Arguments
The Debunking Handbook Part 4: The Worldview Backfire Effect
Posted on 23 November 2011 by John Cook, Stephan Lewandowsky
The Debunking Handbook is an upcoming a freely available guide to debunking myths, by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky. Although there is a great deal of psychological research on misinformation, unfortunately there is no summary of the literature that offers practical guidelines on the most effective ways of reducing the influence of misinformation. This Handbook boils down the research into a short, simple summary, intended as a guide for communicators in all areas (not just climate) who encounter misinformation. The Handbook will be available as a free, downloadable PDF at the end of this 6-part blog series.
This post has been cross-posted at Shaping Tomorrow's World.
The third and arguably most potent backfire effect occurs with topics that tie in with people’s worldviews and sense of cultural identity. Several cognitive processes can cause people to unconsciously process information in a biased way. For those who are strongly fixed in their views, being confronted with counter-arguments can cause their views to be strengthened.
One cognitive process that contributes to this effect is Confirmation Bias, where people selectively seek out information that bolsters their view. In one experiment, people were offered information on hot-button issues like gun control or affirmative action. Each parcel of information was labelled by its source, clearly indicating whether the information would be pro or con (e.g., the National Rifle Association vs. Citizens Against Handguns). Although instructed to be even-handed, people opted for sources that matched their pre-existing views. The study found that even when people are presented with a balanced set of facts, they reinforce their pre-existing views by gravitating towards information they already agree with. The polarisation was greatest among those with strongly held views.1
What happens when you remove that element of choice and present someone with arguments that run counter to their worldview? In this case, the cognitive process that comes to the fore is Disconfirmation Bias, the flipside of Confirmation Bias. This is where people spend significantly more time and thought actively arguing against opposing arguments.2
This was demonstrated when Republicans who believed Saddam Hussein was linked to the 9/11 terrorist attacks were provided with evidence that there was no link between the two, including a direct quote from President George Bush.3 Only 2% of participants changed their mind (although interestingly, 14% denied that they believed the link in the first place). The vast majority clung to the link between Iraq and 9/11, employing a range of arguments to brush aside the evidence. The most common response was attitude bolstering - bringing supporting facts to mind while ignoring any contrary facts. The process of bringing to the fore supporting facts resulted in strengthening people’s erroneous belief.
If facts cannot dissuade a person from their pre-existing beliefs - and can sometimes make things worse - how can we possibly reduce the effect of misinformation? There are two sources of hope.
First, the Worldview Backfire Effect is strongest among those already fixed in their views. You therefore stand a greater chance of correcting misinformation among those not as firmly decided about hot-button issues. This suggests that outreaches should be directed towards the undecided majority rather than the unswayable minority.
Second, messages can be presented in ways that reduce the usual psychological resistance. For example, when worldview-threatening messages are coupled with so-called self-affirmation, people become more balanced in considering pro and con information.4,5
Self-affirmation can be achieved by asking people to write a few sentences about a time when they felt good about themselves because they acted on a value that was important to them. People then become more receptive to messages that otherwise might threaten their worldviews, compared to people who received no self-affirmation. Interestingly, the “self-affirmation effect” is strongest among those whose ideology was central to their sense of self-worth.
Another way in which information can be made more acceptable is by “framing” it in a way that is less threatening to a person’s worldview. For example, Republicans are far more likely to accept an otherwise identical charge as a “carbon offset” than as a “tax”, whereas the wording has little effect on Democrats or Independents—because their values are not challenged by the word “tax”.6
Self-affirmation and framing aren’t about manipulating people. They give the facts a fighting chance.
References
- Taber, C. S., & Lodge, M. (2006). Motivated skepticism in the evaluation of political beliefs. American Journal of Political Science, 50, 755–69.
- Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. (2010). When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions. Political Behavior, 32, 303-330.
- Prasad, M., Perrin, A. J., Bezila, K., Hoffman, S. G., Kindleberger, K., Manturuk, K., et al. (2009). “There Must Be a Reason’’: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification. Sociological Inquiry, 79, 142-162.
- Cohen, G. L., Sherman, D. K., Bastardi, A., Hsu, L., & McGoey, M. (2007). Bridging the Partisan Divide: Self-Affirmation Reduces Ideological Closed-Mindedness and Inflexibility in Negotiation. Personality & Soc. Psych., 93, 415-430.
- Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. (2011). Opening the Political Mind? The effects of self-affirmation and graphical information on factual misperceptions. In press.
