Yes but that does not apply to this study; the participants weren't even willing to acknowledge the statistical results when it disagreed with their point of view. Let alone changing their minds.
About your point about having evidence selectively presented, it's easy to discard all information that disagrees with your worldview. What's hard is actually changing your mind. If you believe that there is a 'culture war' going on with filtering of evidence and manipulation from all sides, the rational response would be to look at all evidence skeptically, not just the evidence that disagrees with you. Yet in that study, participants had no problem accepting statistical results that agreed with them or that they didn't have strong political opinions about. And, importantly, this behaviour got worse for smarter people.
I'm not much interested in that particular study. I'm discussing your tl;dr which is
The smarter you are, the less likely you are to change your mind on certain issues when presented with new information
You, clearly, think this is bad. I, on the contrary, think that in certain situations -- to wit, when your stream of evidence is filtered -- NOT updating on new information is a good idea.
I feel this is a more interesting issue than going into the details of that study.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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