Transcriber: Jing Wen Wong Reviewer: Eunice Tan
I'd like to start this talk with a thought experiment.
I want you to pretend for a minute
that some powerfully held belief of yours is actually false.
And I don’t mean just an opinion;
I mean a fact that you hold as incontrovertibly true.
For example, if you believe in climate change,
pretend that you are wrong and just don't know it.
Or if you don't believe in climate change,
pretend the same -
that you are wrong and just don’t know it.
The purpose of this exercise is not whether your belief is correct or not.
So set that aside,
and just focus on imagining that your truth is in fact false.
As you imagine this,
I want you to think about the things that have caused you to believe as you do.
Why do you believe this?
Did someone you trust tell you about it?
Do the people you spend time with believe it?
Do your news sources agree with it?
Did you research it yourself, and if you did,
did what you find agree with you?
Regardless of your belief,
your answer to all of these questions is probably yes,
even if you and the person beside you hold the exact opposite beliefs.
Now ask yourself,
What would it take for someone to change your mind?
If you hold something to be true,
how much persuasion would it take
for someone to convince you that you were wrong?
How receptive would you be to that persuasion?
And most importantly,
is it even possible for someone to change your mind,
no matter how persuasive they are?
It's a little uncomfortable, isn't it?
Imagine, really imagine, changing your stance on climate change
and then telling people about it.
What would that conversation look like?
There are some very real social consequences to changing our beliefs.
And when it comes to ourselves, we are viscerally aware of this.
We understand that it will create tensions in our social groups
and that it can damage relationships that we value.
We know this.
We know that this is how it works.
But somehow, we forget it
when the people we’re talking to don’t believe as we believe.
We don’t really consider why they may hold the given belief
or what that belief might mean to them on a personal level.
We don’t respect the social costs to them
if they reject the beliefs of their community.
But that’s what we need to start doing,
because our beliefs are part of our identity.
So threats against our beliefs are often perceived as threats against ourselves,
and we respond defensively to them.
And because we tend to identify with groups
and to hold beliefs within those groups,
an attack against our beliefs doesn’t only threaten us as individuals
but also the people we respect and connect with.
And that makes our responses to these threats all the more potent.
As journalist David Roberts put it,
“Human beings are not primarily rational creatures.
We are primarily social creatures.
We are born into specific social contexts,
overlapping tribes from which we absorb our worldviews and values.
We do not reason to it at all.
We inherit it.
Because belonging to tribes is fundamental to our well-being,
these markers become very important to us.
Protecting them is adaptive behavior, among our most basic interests.”
So we have this initial bias to believe what the people around us believe,
and then we’re confronted with someone else’s facts,
and we don’t like it.
So we do two things.
First,
we avoid.
We control the facts that we encounter
so that most of what we see and read supports our preconceived beliefs.
And this is very easy to do.
Information filters in our social media and search engines
are specifically designed to bring us things they know we’ll like,
making avoidance not only possible but convenient.
Second, failing -
(Laughs)
failing our ability to control the facts that we encounter,
we will tend to dismiss, dispute and deny information that goes against our beliefs.
We may reject it for its source, its references,
the author and his, her or their credentials.
We might look them up in Google
to see what other people have to say about them and their work,
going to lengths that we would never bother with if the person agreed with us.
So if we dispute, reject and avoid information that goes against our beliefs
and we do this in order to protect our identity
and the people we identify with,
the question becomes, What next?
If climate change is real,
we need to convince people to take action against it,
or if vaccines are safe, we need to convince people of that.
But how do we do it?
First of all, we don’t do it like this.
[Vaccines are a conspiracy from Big Pharma to make money
and I’m not going to fall for it.]
Because that kind of interaction doesn't often lead to this.
[You know what? You’re totally right.
I’m going to go get up to date on all my vaccines right now.]
To be fair, though, not many interactions do.
But our immediate assumption that people who don’t believe as we believe
are deluded or unintelligent is not conducive to an open dialogue.
So let’s bring up a few other options and talk about how they might be received.
Facts don’t work,
because what makes that fact compelling is trust in its source
and different people trust different sources.
Consider the guy in my comic.
He doesn’t trust Big Pharma.
So you pointing to research produced by major pharmaceutical companies
is not going to convince him of anything.
So when I say facts don’t work,
what I mean is you can’t make someone believe what you believe
for the reasons you believe it.
That’s not how identity or social interactions work.
One of the things to keep in mind with science deniers in general
is that they're not bad people.
In the case of anti-vaxxers,
they’re often acting out of a genuine fear of the vaccine
either for themselves or for their child.
Vaccines are full of scary ingredients;
their side effects, though rare, can be severe;
and a lot of people are telling them
that vaccinating their child is going to hurt them.
It can seem pretty rational in that context
to decide to take the small chance
that their child gets sick with a rare virus
and the even smaller chance that that virus has lasting effects,
rather than expose them to a potentially harmful vaccine
they don’t understand and don’t trust.
One of the ways to deal with this mistrust of vaccines, then,
is to personalize.
Make the disease and its consequences real;
talk about actual cases.
Because making things real and personal
changes the balance of that fear and mistrust.
When you tell someone about the nurse who took measles back home to her child
and what that family ended up going through,
you start to make the disease scarier than the vaccine.
And while that might not change an anti-vaxxer’s mind,
it might make them doubt their position.
Another approach to changing people’s minds is from within the group.
We care more about what our people say
than we do about the words of people we don’t identify with.
It's very easy to dismiss a stranger who believes differently from us.
But when that person is a friend or a family member, it’s different.
While they might not succeed in changing our minds or changing our positions,
we’re going to spend more time thinking about their belief
and where it came from and how justified it is
than we would if that person were not a member of our group.
And this effect isn’t limited to people we connect directly with either
and can be even more pronounced
when the person speaking is a respected icon of one of our groups.
If you’re an anti-vaxxer, and someone you respect,
like a news anchor or a particularly popular politician,
tells you that vaccines are safe
and explains to you why you should take one
or why you should get it,
you’re going to be more likely to listen to that advice
than the same advice coming from a Big Pharma vaccine researcher.
This one's tricky, though.
It’s rare for people to speak out against the beliefs of their group
because doing so can damage their position within that group
and even cause them to be ejected from it.
So it takes a special kind of person and a special kind of balance
to make these types of arguments effectively.
Lastly, framing your argument in a way that decreases its perceived threat
can increase a person’s willingness to change their mind.
And what I mean by this is,
in the case of vaccine science, change your argument
from one that focuses on science and Big Pharma and authority
to one that focuses on something else
that the person you’re speaking with values.
For instance, you might focus on a belief they hold in the sanctity of all life.
Or if the person is a business person,
you might talk about the vast economic importance of vaccines.
The goal of this kind of argument is to redirect the focus
away from whatever it is that is blocking their belief
in a direction that validates another aspect of their identity,
thereby allowing them to act without threat.
So really,
the core of effective persuasion is respect and validation.
We need to meet people where they are -
beliefs and therefore their personal and group identities -
with respect
and give them reasons to change that align with their values.
And even doing all of these things, we still might not succeed.
But opening that dialogue at a personal level,
and ultimately at a societal one,
is a vital step in the path to change.
Thank you.
(Applause)