The Backfire Effect

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The backfire effect, they believed, must have some natural upper limit. For those who received 10 to 20% negative info, that info backfired. And it made those people love their candidate more so than if they got no negative information at all. The other folks with a little bit of negativity are still perfectly happy with the candidate that they started with.

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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