i'm just sayin'

this study, reported in the washington post, shows that republicans are even more likely to believe political misinformation when they have been shown evidence that it is wrong than they were before the misinformation was corrected.

"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."

link to actual duke university paper

this study, cited in newsweek, shows that conservatives are more likely to be afraid of pictures of threatening things, like spiders, than liberals.