Guest opinion by John Ridgway
“Return your sword to its place, for all who will take up the sword, will die by the sword.” – Mathew, 26:52
Fans of Stephan Lewandowsky have learnt that an awful lot can be ‘explained’ simply by invoking the cognitive bias of your preference. To demonstrate the power of such a strategy, I recently shared with you my Climate Skeptic’s Guide to Cognitive Biases. Although at times tongue-in-cheek, the guide nevertheless had a serious point to make – whichever side of a debate you may choose to take, you can always appeal to cognitive bias to put your opponents in their place. Unfortunately, the fact that my guide included over sixty biases meant that I couldn’t go into too much detail for any single one. So I have decided to return to the subject, but this time to concentrate upon a single bias to further illustrate the point.
The bias I have selected for this purpose is the Backfire Effect, which I have chosen for two main reasons. Firstly, the effect is deemed to be the quintessential vice of the climate sceptic. Secondly, accusations of Backfire Effect appear to be Lewandowsky’s favorite barb, since they form the pretext for his notorious Debunking Handbook. I hope you’ll agree it would be remiss of me to write about this effect without engaging in a bit of Lewandowsky baiting.
The Backfire Effect Redux
The first thing to remind you about the Backfire Effect is that it is easy to summarise: When people are confronted with information that refutes their previously held beliefs, they respond by strengthening the belief rather than relinquishing it. This is a surprising outcome, and so one should expect it to be difficult to explain. However, explaining the effect turns out to be very easy; the challenge is getting any two psychologists to agree upon the explanation. After just the briefest of internet searches I was able to find the following offerings.
People respond to refutation by strengthening their beliefs because they:
- Feel they are being persecuted
- Are inappropriately self-confident due to consensus fallacy
- Are emboldened by a supportive availability cascade
- Are demonstrating a reactive confirmation bias
- Are over-enthusiastic in their self-affirmation
- Are reacting to a perceived threat to their self-interest
- Exhibit bravado in the face of embarrassment
- Suffer from a cognitive deficit1
- Suffer cognitive dissonance and so fall back on belief bias
- Reject the refutation as being part of the conspiracy
- Succumb to cognitive laziness
- Suffer from biased assimilation
- Are desperate to avoid the identity crisis that an abandonment of their belief would entail
- Are reacting negatively to refutation overload
- Subconsciously respond to a perverse form of the availability cascade simply by hearing their own myths repeated during the refutation
With so many explanations on offer, one has to wonder whether the pundits are all talking about the same thing. The Backfire Effect is beginning to look like the catch-all explanation for any situation in which a debate didn’t go the way someone expected. Moreover, one should keep in mind that the Backfire Effect was confirmed in controlled experiments that were conducted by a discipline that has a meagre 39% success rate when it comes to reproducibility.2 That doesn’t mean that I rule it out as the potential cause of an individual’s perverse intransigence, but my level of trust in the psychological explanation is such that I find it perfectly plausible that sometimes the real explanation might be one that isn’t actually on the psychologists’ list. Maybe the backfire happens simply because the refutation isn’t actually a refutation.
The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But
Whenever examples of the Backfire Effect are discussed, the two ‘wacko’ groups that are invariably cited are the anti-vaccination campaigners and the climate change ‘deniers’. So this is the deal: Any belief that a climate sceptic may have can be taken, a priori, as incorrect. This, of course, means that any counter-argument to their belief is, necessarily, a refutation. Any resultant strengthening of the belief, therefore, has to be a perfect example of the Backfire Effect. The sceptic is debunked but mindlessly carries on in a state of delusion.3
At least, this is how psychologists will see it. The problem, of course, is that the Backfire Effect only applies when dealing with an axiomatic truth, but when it comes to climate science, one wonders how psychologists (who let’s face it are no more experts on climate science than I am) are able to identify such truths. This is a vitally important point, because if you are in the business of peddling axiomatic truths, then you had better be certain of your facts. Which brings me back to Professor Lewandowsky.
The Debunking Handbook
Lewandowsky thinks he knows why he can say that the climate science uncertainties are bogus, and he thinks he knows why climate sceptics are therefore deniers in disguise. This much is evident from reading his Debunking Handbook, which carefully explains the reasons for the Backfire Effect and the best strategies for overcoming it. The reasons, incidentally, are the last three mentioned in my list given above. The strategies are basically: When dealing with your denier, provide the “core facts” that debunk the myth before referring to the myth you are debunking; immediately prior to mentioning the myth, make sure you explicitly warn that you are about to reveal a falsehood; and make sure you leave the denier with the correct belief, in order to fill the gaping hole you have just created by your debunking.
