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Highlights: #180 – Hugo Mercier on why gullibility and misinformation are overrated

80k After Hours

NOTE

Case studies of resistance to persuasive arguments

People generally tend to change their beliefs in the direction of persuasive arguments based on facts and trusted authorities. However, there are documented cases where beliefs shift in the wrong direction, such as vaccine hesitancy for a specific vaccine and population group. Despite these outliers, there are numerous experiments showing that providing a compelling argument rooted in facts and trusted sources usually leads to a change in people's beliefs, although not always to the extent desired.

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Speaker 2
And that was actually the only case in which people's beliefs shifted, updated in the wrong direction relative to what you might expect. You know, in some cases they didn't move so much, but that was the one case out of dozens in which it went in the wrong direction. Do you think to some extent people are maybe cherry picking cases where folks are resistant to arguments and they ignore just the familiar everyday cases when arguments persuade us sensibly all the
Speaker 1
time? Yes. Yes. And in the documented cases of this backfire effect, there's another one with vaccine hesitancy, I think, for one specific vaccine and one specific range of the population. But, but yes, I mean, there are kind of now dozens, if not hundreds of experiments showing that in the overwhelming or like the quasi, you know, entirety of the cases, when you give people a good argument for something, something that is based in fact that they would, you know, some, some authority that they trust, then they are going to change their mind, maybe not enough, not as much as we'd like

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