Mike Jonas writes:
The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation, UK) looks at analysis that could lead to more moderate attitudes.
This BBC article provides some food for thought that is relevant to the climate debate. It looks at a paper “Political Extremism Is Supported by an Illusion of Understanding” by Fernbach, Rogers, Fox and Sloman, which shows how people’s mistaken sense that they understand underlying causal processes can be used to improve the quality of their arguments and lead to more moderate attitudes.
That is something that the climate science debate could really do with – but be warned: it doesn’t just apply to others, it applies to you too!
The BBC article is here:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140521-the-best-way-to-win-an-argument
and the Fernbach et al paper is here:
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/24/6/939.short
both sides? what a concept!
Nice one, thanks
We can’t view the BBC article from the UK because we Brits only fund the BBC. Apparently despite us funding them, when they operate abroad in a “for profit” capacity we in the UK aren’t allowed to see what they are saying because we don’t fund that part. When out of the UK anyone can see the UK funded part of the BBC website. Those who can see the above site, what have you paid to fund it? I’d be very interested to know.
The wrong way is to sling “facts” at your opponent. He is under no obligation to accept them as facts, nor are you obliged to accept his. It goes nowhere.
The best way I have found is the Socratic method- asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking. Lead your opponent to a place where he realizes he’s wrong.
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice….
Extremism. What a miss-used word. I would posit that political extremism is the political norm for both mainstream LEFT and RIGHT paradigms. And this position is supported by the above articles. What luck for (radical) leaders that men don’t think.
I deal with this on a regular basis, working with building operations staff. Trying to teach someone an idea they think they already understand is more complex than I ever imagined.
I also learn something new in every building I visit. Some discoveries are positive, and some are not.
Sorry, I don’t see how this has anything to do with the best way to win an argument.
People tend to not understand things as well as they think they do. When challenged to explain, they start to realize their lack of understanding. Fine. This is not new behavior.
“shows how people’s mistaken sense that they understand underlying causal processes can be used to improve the quality of their arguments and lead to more moderate attitudes.”
“People’s mistaken sense . . . can be used to improve the quality of their arguments.”
Nonsense.
No wonder the climataocrats won’t sit down for in depth interviews that ask them to explain how taxing CO2 or wind mills will actually help anything to do with climate. No wonder the President and so many other political leaders rely on name calling and ignoring those who would question him.
Debating a belief system which is all that CAGW is, is a waste of time and effort. Facts don’t matter to them, nor does logic. They are burdened with emotion and irrationality, and thus immune to facts and logic.
“That is something that the climate science debate could really do with – but be warned: it doesn’t just apply to others, it applies to you too!”
======================================
Apropos of that, in a round-about way, I was taught something by a kind mentor that was something of an epiphany.
This person had asked the advice of his lawyer on a business matter. The lawyer said (to the effect of): “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but your position is unfavorable.”
My mentor, instead of being upset with the news, said “On the contrary, that’s great news. Now at least I have an impartial assessment of my position; I know where I stand and can plan accordingly.”
The truth sets you free, and it’s sad to see people willfully embrace error.
son of mulder says:
“Those who can see the above site, what have you paid to fund it? I’d be very interested to know.”
My attention at/near advertisments.
Annoyingly, the referenced BBC page isn’t accessible from within the UK:
“We’re sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes.”
‘Extremism’ is associated not with being right but not tolerating the right of others to disagree with you.
The Old Testament is very extremist by saying ‘Thou shalt have no other God but me’. Very dictatorial, isn’t it?? You’ll find similar statements in the Koran if I’m not mistaken……..
The grey areas emerge when someone accepts the facts you have presented to them which refute their argument but refuse to climb down from their position. I’ve seen this a lot with climate zealots.
Another grey area emerges when someone demands an equal vote using the line: ‘I haven’t got a clue, but these experts say so, so they must be right’, without spending enough time to determine whether you should believe what the experts tell you. It’s very frustrating that one, and you can see why people may descend toward extremism.
A third grey area involve those folks whose mode of argument always involves sneering, deriding, and lying whenever you try and engage in debate. There’s a temptation to descend to violence with these people, because they are the apotheosis of debating extremists and often they have held senior positions where people aren’t supposed to challenge their authority. They are some of the most dangerous people in fomenting extremism, because they combine power, influence and authority with wrong-headed, pig-headed ignorance allied to an unacceptably aggressive debating style.
