关于原来的位置受到事实影响的研究

The Backfire Effect: The Effects of Original Positions on Subsequently Considered Evidence证据回火效应：原来的位置的影响

 

Abstract 摘要

Researchers analyzed people’s attitudes change when they confronted counter-arguments.
研究人员分析了人的态度改变时，他们面临的各种反应。
Previous studies suggested that belief-inconsistent arguments resulted in the backfire effect, that participants tend to hold their initial beliefs more strongly. We divided participants (N = 36) into proponents and opponents of the death penalty based on their answers and gave each group belief-inconsistent arguments. We hypothesized that after reading the belief-inconsistent argument; participants’ pre-existing opinions would be strengthened. However, our backfire effect hypothesis was not confirmed. Instead, we found a different significant effect that the participants’ attitudes difference narrowed.然而，假设没有得到证实，我们会看到适得其反的效果。相反，我们发现了一个与众不同的显着效果，参与者的态度差会缩小。

The Backfire Effect: The Effects of Original Position on Subsequently Considered Evidence.“逆火效应：原来的位置随后会受到一些事实的影响。

Most people hold opinions on controversial social issues. Under the influence of their predisposed opinions, it is hard for people to evaluate new information without bias, especially information that contradicts their initial beliefs. Previous research shows that belief-inconsistent information fails to lessen people’s original belief, but rather strengthens their initial thought. Nyhan and Reifer (2004) termed this phenomenon as the backfire effect, that when confronted with evidence that contradicts their original beliefs, people tend to hold their original opinion even more strongly.http://www.ukassignment.org/uklunwen/

The backfire effect influences voters’ attitudes in politician election, when they encounter belief-inconsistent information. In a study of the persistence of factual misconception about politicians, Nyhan and Reifler (2004) randomly assigned participants into four groups and gave them either a misleading claim or a misleading claim with a correction and found that after they read the correction, people tended to evaluate the politicians more negatively. Redlawsk (2002) found similar results in studying the effects of affect-inconsistent information on voters’ decision-making process. After reading negative information about their preferred candidate, voters evaluated the candidate more positively than before.。接收到他们的首选候选人的负面信息后，选举候选人的选民进行的评估比以前更积极。

The influence of the backfire effect also extended to people’s decision-making processes on various social issues.  In a study of attitude about capital punishment, Lord, Ross, and Lepper (1979) examined the change of people’s opinions after reading belief-consistent articles and belief-inconsistent articles. They gave participants both belief-consistent arguments and belief-inconsistent arguments and measured the change of their opinions. The results showed that participants evaluated belief-confirming evidence as more convincing than belief-disconfirming evidence. After being exposed to arguments that contradicted their original positions, the attitudes of both the opponents and the proponents polarized. 

Motivated Reasoning动机的推理

The motivated reasoning theory is a common explanation for the cause of the backfire effect. People’s motivation exerts effects on their cognitive process of assessing, assimilating and evaluating information.
动机推理理论是一个常见的关于适得其反的效果的原因的解释。人的动机会对他们的认知过程中的评估，吸收和评估信息施加影响。
They assess belief-consistent information more favorably than belief-inconsistent information (Fischer, Frey, Greitemeyer, & Schulz-Hardt, 2009). They may examine belief-inconsistent information at a face value but evaluate belief-consistent information at a critical value (Cann, Kucsova & Taber, 2009). A study by Boysen and Vogel (2007) on people’s attitudes towards homosexuality showed that people who originally had a positive attitude towards homosexuality were more likely to accept the biological explanation for homosexuality than people who originally displayed a negative attitude. 

Cann, & Kucsova, Taber (2009) found that people tended to actively defend their original beliefs when they receive new information. In a study of the motivated processing of political arguments, they evaluated participants’ attitudes on a variety of social issues, and then gave them both one-side arguments and two-side arguments on issues that randomly selected from the former social issues and measured the adjustment of their attitudes. They found that participants were unable to disregard pre-existing attitudes when they assimilated new information. Participants actively degraded belief-inconsistent arguments and formed counter-arguments to defend their original idea.

The current study was designed to examine the backfire effect on participants’ attitudes change when they confronted belief-disconfirming arguments on social issues. We chose the death penalty, because it is always an extremely controversial issue, with abundant arguments on both sides. We constructed hypotheses based on former studies and predicted that, after reading the belief-disconfirming arguments, people in both groups would lean towards their original beliefs even more. This hypothesis was generalized to participants’ attitudes on the three following questions on whether the death penalty is a deterrent to crime, whether the death penalty is more humane than a life sentence, and whether the death penalty violates basic human rights. In this experiment, participants were divided into the opponent group and the proponent group based on their original positions towards the death penalty. The experimenters gave each group a belief- disconfirming article, and later tested their attitudes again to see whether and how their attitudes changed.