Fixing the backfire effect

If you're a speaker, and you want to convince someone of something, there's a few things you can do.

1.) Appeal to shared axioms. If I tell you X is bad, and you like X, you may get angry at me for telling you a thing you like is bad. It may even seem like an attack on YOU, because you like X. If I tell you X is bad, and you like X, but you dislike Y, and I start by saying "you know, Y is bad *for this reason*, right?", and you *agree with me*, then the leap from that to "this reason also applies to X" and "therefore X is bad too" is smaller, because you already agreed.

2.) Separate the belief from the believer. When people identify themselves as believers-in-[thing] (whether that is adherents to a specific religion, fans of a specific sports team, or statisticians), and they are told "thing is wrong for this reason or that reason", and then they see that as a threat, that is because they have a personal vested interest in whatever the thing is (whether that is just their peace of mind or millions of dollars does not change that). If you can, for example, explain to someone that every pilot today is privileged because they were born in a world where planes exist, and that does not mean their hard work is meaningless, and that does not mean they're bad people, and so on and so on... then it should be easier to get them to agree about institutional privileges than if you just go around saying "you didn't build that".

Separating people from beliefs is a very good habit in general, by the way, for yourself and for others, because it makes it far easier to just say "well, shit, then I'm wrong", and change your beliefs, if you don't think being wrong about something says something bad about *who you are*. It also makes it easier to sympathize with people you might think are assholes, which matters for #5.

3.) Hedging your claims. "It could be the case", "I think that", "maybe if you think about it this way", all make it seem like less of an "imposition". I have a particularly hard time with this, because I think it's weird that if I say "X is the case", people don't just automatically assume that there is an implicit "I believe that" right before that (I mean, I'm not omniscient!).

4.) In the same vein as #1, #2 and #3, progressive arguments. "Okay, you don't have to believe that Chocolate is the best flavour, but can we both agree that it's *a* flavour? And that *people exist that like it*?" Bit by bit, pieces fall into place, and idea seeds germinate in people's minds.

-- 4.5) GIVE IT TIME. People fucking suck at understanding a thing in 5 minutes. I know people who disagree with me in the moment and then, 6 months later act like the belief I was stating and they were saying was wrong is the most natural thing ever. Human beings are not all that rational, even if we like to think we are. Letting an idea sit in someone's brain for a few days or weeks or months is sometimes the most productive thing you can do. Give them all of the puzzle pieces and wait, occasionally asking "hey, so [topic]?" to know that they still know the puzzle pieces are there. They will, *eventually* put them together, if your position is actually the necessary logical conclusion from those priors.

5.) Make the interlocutor feel heard. A lot of the time, people don't actually want to "be right" or "discover the truth". They think X, and you think Y, and they don't actually want you to think X (even though they may say they do), they want what they think and what you think to line up. They want to agree. Actually listening, and paying attention to what they say, not to rebuke them, not to prove them wrong, but to understand them, helps with this. Understanding your audience is the first step to changing their minds, and you do that by prioritizing their experience and playing the Believing Game with them for a while.

Here are a couple of articles on things, I'll maybe add more later:

www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-convince-someone-when-facts-fail/
blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/how-to-talk-to-a-science-denier-without-arguing/