A key question—and one that’s difficult to answer—is how “irrational” all this is. On the one hand, it doesn’t make sense to discard an entire belief system, built up over a lifetime, because of some new snippet of information. “It is quite possible to say, ‘I reached this pro-capital-punishment decision based on real information that I arrived at over my life,’” explains Stanford social psychologist Jon Krosnick. Indeed, there’s a sense in which science denial could be considered keenly “rational.” In certain conservative communities, explains Yale’s Kahan, “People who say, ‘I think there’s something to climate change,’ that’s going to mark them out as a certain kind of person, and their life is going to go less well.”
The whole article is very good, but I especially liked this part as it echoes what I was saying not too long ago. Also:
Given the power of our prior beliefs to skew how we respond to new information, one thing is becoming clear: If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn’t trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.
The fact that such an obvious truism is not practiced by so many of the people who like to imagine themselves activists for sociopolitical progress is largely what convinces me that their professed ideals are little more than means to the expression of their own righteousness.
June 26, 2013 @ 8:23 pm
On the other hand, believing things that aren't true has it's own down sides. And saying you believe in things when you don't makes you a liar. I like to point out both cases and let the chips fall where they may.
Example: After some Facebook "friends", Republicans, said they didn't believe anything Paul Krugman says, I challenged them to find one example where he was wrong. They sputtered and harumphed a bunch of nonsense ("No one is right all the time!… You have drunk the Koolaid!"), but they failed to produce a single item (I can't either). They don't speak to me any more, but their stupidity was exposed.
June 29, 2013 @ 12:48 pm
I don't have any worthwhile opinion on it, but this post and discussion centered on Krugman was interesting.