This week at work, we found out that one of the kids has lice. Cue phantom itching.
The child was treated and allowed back to school after 24 hours, as per school policy. That day, the teachers all watched in horror as the child obsessively scratched at his/her scalp. I gloved up and did a head check..and found nits, nits galore. Like the mature professional that I am, I panicked and called the kid's mom--who told me that she had been informed that school policy said that kids with lice weren't excluded from school, even with live bugs on their heads. Live bugs! And of course, immediately after this phone conversation, I turned around to see this child literally rubbing heads with another kid.
I was pretty shocked about the live bug policy (perhaps readers are familiar with my feelings about bugs in any context). My previous school experience has always been "no nits". My fellow teachers were also displeased, and a revolt started brewing below the surface of our polite preschool. Yesterday we were quietly presented with a scholarly article debunking all of our assumptions about the life cycle, spread, and containment of head lice.
There's a surprising study put out by the University of Michigan regarding "backfire". The data they collected shows that politically misinformed people, when presented with the facts, actually cling harder to their mistaken beliefs. An excerpt from the show "Talk of the Nation" on NPR, hosted by Neal Conan:
CONAN: Well, Brendan Nyhan is a health policy researcher at the University of Michigan. He recently published "When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions." That was in the June issue of the Journal of Political Behavior, and he joins us now from the studios of WUOM, Michigan Radio, our member station in Ann Arbor. Nice to have you with us today.
Mr. BRENDAN NYHAN (Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research, University of Michigan): Thanks for having me.
CONAN: And when facts are readily available, why are they not enough to change people's minds?
Mr. NYHAN: Well, the problem is, you know, as human beings, we want to believe, you know, the things that we already believe. And so when you hear some information that contradicts your pre-existing views, unfortunately, what we tend to do is think of why we believed those things in the first place.
And, you know, so when, you know, we get these corrections, we tend to say I'm right, and I'm going to stick with my view. And the thing that my research, which is with Jason Reifler at Georgia State University, found is that in some cases, that corrective information can actually make the problem worse.
They go on to use the example of "birthers", the fools who refuse to believe that President Obama is an American citizen despite all evidence presented to them. Well, apparently I'd fit right in with the birther crowd, because I had the same kind of foolish reaction to the lice article that they do to the President's birth certificate.
Just call me Orly Taitz from now on. You'll find me in the corner, scratching at imaginary bugs.