So my position currently is that extremism in debate is fomented when an ignorant majority demand equal influence to those who have bothered to educate themselves as to the complexities of the matter, whilst not being financially dependent on the outcome of the argument.
Of course, it is also fomented by threats to people’s livelihoods, family security or personal welfare.
The BBC writer might want to add a follow-up piece on journalists who tip toe around the extremists positions and appease their bullet point rant lists like anti-nuclear slant, head in the sand bully tactics, and 10,000 years ago mush.
This is for all of us British who are denied access to this article, in spite of being forced to pay the annual BBC license fee.
Neurohacks | 21 May 2014
The best way to win an argument
How do you change someone’s mind if you think you are right and they are wrong? Psychology reveals the last thing to do is the tactic we usually resort to.
You are, I’m afraid to say, mistaken. The position you are taking makes no logical sense. Just listen up and I’ll be more than happy to elaborate on the many, many reasons why I’m right and you are wrong. Are you feeling ready to be convinced?
Whether the subject is climate change, the Middle East or forthcoming holiday plans, this is the approach many of us adopt when we try to convince others to change their minds. It’s also an approach that, more often than not, leads to the person on the receiving end hardening their existing position. Fortunately research suggests there is a better way – one that involves more listening, and less trying to bludgeon your opponent into submission.
A little over a decade ago Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil from Yale University suggested that in many instances people believe they understand how something works when in fact their understanding is superficial at best. They called this phenomenon “the illusion of explanatory depth” [1]. They began by asking their study participants to rate how well they understood how things like flushing toilets, car speedometers and sewing machines worked, before asking them to explain what they understood and then answer questions on it. The effect they revealed was that, on average, people in the experiment rated their understanding as much worse after it had been put to the test.
What happens, argued the researchers, is that we mistake our familiarity with these things for the belief that we have a detailed understanding of how they work. Usually, nobody tests us and if we have any questions about them we can just take a look. Psychologists call this idea that humans have a tendency to take mental short cuts when making decisions or assessments the “cognitive miser” theory [2].
Why would we bother expending the effort to really understand things when we can get by without doing so? The interesting thing is that we manage to hide from ourselves exactly how shallow our understanding is.
It’s a phenomenon that will be familiar to anyone who has ever had to teach something. Usually, it only takes the first moments when you start to rehearse what you’ll say to explain a topic, or worse, the first student question, for you to realise that you don’t truly understand it. All over the world, teachers say to each other “I didn’t really understand this until I had to teach it”. Or as researcher and inventor Mark Changizi quipped: “I find that no matter how badly I teach I still learn something” [3].
Explain yourself
Research published last year [4] on this illusion of understanding shows how the effect might be used to convince others they are wrong. The research team, led by Philip Fernbach, of the University of Colorado, reasoned that the phenomenon might hold as much for political understanding as for things like how toilets work. Perhaps, they figured, people who have strong political opinions would be more open to other viewpoints, if asked to explain exactly how they thought the policy they were advocating would bring about the effects they claimed it would.
Recruiting a sample of Americans via the internet, they polled participants on a set of contentious US policy issues, such as imposing sanctions on Iran, healthcare and approaches to carbon emissions. One group was asked to give their opinion and then provide reasons for why they held that view. This group got the opportunity to put their side of the issue, in the same way anyone in an argument or debate has a chance to argue their case.
Those in the second group did something subtly different. Rather that provide reasons, they were asked to explain how the policy they were advocating would work. They were asked to trace, step by step, from start to finish, the causal path from the policy to the effects it was supposed to have.
The results were clear. People who provided reasons remained as convinced of their positions as they had been before the experiment. Those who were asked to provide explanations softened their views, and reported a correspondingly larger drop in how they rated their understanding of the issues. People who had previously been strongly for or against carbon emissions trading, for example, tended to became more moderate – ranking themselves as less certain in their support or opposition to the policy.
So this is something worth bearing in mind next time you’re trying to convince a friend [5] that we should build more nuclear power stations, that the collapse of capitalism is inevitable, or that dinosaurs co-existed with humans 10,000 years ago. Just remember, however, there’s a chance you might need to be able to explain precisely why you think you are correct. Otherwise you might end up being the one who changes their mind.
