Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)
This is very long and complicated, but I&#x27;ll try to write a quick comment.<p>Many people know from experience how hard it&#x27;s to convince anyone to change what they say, the way they behave, etc, from facts alone. I say &quot;behave&quot;, because it&#x27;s very important to realize the difference between &quot;rationally accepting&quot; and &quot;caring about a truth or fact&quot;, more to that later.<p>We also know that people can change their minds quite easily when they are exposed to pretty much anything for enough time, with enough repetition. Even when we know something is false, the repetition of a certain discourse can have a noticeable effect on us. When you pair that with other types of external pressures, it becomes even more egregious.<p>The key point is that we can&#x27;t easily change how people feels while being respectful with that people and trying to make them change through words only. We are irrational, and we all have different priorities. Even if I accept a fact, it might not be something important to me, even if I rationally say it is, so I won&#x27;t change the way I act, and it won&#x27;t matter that much. Otherwise, I might say that I don&#x27;t accept something just because I don&#x27;t feel that way, even if I have to discard and ignore (unconsciously) the facts. What &quot;I feel &quot;is more relevant than the facts that I &quot;don&#x27;t really (want) to understand&quot;. As tobr puts very well in another comment too, all these feelings and ideas have a long term effect: &quot;When our minds are mulling over some piece of information, whether it’s true or not, it will have side effects on other thoughts, opinions and emotions. If we’re confronted with a revised set of facts later, there is no way to rewind all those side effects.&quot;<p>I thought it was interesting to write about all this, not only because it really helps a lot understand why facts might or might not help much changing the way people behaves, but it also helps us understand better how to actually make people change their minds. Words might be very effective for those that are already in a similar line of thought, but in other cases we might want to try changing the way people feels about something instead, by  trying to making them live, in first person, the contradictions in their own beliefs (unfortunately, for many technical issues, you can&#x27;t do that without becoming a teacher (and that assuming the other person trusts you enough to let you teach something), but then it&#x27;s not surprising that people can&#x27;t trust facts that depend on knowledge they don&#x27;t have, it&#x27;s only natural). And all this also help us understand that even though we might accept many rational truths, we all have different priorities, so the ones we end up acting upon deserve some consideration. Sometimes you are so focused on your own causes that don&#x27;t understand how others don&#x27;t share it, when it&#x27;s simply that they have their own ones too, not necessarily that they don&#x27;t rationally accept and understand what you are doing. And there are a billion worthy causes. For some people it might be about saving the world. Others focus only on their kids. We can do a lot to manage better that collision between rationality and irrationality, between facts and feelings, because both are critical to us as human beings.