Assumptions dressed up in a lab coat

An interesting study that highlights the blinders worn by all people including academic researchers. E! Science News reports on research purporting to demonstrate the difficulty of getting people to change their mind. The article is False beliefs persist, even after instant online corrections. I don’t disagree with the conclusion of the researchers:

Garrett said the results of this study cast doubt on the theory that people who believe false rumors need only to be educated about the truth to change their minds.

"Humans aren't vessels into which you can just pour accurate information," he said.

"Correcting misperceptions is really a persuasion task. You have to convince people that, while there are competing claims, one claim is clearly more accurate."

I believe all that to be true but I don’t believe that their experiment actually supports the conclusion.

Here is the description of the experiment:

The experiment was designed to see what would happen when participants read false statements copied from a "political blog" (actually text prepared by the researchers) about the issue of electronic health records.

While some of the information, collected from news stories and government sources, was correct, the researchers also inserted several false statements about who was allowed access to these records. For instance, the message falsely claimed that hospital administrators, health insurance companies and even government officials had unrestricted access to people's electronic health records.

You probably see the problem right away. Take the example of the “false” statement that “health insurance companies and even government officials had unrestricted access to people's electronic health records.” Clearly the academicians interpret that because health insurance companies and government officials aren’t supposed to have access to these records, then they don’t. This is empirically false. There are lots of things that aren’t supposed to happen but do happen with regularity.

So how are the participants in the experiment supposed to be reacting.

This an issue of theory versus experience, of definitions and assumptions. For an academic mind it may be believable that if there is a rule against something then if anyone else, based on their experience, observes that the rules don’t determine reality, then they are wrong.

But who is wrong here? The theorist that believes rules determine reality or the pragmatist who bases their assessment of reality not on the rules but on experience.

So when an academic corrects someone by providing them further affirmation of the theory and the participant doesn’t change their mind because nothing has been done to change their experience, is the academic correct in concluding that participant minds aren’t easily changed? I would say no. I would argue that the academic has utterly failed to understand the nature of the process and they are blinded by their own prejudices and unstated assumptions.

Let’s imagine an alternative example. The IRS has elaborate security precautions in place to protect personal financial data from hackers and from inappropriate use by government employees. There are easily a dozen or more reports a year of instances, where, despite the precautions, personal records are compromised or stolen, sometimes millions of records at a time and are accessed inappropriately by IRS agents, other agencies, and by politicians. It happens all the time even though it should not.

The academic knows that the precautions are in place and that they ought to work. Say someone reads of these multiple instances where the security guidelines are breached. The academic reminds them correctly that there are all these security regulations. If the subject still believes that hackers and government employees can access personal records, would we really judge, as the researchers in this exercise have, that the subject was resistant to being corrected? I wouldn’t come to that conclusion. Reality trumps theory.

We see this all the time in the field of psychology and sociological research. The embedded assumptions of the researchers determine the outcome. So it sounds like science, kind of looks like science, is reported as science but all it is ignorance, prejudice, and assumptions dressed up in a lab coat.