[1] http://www.yale.edu/cogdevlab/aarticles/IOED%20proofs.pdf%201.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_miser
[3] http://www.changizi.com/
[4] http://pss.sagepub.com/content/24/6/939.short
[5] https://www.contributoria.com/issue/2014-05/5319c4add63a707e780000cd
Its possible to read it from the UK via a proxy server For example
http://online.netproxy.pw/
Just paste in the link
Another follow-up piece might be helpful if we could better understand irrational public policy stands based on perceptions of no cost of being wrong positions. The no cost driver appears to be powerful in the case of this President and his manipulation of practically all federal agencies in ludicrous statements and policy warps. Something similar may underlie the violent leaders and their sequence of actions right up to their demise in bunkers, etc.
The piece of the analysis he left out is the intense hatred that scientist fanatics feel for anyone who really can demonstrate that they understand the underlying processes better than the fanatics do. They don’t “agree” when they find that out, they start shrieking “Burn the Witch! Burn the Witch!!!”
Just ask Bengtsson how that works.
From the article:
>>>Those in the second group did something subtly different. Rather that provide reasons, they were asked to explain how the policy they were advocating would work. They were asked to trace, step by step, from start to finish, the causal path from the policy to the effects it was supposed to have.
[snip]
>>>Those who were asked to provide explanations softened their views, and reported a correspondingly larger drop in how they rated their understanding of the issues<<<
I believe that someone posting on these pages described his own approach to climate discussions as being quite similar to this. A lot of people might discover that they can't explain their beliefs in detail.
Interesting article. I used to hang out at Scientific American (before they ostensibly banned me for pointing out that Michael Mann did not actually win the Nobel Prize) and one of the questions I constantly asked the Alarmists was to explain to me the CO2 positive feedback/amplification mechanism and provide real world data that supports it’s existence. At first the Alarmists would proclaim “computer models prove it” and I would say computer models are not proof as they can be made to say anything the modeler wants. Next they would proclaim “CO2 affects water vapor” to which I would say, “Fine, then find me a paper that experimentally defines the mechanism and limits”, when no papers demonstrative of the mechanism could be found, the invective and bullying started. After this continued for some time, with still no satisfactory responses offered up by the Alarmists, calls for my banning began and ultimately I was kicked off the website, along with several others who asked similar questions.
The point I’ll make is that sometimes asking someone to explain it to you does not moderate their position. It may make them become more radical and intolerant.
“We can’t view the BBC article from the UK because we Brits only fund the BBC.”
If you want to mask your country of origin, use a VPN and tunnel into the internet. ProXPN has a variety of VPN gateways around the world; their free service uses their gateway in Dallas, Texas, USA. I just verified that you can get access to the BBC website through this gateway. I’m actually not a paying customer; I only use their free service occasionally to deal with stupid policies of ISPs and websites.
The problem is, the only time you get a real, two-way conversation is after the World and his Mother have fought themselves to a standstill and they see reasonableness as the first port of call, rather than ‘you are a ‘denier” unless you agree with all my statements from Day 1.
Sorry, we’ll have to take down the Climate ‘Science’ and associated University Departments before we can have a dialogue about reality……:o)
McMulder: this is really off topic, but you are touching on a very sore point with me. As you (as someone that has lived outside the US) are aware, the US news and media it stitched up tight here, you only get to see what they want to feed you, news or general entertainment. Much better sources are just not aired.
I used to listen to short wave BBC WOrld Service broadcasts, then the BBC sold re-broadcast rights in the US to PRI and shut down all the SW relays to the US. The. BBC claims this was to allow better reception, and that programming was available on local radio channels. Of course, the satellite feeds are encrypted, and at least here in Oregon, if there is any BBC WS content available, it’s for half an hour at 4am.
The rest of the world gets BBC WS TV, but all available feeds in the US are now encrypted, because the BBC sold the name to The Discovery Channel, who call it BBC America, which has really little in common with the BBC other than showing some of their content, a lot of independent tv (ITV) programs and a bit of locally produced content.
The amount of locally produced stuff is likely to increase, because both BBC and ITV have sold a lot of their better programming to Acorn Media which is no longer re-selling to US distributors, having decided it can compete with. Netflix and Amazon in Internet distribution.
Since even if you were to send the BBC a check for a TV license you still wouldn’t be able to see the content, I take the same money and donate it to vpnuk.info.
Right, so the message is that people crumble under questioning (the basis of the Socratic method) – hence the phrase “WE ask the questions.”