Have you ever had a really hard time getting through to someone?
Have you engaged with people on social media or in real life about something that was important to you, about which you knew a lot, but you simply could not budge the other person no matter what you said or did?
Let’s talk about why it’s so hard to talk to some people, why no matter what you say or how you say it, there is nothing you are able to do to crack them or even get them to acknowledge the things you said. It has to do with propaganda, our brain, our imagination and something called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It can be tough to keep these things in mind in the heat of a debate or social media argument, especially when you’re all fired up over some hot topic issue. But if your goal is to change hearts and minds, or at least understand opposing points of view, you have to remember that some people you interact with do not see the world the same way you do. I don’t mean just a difference of opinion over a set of facts. If that was all we had to contend with, debates and rhetoric would be easy. No, the problem is one of perception.
This is why one of the biggest objections I have to telling lies or using deception in propaganda, argument or news media is that it creates a false world view to those who watch or listen to those lies. It depends on the quality and quantity of lies a person is told as to how skewed their views can get, and on what subject matter the lies are being told but the bottom line is that the more lies a person accepts as true, the more out of touch with reality that person will become. I don’t think this receives the degree of attention it requires in our modern society. We willfully and happily spread false information in support of our causes or ideals and then wonder why the world seems like it’s getting crazier and more violent and more divisive.
The examples of this are legion but first let’s address why people don’t even see this problem as clearly as they should. It’s odd and even tragic, but most people truly believe that they are usually impervious to being deceived. They honestly think that they are sharper, smarter and more perceptive than they really are. We know this is a fact from the Dunning-Kruger studies. In short, the Dunning-Kruger Effect is the cognitive bias in which people of low ability delude themselves into thinking they are superior and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. This illusion of superiority comes from the inability of low-ability people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their actual competence or incompetence. In other words, stupid people are too stupid to recognize that they are stupid and not just that, but convince themselves they are actually smarter than everyone else. And in case you think this doesn’t apply to you, it does.
Statistically speaking, 50% of the population is below average in ability or intelligence. If you understand the term “average” then you would understand why this is true. Now of course being “below average” is not an overall value statement about any individual. You have to be clear about what it is that you are below average in. You who are watching this right now are below average in all kinds of things. You probably don’t think about that too much, because we tend to focus on our strengths more than our weaknesses but it is true. For example, I’m not afraid to admit that I’m a horrible baseball player. I’m so far below average, I thought baseball games were played at night because bats are nocturnal. (groan)
On the other hand, I’m not below average when it comes to my reading and writing skills. I’ve practiced those all my life, I’ve worked hard to hone and improve those skills and I’m pretty good at it. I could be a lot better, though, and I am always seeking to learn more and new things to improve my ability as a writer.
A truly competent and rational person is able to assess their own strengths and weaknesses far better than an incompetent or ignorant person can. Incompetent and ignorant people cannot face their incompetence and ignorance and live in a place we call denial. I’ve made a whole video about the topic of denialism which is linked below if you want to check that out. It’s understandable that this happens because human beings have strong egos and a good self-image is important to us. However, this creates very real and very difficult barriers when it comes to critical thinking.
If people are not skilled in spotting deceptive advertising, biased news reporting and the countless other ways we are deceived every single day, they are not going to have any critical thinking filters or guards up and therefore they will believe lies are truth. They will not question so-called “trusted sources” and even worse, will automatically nay say any source of information that does not conform with their preconceived ideas. They will literally not even look at or even not perceive the existence of information that contradicts or challenges their ideas. They gloss right over it or act like it doesn’t even exist.
Just the other day I was having one of those internet arguments we all love to engage in and I repeatedly made a point about a particular fact which was not controversial or opinion based but was a simple statement of fact on the same order as saying the sun is rising in the morning. Yet the person I was arguing with just flatly refused to acknowledge that fact. After repeating it a number of times, it became clear this person was not even perceiving the words I was saying. She was so far down a rabbit hole of false information, her world view had filtered out anything contrary to what she thought was reality.
I’ve referred to this as delusion in the past but after some study, I’ve come to realize that is too strong a term for this phenomena since delusion infers a mental disorder that could be genetic or otherwise caused by some abnormal biology. A better term is an illusion – a thing that is wrongly perceived or interpreted by the senses. That is the world that someone who accepts false information lives in. To the degree they are living in lies, they are living a life surrounded by illusions. And some of those illusions can result in beliefs that are not just tragic but even horrifying.
