How to Convince Someone When Facts Fail

Why worldview threats undermine evidence

Michael Shermer
Scientific American
January 1, 2017

Have you ever noticed that when you present people with facts that are contrary to their deepest held beliefs they always change their minds? Me neither. In fact, people seem to double down on their beliefs in the teeth of overwhelming evidence against them. The reason is related to the worldview perceived to be under threat by the conflicting data.

Creationists, for example, dispute the evidence for evolution in fossils and DNA because they are concerned about secular forces encroaching on religious faith. Antivaxxers distrust big pharma and think that money corrupts medicine, which leads them to believe that vaccines cause autism despite the inconvenient truth that the one and only study claiming such a link was retracted and its lead author accused of fraud. The 9/11 truthers focus on minutiae like the melting point of steel in the World Trade Center buildings that caused their collapse because they think the government lies and conducts “false flag” operations to create a New World Order. Climate deniers study tree rings, ice cores and the ppm of greenhouse gases because they are passionate about freedom, especially that of markets and industries to operate unencumbered by restrictive government regulations. Obama birthers desperately dissected the president's long-form birth certificate in search of fraud because they believe that the nation's first African-American president is a socialist bent on destroying the country.

In these examples, proponents' deepest held worldviews were perceived to be threatened by skeptics, making facts the enemy to be slayed. This power of belief over evidence is the result of two factors: cognitive dissonance and the backfire effect. In the classic 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, psychologist Leon Festinger and his co-authors described what happened to a UFO cult when the mother ship failed to arrive at the appointed time. Instead of admitting error, “members of the group sought frantically to convince the world of their beliefs,” and they made “a series of desperate attempts to erase their rankling dissonance by making prediction after prediction in the hope that one would come true.” Festinger called this cognitive dissonance, or the uncomfortable tension that comes from holding two conflicting thoughts simultaneously.

In their 2007 book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), two social psychologists, Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (a former student of Festinger), document thousands of experiments demonstrating how people spin-doctor facts to fit preconceived beliefs to reduce dissonance. Their metaphor of the “pyramid of choice” places two individuals side by side at the apex of the pyramid and shows how quickly they diverge and end up at the bottom opposite corners of the base as they each stake out a position to defend.

In a series of experiments by Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan and University of Exeter professor Jason Reifler, the researchers identify a related factor they call the backfire effect “in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.” Why? “Because it threatens their worldview or self-concept.” For example, subjects were given fake newspaper articles that confirmed widespread misconceptions, such as that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. When subjects were then given a corrective article that WMD were never found, liberals who opposed the war accepted the new article and rejected the old, whereas conservatives who supported the war did the opposite ... and more: they reported being even more convinced there were WMD after the correction, arguing that this only proved that Saddam Hussein hid or destroyed them. In fact, Nyhan and Reifler note, among many conservatives “the belief that Iraq possessed WMD immediately before the U.S. invasion persisted long after the Bush administration itself concluded otherwise.”

If corrective facts only make matters worse, what can we do to convince people of the error of their beliefs? From my experience, 1 keep emotions out of the exchange, 2 discuss, don't attack (no ad hominem and no ad Hitlerum), 3 listen carefully and try to articulate the other position accurately, 4 show respect, 5 acknowledge that you understand why someone might hold that opinion, and 6 try to show how changing facts does not necessarily mean changing worldviews. These strategies may not always work to change people's minds, but now that the nation has just been put through a political fact-check wringer, they may help reduce unnecessary divisiveness.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-convince-someone-when-facts-fail/

Crosstalk: Science and Pseudoscience in This ‘Age of Magic’

SUNIL LAXMAN

The Wire

April 20, 2016

There have been many clashes of civilization over the centuries, over which the fate of humanity hung. Perhaps the biggest one that remains is that between science and pseudoscience.

“Science is the most durable and non-divisive way of thinking about the human circumstance. It transcends cultural, national and political boundaries.”
– Sam Harris

What is not science?

If you randomly ask three different people what they think science is, you’ll get three different answers. Often, these answers are at two ends of a spectrum. One end will describe science as “a collection of facts”, while the other suspiciously looks at science as a belief system. Yet, science is neither. It is a systematic effort to accumulate knowledge based on evidence, and form testable explanations about the universe. Science relies on recognising patterns, and being able to generalise rules from them, which can be tested, and if false, eliminated.

