Four years ago, I reported on a study that showed that Emotion Overrules Reason. Joe Keohane (Boston Globe) writes about similar research in How Facts Backfire. A few excerpts:

Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions.

the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic.

politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong.