Send in the stupid fucking clowns

How disappointing is it that being given factual information to counter misinformation can actually increase our beliefs in the misinformation?

Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.

I've already noted it is unwise (and uncool) to rig a study to make conservatives look stupid. And I recognize flaws in the fact that most researchers investigating these issues are "raging liberals." But the fact that all the researchers are democrats only matters if you can show where bias may have crept into the study. I suspect (though I don't know for sure) they used double-blind procedures to cover for that. Sad, I tell you. Just sad.