{"id":1145,"date":"2014-05-23T16:30:41","date_gmt":"2014-05-23T23:30:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=1145"},"modified":"2020-10-18T11:56:42","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T18:56:42","slug":"what-would-make-someone-change-their-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2014\/05\/23\/what-would-make-someone-change-their-mind\/","title":{"rendered":"What Would Make Someone Change Their Mind"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fascinating essay in The New Yorker<\/i> by Maria Konnikova, I Don\u2019t Want to Be Right<\/a>, which addresses the various results that show you just can\u2019t change people\u2019s minds with evidence.<\/p>\n

\nCould various pro-vaccination campaigns change parental attitudes toward vaccines?\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They tried four different campaigns, and none of them worked.<\/p>\n

\nThe result was dramatic: a whole lot of nothing. … \u201cIt\u2019s depressing,\u201d Nyhan said. \u201cWe were definitely depressed,\u201d he repeated, after a pause.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Similar results have been covered before, but this essay goes a bit into the circumstances of when and how people might actually change their minds. <\/p>\n

\nIt\u2019s the realization that persistently false beliefs stem from issues closely tied to our conception of self that prompted Nyhan and his colleagues to look at less traditional methods of rectifying misinformation. Rather than correcting or augmenting facts, they decided to target people\u2019s beliefs about themselves. In a series of studies that they\u2019ve just submitted for publication, the Dartmouth team approached false-belief correction from a self-affirmation angle, an approach that had previously been used for fighting prejudice and low self-esteem. The theory, pioneered by Claude Steele, suggests that, when people feel their sense of self threatened by the outside world, they are strongly motivated to correct the misperception, be it by reasoning away the inconsistency or by modifying their behavior.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the lab, when people were asked to write essays about a time they felt good about themselves, \u201cattitudes became more accurate\u201d…<\/p>\n

\nStill, as Nyhan is the first to admit, it\u2019s hardly a solution that can be applied easily outside the lab. \u201cPeople don\u2019t just go around writing essays about a time they felt good about themselves,\u201d he said. And who knows how long the effect lasts\u2014it\u2019s not as though we often think good thoughts and then go on to debate climate change.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fascinating essay in The New Yorker by Maria Konnikova, I Don\u2019t Want to Be Right, which addresses the various results that show you just can\u2019t change people\u2019s minds with evidence. Could various pro-vaccination campaigns change parental attitudes toward vaccines? They … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,30,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-mind","category-thinking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1145"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1146,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1145\/revisions\/1146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}