Let’s say you’re having an argument with a friend about oh, let’s say, Obamacare, or even who the best quarterback in the NFL is. You present your friend with a set of facts that you would think would clinch your argument. And yet, while the facts you present clearly contradict your friend’s position, you discover that presenting your friend with these facts does nothing to correct his or her false or unsubstantiated belief. In fact, your friend is even more emboldened in his or her belief after being exposed to corrective information.

A group of Dartmouth researchers have studied the problem of the so-called “backfire effect,” which is defined as the effect in which “corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.”

The problem here may be the way your friend is receiving these facts. Since your friend knows you and your opinions well, he or she does not view you as an “omniscient” source of information. When it comes to receiving corrective information about a public policy issue, the authors of the Dartmouth study note

people typically receive corrective information within “objective” news reports pitting two sides of an argument against each other, which is significantly more ambiguous than receiving a correct answer from an omniscient source. In such cases, citizens are likely to resist or reject arguments and evidence contradicting their opinions – a view that is consistent with a wide array of research.