Some time ago I posted a couple of bits about a book called When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger, or more accurately, posts about my (then) current thinking about the implications of what Festinger has to say. When I was reading today I came across a piece in Mother Jones in the same vein.

The article is interested in political persuasion and contemporary denialism – you know the people who think that autism is caused by vaccinations (despite all the evidence to the contrary), the people who think the earth was created in 7 days and that life does not evolve (despite all the evidence to the contrary), the people who believe the climate is not changing and even if it is what humans do has no impact (despite all the evidence to the contrary). Those guys. In Festinger’s study they are called The Seekers.

In the annals of denial, it doesn’t get much more extreme than the Seekers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. But while Martin’s space cult might lie at on the far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there’s plenty to go around. And since Festinger’s day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called “motivated reasoning” helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, “death panels,” the birthplace and religion of the president (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.

The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call “affect”). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we’re aware of it. That shouldn’t be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It’s a “basic human survival skill,” explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.

We’re not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn’t take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that’s highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.

There four pages of interesting information about this, and science does not escape the analysis.

And it’s not just that people twist or selectively read scientific evidence to support their preexisting views. According to research by Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan and his colleagues, people’s deep-seated views about morality, and about the way society should be ordered, strongly predict whom they consider to be a legitimate scientific expert in the first place—and thus where they consider “scientific consensus” to lie on contested issues…

…Indeed, there’s a sense in which science denial could be considered keenly “rational.” In certain conservative communities, explains Yale’s Kahan, “People who say, ‘I think there’s something to climate change,’ that’s going to mark them out as a certain kind of person, and their life is going to go less well.”

It comes down the fact that facts can’t persuade under these kinds of circumstances. So what then? Education?

In a 2008 Pew survey, for instance, only 19 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed that the planet is warming due to human actions, versus 31 percent of non-college educated Republicans. In other words, a higher education correlated with an increased likelihood of denying the science on the issue. Meanwhile, among Democrats and independents, more education correlated with greater acceptance of the science.

So not education. Or at least that by itself isn’t enough. Mother Jones suggests careful presentation of data inside an already acceptable model tailored to the group you want to inform.

Conservatives are more likely to embrace climate science if it comes to them via a business or religious leader, who can set the issue in the context of different values than those from which environmentalists or scientists often argue. Doing so is, effectively, to signal a détente in what Kahan has called a “culture war of fact.” In other words, paradoxically, you don’t lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.

I accept this as almost certainly true but mentally rebel anyway.  Still, I know that when May 22 comes along and when Harold Camping‘s group find themselves still here, they will not renounce the silliness. They’ll just dig in deeper. And partly that is because they value faith over data; they want the emotional comfort of belonging much more than they want the satisfaction of having an accurate view of reality.

My rebellion comes because such behaviour, such irrationality, offends me. I want to believe that facts are enough of a persuasion despite the clear evidence that they are not. Yet, I know that I have (and do) tailor my way of speaking about things depending upon which group of people/family I am with. I am an atheist, for example, but I am perfectly capable of speaking about spirits when in the sweat. And I have no intention to defraud. I am speaking what I feel to be true in the terms under which people I care very much about can hear me.

Nevertheless, such culture crossing, such a liminal stance, is difficult, time-consuming and requires enormous physical and emotional effort. And if the studies Mother Jones references in the article are true, some of us just can’t stand the world a liminal stance illuminates. So there will always be some of us that jump out of the unknown and unknowable center where uncertainty reigns and one is asked to always walk on the uncertain surface of civilization’s waters. Some of us will always hop back to shore and into a black “yes” or “no.”

Here’s another fact: May 22 will arrive so we will be required to keep going. The only choice is how we go.