A growing body of empirical evidence suggests that conservatives with greater exposure to political information are more likely to be wrong.

Republicans who consider themselves well-informed about President Barack Obama’s health care plan are more likely to accept myths about “death panels” than their uninformed counterparts, according to a 2010 study at U. Michigan. And in “Unequal Democracy,” (2008) Larry Bartels found that well-informed conservatives are less likely to know that income inequalities in America have increased over time. In both studies, the opposite was true for Democrats and liberals — for them, more information consumption correlated positively with correct answers to questions. So while the data is far from comprehensive, when it comes to certain politically-charged (but fact-based) questions, the more conservatives “know” the less likely they are to be right. Why?

One explanation making the rounds is that the modern conservative movement has systematically embedded itself in a self-serving closed information loop. Cross-promoting, blatantly partisan conservative outlets — Fox News, the National Review, the Drudge Report — are now so numerous and powerful that they constitute an entire alternative media sphere. What’s more, they are committed to advancing a vision of the world that supports conservative priorities, sometimes at the cost of accuracy. When this media counterculture is combined with confirmation bias (the natural tendency to seek out information confirming existing beliefs), and mistrust of the “liberal mainstream media,” (which has led many conservatives to consult only right-wing news sources), the end result is a poisonous intellectual cycle known as “epistemic closure.”

Epistemic closure can perpetuate politically expedient falsehoods (like “death panels” and Obama’s supposed Islamic background, among others), and prevent healthy discussion and debate — both between liberals and conservatives and within the right-wing movement. Conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan has even called epistemic closure a force that is “killing conservatism.” When the right wing struggles to maintain, as Sullivan says, an “alternative reality” as a form of “denial,” it can marginalize the conservative intellectual elite. Indeed, right-wing writer David Frum was fired from the conservative American Enterprise Institute in March when he criticized Republicans for refusing to engage with Democrats on the health care bill. Predictably, many liberal pundits are giddy about epistemic closure theory. And why shouldn’t they be? It gives them the opportunity to say, “Ha ha! Conservatives are stupid and their entire movement is founded on a quicksand of lies and self-delusions. We win, once and for all!”

But this phenomenon should be studied as more than just a particularly sticky ball of mud that liberals may fling at conservatives. For one thing, it is not just a feature of the right. Liberals, too, are liable to accept falsehoods that gibe with their convictions. The Tea Party movement, for example, was dismissed as racist and homophobic by many liberal media figures after a few unrepresentative bigots in the crowd said and did some terrible things. It is unfortunate that many chose to focus on this in lieu of constructively engaging the movement on an intellectual level. And while conservative epistemic closure seems more “monolithic,” as Think Progress’s Matthew Yglesias points out, there are many subsets of liberalism — especially on the far left — that suffer from narrow-mindedness; environmentalists, feminists and immigrants’ rights activists all have their own brands of “groupthink.”

So what do we do about epistemic closure, a problem which, to some degree, affects the entire political spectrum? During his commencement speech at U. Michigan, Obama tossed out a few bromides on the subject. “Everybody is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts … If you’re somebody who only reads the editorial page of The New York Times, try glancing at the page of The Wall Street Journal once in a while.” But, it’s not that simple. It is easy to choose newspapers, blogs or TV personalities that leave one feeling reassured day after day. But readers who want to escape epistemic closure should use today’s unprecedented number of news options to seek out intelligent argument from all sides. If your media diet has you struggling, backtracking and rethinking issues regularly, you’re probably on the right track.