{"id":2020,"date":"2011-05-17T13:08:55","date_gmt":"2011-05-17T17:08:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/05\/the-backfire-effect-and-how-to-leapfrog-it.html"},"modified":"2011-05-17T13:08:55","modified_gmt":"2011-05-17T17:08:55","slug":"the-backfire-effect-and-how-to-leapfrog-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/05\/the-backfire-effect-and-how-to-leapfrog-it.html","title":{"rendered":"The backfire effect, and how to leapfrog it"},"content":{"rendered":"If you have evidence against something that will harm public health\nor waste money, just tell everybody and they’ll understand and stop it, right?\nNope, humans don’t work that way.\nMore likely you’ll provoke the backfire effect,\nreinforcing beliefs in the bad information that caused the problem\nin the first place. Here are some ways to jump over that effect to get at solutions to the problem.\n

\nShankar Vedantam wrote in the Washington Post 15 Sep 2008 about\n\nThe Power of Political Misinformation<\/a>,\nillustrating with a couple of well-known examples of misinformation\n(you’ll recognize them), and continuing:\n

\n\n<\/a>\nNearly all these efforts rest on the assumption that good information\nis the antidote to misinformation.\n

\nBut a series of new experiments show that misinformation can exercise\na ghostly influence on people’s minds after it has been debunked —\neven among people who recognize it as misinformation.\n<\/blockquote>\nCountering bad information directly just reinforces it.\n

\nChris Mooney wrote more about why that is in Mother Jones 18 April 2011,\n\nThe Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science<\/a>:\n\n\n

\n\n<\/a>\n"A MAN WITH A CONVICTION<\/strong> is a hard man to\nchange. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or\nfigures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails\nto see your point." So wrote the celebrated Stanford University\npsychologist Leon Festinger<\/a> (PDF),\n\n<\/a>\na passage that might\nhave been referring to climate change denial—the persistent\nrejection, on the part of so many Americans today, of what we know\nabout global warming and its human causes. But it was too early\nfor that—this was the 1950s—and Festinger was actually\ndescribing a famous case study<\/a> in psychology.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nIt’s not like this observation was new:\n
\n\n“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”\n
\n—Epictetus (c.55-c.135)\n<\/blockquote>\nThe difference is that Festinger investigated modern examples of\nthe phenomenon with modern scientific techniques,\nfor example infiltrating an end-of-the-world cult (is it May 21st yet?)\nand discovering that when the day came and the world didn’t end\nthey just believed that their faith had postponed the end!\n

\nMooney continues with even more modern experiments that demonstrate\nthe phenomenon, and then spells out the backfire effect:\n

\nAnd that undercuts the standard notion that the way to persuade people\nis via evidence and argument. In fact, head-on attempts to persuade\ncan sometimes trigger a backfire effect, where people not only fail to\nchange their minds when confronted with the facts—they may hold their\nwrong views more tenaciously than ever.\n<\/blockquote>\nI promised to spell this out:\n\n“Because if that is all, you are using their own framing, and reinforcing the biomass supporters in their own minds.”<\/a>\n

\nMarching around with nothing but signs that say “No Biomass” just\nre-enforces in many peoples’ minds that biomass must be good.\nThe VDT can editorialize about how people ought to stop thinking\nthat it’s just a bunch of fringe people opposed to biomass,\nbut the signs are a large part of why<\/em> people believe that.\nI can spell out and show pictures over and over of black and white,\nold and young, academics and workers marching with those signs,\nbut all a lot of people see are the signs.\n

\nDoes that mean stop carrying those signs?\nNo.\nBut it would be more productive to add some other signs.\n

\nMooney concludes:\n

\n…you don’t lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with\nthe values\u2014so as to give the facts a fighting chance.\n<\/blockquote>\nWhat are your values?\nWhy do you care about biomass?\nIt’s largely health, isn’t it?\nHow about some signs that say Yes Clean Air!\nor Yes Healthy Children!\nor … you make some up.\n

\nHow about go deeper?\nWhy do people want the biomass plant, anyway?\nBecause they want jobs for themselves and their children.\nDon’t we all want that?\nSo why not talk about that?\n

\nWhat will provide more jobs?\nEven Sonny Murphy\n\nis promoting solar for jobs.<\/a>\nEven Mr. formerly-Democratic-now-Republican state Senator Tim Golden\n\nis singing the praises of Jimmy Carter and Ted Turner and quoting\nYogi Berra to say solar is good practice now.<\/a>\nA recent Arizona State University study says\n\nGeorgia is number 3 out of the top ten states that could benefit most\nby generating solar electricity<\/a>,\nafter only Arizona and Colorado.\n

\n\n<\/a>\nAnd south Georgia could generate so much power it could power itself\nand generate profit by exporting electricity to Atlanta!\nAll with lots of jobs planning, installing, studying, etc.:\njobs for construction workers, architects, and professors.\n

\nAtlanta wants our water?\nHa!\nLet’s sell them solar!\n

\n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you have evidence against something that will harm public health or waste money, just tell everybody and they’ll understand and stop it, right? Nope, humans don’t work that way. More likely you’ll provoke the backfire effect, reinforcing beliefs in the bad information that caused the problem in the first place. Here are some ways […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,120,40,14,41,21,22,133,178,700,55],"tags":[4553,8738,2153,8704,4556,876,847,4555,8714,2900,4552,8742,8796,8727,4554],"class_list":["post-2020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-biomass","category-community","category-economy","category-health-care","category-planning","category-politics","category-vdt","category-vlcia","category-wace","category-water","tag-backfire-effect","tag-biomass","tag-children","tag-economy","tag-epictetus","tag-health","tag-jobs","tag-leon-festinger","tag-solar","tag-valdosta-daily-times","tag-values","tag-vdt","tag-wace","tag-water","tag-wiregrass-activists-for-clean-energy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-wA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2020\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}