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I don't think it's possible to change their minds. I think reasonable people have always been and will always be a small percentage of the population. I just wish the reasonable people could be in charge.
When people say their mind is made up, that is the time to use Socratic method and trap them in their own contradictions. People want to be right. They'll change their minds when they feel they should. That's why all efforts to win people over tend to use emotional manipulation. And emotions are only reliable as value judgments if rational values were internalized to guide them. And rational values are not automatically engrained except by the luck of nurture, having rational parents or teachers or authors as early influences. Rare is the mind that is its own inspiration.
You've heard people say, "Be reasonable. Do it my way." Everyone believes themselves to be right and therefore those who don't agree must be wrong. That is why humans need objectively verifiable values. No matter how much lip service we pay to Reason, and how we dismiss others' judgments as "only opinions", every opinion is rooted in the opiner's value system and believed to be reasonable. And those beliefs are held firmly in place by the emotional reinforcements of the individual's life experiences. Those emotions may even block reason, as happens with people of faith and fanaticism who nevertheless believe in their own rightness, undergirded by an assumed omnipotent power.
I don’t tend to think of persuasion as conquering, though the word fits well with Ayn Rand’s vigor. Conquest to me smacks too much of hostility and force. Persuasion is working within people’s inborn need to be right and their trust in their own rightness. We humans would not have developed the scientific method of self-correction if the seed of it were not also contained in our own minds, in our powers of introspection.
Survival depends on self-correction when causes and effects are discovered. The very process of learning by the young of any species, and particularly one as complex as humans, depends on the faculty of taking in and sorting out and changing rules as needed. All these are based on the facts of reality as we encounter them. It is their accurate interpretation that needs Reason in a creature capable of abstract (conceptual) thought. And that requires the Randian moment of volition. The mishmash of impressions and reactions that constitute the human psyche in all its jumbled complexity will otherwise leave a mind floundering in emotional conflicts and interpersonal adversities.
That life nevertheless goes on speaks to the flexibility and safety margins of natural selection that lets the species muddle through despite constant wars and natural disasters. How much better would life be for every individual if we substituted cooperation and productivity for mutual destruction? Or am I being unreasonable?
the strike. . problem is, it's hard to do and they forget
after a generation. . how might a permanent fix be
arranged? . That Is The Question. -- j
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To their great surprise, among their findings were the majority of people become more certain in their original belief than they were before seeing the evidence. The team of psychologists investigating this phenomenon was surprised by what they found, and since 1956 thousands of experiments have supported their findings.
In 2006, Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler investigated this commonly recognized phenomena. They experimented with many long-held and emotional issues like stem cell research and tax reform. They found evidence the subjects accepted as true which contradicted the long-held belief, increased the strength of the participants’ misconceptions if the evidence contradicted their ideologies.
Restated, once a person believes something, the person protects the belief from harm. The protection is instinctive and unconscious whenever confronted with inconsistent evidence. Just as confirmation bias shields one when the individual actively seeks information, the backfire effect defends the belief when the evidence blindsides a person and the natural response is to stick to the beliefs instead of questioning them.
Over time, the backfire effect helps make a person less skeptical of those beliefs which allows one to continue accepting the beliefs and attitudes as true and proper.
The conclusion of all this is simple: you are not likely to convince another person to change a deeply held belief using evidence., but even worse, they may grab onto the bad belief even stroner than they did before you started talking to them.
Memes are the human software just as genes are our hardware. No supernatural entity involved or necessary. And just as body tissue can develop tumors, so can the mental content. Belief systems like religions reinforce their staying power by even forbidding questioning, demanding submission and obedience. Gack.
I am fond of Rand's wishing you a good psycho-epistemology!
And, as you say, one barrier is people do not want to admit they have been fooled---which is why so many con men go scot-free. It will take a long time and a lot of education to get the majority of people to recognize beliefs should be checked against reality.
We cannot check all the beliefs taught to us as children, and fortunately most things were true, so we need only check those beliefs which are brought to our attention as potentially incorrect AND which make an impact on our lives. Such is the ideal, that every belief is subject to change upon the presentation of new credible evidence. An ideal to seek.
If you listen to the lamestream, it's apparent but talk to people and it's the opposite....so the only conclusion one can make is the fix is in and cheating is the means to their end.
It bothers me to even think that is the case.
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