The Debunking Handbook

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A few years ago, social scientists Steven Lewandowski and his colleague John Cook wrote the debunking handbook. The idea is that if you just dump a bunch of facts at the feet of people who have misconceptions or have faulty information, these facts will just sort of break a wrongness spell. If only you gave them more information than they would see the light; bingo, everybody is happy. But before you reach it, challenges often backfire: Once information has become interwoven with someone's personal identity, their worldview can be decimated.

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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