Helpfully, Lewandowsky provides examples, one of which is the debunking of the ‘myth’ that there are still fundamental uncertainties that are preventing a meaningful consensus within the climate science community. In keeping with his debunker’s strategy, he opens with his “core fact”:
“97 out of 100 climate experts agree humans are causing global warming.”
Of course, no citations are offered to support this statement, although it might as well be said that none of the candidate papers that come to mind are above criticism, particularly those produce by the Debunking Handbook’s co-author, John Cook.. It should also be pointed out that Lewandowsky’s preoccupation with consensus figures betrays a basic misunderstanding of how science works. However, most importantly, this statement of “core fact” fails to understand that it is not causation but the degree of attribution that troubles most sceptics. Nor should we overlook that Lewandowsky blithely ignores the sociological factors that seriously undermine the validity of the consensus. This all means that the supposed core fact is far from factual and anything but core. So anyone who thinks it serves as an axiomatic truth capable of debunking a myth, is being seriously optimistic.
The Backfire Effect – A Case Study
So here is how the Backfire Effect works on this occasion:
You read a document that professes to demonstrate the best way of debunking your own views. It provides examples. However, in the very first example you look at, you come across a statement that is supposed to serve as a straightforward refutation but is, in reality, highly contentious. Concerned, you look into the author’s other works and you come across a paper titled, “Conspiracist Ideation as a Predictor of Climate-Science Rejection”. You then discover that its findings are authoritatively disputed.4 You don’t presume that the disputation is valid but it looks pretty damming. Then you discover that the same author has produced a paper titled, “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation”. This paper takes the supposedly misplaced criticisms of one of his previous papers5 as further evidence that the accusations he had made in that paper were valid. You look into it and quickly discover that this argument is an obvious begged question, and so you wonder how such pseudo-scientific nonsense got through peer review. This just adds to your misgivings. Nor does it help to reflect upon the high profile that the author has amongst the pro-CAGW pundits, or indeed amongst his own profession. As a result of this experience, you are left even more sceptical than you were at the outset.
Bingo! It’s the Backfire Effect! You’re a cognitively challenged conspiracy theorist.
I’m sure I am as guilty as anyone for succumbing to the Backfire Effect. But next to Stephan Lewandowsky I am an amateur. Lewandowsky has taken a humble and commonplace cognitive bias and out of it created a thing of beauty. The more you get frustrated by his ill-formed arguments and motivated reasoning, the more this strengthens his belief. He has created for himself a meme that includes the idea that frustration with the meme provides evidence of its validity. This is a recursive delusion. Lewandowsky purports to be an expert on the psychological pathology that lies behind the Backfire Effect, and yet in his own hands he has elevated the effect to the status of an all-encompassing but ultimately sterile logic.6 So, if anyone can be said to have shot himself in the foot, then it has to be everyone’s favourite psycho-warrior, Stephan Lewandowsky.
Notes
1 I think in this instance ‘cognitive deficit’ is being used as a euphemism for stupidity.
2 A ‘Reproducibility Project’, undertaken by the journal Science, found that only 39% of the results of experimental and correlation studies published in three prominent psychology journals could be replicated.
3 And before you start, I’m not using the term in the narrow sense used by psychiatrists. There is no presupposition of mental illness; just a false belief that is held strongly enough to serve as a motivation.
4 Dixon R., Jones J., “Conspiracist Ideation as a Predictor of Climate-Science Rejection – An Alternative Analysis”, Psychological Science, March 26, 2015.
5 I am referring to, “NASA faked the moon landing – Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science”.
6 Expressed in doxastic logic’s terminology, Lewandowsky is a Conceited Reasoner regarding matters of climate sceptic argumentation, including his assumption that climate sceptics thrive upon the capacity to be Peculiar Reasoners. A Conceited Reasoner is defined by:
and a Peculiar Reasoner is one for which:
“humans are causing global warming” is true. We build homes, and heat them, just for the purpose of keeping us warm! The effect is more or less (correct me if wrong) equivalent to 1 hour of sun more in a year.
And this is supposed to be the big deal, worthy of giving all power to some worldwide bureaucracy? seriously?
For those who wish to revisit it, the “97%” paper is here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009EO030002/epdf. The most obvious hole in the paper is that the sample size, from which the 97% was deduced, was a mere 77. I suspect there are more holes which readers at the time didn’t see, but which might be more obvious now. And there are plenty of people in this forum far more eagle-eyed about such things than I am.
