When a story is false, we run into a third problem: Even when misinformation is corrected, many people continue to believe it. For example, in one study, participants from Australia, Germany and the United States were asked about arguments made by the US government favoring the invasion of Iraq which were subsequently retracted, such as the claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The Australian and German students were sensitive to retraction; that is, when they knew a claim had been retracted, they tended not to believe it. The Americans, however, were insensitive to retraction; on the whole, they tended to believe statements that they knew had been retracted about as much as statements they did not know had been retracted.
Paradoxically, attempts to correct misinformation can lead to a backfire effect, in which people are more likely to believe false information after it has been debunked. Sometimes this is due to increased familiarity with the claim as a result of its being repeated during the retraction. However, backfire effects are most likely to occur when the original claim is consistent with the ideology of the person who believes it. Not surprisingly, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to continue to believe that Iraq had WMDs even after the Bush administration admitted they didn't. When ideological backfire effects occur, people can be suspicious of the motives of the person or organization doing the correcting (often the news media) and discount the retraction.
Lewandowsky and others make three suggestions for successfully correcting misinformation: (1) warn people at the time of initial exposure that the information is suspect, (2) repeat the retraction several times, focusing only on the new, correct information, and (3) provide a plausible alternative explanation for the previous false belief. In the case of ideologically motivated false beliefs, they make a fourth recommendation: Affirm the target's ideology before attempting to correct the false belief. The first two remedies require news media cooperation that the Obama administration is unlikely to receive. Since no single alternative explanation accounts for all the anti-ACA anecdotes, providing plausible explanations for false beliefs requires extensive investigation of individual cases. The fourth suggestion would seem to require a statement like this: “We agree with you that Obamacare is a disaster, but in this case, you are wrong because . . .”
Here is Lewandowsky discussing misinformation and its correction in the important area of climate change.
I see no magic bullet here. The best solution for the administration may be to appeal to the value Americans place on self-reliance and encourage them to explore their health care options for themselves. But they can't do that until their website is fixed. If they lose the cooperation of young people, the market will suffer from adverse selection—not enough people paying into the system, and too many older, sicker people drawing it down. Insurance rates could increase dramatically next year, just in time for the 2014 elections. Then Obama will see how much fun it would be if the Tea Party controlled the Senate as well as the House.
The HealthCare.gov fiasco is bad news for single payer advocates too. I'm afraid most people don't realize that it was Obama's reliance on an "overly-complicated, market-based Republican health care plan" that made the website so difficult to set up. They may simply conclude that government can't do anything right.
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