Well, it's just like Nisbet has been saying--and like I have been saying. The "facts" rarely change minds. Here's Shankar Vedantam:
The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.... ....Contrary to the conventional notion that people absorb information in a deliberate manner, the studies show that the brain uses subconscious "rules of thumb" that can bias it into thinking that false information is true. Clever manipulators can take advantage of this tendency.... ...The experiments do not show that denials are completely useless; if that were true, everyone would believe the myths. But the mind's bias does affect many people, especially those who want to believe the myth for their own reasons, or those who are only peripherally interested and are less likely to invest the time and effort needed to firmly grasp the facts.
I'm convinced this applies to the battles against anti-evolutionism, global warming skepticism, HIV-AIDS denial, and much, much else. If we want to win in these fights, we need more than "the facts" on our side. We need a carefully applied understanding of how humans make up their minds on complicated subjects--and how hard it is to change them.
PS: Totally unrelatedly, but as promised, we are no longer moderating comments here at The Intersection. Fire away!