Doran/Zimmerman
In addition to continuous filtering of responses until they got the answers they wanted, the REAL takeaway is that the supposed conclusions are in no way controversial, would be agreed to by most of this blog’s readers and certainly did NOT say that the warming was catastrophic or even an immediate danger (which of course a previous President DID say when he pretended to quote the study.)
A. Who were the several “climate scientists” who thought present temperatures are NOT higher than pre-1880 (they missed the Little Ice Age in their studies?)?
B. This was a survey sent to scientists, so the meaning of the word “significant” is relevant. If they meant “occurred more than could be explained by chance” then of course humans HAVE contributed (deforestation, UHI and of course CO2). However, even if they meant the word as it is used in the vernacular (“major” as in “significant injuries”, the conclusion is STILL meaningless because they asked if human activity was a CONTRIBUTING FACTOR to the warming (in contrast to Lewandowski’s statement). Again, who on this blog would disagree?
And there were other method errors, to boot.
Anyone who works professionally as a negotiator and persuader is familiar with the rebound effect. Putting aside all of Lewinsky’s academic jargon, I think it has a simple, common sense explanation. If you attack a person, he will defend himself. In a verbal argument, if a person perceives his deeply held beliefs are being attacked, he will attempt to marshal all of the evidence and arguments that support his position. When he does so, his beliefs are reinforced rather than weakened. Moreover, the more threatening he perceives the intensity of the attack, the more likely that the argument will engage the limbic “fight or flight” systems of his brain, which simultaneously shuts down pre-fontal cortex, the center of rational thought.
There is a great deal of literature in the field of negotiating how to avoid the rebound effect, none of which Lewinsky suggests. A few of the most basic points are these:
1) When people are arguing, rather that discussing, they are not in a frame of mind to be open to persuasion. The first step in changing this is to follow the simple advice of Stephen Covey, “seek first to understand, then to be understood.” If you want to persuade a person, you first need to understand why he believes as he does. To be most effective, you need to understand the other person’s argument better than he does. This not only helps you understand how to frame your position, but also starts to reduce the other persons defenses. One of the most effective things you can say in an argument is, “I understand how you arrived at this position” followed by a succinct summary of their arguments. If a lawyer is writing a brief on a complex case and he thinks that his opponents arguments are silly, he is not doing his job right.
2) To change a persons openness to being persuaded, it is helpful to find some common ground, which is almost always possible. I in no way buy into conspiracy theories that suggest that the Apollo lunar landing was faked. I could, however, imagine saying to someone who does, that “I don’t always trust what government officials say, especially when they have an incentive to mislead”
3) Once the above steps have been followed, you still must avoid attacking your opponents’ position directly. Instead of making assertions that point out why he is wrong, ask questions such as “have you considered . . .? or “have you read what so and so has said on the subject?” Asking questions encourages a person to reconsider his position rather than to defend it.
4) Almost no one will not immediately change a deeply held belief on the spot. Persuasion is a process. Allow people to mull things over and don’t immediately back them into a corner. Allow them to save face.
Having provided what I would view as a common sense way of persuading someone to change his position, I will say that Lewinsky follows none of my advice. He loses, personally, me at step one because he has no idea what parts of climate science I dispute or why. I could care less about the 97% consensus because I would consider myself part of it as I understand how it is defined. When he accuses Steve McIntyre of being a “denier” or a conspiracy monger, it is obvious that he has absolutely no understanding of Steve’s arguments.
I agree with your comment. I would add, however, that you also have to be prepared to have more people maintain their beliefs than change them.
I think people don’t ever really change belief. They, however, accept two things
* to lose faith in people and organizations that were supposed to hold the same belief (like, communists losing faith in USSR and communist parties after Berlin events showed the people were discontent)
* to put the belief down the list of their motives, while other motives step up
CAGW believers are not really concerned about the “GW” part, they are concerned with the “CA” part: that humans mess with Nature. When the GW scare will wane, and it will, they will feel deceived and dirty, they will find it harder to trust the next scaremonger, but they won’t stop to be worried.
In other words, Lewandowsky, although being a “psychologist”, doesn’t understand these obvious and simple things as laid ouf by you. That man is completely nuts. Bristol University, where he is giving lectures, seems to be hoarding nuts by the Zetaton.
“although being a “psychologist”, doesn’t understand these obvious and simple things as laid ouf by you”
HA, “being a psychologist” is nothing to brag about, to wit:
Excerpted from above published commentary:
The literal fact is, psychologists and psychiatrists are no more capable of “identifying such truths” than they are capable of identifying and/or explaining “why and how” people “think” and “act” the way they do…….. simply because, …. most every practicing psychologists and psychiatrists don’t really have a “clue” why they, themselves, “think” and “act” the way they do.
