The Information Deficit Model in Science Communication

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If you want to change people's beliefs, use facts. They work just fine. If you want to changed their feelings about the world, their interpretation of it, their opinions about it, well, you need to change their attitudes. And this is the lesson that we, out here in the non-academic world, have yet to understand. Thanks to Hovland's work, which he continued at Yale after the war, all the way to his dying day, science stopped using beliefs, opinions, feelings, values, and attitudes interchangeably.

In 2017, YANSS did three episodes about the backfire effect, and by far, those episodes were the most popular that year. Then, in 2018, part four was the most popular.

The backfire effect has his special allure to it, because, on the surface, it seems to explain something we’ve all experienced -- when we argue with people who believe differently than us, who see the world through a different ideological lens -- they often resist our views, refuse to accept our way of seeing things, and it often seems like we do more harm than good, because they walk away seemingly more entrenched in their beliefs than before the argument began.

But…since those first three shows, researchers have produced a series new studies into the backfire effect that complicate things. Yes, we are observing something here, and yes we are calling it the backfire effect, but everything is not exactly as it seems, and so I thought we should invite these new researchers on the show and add a fourth episode to the backfire effect series based on what they’ve found. And this is that episode (again).

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