Skepticism and science have much in common and skepticism is really nothing more than science applied to extraordinary claims. But trying to make people change their minds about their own extraordinary beliefs is difficult. Therefore the question arises as to what we as skeptics should try to achieve.
Firstly, we can almost never win over the other side, the true believers, or even the victims. How could we? They may have a vested interest in continuing to believe, they may be making a living out of it, so it would be unreasonable to assume that they would accept the scientific method, and the results it comes to. I have heard from dowsers and homeopaths, when investigations of their crafts resulted in a negative outcome for them, that this only proved they are right, because somehow the science must have failed, and not the other way round.
This leaves us with the naïve, the undecided, the fence-sitters, and anyone else prepared to listen to us, if we are going to avoid preaching to the choir. What ways are there to interact with these people, and how successful are these methods in changing their minds?
One somewhat surprising result from early on in the days of organised skepticism is that facts do not count. In the early 90s, two German psychologists, Robert König and Elisabeth Koch found that for paranormal topic after paranormal topic, the amount of science you knew and the amount of knowledge that you had about the paranormal topic in no way correlated with whether or not you accepted the paranormal topic as legitimate. To take astrology for an example, astrologers and their opponents (astronomers!) seemed to have about the same knowledge of astronomy as each other, and also knew about the same amount of astrology as the other, but this failed to correlate with whether they thought astrology was good or bad. Stuff a person full of facts, and all you have is a person stuffed full of facts, but you have achieved little in developing that person’s ability to make decisions.
Later Michael Shermer remarked about the Holocaust denier David Irving that Irving was one of the most knowledgeable people he had come across in respect to the Second World War, and with all that knowledge, Irving regularly comes up with obscure factoids to support his thesis that the Holocaust never happened, some of which are so obscure that even historians may be unfamiliar with them (this is a type of Gish Gallop). As a result these historians are made to look foolish, ignorant, or even arrogant. With a vast collection of facts at his disposal, Irving can cherry-pick to his heart’s content, but he cannot do what historians do, and that is to interpret facts in a scientifically valid manner. All Irving does is to re-interpret them in the light of his prior hypothesis.
Chris Mooney, former host of the podcasts Point of Inquiry and Inquiring Minds has consternated the fact that politicians know what there was to know about climate change but the American Republicans refuse to accept it, and it doesn’t appear that any number of new facts would change that mindset. The reason for this stubbornness according to Mooney is that they disagree with what has to be done about, or at least with what the left-wing thinks has to be done about it: Sanctions on CO2 emissions and investment in renewable energy sources and carbon sequestration. That all is too much Big Government for the Republicans.
How can you have all the facts and still not heed the science? Mooney thinks that there must be a better way of explaining the science, a process that George Lakoff has termed “framing”. Basically you take an unacceptable idea and present it in a context that makes it acceptable, logical or even desirable. For example you could try reframing “taxation” as some sort of membership fee, something that you pay in order to gain a benefit. While it may be true that a glass can be framed to be half-full or half-empty, what I doubt is that such manipulation, performed in order to persuade someone of the framer’s point of view, is effective in the long run. More likely is that an attempted “frame” will be seen for what it is, an attempt at spin, and loses its effect.
It seems that we are in a bit of a dilemma, if neither presenting the facts neutrally to an undecided person, nor presenting them to them in a positively reinforced way are likely to win people over in the long term. People will do almost anything to re-interpret facts in the light of their prior beliefs, a behaviour that I think has been unfairly dubbed “denialism”. In part two I will consider further options which might be of use.
