". . . The evidence made not the slightest difference."

Found a follow-up to something interesting I heard last year about how people cannot be told the truth if the truth disagrees with their preconceptions.

The same sort of issue — the persistence of misperceptions in the face of evidence — has also been intriguing Brendan Nyhan, of Duke University, North Carolina, and Jason Reifler, of Georgia State University. And they have published two fascinating papers providing the results of experiments that they conducted into whether it is possible to correct such errors of fact.

Their conclusions are not a cause for optimism.

I had heard about their study when I was writing my Deist Miasma series, but they were still working on questions I found too fundamental to include before the answers had been found. This new study found what I had suspected all along:

First, correcting a misperception doesn’t really work when the original misperception fits snugly with the subject’s ideology. Second, and worse still, attempting to correct errors often produces a backlash, with the error becoming more firmly believed. (Emphasis mine.)

Lesson: It really doesn't matter that you are right on the facts; people who don't like the facts simply won't listen.