The Rules of Contagion

wrote statistician Andrew Gelman after the paper was retracted.
Gelman pointed out that this seems to happen a lot in psychological
science. ‘People argue simultaneously that a result is completely
surprising and that it makes complete sense.’[60] Although the
backfire effect had been widely cited as a major hurdle to persuasion,
here was a study claiming it could be cleared in one short
conversation.
The media has a strong appetite for concise yet counter-intuitive
insights. This encourages researchers to publicise results that show
how ‘one simple idea’ can explain everything. In some cases, the
desire for surprising-yet-simple conclusions can lead apparent
experts to contradict their own source of expertise. Antonio García
Martínez, who spent two years working in Facebook’s ads team,
recalled such a situation in his book Chaos Monkeys. Martínez tells
the story of a senior manager who built a reputation with pithy,
memorable insights about social influence. Unfortunately for the
manager, these claims were undermined by research from his
company’s own data science team, whose rigorous analysis had
shown something different.
In reality, it’s very difficult to find simple laws that apply in all
situations. If we have a promising theory, we therefore need to seek
out examples that don’t fit. We need to work out where its limits are
and what exceptions there might be, because even widely reported
theories might not be as conclusive as they seem. Take the backfire
effect. After reading about the idea, Thomas Wood and Ethan Porter,
two graduate students at the University of Chicago, set out to see
how common it might actually be. ‘Were the backfire effect to be
observed across a population, the implications for democracy would
be dire,’ they wrote.[61] Whereas Nyhan and Reifler had focused on
three main misconceptions, Wood and Porter tested thirty-six beliefs
across 8,100 participants. They found that although it can be tough to
convince people they’re wrong, an attempted correction doesn’t
necessarily make their existing belief stronger. In fact, only one
correction backfired in the study: the false claim about weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq. ‘By and large, citizens heed factual