Did the boomerang theory boomerang?

January 4, 2018 7:18 AM

"the best evidence against our paper is that it keeps getting rejected." Daniel Engber explores the post-fact research and finds some significant opposition. Previously (SLSlate)
posted by doctornemo (21 comments total)

That piece is way, way, way too long. He needed an editor to tell him to cut to the chase. I care about this issue, and yet I got bored halfway through and backed out. (And no, I don't have a short attention span, I've read War and Peace three times.)
posted by languagehat at 8:16 AM on January 4, 2018 [10 favorites]

I think the length makes it more effective if you're inclined to disbelief - at first you resist the idea that your prior knowledge of the boomerang effect might be wrong, by the time you get to the end you've heard the modified claim so many times that it starts to seem more plausible.

And the most important part of the article is at the end:

Today’s proclamations about the end of facts could reflect some wishful thinking, too. They let us off the hook for failing to arrive at common ground and say it’s not our fault when people think there really is a war on Christmas or a plague of voter fraud. In this twisted pipe-dream vision of democracy, we needn’t bother with the hard and heavy work of changing people’s minds, since disagreement is a product of our very nature or an unpleasant but irresolvable feature of our age.
posted by subdee at 8:51 AM on January 4, 2018 [10 favorites]

My first thought is to wonder whether the so-called boomerang effect depends on a (real or perceived) ideological charge to the underlying claim.

Maybe our beliefs don't boomerang regarding politically neutral statements like "Humans can regrow the tips of fingers and toes after they have been amputated," but when exposed to statements such as "Barack Obama is not a Muslim," some people tend to overcorrect for their distrust of what they perceive as the other side.

Is it possible that people tend to give negative weight, rather than zero weight, to statements when they believe that the person making the statement may be motivated to lie? Could this partially explain the disparity between the results of different studies about the boomerang effect?

Continuing to speculate: Is it possible that we learn this "negative-weight" strategy from face-to-face interpersonal interactions in our everyday life (a context in which it might be the correct strategy), and erroneously apply it to calculated public statements and published media?
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 8:56 AM on January 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

I teach, and it's easy to feel that teaching is ineffective when students are failing to grasp obvious concepts even after hearing and seeing them demonstrated a million times. But I'm not doing my job as an educator if I give up. What often happens is that months after the test where students failed to recall x, y or z, they will surprisingly turn out to have been paying attention the whole time - just with some latency between the presentation of the idea and the time they adopted it and added it to their storage vault of ideas. So I absolutely believe it is important to continue to fight misinformation even the results don't seem to be working.
posted by subdee at 8:59 AM on January 4, 2018 [20 favorites]

What is interesting to me is that the author mentions the tendency of studies to cherry pick statistically significant results in their experiment and recreation of said experiments, and could it not be this tendency itself that has led us to a post-truth age?
posted by ionfarmer at 9:51 AM on January 4, 2018

Whether or not a denial can boomerang in the strict sense of making someone's preexisting belief stronger, it can definitely introduce a belief/scandal/conspiracy to someone who hadn't heard of it before, and that person might make a 'where there's smoke there's fire' determination that there must be some kernel of truth despite the denial.

Like, if the newspapers tomorrow strongly deny that pineapple on pizza reacts to create poisonous gas, wouldn't you be a tiny bit suspicious that maybe the gas isn't strictly poisonous, but something is going on.
posted by Pyry at 10:20 AM on January 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa. Whoa!! WHOA. This is a fabulous article-- I mean not just to take on the failed replications of the backfire effect but also the failed replication of online partisan sorting and the detailed investigation as to how powerful motivated reasoning is.

Brendan Nyhan is really a hell of a guy. The way he's supporting replications and debunkings of his own work and detailed critiques of how big various cognitive effects really are is pretty stand-up; in general it feels like a lot of scientists who are interested in cognition have been willing to accept the painful reality that we know a lot less than we thought we did about it, and that's in itself kind of encouraging to me.
posted by peppercorn at 10:40 AM on January 4, 2018 [14 favorites]

Indeed. Long but well worth the read. Science isn't science if it's not replicable. I just finished Benjamin Franklin's 'Autobiography' and there's a bit where he receives a scathing denouncement of his publications on electrical experiments, and decides to not even reply, being assured that the replicability of his work will be the best defense. Which it was. Just gotta have folks doing the replicating.

And I do think the "freakonomics" bent of modern click-bait headline writing has a lot to do with what gets traction in the news. "You won't believe how up is actually down!" Whereas clear evidence that there is little or no such effect just isn't interesting enough to publish or click though.
posted by jetsetsc at 11:23 AM on January 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

This seems very important: that the proportionality and repetition of not concepts, but of impactful words and phrases controls how much people remember and believe them:

This made sense to Skurnik and his colleagues. He already knew from prior research that the more you hear a thing repeated, the more reliable it seems: Familiarity breeds truthiness. Now the study of the flyer suggested this effect would hold even when the thing you’ve heard before has been explicitly negated. Imagine a debunking like one shown on the CDC flyer: The flu shot doesn’t cause the flu. Over half an hour, Skurnik’s study argued, the word doesn’t fades away, while the rest of the message sounded ever more familiar—and thus more true.

