[ExI] Be nice to leftists

[BillK]

On Mon, May 26, 2014 at 10:43 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote:
> Au contraire - there is an entire and enormous field of psychology devoted
> to attitude change and creation.  In economic psychology there is marketing.
> Thousands of studies - change and creation occur constantly.  One tip: do
> not present an argument far different from the people whose attitudes you
> are trying to change.  Just try to move them a little way or you will get
> the stubbornness indicated by billk.  But sometimes huge changes, like from
> religious to atheist or the reverse happen.  Just a little thing like
> whether the pro argument is first or after the con argument matters.  Dozens
> of variables matter aside from the strength of a person' belief.  bill w
>

Well, yes, but......
I wasn't referring to opinion manipulation, adverts, etc.

I was referring to confirmation bias.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias>
Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is
the tendency of people to favor information that confirms their
beliefs or hypotheses. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged
issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs.

People also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their
existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been
invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes
more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same
evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the
evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect
(a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and
illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association
between two events or situations).
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BillK