There are some further correlations that can be made on this. For example, we know that motivated reasoning is a powerful cognitive force. This is basically the unconscious tendency people have to process information in such a way that it fits their preconceived ideas and emotional investments. Now emotion and intellect are the two forces hard at work in our brains and they work together in often surprising ways. If someone receives a particularly alarming piece of false information, for example, they will have emotional reactions to it such as frustration, fear, anger or even terror. These emotional reactions reinforce the belief all by themselves. If and when more false or half-true information appears which looks like it corroborates that first false datum, it is just added to that pile without much critical thinking or filtering. It’s just the way our brains work and there is very little we can do to change it. But we can conscientiously apply critical thinking to overcome some of its effects.
This is one of the reasons why trying to fight irrationality and false information with facts just plain doesn’t work. If someone is heavily invested in believing something false is actually true and their emotions are piled up on top of it, which is almost always the case with core or important beliefs, then you’ve got some real work cut out for you to dig through all that and pry loose that false data. You can throw objectively true facts at a person all day long but they will not only ignore or nay say the facts you throw at them, they might not even be able to perceive them at all. I’m talking about looking right at them and not seeing they exist. If you think this is far fetched, it’s not. Perception has been proven to be skewed based on our motivations or even social connections.
Dan Kahan from the Yale Law School wrote: “In the 1950s, psychologists asked experimental subjects, students from two Ivy League colleges, to watch a film that featured a set of controversial officiating calls made during a football game between teams from their respective schools. The students from each school were more likely to see the referees’ calls as correct when it favored their school than when it favored their rival. The researchers concluded that the emotional stake the students had in affirming their loyalty to their respective institutions shaped what they saw on the tape.”
If you think about it for a second, this happens to us all the time. How many times have you been looking for your keys or something and you look all over your house, your car, the kitchen drawers and you can’t find them anywhere. Then you find yourself standing in the living room and you suddenly kind of wake up from a trance state and finally notice your eyes are looking right at your keys on the coffee table? Just because we are looking at something doesn’t mean we see it. And just because you are talking to someone doesn’t mean they are hearing even a word you are saying.
I want to be clear that I’m not saying that false information shuts down your critical thinking faculties. It’s worse than that. What it does is filters and partitions your critical thinking so that you can only be selectively skeptical. Here’s a clip from Anthony Magnabasco’s channel on street epistemology which demonstrates this point. This man is talking about the miracles and wonders of Christian belief but when is skeptical about miracles from other religions. Check this out.
He had an unexpected, probably even to him, moment of honesty where he admits that he cannot be skeptical about his own beliefs. This is very common.
Now here’s a short clip from a person who is being asked about marijuana legalization. He is not being asked if he does or doesn’t want marijuana legalized. He is being asked if he would be willing to consider changing his mind if he were presented with evidence contrary to his position. The conversation can’t even get started though because of the series of underlying investments this person has made in his politics and the blatantly false views he has about people on the Left end of the political spectrum. This man is incapable of having a rational conversation on the topic of marijuana. He’s not just unwilling to receive facts about marijuana, he’s completely incapable of it.
For the past couple of years, I have worked to figure out how to use rationality and reason to engage with people who have differing or opposing ideas and how to change hearts and minds. And the fact is that there are some people who just have to be written off entirely. Not because it’s impossible to sit down with them and eventually get them around to seeing outside their little preconceived boxes of belief, but because it would simply take too much of your valuable time to do so. Where you could engage with ten different people at varying ends of their belief spectrum, perhaps seven of them could actually be moved or could be made to consider opposing facts or evidence, there are three of them who seemingly will not budge no matter what you say or do. I’m just making up those numbers to make a point but according to my experience, most people are not this extremist in their thinking and can be swayed eventually by facts and reason.
So don’t be so quick to think you are talking to one of these entrenched believers simply because they challenge your beliefs or are difficult to talk to. You’ll know this kind of person I’m talking about because during the course of talking to them, you will notice this odd phenomenon of them ignoring or refusing to engage with facts and evidence you present, or even if you question them around the idea of changing their mind. They are recalcitrant, obstinate, unwilling or seemingly incapable of agreeing with even the simplest and most uncontroversial of facts on the topic under discussion.
This is the sign of a cultic or extremist belief and is also indicative of, for lack of a better term, what I will call mind control. It is the result of an overly propagandized mind. It is a person who has ceased thinking entirely on the subject and will only parrot platitudes, mantras and thought-stopping cliches at you. This person is an utter waste of time to a critical thinker and should simply be dismissed and ignored once identified. They are not engaging with you in an honest or open manner, they do not care one iota what you have to say. They pontificate, they do not communicate. Thankfully, this level of extremist thinking is uncommon. For fervent, unreasonable belief of this nature, an intervention would be required to get through to them. So yes, they can be reached but very few of us have time for any of that.
Thank you for watching.