. It was a lively atmosphere, and the sense was that everyone was doing something important.

Teaching students to be creative, altruistic, independently-minded individuals. What a bizarre concept.

I guess encouraging that kind of independence is dangerous when the destinations for 90 percent of pupils are stifling little cubicles where they’ll remain hunched over keyboards eight-hours a day. It’s best to teach kids they suck early on, so they’ll think they somehow deserve to suffer when they find themselves earning minimum wage, unable to afford health care, or the rent for their studio apartments.

Sadly, the highest echelons of both education and the business world are usually off limits to middle class and working class families anyway. This means students are force-fed the lie that if they behave as uncivilized, cutthroat, cheating monsters, they too can ascend to the glorious domicile of the rich.

The truth is they’ll most likely remain stuck in their respective class, except now they’re forever stymied by a process that leaves them bitter and mentally handicapped. They’re permanently afraid to admit to mistakes or weaknesses lest they be labeled “undesirable.”

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Update: This dangerous thinking is clearly demonstrated by climate change deniers, who still insist the earth is not getting warmer even though NASA just announced the first half of 2010 was the warmest on record, and the scientists involved in the denier’s cause du jour, Climategate, have been cleared of any wrongdoing – first by a British Parliamentary inquiry, and now Pennsylvania State University. Because these findings don’t fit the deniers’ ideologies, they’ll ignore the facts, or refute the inquiry commissions as being somehow biased.