And iffen one can’t explain the “root source” of their own “actions” ….. there is no way they can define or explain the “root source” of the “actions” of others. Thus, the actions of said psychologists and psychiatrists are little more than “Monday morning ‘Quarterbacking’ in the Health Care game”.
@ur momisugly Samuel C Cogar
I put the noun psychologist in “quotation marks” to show that I am not really convinced of their science. But I still believe that they have some advanced insight into matters John Doe has not. And, yes, I do agree with what you insinuated: some psychologists badly need a psychiatrist. This will end like a fight of Goliath vs Goliath, both dropping dead.
@ur momisugly Non Nomen
IMLO, there is very little if any “actual” science involved in what psychologists and psychiatrists are touting as “reasons & causes” of personal problems that are directly associated with one’s re-occurring and debilitating “spells” or “attacks” of emotional or mental discomfort.
HA, a broken clock has “advanced insight” into what the exact time will be at two different occasions each day.
The practice of psychology and psychiatry are still primarily “rooted” in the written commentary of a late 19th Century heroin addicted author, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939).
And the only thing the “P& Ps” have actually accomplished during the past 100+ years has been the development of new prescription drugs for “masking” the emotional effects of the afflicted person(s) ….. and the “coining” of dozens of “new names” to describe the original problem.
Iffen it is a “nurtured problem”, ……. then the only cure for it is …. the afflicted person has to “re-nurture” or “un-nurture” it him/her self. No one else can do it for them.
“4) Almost no one will
notimmediately change a deeply held belief on the spot.”Pauld,
Your comment is very informative and well presented.
From the article: “In keeping with his debunker’s strategy, he opens with his “core fact”: “97 out of 100 climate experts agree humans are causing global warming.”
Lewandowsky “core fact” is actually a lie. There is no 97 percent consensus. This is a lie. If he is going by his sidekick Cook’s study, the real figure is actually less than a 2 percent consensus, which is no consensus at all.
That’s what we expect out of activists Alarmists: A bunch of lies, and Lewandowsky does his part here.
Allegiance to a group is strong in primates, people will defend their beliefs because these beliefs are connected to a group they associate and are in allegiance with, to change their beliefs is to abandon the group and become isolated, which is not a good survival strategy. Conformity to one’s group has been strongly selected for.
The points of the post are valid.
But the verse quoted, while often quoted as a “proverb”, does not apply.
He was speaking to his disciples at that time, at that place, in the the circumstances they were facing.
a discipline that has a meagre 39% success rate when it comes to reproducibility
This is why I did nothing with my BA in psychology. And btw there is no way psychology has a 39% success rate. That number is as phony as the 97% meme.
While psychology is excellent at figuring out where a problem originated I don’t believe it has ever “cured” anyone. And only very rarely even helped anyone.
I could have made (not “earned”) much more money if I had stuck with it but I would have gone crazy from the cognitive dissonance.
I’ve been using #ConfabulatoryConfirmationBias on twitter for a few years now having read all the Warmist BS 😀
Lewandowsky is the best example of his own latest theories. Interestingly, before he jumped off the deep end into climate psychology and conspiracy ideation, he did reasonable work. Even more interestingly, much of it is about bias effects that are clearly occurring in the climate consensus. I think this explains his bizarre position. It was either give up a world view (CC has become highly aligned with left of center views in some countries, like the US, and Oz where Lewandowsky comes from), which all his own theories showed was wrong, OR sacrifice everything to insist that the certainty of imminent CAGW is unquestionable, yet having to turn his prior theories completely upside-down relative to the social data, in order to try and fit this false picture.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/06/wrapped-in-lew-papers-the-psychology-of-climate-psychologization-part1/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/08/wrapped-in-lew-papers-the-psychology-of-climate-psychologization-part2/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/09/wrapped-in-lew-papers-the-psychology-of-climate-psychologization-part3/
Psychologist make too many claims about groups of people, many of them are just wrong.
Psychologist are stuck in their own bias-sets, and all too often see everything that people do as a result of some prior personal experience. This is mostly BS on the part of the psychologist.
The very basis of this piece is just wrong built as it is on nothing more than BS.
But then again I’m very biased again all social ‘science’. On an individual basis a psychologist can be useful to the troubled, but in trying to expound broad generalities to whole population they(Psychologists) are on very shaky ground.
Some news:
Lewandowsky has realised the ‘back fire effect’ is only relevant is people aren’t really paying attention…
ie it is nonsense… if people are actively engaging/listening… their is no ‘backfire effect’
he has even published this in ‘peer reviewed’ science…. lol
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211368116301838