Changing Opinions

[Phoebe]

Since Tahlvin was making me think about this another thread, and this has come up more than a few times both here and elsewhere lately, I'm curious what people think about what actually causes human beings to change their opinions and beliefs. For reasons of ethics, courtesy, and fallibility, I don't usually give harsh criticism to people who disagree with me - and I don't mean here, I mean in day to day life. I tend to tread very gently with people whose opinions I consider flat wrong. That's probably one reason I don't bother much with such things on the internet, though I have tried occasionally to reform - failed, I guess.

The thing is, I don't have any evidence that treading gently with people whose opinions I consider flat wrong is actually helpful in making them change those beliefs. All the evidence I do have is that belief formations and changes and commitments are often irrational processes, and even the rationally-driven ones arise from inner conflict and struggle, which can be very upsetting emotionally. Anecdotally, when I consider beliefs about which I changed my own mind, it never happened because someone was polite and understanding with me. It happened when people said, listen, you're full of shit, and here is why. And at the time I didn't always listen, but if the arguments were good ones, eventually they won. Maybe the jury is still out on other such arguments I haven't accepted yet. But no major beliefs - including religious, political, moral, practical - underwent reversal because I was respected and heard out by my opponents.

Now that we have experienced the fun events of the past year, and the twenty years preceding it, people seem very sincere about this idea that we have to respect our political opponents, and failure to grasp where they're coming from and hear them out and such is the problem. Nah, the problem is that the left eats itself and needs to drive more people to the polls and fight hard against manipulation of our elections. Like Ron is always saying, regardless of what wrongs the other side commits, his side always has the numbers to win and simply does not vote like they should. I don't see the point of being conciliatory. I think people need to own every bit of the bullshit damage they've inflicted on other human beings - they need to see it up close and personal and feel it with their cold hearts until something clicks, e.g. that it's morally heinous to make so many children live in constant fear of being separated from their parents, when they were told for years that everything they were doing was legal. Screeching "ILLEGAL" at these situations is flatly false, and people need to start getting that, and realizing they actively hurt people and are still hurting people, right now, today. It's morally heinous to deprive people of their access to health care, especially in all the cases where it will now amount to pulling the rug out from under people cruelly. I don't see how my patient attempts to understand a bunch of fundamentally racist nonsense will change those minds.

[Mike]

I think we already came to agreement on this in another thread. You are absolutely correct. Trying to understand people who oppose you is stupid and fruitless, especially when the people who disagree with you are objectively evil. One's energies are better spent elsewhere.

[Phoebe]

Is there some reason why we should think that gentle efforts to understand and persuade people are the best means of getting them to dump their toxic opinions? Really, I have no evidence of this on any level - neurological, psychological, rational, emotional. Meanwhile, I have evidence that people who change beliefs often have to literally "rewire" some things in their brain, and that emotion is a lot more important in this experience than we may like to think. Patient attempts at understanding don't necessarily elicit the emotions that cause a change in bad beliefs.

For reasons of courtesy/ethics/fallibility, as I say, I tend not to confront people in a pushy way about their bad or irrational beliefs, and as you know, that's something I literally have to do nearly every day. But the older I get and the more experience I gain, the more I think the midwest-nice methods are ineffective. People may simply need to be confronted with evidence that they're being stupid and irrational, and that their beliefs have really damaging consequences for other people that should indeed make them feel sad and bad and all those things. I would imagine you encounter people who think in some pretty alien ways, and that you have to deal with this too. Are you changing minds? I'm serious, this isn't a rhetorical question.

Meanwhile, I look at all the people I know personally who were changed in some fundamental way by their devotion to Fox News, and again, this is no joke. It's like, what the FUCK happened to you and your mind, because you used to be a reasonable and reasonably nice person? Instead, you got really scared of a bunch of things that aren't real, and I don't think it was rational persuasion and patient understanding what brought you there. So what's going to bring you back? At this point my vote is for more, better fear, and maybe some serious Oh, Shit moments where you realize how badly you have screwed up things with your voting.

Edited to add: like Ron says, though, all this is secondary. And this is another reason I don't really care that much. Elections would be won handily if all the people on the side of sanity would go vote, or be driven to the polls, or helped to pre-register and vote by mail, or... whatever it takes to get them to actually do it. There are still more people who dislike the crap going on in our name today than there are people who like it, and those people need to vote.

[bralbovsky]

The most efficient, mass transit, opinion/character changers (most often not for the better, in my experience) are law school and the armed service.

Many sane friends have been turned to the dark side by their traumas there. Some, with similar experience survived, but none unscathed. That's the tricky part of this: It's not easy, but simple to change someone's perspective if you add threat (real or imagined) and incentive. Destroying rationality is much easier than building it. Compassion is expensive.

Years spent introducing kids to scientific thinking and logic has made me aware that it's possible, but takes artisanship, stability, patience. We are all magic items, and it only takes the foot of an ant...

[Phoebe]

[Tahlvin]