Hillary at Benghazi Hearings

Thanks for sharing this study. It will be helpful when getting into political discussions with friends and family who lean hard right. (Will help me stay cool.) And good for me to know about myself, as well.

BrickPig said:

callista said: This is what frightens me-a giant mass of people for whom no amount of actual information, common sense, or logic can make a dent in their willfull ignorance. I try to avoid these folks in real life, but it scares me to know there are so many of them out there!!

BG9 said:By now these entrenched beliefs shouldn't be a surprise.

Over the years we've seen evidence of willfull ignorance. Its as plain as the noses on our faces when over 40% of Republicans believe Obama is a Muslim and over 20% believe he's not born here.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/?page=full
"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.
“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”
These findings open a long-running argument about the political ignorance of American citizens to broader questions about the interplay between the nature of human intelligence and our democratic ideals. Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas, and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence. In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we vote."

Note that the study did not indicate left or right leaning errors.

essential reading on Benghazi. We are really witnessing a remarkable event in America politics regarding the Benghazi investigations. The Republican party is blatantly using the power of the federal government to try and destroy a political opponent. I think that's how the USSR used to deal with opponents.

ParticleMan said:
Note that the study did not indicate left or right leaning errors.

I can see some of those behaviors in myself. It was an eye-opening read.

Its Hillary's fault that the hearing with her was a circus. She set them up. She embarrassed the republicans and the honorable committee.

How do I know?

Here we have it, directly from the horses mouth, the Honorable REP. DEVIN NUNES (R), CALIFORNIA, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee

NUNES: Well, I think it's important for all of us to remember that Hillary
Clinton is one of -- one of dozens and dozens of witnesses who needed to
be interviewed. Hillary Clinton also is the one who decided she wanted
to have the public display. The other people who have come in have done
it privately. They did not want an open hearing. So clearly she had it
in her mind to make this a political grandstanding occasions, which she
did very well. She's a very good politician.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/face-the-nation-transcripts-october-25-trump-christie-nunes-schiff/

wow. regarding the link I posted above, it's even more eye-opening than I thought. The political machinations of the Gowdy committee are just immense.

Gowdy should stand trial for treason.