Also, Companies Should Stop Exploiting Cheap Foreign Labor

[ng_nighthawk]

Politicos should stop using over-the-top, inflammatory rhetoric. The problem with it is that it inflames people.

But the reason people use it is that inflaming people is a really effective way to motivate them.

Let me string a few concepts together for you:

1. People do not change their minds because of new facts. Rational arguments don't change

Comments

[dr_tectonic]

(1) is overstating the case. I believe that what the U-Mich studies show is not that facts don't change minds, but that when people in an experimental setting are presented with ostensibly factual statements that don't accord with their worldview, they discount their veracity. That's not a finding about how people think in response to facts; that's a finding about how people allocate trust.

Which is not to say that I disagree with your analysis on the whole. I'm just opposed to the notion that rational fact-based argument is a lost cause.

[ng_nighthawk]

I hope you're right. It's been the source of much of my political despair in the last year or so. Of course, that's not solely because of one study but because this matches so much of my observations. That said, I also have personal examples of facts and rational arguments changing minds, so it's clearly not universal, even if it turns out to be generally true.

Hmm... let me throw this out. If the only people you trust are people who agree with you, and once someone disagrees with you then you no longer trust them, aren't we in the same place?

To answer my own question, only if the only source of trustworthy information is other people. But I think for most folks that's true of most high-level information?

[dr_tectonic]

I think it has less to do with source and more to do with presentation.

A reason-oriented thinker sees various features of something like an officially-worded correction as earmarks of honesty, and evaluates the content accordingly. An emotion-oriented thinker is going to be looking for something totally different (I have no idea what), and not finding it in those sources -- but if Joe Talk Radio says something about this important change in the facts about X that you need to know about, that feels Really True.

The other question is how threatening the counter-fact feels. Is it presented in a way that seems to recognize and shore up the credibility of trusted sources, or undermine them? Depends on the fact, the sources, the presentation, and what you're looking for. I think most of the "backfire effect" comes from presentations that are neutral from a rationalist perspective but very threatening if you perceive them emotionally.

[dr_tectonic]

I think in about 8 months, it's going to be time for some tough love when it comes to emotional thinking.

You're right about modeling correct attitudes and refusing to participate in dysfunctional dialogue. But I'm also going to give good old-fashioned social pressure a try: I'm going to start treating emotional rhetoric with open amusement. I figure embarrassment is a pretty strong lever for changing behavior...

[srotu27]

You and I have been down this road before, so let me recommend, once again, Dan Ariely's behavioral economics work, especially his newer book. It's not on this topic, per se, but it is on patterns in irrational behavior and gives some insight into eliciting desirable behavior

[srotu27]

Ariely's more recent book The Upside of Irrationality, the name of which escaped me yesterday as I wrote this on my phone. Not that his other book (Predictably Irrational) is not as good--- I'd say it's better, in some ways, just that the newer one is marginally more topical.

[srotu27]

The other thing I'd say is that it doesn't necessarily take inflammatory rhetoric to make worthwhile change-- look at people growing their own food in personal and community gardens. Look at people biking to work. These are not low-effort changes we're making. They're fairly high cost, high-sacrifice changes. You can say they are the result of politics of fear, and that's not entirely untrue, but I don't get the sense that these voluntary and significant changes are a result of fear of global warming so much as they're a tale compellingly told, about trade-offs that pay off at many levels.