See also, "If so many people are saying it, maybe it's true." Presently, only one person has to say a thing, but it can seem like more people if that one instance is quoted, referenced, and repeated -- even if those mentioning it are negating it. On the Internet, everyone is repeating everything.
posted by amtho at 11:24 AM on January 4, 2018

Amtho, that is indeed the traditional explanation of the boomerang effect, but the point of the article above is that it's not currently supported by the evidence. (Although your comment is an interesting counterexample!) In fact, we don't have a good understanding at the moment of how debunkings or mythbustings are processed.
posted by peppercorn at 11:38 AM on January 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

Or it could be that our declarations of a post-truth age are more akin to another form of rumor catalogued during the 1940s: the “pipe dream” tale. These are the stories—the Japanese are out of oil; Adolf Hitler is about to be deposed—we tell to make ourselves feel better.

Hey, that's the one that fit my biases. The "post-truth" meme spread rapidly during and after the 2016 election, and within our liberal bubble I think it was part of an emotional meltdown regarding the outcome. More specifically, a "good old days" myth regarding what journalism was "way back" in 2013 or 2014, where a Trump presidency then in theory couldn't have happened. Of course this wouldn't have held weight if you looked at how we talked about the media during the Obama presidency.
posted by MillMan at 11:39 AM on January 4, 2018

I think that the 'gut reaction' that folks had to the uncovering of what's been termed the Boomerang/Backfire Effect has to do with the complex situation(s) where the corrections arise.

InGroup/OutGroup (seems to me) are key features that the studies that 'refute' the effect may be missing.

If one is simply presented with refutational data from a neutral authoritative source (like researchers questioning college students) the reaction to correction is very different that when corrections are initiated by 'the enemy' (i.e. Gun Nuts, Liberal Media, Trumpanzies, Pinko Commies, etc.).
posted by CheapB at 11:50 AM on January 4, 2018

peppercorn, I wasn't trying to illustrate the boomerang effect -- which most people seem to interpret as "facts just make people dig in" -- but rather to quote Skurnick's alternate interpretation of previously reported results: what may have led people to retain incorrect information wasn't that they were resistant to truth, or even that wrong information was more attractive, but rather that the way they remembered information disadvantaged negative statements.

They just remembered the most important words that they heard the most often.

If that's so, it calls into question a lot of the research referred to in the article.

However, the reason I was moved to post it here (and risk being completely misunderstood, as I think I was), is this:

It means that to combat misinformation, one has to answer with positive assertions about what is true and what is real, and to do it over and over again, so that the true information is shown to be accepted by you and by other real people.

Furthermore, if there are agencies out there actively working to propel and reiterate false information -- either about scientific facts, or the prevalence of certain attitudes in our society, or the utility or futility of combating societal problems civilly -- then individuals have to counter that by engaging, over and over again, individually, with other people who don't yet agree with them.
posted by amtho at 12:00 PM on January 4, 2018 [6 favorites]

Oh, I see! I apologize. That makes sense and is indeed a fascinating read on the data.
posted by peppercorn at 12:12 PM on January 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

Let's look at old Ben's experiments a little closer

10. But suspend two or more phials on the prime conductor, one hanging to the tail of the other; and a wire from the last to the floor, an equal number of turns of the wheel shall charge them all equally,

I run down to Radio Shack, oh wait, 1700's I'll make do with whats in the stable, is that wire important? I'll use some string from the shed. Damned stupid trouble to wast my time, nothing happened. Now let's replicate an experiment on global warming, I need to install how many sensors around the world to even begin to gather data? Science is HARD. I should keep the actual timeline of how long it took the best minds to accept the idea of germs and washing hands before surgery. And how many reversals on the health/harm of coffee (it's good for you now)

The idea someone would use string not wire is silly but there are probably a good number of failed replication attempts on any new thing.
posted by sammyo at 2:26 PM on January 4, 2018

in the early 1940s, as the nation grappled with a rash of seditious, wartime rumors. Newspaper fact-check columns, known as “rumor clinics,” sprang up in response to the “fake news” of the time—the claim, say, that a female munitions worker’s head exploded when she went to a beauty parlor for a perm.
posted by sammyo at 2:37 PM on January 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

articles like this, and the replication crisis in general, make me really, really glad I stopped reading Cracked, and news like it. So full of "everything you thought about the world is WRONG."

Much happier to be listening to 99%invisible instead, which is full of "Here's all the little things that you maybe didn't notice, that support the big things you find useful."
posted by rebent at 7:24 PM on January 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

One has live life carelessly
If he or she has failed to see
That truth is not alive or dead
Truth is struggling to be said
-David Berman
posted by es_de_bah at 8:31 PM on January 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

Am I wrong or is there an idea in held in several schools of psychology, including cognitive, cultural, business psychology, that for various reasons, criticizing someone usually causes them to basically withdraw? And wouldn't a corollary of that be the purported boomerang effect, in that particular facts are perceived as part of criticism and so the recipient rather has motivation to disregard facts as not salient to avoid having to modify their worldview? Like how does this reexamination of how facts behave in psychology fit into a possibly broader picture of how language, argument, criticism, and rhetoric work?
posted by polymodus at 12:26 PM on January 5, 2018

And wouldn't a corollary of that be the purported boomerang effect, in that particular facts are perceived as part of criticism and so the recipient rather has motivation to disregard facts as not salient to avoid having to modify their worldview?

I firmly believe it's possible for facts, if they are presented well and not pre-judged, to _not_ be perceived as criticism. That's one reason why teaching them in schools, or just having them out in the information ecosystem to be discovered at will, is so powerful.

Even facts that have been pre-judged can get through, since most people now are, I think, much more likely to question what they've been told than people 50 years ago.
posted by amtho at 6:16 PM on January 5, 2018

I just finished Benjamin Franklin's 'Autobiography'

Interesting piece about Franklin: Benjamin Franklin’s Retirement and Reinvention
posted by homunculus at 6:04 PM on January 18, 2018