"Facts don't necessarily have the power to change our minds". (great article with enormous implications for 9/11 Truth))

Best Opinion: Boston Globe

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/

"It's one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one," says Joe Keohane in The Boston Globe. "'Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,' Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789." The firm American belief in this notion is at the heart of our democracy. We believe that "knowledge is the best remedy" to "ignorance and misinformation," and that if people have the facts they'll be "clearer thinkers and better citizens." Unfortunately, we may have been wrong all along. Here, an excerpt:

"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....

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper."

Read the full article at The Boston Globe.

How about a link?

How about a link?
No Link. The Link is missing. The Missing Link!

How facts backfire

"How facts backfire - Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains"

Good article, but it ends with this:

"Getting a politician or pundit to argue straight-faced that George W. Bush ordered 9/11, or that Barack Obama is the culmination of a five-decade plot by the government of Kenya to destroy the United States — that’s easy. Getting him to register shame? That isn’t."

This highlights a basic assumption behind the article, that what different people consider the verifiable truth depends on where you get your evidence. In other words, you can't escape from trusting someone, even if it is only trusting yourself.

I found this article by another route, via The Mind of the Denier at climatecrocks.com. This includes a video of John Dean discussing research on the authoritarian mind, and a reference to another article Truth is in the Bias of the Beholder which reviews some strategies for dealing more effectively with those who are biased. Here are a couple of my favorite points, which are highly relevant for this community:

* Debunking myths may actually reinforce them!

* Make your information easy to process and it will be accepted as having more value.

One thing I hope people here are aware of is that the myth of the official story is so strong in most people's minds that they see us as being deluded by fiction rather than the other way around. It takes courage to even look at contrary facts, to consider that they might be the real facts rather than myths of mere conspiracy theories, and to question what you firmly believed were facts.

done

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Odd bit at the end

"Getting a politician or pundit to argue straight-faced that George W. Bush ordered 9/11... — that’s easy."

If only! Granted, I figure the orders came down from over Bush's head, but the suggestion that he was behind it is at least closer to the truth than the nonsense our politicians and pundits spout.

Not only won't facts necessarily change some folk's

minds, but some folks refuse to look at the facts!

Emotional Impact is a tool when communicating facts...

Facts alone are just data.
During a communication, the impact from facts comes with an emotional (or motion) tier.
Attached to 9/11 is a dynamic emotional (and motion, i.e. action as in "go to war") spectrum.
Some 9/11 films also artfully inspire huge emotional impact when communicating facts about 9/11.

We should use facts, but not overlook effective means of communication and marketing when we relay those facts.

Posted the following on the Boston Globe site

"Getting a politician or pundit to argue straight-faced that George W. Bush ordered 9/11"

In fact, the entire February issue of The American Behavioral Scientist journal is devoted to SCADs - State Crimes Against Democracy - focusing on 9/11 and everything it has been used as a legitimation for.

The articles in the journal refer heavily to the work of independent 9/11 researchers, including the peer-reviewed article "Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe" by an international group of scientists, published in Bentham's chemical physics journal.

Laurie A. Manwell's article in the American Behavioral Scientist is especially relevant to this Boston Globe article. Quoting from the summary of her article:

"Protecting democracy requires that the general public be educated on how people can be manipulated by government and media into forfeiting their civil liberties and duties. This article reviews research on cognitive constructs that can prevent people from processing information that challenges preexisting assumptions about government, dissent, and public discourse in democratic societies. Terror management theory and system justification theory are used to explain how preexisting beliefs can interfere with people’s examination of evidence for state crimes against democracy (SCADs), specifically in relation to the events of September 11, 2001, and the war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq. Reform strategies are proposed to motivate citizens toward increased social responsibility in a post-9/11 culture of propagandized fear, imperialism, and war."

Propagandized fear can make people forget many things - such as the facts that the post-9/11 anthrax attacks, framing the Muslims, led to a U.S. military laboratory, while the White House started to take Cipro against anthrax on the very day of 9/11, weeks before the anthrax attacks - while the voluminous Patriot Act legislation, legitimated by 9/11, was already waiting on the shelve by 9/11 - and was passed the next month, after the two Senate leaders trying to halt it had received the anthrax letters.

I heartily recommed reading the articles in the above-mentioned issue of the ABS.

All true

It's a good article that corroborates with an article I wrote nearly a year ago.

http://arcterus911.blogspot.com/2009/11/whos-real-skeptic.html

And yes, it does have huge implications for 9/11 Truth. But that goes both ways. Although it does mean that the debunkers are susceptible to ignoring facts to support a flawed conclusion, it also means the same thing for our side. Who's to say we're not deluding ourselves? At some level of our subconscious we are biased, it may be only a small bit of bias but it's there. This means total objectivity is impossible. I like to think that I'm as objective as I can possibly be, and I've come to the conclusion, having gone through all the evidence, that there were government forces directly responsible for 9/11 in some way, shape, or form. But I don't delude myself into thinking that I know this for a fact. We all interpret evidence differently. I'm no fool, and I understand that the contents of this article are no more helpful for the 9/11 Truth Movement than they are for any other side of the issue, or any issue.