How Big Tobacco invented Donald Trump and Brexit (and what to do about it) / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2017/03/17/scientific-curiosity.html
Economist Tim Harford (previously) traces the history of denialism and “fake news” back to Big Tobacco’s cancer denial playbook, which invented the tactics used by both the Brexit and Trump campaigns to ride to victory — a playbook that dismisses individual harms as “anaecdotal” and wide-ranging evidence as “statistical,” and works in concert with peoples’ biases (smokers don’t want cigarettes to cause cancer, Brexiteers want the UK to be viable without the EU, Trump supporters want simple, cruel policies to punish others and help them) to make emprically wrong things feel right.
This “motivated reasoning” is incredibly hard to undo. Studies of whether presenting refutation to people who’ve bought into a belief system that serves their personal agendas shows that counterpoints can actually strengthen their beliefs (the “rebound effect”).
But one promising approach is to cultivate “scientific curiosity,” which is not the same as being a scientist: people who habitually engage in scientific curiosity are less prone to the rebound effect and more able to overcome motivated reasoning.