It's one of the underpinnings of democracy: Informed citizens make better voters and better decisions. If you're wrong, all it takes is the facts and you change your mind. That's the popular belief, anyway.

The problem, as we've been hearing, is that's not always the case, especially when it comes to very partisan issues....

Brendan Nyhan, a health policy researcher at the University of Michigan... recently published a study called "When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions."

...

These misperceptions, you know, we haven't studied them. And they are important because people are changing their minds in some cases based on the -you know, it's influencing their vote, it's influencing their opinion. And, you know, they're not just holding these misperceptions. They're holding them actually, in some cases, more confidently than people who have the correct view.

In Politics, Sometimes The Facts Don't Matter : NPR