Unfortunately, treating science as a mere collection of facts is easy. After all, science textbooks are full of information, and our current education system glorifies the memorisation of these bits of information. Generations have grown up memorising formulae that state that force equals mass times acceleration, or famously E=mc2 and the like, without the faintest clue about what this means, or how these came about, and why these stand to be true. Easier still is treating science as a belief system, which is a reflection of our society, and of human nature. Since we as humans rely on belief systems for many things in our life, we tend to impose the values of our belief systems to all systems. Yet, science stands alone in being not a system, but a process, where the pursuit of knowledge relies on collecting knowledge based on evidence.

The amazing thing about science is that anyone can think like a scientist. However, if you just observe, collect information, and think something “feels right”, or that something “makes sense”, this isn’t sufficient to be science. For something to become a scientific endeavour, an observation will lead to a hypothesis, which then needs to be empirically tested. Indeed, in earlier columns, we have explored these aspects of the scientific method and the process of science, ranging from the importance of a testable hypothesis to inductive reasoning, through conditions that enable science to thrive.

Through this, we can easily understand attributes of science. Science is never complete, but a continuing, dynamic process with constant refinement. Knowledge constantly accumulates, and science constantly progresses. So it is important to be able to differentiate what is science, from what is unscientific. Verifiability (by testing and analysing a hypothesis) remains a cornerstone of science, but this is often difficult to actually do. For example, it was difficult to verify that light is both a wave and a particle (though it did happen). In this, the philosopher Karl Popper stands out in his simple benchmark for distinguishing what comprises science. Instead of just verifiability, Popper describes the use of falsifiability as the benchmark of scientific theories.

Unlike verifiability, falsifiability is the inherent possibility that any idea can be proven false. Now, in order to be able to question a hypothesis or an idea, you at least need to be able to theoretically falsify it or prove it wrong. By using falsifiability as a demarcation criterion, anything that is (even theoretically) not falsifiable becomes unscientific. This is a remarkably simple, and elegant way to think of what is scientific. This notion of falsifiability, when scrupulously applied, is very effective in weeding out the unscientific. This then allows you to separate science, from the all-pervasive, pernicious influence of that remarkable shape-shifting beast, pseudoscience.

Pseudoscience is a belief that masquerades as science and even extensively uses terminology from science to claim validity. One defining aspect of pseudoscience is to start with a conclusion, and then find “facts” that support it. This also means that the field cannot change since inception. Any challenge to an existing idea is considered hostile, and any observation that is not consistent with the original idea is usually thrown out. The very possibility of falsifiability is impossible. And to be effective, pseudoscience cloaks itself in scientific sounding words (“inner energy”, “positive molecules”, “refined antioxidants”, “cosmic balance”) that are utterly meaningless.

Science everywhere

Carl Sagan brings these concepts together in his book The Demon-Haunted World, where his famous dragon appears. Supposing you say that a fire-breathing dragon lives in your garage, surely I’d ask you to show me. But now, what if you assert that the dragon is invisible? In that case, I’d say you could use paint on the floor to find its footprints. But if the invisible dragon also floats in the air, and no solid object can mark it? Then I’d ask to measure the heat from the fire. But now if you assert that the invisible, flying dragon also breathes heatless fire? Here, more than verifiability, every possibility of falsifiability fails, and so you are left holding on only to belief. In this space where pseudoscience thrives, there are really no goalposts of ideas, and not just merely shifting goalposts.

But why might it even be important to separate the scientific from the unscientific? Venki Ramakrishnan, the president of the Royal Society, and who’s pioneering work on how proteins are made led to a Nobel Prize,notes ruefully in a column that if you say you don’t know anything about music, or hate art, or despise reading, you are an uncultured ignoramus. However, it is perfectly fine (or even a badge of honour) to say you know nothing about science or math, or that “you hate science”. Yet science, which is so pervasive in every aspect of our society, should be something that is enjoyed, appreciated and celebrated every bit as much as art and culture.

