That’s the title of a 2022 book by David McRaney, a Mississippi journalist who saw first-hand people’s hostility toward information and ideas (like in science) at odds with their pre-existing viewpoints. He thought it futile trying to change minds. The gay marriage issue seemed a case in point. Then public opinion about it flipped dramatically. Which changed McRaney’s own thinking.
“So,” he queries (his emphasis), “what was the point of all that arguing in the first place?” Probing some science, he suggests that actually it’s not a bug in human life but a feature — enabling societies to resolve issues in ways that serve their interests. He found many past examples where opinions appeared set in stone, but then shattered — evoking a term from evolutionary biology — “punctuated equilibrium.”
An opinion is a feeling, like an emotion, a mood. Persuasion is a force that can affect that feeling — if there’s some receptivity. Hence it works best focusing on people’s motivations behind their opinions. Much of the book reviews methods that have been developed to change minds, not by bludgeoning people with facts, but establishing a rapport of mutual humanity, and exploring together why they believe what they do.
McRaney profiles Charlie Veitch, leader of a British “Truther” group, believing 9/11 was an inside job. The BBC flew them to America, where various experts debunked their theories. All were unmoved — except for Charlie, who was actually persuaded, and publicly recanted. The others then showered him with abuse and harassment. So what’s the lesson? McRaney thinks it actually has little to do with facts and evidence.
Take gay marriage again. It wasn’t information changing minds. Rather, getting people to interrogate their own feelings — conversations with themselves. Thinking about their thinking — why do I feel this way?
Reading this, I was saying, okay, but that involves what was really a prejudice rather than a conviction or belief. And, when it comes to politics and polarization, McRaney says what’s required is a “gestalt understanding” of “the psychology of reasoning, motivation, social rewards, social costs, norms, beliefs, attitudes, and values . . . within individual brains, right down to neurons, hormones, and ganglia.” That’s quite a package.
One’s brain constructs a model of reality. Not corresponding exactly to what might be called real reality. For instance, we don’t actually see in three dimensions, but our brains use visual cues to create an internal illusion that we do.
A great example was “The Dress,” a 2015 online controversy — some saw it as blue and black, others white and gold. The lighting made the image ambiguous, requiring the brain to disambiguate it, with its whole past experience, including the conditions under which one’s vision has customarily functioned, coming into play. That differs from one person to another.
And McRaney introduces, from psychology, the term, naive realism — the belief that you perceive the world as it truly is, free from personal assumptions or biases, thus objectively and rationally. Not from your own individualized disambiguation heuristics.
McRaney writes that something similar applies to political perceptions. However, if one’s visual system is effectively geared to see The Dress as blue and black, it physically cannot look otherwise; but politics is not like that. With a tipping point where information can force one to resolve cognitive dissonance by changing an opinion. McRaney invokes Thomas Kuhn’s concept of “paradigm shifts” in science, where new evidence changes the prevailing view. Similarly for individuals, one tries to fit anomalous data into one’s old understanding of reality, but at some point that fails. As in Veitch’s case. But, McRaney says, before that tipping point, incongruent information can actually make people defensively dig in their heels.
Seeing the information “as if it was a threat to their very flesh and blood.” Indeed, he cites work by neuroscientists showing that being challenged on a political wedge issue can send one’s brain into “fight-or-flight mode.”
Zach was a minion of Westboro Baptist Church — infamous for homophobia. Then his seeking treatment for a painful injury was deemed somehow heretical. His family demonized him (the father loved his nonexistent god more than his suffering son). This gave Zach a paradigm shift. The dam broke, and then doubts about his received picture of the world became a flood.
A key point is the social/tribal factor in one’s beliefs. Evolution made us highly social creatures because cohesive groups proved better at surviving and thriving. Hence being part of a group engenders positive feelings, with a sense of “us-against-them” toward other groups. And a belief system, like a religion — or a political stance — helps anchor a person into their group. Being in good standing with the group is more important than being factually correct. Both Veitch and Zach could break free of that because they managed to find different social support systems.
But how do people fall down opinion rabbit holes to begin with? One, recently profiled on NPR’s This American Life, had crazy religious and political ideas. Lost him his wife and daughter. His son though tried to engage and, hoping this would lance the boil, made a $10,000 bet on whether a list of ten predictions by the dad would prove true in 2024. Including Obama, Biden and Pelosi all convicted of treason and Trump restored to power before the election. The father (not affluent!) cheerfully paid up — but recanted nothing.
The guy wasn’t even part of some whacko group — it was all in his own head, filled with crap off the web. Laughable to anyone with a grip on reality. But too many people seem to have lost such plain old common sense.
The Rational Pessimist 