- Hardisty, D. J., Johnson, E. J. & Weber, E. U. (1999). A Dirty Word or a Dirty World?: Attribute Framing, Political Affiliation, and Query Theory, Psychological Science, 21, 86-92
Some people are quite capable of firmly believing things that their own memory should tell them are untrue. They will rewrite their own memories, facts, friendships, arguments/logic they supposedly find compelling, and nearly anything else in order to preserve the viability of 'sacred Truths' in their own minds.
Generally, the only way you can get something past such a distortion filter is if you can figure out the underlying beliefs and then somehow get the facts to fit within that fictional framework.
For example, here in the U.S. most people in rural areas are Republicans and thus 'know' that global warming is just an evil scheme by commie liberal elitist government types out to destroy the American way of life. However, wind power companies have managed to make headway in many of these areas by presenting themselves as ways to be self sufficient ('we don't need no elitist government bureaucrats sticking their noses in our business, we can generate our own power') and 'patriotic' ('this is American wind we are using... not commie terrorist oil') and never ever mentioning that they will reduce global warming.
There's a sort of opposite effect to the self-affirmation findings in the post. Specifically, showing your "credentials" on a topic can leave you free to express the opposite of what the credentials imply. For instance, proclaiming yourself to be non-racist first can make you more likely to display racism later, such as making a race-based hiring decision. This would seem to point in the opposite direction to the self-affirmation effects; I don't know if these two have ever been reconciled. (good ref is Monin, B. & Miller, D. T. (2001), Moral credentials and the expression of prejudice, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81).
And I'm not trying to be contentious, but it's important to note that a die-hard WUWT fan could read this post and think "Yes, confirmation bias is exactly why those SkS and Real Climate people believe what they do. If only they could open their eyes and drop their preconceptions." The processes that underlie, say, confirmation bias, or the illusion of truth effect, don't work one way for info that matches the real world and another way for info that's fantasy, they'll operate no matter what the actual veracity of the information.
Excellent point, and something that always amuses me. Climate science "believers" are often accused of being in a religious faith (thus completely subtracting the word science from any meaningful sense in the debate). Yet this is exactly how deniers are viewed, as clinging to their position religiously, in spite of the evidence.
And yet, now we must turn this back on ourselves, and ask if we aren't being religious in our secular appreciation of the science, by projecting this religious faith view of belief on the deniers who project it on us.
Perhaps it is us who are so religiously wedded to science and facts that we can't see that we are unable to shed that burden and free ourselves from the need to believe in evidence and logic, or at least to realize that the evidence and logic, no matter how strong, are countered by the equally powerful forces of wishful thinking and common sense.
[Okay, sorry, I just can't bring myself to even imply that full scale denial is anything but a bizarre, psychological impediment.]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
Can't remember the company (I've already got mine) but "I'm not trying to save the world. I'm just saving up for a trampoline." is advertising genius.
Somebody should really forward a copy of this to the Labor strategists that allowed the "carbon tax" to become the commonly accepted way of referring to the policy.
Scientists may say, "The world is very likely X and it is very unlikely Y." Then someone jumps in from Political Group A and generalizes on the basis of their own conservation bias, "Yeah, those stupid Political Group B people are all idiots and deny logic and science." Are these people hindering progress by increasing the defensiveness with which anyone who identifies with Political Group B will approach the topic? Should we be trying to censor such supporters of science? Should we censor ourselves when identifying groups who resist the finding that "The world is likely X" and inhibit the dissemination of that finding?
To make this 'real' in the context of internet discussions, are the 'concern trolls' correct about tone? Is PZ Myers wrong about the value of humiliation?
I'm not fond of humiliation as a teaching, tutorial or discussion technique, but I know it has many adherents and a long, not-so-glorious history in universities. It's an extension of not suffering fools gladly. Probably marginally useful in training where people are looking to enter professions (in medicine or the military for instance) where clear thinking and rapid judgments can be crucial. I see it as a form of intellectual bullying. Mainly because it tends to become an habitual, charmless style rather than an occasional startling wake-up call. It's only saving grace is that it's honest.
The same cannot be said for the 'concern trolls'. Where I see such interventions in discussions, I'm prepared to bet my wardrobe that it's the thin end of a wedge which generally finishes up going in a very unpretty direction.
Very interesting stuff.
I have found, when posting on message boards, that if you make somewhat of a connection with a poster before "educating" them (my friend calls this hitting them on the head with a dead fish - making the sound "whop" - thus whopping them) - you don't necessarily get to agreement, but you might get to an agreement to think about it.
