Just a Thought

Awhile ago I did a post about Terror Management Theory and then a follow up to it. This led me to scribble a note late one night as I was about to fall asleep. I just found the note and it still made sense! So I wanted to share it with you.

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Often, atheists feel that religious people, new agers, etc., need to rid themselves of their religion completely. While I don't believe accommodationism is an appropriate goal, I think asking people to start over with nothing but a vacuum (not an accurate description, but how it would be perceived) is unrealistic and will almost always be rejected.

Instead, what about getting rid of just the worst influences? For instance, a recipe calls for lard and bacon fat. Get rid of the lard and replace it with something healthy and equally satisfying. Then later get rid of the bacon fat and replace it with something healthy and satisfying.

Let the people understand that it's a healthy replacement and that their worldview is not threatened, just improved.

This is how I did it, in stages.  Baby steps. Instead of threatening and attacking, perhaps use humor and thoughtful Socratic questioning . Maybe it could work?

Definitely add Critical Thinking to the recipe first! :)

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What do you think? What would you take out first from the recipe? What would you replace it with?

The Science of Persuasion

The other day I gave you a transcript from a lecture. The article was titled Why People Defend Their Dogma. At the end I promised a follow-up with some practical advice. And here it is. They did another episode of Reasonable Doubts, Episode 70, where they talked about how to persuade people, especially about science. They talked about a professor who has done some studies. I have written up a transcript of the salient parts of the conversation.

Partial Transcript:

37:18 If the goal is not to score points, if the goal is actually to persuade people, if the morally superior goal is to win minds rather than just make people look stupid, then tone really does matter. Psychology has some things to say about how we should best go about trying to persuade people to really, any position, but even more specifically to a scientific position that they may otherwise feel threatened by,  or may conflict with their worldview.

38:07 It's an empirical issue. What is likely to be persuasive or off-putting or not is a testable question. There are people right now researching how you package factual issues and seeing if that affects the rate at which people believe, disbelieve or deny them.

One of the examples of this, there is a researcher who's name is Geoffrey Monroe from Towson University who has done some studies on peoples' willingness to agree with belief consisting information as opposed to information that's inconsistent with beliefs as a function of things like how the information is presented to them.

So he had a piece on Science and Religion Today where he folded this into the debate about, do you alienate people by using blunt language that offends them. The theory behind this that people don't, as most people probably realize, they don't simply make up their mind on the basis of factual, cognitive, cold type calculations. This is one aspect that frustrates us, is that when we are debating with somebody, it quickly becomes apparent that the facts of evolution in some cases won't make a difference, if the person has an emotional investment.

So people hold attitudes because they are linked to aspects of your self-identity. As stated in Terror Management Theory, if you have a worldview that can be threatened, you get defensive. You circle your wagons as if attacked. In the same way, with factual issues like scientific-type things, religious people hold these as part of their broader self-identity.