What Is Going on With the War in Iraq?

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In the U.S., people who knew that things were corrected and turned out to be false later on, they still believed in that. In Australia and Germany, when they knew something was false, they no longer believed it. People are just less likely as a population to harbor that skepticism than people who lived in other regions. Scientists live in a world where facts usually work on people with some struggle, but they still work. But as the AI researcher Eliza Yodkowski once wrote, science is smarter than scientists.

If dumping evidence into people’s laps often just makes their beliefs stronger, would we just be better off trying some other tactic, or does the truth ever win?

Do people ever come around, or are we causing more harm than good by leaning on facts instead of some other technique?

In this episode we learn from two scientists how to combat the backfire effect. One used an ingenious research method to identify the breaking point at which people stop resisting and begin accepting the fact that they might be wrong. The other literally wrote the instruction manual for avoiding the backfire effect and debunking myths using the latest psychological research into effective persuasive techniques.

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