Recent polls have found that as much as 15% to 20% of the public, including about 30% to 45% of Republicans, falsely believe that President Barack Obama was not born in this country.
Will Wednesday's release of Obama's long-form birth certificate put an end to the birther myth?
The odds aren't good. The problem is that people can be extremely resistant to unwelcome factual information. In 2005 and 2006, I conducted a series of experiments to study this problem with Jason Reifler, a political scientist at Georgia State University.
In these studies, undergraduate participants were given news articles in which a political figure made a misleading claim. In some cases, this claim was followed by a correction that set the record straight.
Disturbingly, we found that corrective information in news articles often fails to reduce misperceptions among the ideological or partisan group that is most vulnerable to the false belief.
In some cases, corrections even made misperceptions worse -- a result we call a "backfire effect." Unfortunately, this sort of response is typical.
Many other studies have found that people tend to resist or reject information, including scientific evidence, that contradicts their pre-existing views.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/04/28/nyhan.birther.truth/index.html
