You are just trying to get me to buy a subscription to the NYT

I see what you did there, NYT, WSJ, Economist all 3 are institutions behind a massive paywall.

You are trying to make me use my free articles per month in order to satisfy you.

Well it will not work Greg, I will not become one of the "sheeple" for the NYT just yesterday announced they have over $1 billion in year revenue from subscriptions, and another $600 million and change from advertising (total 1 billion).

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(Pivots)

But seriously from an analytical / logic perspective (and you would not know this) asking for the NYT to demonstrate the validity is probably not a good idea for they are not "unbiased." (I will get to my point.)

The concept of a backfire effect is not a new one, we been studying confirmation biases in Psychology since the 1960s. Economics got into this same field with a different perspective in 1979 with several authors but the most famous one is Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (You have heard of Daniel Kanheman for getting the 2002 Nobel "memorial" prize in ecomonics for the work Kahneman and Tversky did, Kahneman also wrote Thinking Fast and Slow in 2012...note 2017's Nobel Economics winner Richard Thaler also is in the related field of economics). Starting in the 1990s but advancing way more in the 2000s with fMRI we are starting to learn the neuroscience of all this.

But the language of calling it a "backfire effect" is a new term, pioneered in this paper published in 2010 written in 2008.

When Corrections Fail: The persistence of political misperceptions Written by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler

http://unibaker.com/media/The_Persistence_of_Pol._Misperceptions.pdf

(You may be familiar with this paper as a paper that look at people opinions about WMD in Iraq and the media.)

Brendan Nyhan, is a professor at Dartmouth College, but since 2014 he has been a contributor to the NYT The Upshot (which is a blog about data, economics, politics and other things) and according to a quick google he has written 89 articles for The Upshot.

So me posting NYT articles about Nyhan may be kind of biased, wouldn't it Greg?

That said Nyhan is still publishing Academically and his research is still making waves, for example this paper a month ago had Nyhan as one of the 3 authors that tried to explore how big of an effect facebook fake news was for the 2016 election with methods. (The NYT article has nothing to do with Nyhan, but instead is a different author summarizing the research.)

‘Fake News’: Wide Reach but Little Impact, Study Suggests By BENEDICT CAREY JAN. 2, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/health/fake-news-conservative-liberal.html

Links to Vox's The Weeds podcast and a specific episode, which is a reaction to Facebook announcing changes in how it does the feed, and the problem of Fake News. Note the overcast link I am about to give for The Weeds is at a specific timestamp in the middle of the discussion where Brendan Nyhan / Andrew Guess / Jason Reifler 's research came up.

https://overcast.fm/+FOOSPAXts/24:04

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(I am trying to keep this brief)

Now in the social science field we are pretty sure the Backfire Effect exists, we are just trying to determine how big of an effect this is and recent evidence suggests in most people the effect is small for we have systems that counteract the backfire effect. For example this replication of the 2010 paper also was a partial refutation of Nyhan 2010 paper for it found the backfire effect to be small and very depending on how you phrase the question. Furthermore it was only envoked in the WMD question, a question very much tied to personal identity.

http://djflynn.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/elusive-backfire-effect-wood-porter.pdf

But while the backfire effect may be small in large groups it may be particular strong in a subset of the population, and the research from other fields such as the Economics and Neuroscience shows that it is very relevant with the emotional state of the person before hand, and how you phrase the question for language dramatically can alter emotion.

But humans have other systems that also provide push-back against the backfire effect. Sometimes these systems work well to provide push-back and sometimes they do not.

(drops anything else I have to say for the sake of brevity...)

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I posted the Oatmeal piece for I heard about it yesterday and it is a really good demonstration of The Backfire effect for people who have never heard of it. It is not the best "beginner piece" for people who want some academic / technical stuff behind it, but I am probably not the best person to find such a thing for I know way too much about this stuff for it is a former field of study.

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So no Greg I will not buy a subscription to the NYT , The Washington Post is so much better