The backfire effect has had a lot of airplay. I've just now made a quick scan of the study, but not read in detail (https://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan-reifl

The backfire effect has had a lot of airplay. I've just now made a quick scan of the study, but not read in detail (https://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf https://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf). I don't think the paper justifies its conclusion that "corrections [..] increase misperceptions among the group in question". From the paper, "In other words, the correction backfired – conservatives who received a correction telling them that Iraq did not have WMD were more likely to believe that Iraq had WMD than those in the control condition." (https://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf https://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf) I don't think that connection flows. Rather, I see this: when you take people who have developed political opinions, and act in a way that suggests insult to their world-view, some will react with defiance/sabotage. The study identifies the pre-existing political leanings of the subjects. Hence, background work has been done to understand a subject's political persuasion, and the subject knows they have been profiled for this. Then they isolate an issue which some subjects will know to be contentious across liberal/conservative lines, and present the subject with a position. This act (focusing on a vulnerable issue and then preventing evidence that indicates a clear conclusion) alienates the project from the subject, and sets them up to be from a rival worldview. Some subjects, particularly the more politically-aware subjects, will be speculating on the purpose of the study. Then the study asks the subject to - essentially - calculate one plus one one on the issue, towards a conclusion that supports the rival worldview. The people running these studies will be identified by the participants as members of the intelligentsia. That will have a bearing on subject behavior, and will further encourage defiance in some subjects. In my scan, I didn't see signs of effort made to disguise or water down the focus of the study.