And that connection can be relatively tenuous - something that gets the other person thinking about you as a human being - not a 'bot of opposition. I once achieved the effect by simply writing "That is the most rational post I've ever seen you make" (not calling him rational, just more rational than usual - which COULD have been taken as an insult). We ended up having a decent discussion.
The most key point is that you can't change the 20% or so that are committed to being ignorant. You can change their behavior (ie trampolines and getting the gubment off our back) - but they will die believing that climate change is a HOAX.
Intuitively I want to think that both approaches are useful (and ethical!) so I don't like what I've written here about how to interact with opponents. But really, the goal is finding the right tactic to eradicate misinformation that is protected by someone's cognitive psychology. We have to trick them into lowering that guard. It's called effective communication, and I'm not sure it's entirely honest. To avoid the 'Worldview Backfire Effect' when speaking with someone whose worldview one finds odious, perhaps dishonesty is required.
Note, on another thread someone pointed to a Naomi Klein article in The Nation in which she indicated the climate problem was perfect for the Left, because addressing it requires supporting things the Left wanted anyway. Almost immediately someone jumped in to say that Klein needed to be pushed back because this is ammunition for political opponents. In searching for the article a second ago I found a Guardian column called "Dear Naomi Klein: Please Stop Making My Work Difficult." Here Klein's use of the word "reparations" needed to stop. The last line in Part 4 above says that framing isn't "about manipulating people." But it is. All communication is! The question I'm asking is whether it helps to reject/censor communication from one's own side if it has a chance of backfiring. Or is exposure of the target to a diversity of approaches more effective?
The big thing to remember always is that approaches within tertiary education, not just the hard sciences, tend to be robust ... to put it politely. otoh, I work with students who have various learning problems - very few of them have any intellectual difficulty - just a bad history of inappropriate teaching added to a simple visual or aural processing problem, sometimes short-term memory issues.
The big thing is that a 'robust' approach is exactly opposite to what they usually need. And it is not dishonest to tell such a student that the fraction calculation they've done is 'clever!', even though standard testing tells you that they're 4 years behind in maths. It is clever - they just never had the chance to show it previously. When such students change their 'behind' measure by 2 or 3 years within 6 to 12 months, it's glaringly obvious that cleverness is not a problem, the teaching is.
We tell ourselves that we're the realist, clear thinkers on scientific issues. But we can be unrealistic, muzzy thinkers about those we see as uninformed, misled or poor thinkers. Many teaching moments are missed if we give a standard scornful, oh, come on! keep up! response to someone who's clearly out of their depth. SkS is actually one of the best blogs at finding a responder who will make the most of a teaching moment.
It's not dishonest to always treat people who come across as aggressive or dishonest themselves as though they are looking for information or support. Parents among us can recognise the stroppiness of toddlers or teenagers as cover for confusion or distress. And those of us who've worked with the general public have often encountered adults who are in the same boat. And seen our ham-handed colleagues make bad situations worse by focusing on the attitude rather than the problem.
And we must keep in mind what we're asking. To be a realist about what's happening with climate, you have to stare into the horrifying abyss. And then you must take a deep breath and get on with your work, family and social life. Finding ways to tell people that it really is as near to catastrophic as dammit is to swearing - that we can avoid the very worst of it - but a lot of people will die anyway ... not the rosiest of teaching moments.
How does that play out in effective communication on the internet on climate issues?
I find my first instinct is to pull up facts and logic that refute the deniers untenable position. But, honestly, that approach is not working.
I would appreciate your thoughts on specific approaches to combating/educating the tsunami of deniers out there.
One did come back to me when reading - was it number 3 or 5? - graphs do work very well. With some people, when the ground is prepared thoroughly. Got a strongly positive response with graphs a couple of times - though it was with Arctic sea ice stuff, not much wiggle room there.
As for the tsunami. My approach is simply to keep plugging away. The big thing is never to focus on the responders. Always work on the basis that the silent readers are your real audience.
And the hardest of all? Never press for an instant response, nor claim credit for an apparent change of mind.
I learned this one long ago as a union person in management discussions. If I wanted a certain approach adopted, I'd just raise it in ordinary conversation. If it had legs, it would turn into common knowledge or 'accepted management practice' in 6 to 18 months. 'That was my idea', or 'I told you so' were always tempting. But I knew perfectly well that good ideas are worth much, much more than my personal claim on them - and that claim risked a negative response.
New report exposes massive opinion industry in China.
http://elgan.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=38b5dc26a4d87952a5ca1675f&id=515275ef09&e=3836c8cfe5