This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 11, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Epistemic closure in the parlance of Our Times is the process by which a group becomes

so exclusively trusting of their own movement sources of information

that their worldview becomes immune to contrary evidence.

Julian Sanchez, research fellow at the Cato Institute, unwittingly started a debate on the subject, says it has some

implications for our politics.

Epistemic closure is a term I sort of accidentally coined in a blog post about a month and a half ago to

refer to the way it seems to me the conservative media sphere has

increasingly become insulated from factual correction, from reality, frankly.

I think it's sort of hard to argue that on the right now, there are a huge number of, you know, just of patently false beliefs that are incredibly widely held.

And in fact, research has been done showing that self-identified conservatives and Republicans,

the more informed they consider themselves about certain issues, the more likely they are to hold false beliefs.

You know, polls have shown that majority... the more likely they are to hold false beliefs.

You know, polls have shown that

majorities of self-identified conservatives

either believe or are not sure whether Barack Obama

is not a United States citizen, is a racist who hates white people,

had ACORN steal the election for him.

We saw a range of bizarre claims during the health care debate about death panels.

And not to say that there aren't a lot of reasons to oppose

Obamacare, but that was a strange one.

...