Even if not for the grandeur of understanding the natural world, there is a great need to understand the scientific process. As Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Today, we live in an age of magic. A hundred years ago, a simple infection from a wound would invariably be fatal. In World War I, many more soldiers died of hospital infections than actually killed in battle. By World War II, this was not a problem, thanks to thediscovery of antibiotics, which have saved millions of lives. Sadly, people today know more about wines or craft beer than how antibiotics work (or how antibiotic resistance comes about). This list of magical science is everywhere; in medicine, in transportation, in communication, in protection from the elements, or in how we produce enough food to sustain more people on earth at this moment, than have lived in all humanity before 1950. Today, it is critical for every educated person to know how scientific knowledge is acquired, and how scientific foundations are built. It should be embarrassing for someone to say they know nothing about science, or how to recognise something as scientific, and yet it isn’t!

Falling for pseudoscience

What all this does is create an ideal breeding ground for pseudoscience. When everyone is exposed to scientific sounding words, without either an understanding of what they are, or an appreciation for the scientific method, pseudoscience can flourish. One of the oldest examples of pseudoscience was in the field of phrenology. People claimed to know the intelligence of an individual merely by measuring the size of their skull, and observing the number and shape of the bumps on their head. Today, phrenology is considered absurd, because it easily fails every test of falsifiability, with a mountain of evidence to show that this is meaningless. Yet, this field influenced colonialism (and Europeans with their “superior skulls and therefore brains”), slavery (and the abolishment of it), gender stereotyping (with women obviously holding the short end of the stick), and more. But even today, ask a bunch of people if the idea of phrenology is true and the answer will be split evenly between yes, maybe it could be true, and no.

What has this thriving culture of pseudoscience led to? The most obvious is the breeding of a variety of quackery, with the quacks becoming persons of enormous influence and importance in that society. Their voices thunder about the brilliance of ancient knowledge, easily feeding into conspiracy theories of how the ancient knowledge was lost or looted by invaders. Or, there are absurd claims, which easily fail the falsifiability test, that cancer or AIDS or whatever else can be easily cured. Usually, this should fall under the category of snake oil sales, yet cultures of pseudoscience will tolerate, and even promote such quackery. A thriving culture may flourish on how the knowledge of the exact time of birth, mapped on to a meaningless sample of planetary orbits can reveal the fate of that person, or knowledge of their likely misfortune.

Few pseudoscientific fields have had as much influence over the centuries as astrology (not to be confused with astronomy, which is a serious study of planetary bodies). Confusion through belief in such pseudoscience can lead to a paralysis of the ability of a person to make rational, effective decisions, or worse. Immense harm has been done by the pseudoscience of the anti-vaccine movement, which based itself entirely on one now falsified study (a deliberate fraud of epic proportions). Yet the anti-vaccine movement not only relies on that study, but even imagines a conspiracy theory where the whole proving of the study to be false itself was fabricated, ignoring a mountain of scientific evidence. As a result, vaccines, which have saved more lives (and eliminated devastating diseases like small pox and polio), now run the risk of not being effective, putting millions of children at risk.

There have been many clashes of civilisation over the centuries, over which the fate of humanity hung. Perhaps the biggest one that remains is that between science and pseudoscience. We know the lessons of history, but can we learn from it?

Sunil Laxman is a scientist at the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, where his research group studies how cells function and communicate with each other. He has a keen interest in the history and process of science, and how science influences society.

http://thewire.in/2016/04/20/crosstalk-science-and-pseudoscience-in-this-age-of-magic-30552/

America's Cult of Ignorance Is No Match for Asia's Cult of Intelligence

June 17, 2014

John W. Traphagan, Professor of Religious Studies, University of Texas, Austin

This article also currently appears in The Diplomat.

I have been traveling to East Asia (and many other parts of the world) for more than 25 years and over that time one of the things that has always struck me is how intelligent the general public in countries like Japan appear to be. It's not that there aren't dummies in East Asia, but it always seems that the average level of education and ability to think about the world intelligently and critically is impressively widespread. I've often thought about why this is the case and also why the same seems more difficult to say about the U.S. The answer, I think, can be found in a comment science fiction writer Isaac Asimov made about the U.S. while being interviewed in the 1980s: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Asimov is right on the mark, and this cult of ignorance is the most serious national security issue facing the U.S. today. It is more important than the external threats from terrorists or the rise of a politically and economically powerful China. And a major part of the reason it is such a major issue for Americans to fix is that our immediate competitors, particularly those in Asia, have managed to create a culture in which rather than a cult of ignorance, a cult of intelligence plays a major role in shaping attitudes about the world and, thus, policies about dealing with other countries.

