I was talking to a friend of mine the other night who relayed to me a discussion he had with a female coworker, in which the woman revealed that she believed the whole notion that mankind is causing global warming is a big fat lie. My friend had emailed me to request some ammunition to bolster his case. I wrote back, and reminded him that out of over 900 articles published in scientific, peer-reviewed journals in recent years on the subject of climate science, not a single one has contradicted the notion that human activity, in particular CO2 emissions, is directly responsible for global warming. Contrast that to the 600+ articles published in the mainstream media of which 53% contest that simple fact.
That was a stupid response on my part. I should know by now that such people do not respond to reason, distrust science, and believe facts are subjective -- at least the 'facts' that contradict their irrational opinions or beliefs.
The next day I was reading an article in Harper's about peak oil. In it, the author gave a brief history of apocolyptic groups in America, and discussed the work of
Leon Festinger and his book "When Prophecy Fails", published in 1956. Festinger and his crew studied the case of Marion Keech, a bat-shit Chicago housewife who gathered a small group of followers as a result of aliens from the planet Clarion using her as their mouthpiece. Through 'automatic writings', she shared the information with her group that the Earth would soon be flooded, and only true believers would be spared by a Clarion spacecraft that would pick them up shortly before the apocolypse. I presume she was reminded by her alien contacts to bring a towel and some peanuts. When the flood didn't happen, and the aliens didn't beam up Mrs. Keech and her band of loonies, she suddenly received a new message from the aliens that informed her that her groups impressive spiritual development had averted a global catastrophe.
Festinger calls this event "disconfirmation" -- the moment when one's belief collides head-on with a contradictory reality. He even predicted exactly how these people would react post-disconfirmation:
Festinger et al. predicted that the inevitable disconfirmation would be followed by an enthusiastic effort at proselytizing to seek social support and lessen the pain of disconfirmation.
And indeed this is exactly what occurred:
Afternoon, December 21. Newspapers are called; interviews are sought. In a reversal of its previous distaste for publicity, the group begins an urgent campaign to spread its message to as broad an audience as possible.
Among Festinger's interesting observations, he makes this point: "If more and more people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must after all be correct." This is the "50 million Elvis fans can't be wrong" system of logic. It is also the reason there are people who still watch Fox News and explains why some people still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11.
Leon Festinger was also the originator of the
Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, which also helps us to understand fundamentalists, Intelligent Design proponents, and Flat Earthers. Basically, the idea can be boiled down like this: your brain doesn't want to believe two contradictory things. For example, if your belief system has been informed and shaped by an unquestioning belief that some supreme being created the whole world in 6 days, and, since childhood, you've accepted as fact the myth of Adam and Eve, then when you're confronted with something like the Theory of Evolution, your brain wants to reject it outright as nonsense, regardless how compelling the scientific basis might be, or you'll alter your understanding of what evolution is so that it can be incorporated into your existing belief system, or you'll invent a new belief that extends your existing beliefs, such as a competing 'theory' of Intelligent Design that is just as valid as the secular Theory of Evolution.
In a classic test of his theory of cognitive dissonance, Festinger and his colleague Carlsmith conducted an experiment in which they had a bunch of people doing some really tedious, mundane shit for way too long. Then they asked a favor of some subjects: they told selected subjects that they really needed a research assistant to help, and asked the helpers to convince new subjects that the tedious shit was actually fun. One group of phoney assistants was paid $20 to help, another group $1, and a control group was paid nothing. What they found was that the ones who were paid $1 were the most effective at convincing other subjects that turning pegs in holes a quarter turn, then taking them out and doing it again over and over was entertaining stuff.
When asked to rate the peg-turning tasks later, those in the $1 group rated them more positively than those in the $20 group and control group. This was explained by Festinger and Carlsmith as evidence for cognitive dissonance. Experimenters theorized that people experienced dissonance between the conflicting cognitions "I told someone that the task was interesting", and "I actually found it boring". When paid only $1, students were forced to internalize the attitude they were induced to express, because they had no other justification. Those in the $20 condition, it is argued, had an obvious external justification for their behavior.
The researchers further speculated that with only $1, subjects faced insufficient justification and therefore "cognitive dissonance", so when they were asked to lie about the tasks, they sought to relieve this hypothetical stress by changing their attitude. This process allows the subject to genuinely believe that the tasks were enjoyable.
Put simply, the experimenters concluded that human beings, when asked to lie without being given sufficient justification, will convince themselves that the lie they are asked to tell is the truth.
Does this not shed some new light on the world around you? Especially when you think about President Bush and his supporters, as well as all kinds of other fundamentalists?
Festinger makes it clear that countering such a believer with reason and evidence is of no use, and in fact is more likely to force the believer to cling more tightly to the belief in question.
Had I known then what I know now, I'd perhaps have told my friend to abort his attempt to appeal to his coworker's reason vis-a-vis global warming. There is no reasoning with unreasonable people.
However, there is reason for hope. It's a fact that humans have an innate proclivity toward conformity, particularly within a community. And as Festinger points out, (simple, ie. most) people are more likely to believe what they perceive most others around them to believe. So while you can't expect to change a believer's mind with logic, it can only help to let them know that your belief on the subject is contrary to theirs. With any luck, if enough people around them let them know they're just plain wrong, the believers will eventually come around and adopt a more sane belief system that's shared by the reality-based community.
