Once we consider a reference group trustworthy, questioning any of their accepted beliefs or attitudes questions all of them, and this can be a problem.

Contentious issues are contentious because we are disambiguating them differently, unconsciously, and not by choice. If we can see that, it can lead to something Pascal and others at NYU are calling “cognitive empathy”: an understanding that what others experience as the truth arrives in their minds unconsciously, so arguments over conclusions are

The classic example of this is a 1957 observational experiment by the psychologist Leon Festinger, who infiltrated a doomsday cult in Chicago. The leader of the cult, Sister Thedra, told her followers that a spaceship was coming to save them from a world-ending flood on December 21, 1954. Cult members gave away their possessions and their houses

When confronting novel information in moments of uncertainty, we have no choice but to favor those representations. It’s dangerous to be wrong, but it’s also dangerous to be ignorant, so if new information suggests our models might be incorrect or incomplete, we first attempt to fit the anomalies into our old understanding. If they do, we continue

If holding alternative positions might cause you to lose friends, lose advertisers, lose a job, or face public shaming, rejecting what would otherwise be neutral, empirical evidence would be a very rational decision. For issues about which your tribe has formed a consensus, others will use your agreement as a measure of how much they can trust you.

In both groups, people then begin searching for reasons why so many people in other groups can’t see the truth without entertaining the possibility that they aren’t seeing the truth themselves.

So when interacting with someone who is vaccine-hesitant, you’ll get much further if you frame it as respectful collaboration toward a shared goal, based on mutual fears and anxieties, and demonstrate you are open to their perspective and input on the best course of action.

When confronted with new information that seems inconsistent with our existing priors, cognitive dissonance draws our attention to the fact that those priors may need an update. If we couldn’t experience it, we could never change our minds.

The key to changing a nation, or a planet, is persistence. At any one time, for any given system, thousands of us are banging away at it hoping to make the difference that changes the world, but no one knows where the vulnerable cluster is at. No one can will the system to cascade for them. The system must become vulnerable. When it is, with so