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The Debunking Handbook

Bookmarked. I will be reading this in full shortly.

I had not ever considered the idea of these backfire effects. I wish there were more content to it, but I may adjust my debunking tactics in response to this.
 
Cubeless said:
Bookmarked. I will be reading this in full shortly.

I had not ever considered the idea of these backfire effects. I wish there were more content to it, but I may adjust my debunking tactics in response to this.
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Yeah, same, looking back I can see how counterproductive my arguments with deniers have been.
 
I was looking up a paper on the dangers of debunking myths (PDF here: http://sitemaker.umich.edu/norbert.schwarz/files/07_aep_schwarz_et_al_setting-people-straight.pdf) and I came across a new paper "Misinformation and its correction". The abstract is here: http://sitemaker.umich.edu/norbert.schwarz/misinformation_and_its_correction and there's a link to the full text as a PDF. I thought they might both be of interest.

The original paper I was looking up includes these quotes:

Presumably, erroneous beliefs can be dispelled by confronting them with contradictory evidence. Yet attempts to do so often increase later acceptance of the erroneous beliefs...
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Any attempt to explicitly discredit false information necessarily involves a repetition of the false information, which may contribute to its later familiarity and acceptance.
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I did a quick search to see if anyone else had posted about Lewandowsky or Schwarz on the forum and I'm glad I did because I hadn't actually heard about the Debunking Handbook before I found this thread just now.
 
bobwtfomg said:
excellent resource Bit Pattern, thanks
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Happy to oblige. The more people who see it the better
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bit_pattern said:
Part 2: The Familiarity Backfire Effect
To debunk a myth, you often have to mention it - otherwise, how will people know what you’re talking about? However, this makes people more familiar with the myth and hence more likely to accept it as true. Does this mean debunking a myth might actually reinforce it in people’s minds?

To test for this backfire effect, people were shown a flyer that debunked common myths about flu vaccines.1 Afterwards, they were asked to separate the myths from the facts. When asked immediately after reading the flyer, people successfully identified the myths. However, when queried 30 minutes after reading the flyer, some people actually scored worse after reading the flyer. The debunking reinforced the myths.

Hence the backfire effect is real. The driving force is the fact that familiarity increases the chances of accepting information as true. Immediately after reading the flyer, people remembered the details that debunked the myth and successfully identified the myths. As time passed, however, the memory of the details faded and all people remembered was the myth without the “tag” that identified it as false. This effect is particularly strong in older adults because their memories are more vulnerable to forgetting of details.

Cont.
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This is quite interesting and gives the impression of being in complete opposition to what Derek Muller of Veritasium says on the matter (at least when it comes to educational videos --which is what he did his PhD thesis on). It is a general criticism on his part of science videos in general.

It is possible for these two approaches to be equally justified (I am not weighing in with an opinion about it --I'm just pointing out that the two need not contradict each other). If this is so, it would most likely be due to the difference between normal reasoning and motivated reasoning. Someone's misconception regarding the distances and proportions of planets of the solar system is not going to be due to motivated reasoning. Someone's misconception regarding vaccinations or global warming is likely to be due to motivated reasoning.

So maybe the context matters very much with regard to which approach is likely to work best.
 
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