When I started EvC well over 20 years ago I had high hopes. I believed that moderated discussion would bring the light of understanding to benighted evolution skeptics. But that never happened. I bet that if we all got together we could come up with perhaps as many as 10 people we convinced in all that time.
An article in this months
American Scientist is titled
How People Decide to Trust in Science. According to it, our efforts were doomed from the start.
A significant focus of the article is trust in science, how people develop it, how many have it, how it depends upon context. Another important focus is the difference between science in general and regulatory science, such as during covid. It notes that combating distrust in regulatory science with more science education had a paradoxically opposite effect because such efforts were seen as patronizing. It also made political polarizations worse.
So how to develop trust? The article discusses trust methods and discussed their study of long covid patients who participated in an online discussion group. This paragraph is instructive:
quote:
We found that a specific sequence was common to those users whose posts were consistently upvoted. They did not begin their posting career by immediately citing scientific articles, however well supported, but by establishing a similarity of experience, which involved asking questions about the experiences of others and posting about one’s own illness experiences—at the correct moment, when it was relevant and resonant. Only in this way could they establish commonality. On the other hand, users who immediately tried to tell others what they’d learned from the literature were downvoted and disliked—nobody likes a know-it-all. Users whose anecdotal stories lacked attunement to the stories told by others were looked upon with suspicion, and their authenticity was questioned.
In other words, burying someone in facts right off the bat doesn't work. Adding scorn only makes it worse. You have to first build trust and then only gradually introduce facts and/or arguments. And they have to resonate else they'll be rejected.
I don't see how building trust among evolution skeptics was ever possible here. Typically they appeared here already primed with misinformation that they could infinitely draw upon from the many anti-evolution websites. How do you go about building trust with someone whose initial post begins with (picking a topic at random), "Radiocarbon dating has been proved false. The world is only 5700 years old."? How do you respond in a way designed to build trust but that is honest, especially since their next response will probably contain blatantly and usually obviously false information from ICR that was carefully designed to be very convincing for those unfamiliar with science?
Their answer is that beginning by establishing a similarity of experience is very important. I know some of us have such experience, but many are probably like me. Before high school my views were plastic and unformed, but sometime during high school only facts and logic began to matter to me as far as choosing what to accept as true. A friend used to frequently chastise me, "You're too logical."
I believe the article is behind a paywall, but hopefully I've said enough to provide a feel for what it says.
Creation/Evolution Miscellany?
--Percy
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