Many Americans are aware that the U.S. does not score well on measure such as international student assessment tests when compared to other industrial countries. For example, the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) the top five societies for math were Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan-- the U.S. is not in the top ten. It is better by 8th grade, where the same societies are in the top five (although the order changes) and the U.S. makes number 9. Roughly the same pattern can be seen for science results. This doesn't seem too bad, but in a different testing organization's measure, the Programme for International Student Assessment, the U.S. does not fare quite so well, scoring 36th for math, 28th for science, and 24th for reading. With the exception of science, where Finland is ranked 5th, all of the top five countries in this measure are from East Asia.

American policy has generally worked from the assumption that the problem lies in basic weaknesses in the structure of our educational system with its inherent inequalities and the way in which our school curricula are constructed. These certainly have contributed to comparatively weak scores. I have long been convinced that one of the reasons Japan's educational system is better than the U.S.--at least in the sense that a very broad swath of the general public receives a good and equal education through high school--is related to funding. The U.S. system generates inherent inequalities in school funding by depending upon property taxes. Even in states where there is some (usually grudging) redistribution of wealth to support public schools in poor areas (in Texas it is called the Robin Hood law), it is obvious that children in wealthy areas receive a better education with far greater academic and other resources than those in poorer areas. In Japan, because there is a national curriculum and a significant portion of the funding for public schools comes from the national government, in addition to funding from prefectural and municipal governments, there is considerably less inequality in distribution of and access to quality education than in the U.S.

Unfortunately, the troubles with the U.S. education system are much deeper than distribution of funding or curriculum weaknesses, although these are both a byproduct of the cultural issue that Asimov observes. The troubles lie in the cult of ignorance and anti-intellectualism that has been a long-standing part of American society and which has become increasingly evident and powerful in recent years through the propagandizing and proselytizing of groups like the Tea Party and the religious right.

The fundamental reason that countries in places like East Asia present such a significant challenge to the U.S. politically and economically is not because they have a lot of people or big militaries, or seem to be willing to grow their economic and political might without concern for issues like damage to the environment (China). The problem is that these countries have core cultural values that are more akin to a cult of intelligence and education than a cult of ignorance and anti-intellectualism. In Japan, for example, teachers are held in high esteem and normally viewed as among the most important members of a community. I have never run across the type of suspicion and even disdain for the work of teachers that occurs in the U.S. Teachers in Japan typically are paid significantly more than their peers in the U.S. The profession of teaching is one that is seen as being of central value in Japanese society and those who choose that profession are well compensated in terms of salary, pension, and respect for their knowledge and their efforts on behalf of children.

In addition, we do not see in Japan significant numbers of the types of religious schools that are designed to shield children from knowledge about basic tenets of science and accepted understandings of history--such as evolutionary theory or the religious views of the Founding Fathers, who were largely deists--which are essential to having a fundamental understanding of the world. The reason for this is because in general Japanese value education, value the work of intellectuals, and see a well-educated public with a basic common knowledge in areas of scientific fact, math, history, literature, etc. as being an essential foundation to a successful democracy.

Americans need to recognize that if the cult of ignorance continues, it will become increasingly difficult to compete politically and economically with countries that highly value intelligence and learning. Nowhere is this more problematic in the U.S. than among a growing number of elected officials who are products of that cult of ignorance and who, thus, are not equipped to compete with their international peers. Why is this a problem of national security? Because a population and its leadership need to have the knowledge and intellectual skills necessary to analyze world affairs in an intelligent and sophisticated way and to elect intelligent, capable representatives. The problem is not really with our educational system; it is with our educational culture. Americans need to remember the words of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote to Charles Yancey on January 6, 1816: "if a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was & never will be."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-traphagan/america-ignorance-asia-intelligence_b_5505032.html