Tommy Tainant
Diamond Member
Question Time showed that you can’t counter anti-vax myths with cold reason alone | Sonia Sodha
Changing minds is more complicated than simply exposing poor arguments
www.theguardian.com
The main British political discussion show invited in an audience of anti vaxxers to discuss their idiocy with a panel of experts. to limited success.
How do you react when someone politely but firmly tells you that you’re talking nonsense about something that’s important to you? Do you gracefully and immediately give way to their greater expertise? Or do you double down?
Most of us are in the latter camp. Voicing our beliefs tends to solidify them. We may like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, constantly assessing the world for new information that might change our minds, but this is not how our brains work. Explaining to someone that their belief is flat-out wrong is not a good way of getting them to drop it. And research shows that the process of “myth-busting” – setting out a common false statement, then explaining why it is wrong – backfires because it counterintuitively reinforces and helps spread the myths.
But it is impossible to counter emotion with facts and the exercise ,whils exposing the idiocy of the anti vaxxers, will probably not have convinced many. We could have told them cahead of the show. Five years of exposing trumps villiany has not dented his cults belief in him.
And focussing on the ridiculous "stop the steal" nonsense underlines this. Despite zero evidence there are still folk who think that the election was stolen. When it gets to the point that people do not need any evidence i n order to believe something touted by a proven liar then facts and science are not going to penetrate.
It leaves society pretty much at the mercy of uninformed people who think that a half hour rummaging aarund the net makes then PHDs in any subject under the sun.
These people breed, they vote and they bring up chilfren. We should be scared.