Don’t Talk about Politics, Lubrano, Sarah Stein, 2025.
Brexit is also a good case study for how debates can often make issues look more ‘even’ than they might be. As Emily Maitlis, a former newsreader for the BBC, put it, ‘It might take our producers five minutes to find 60 economists who feared Brexit and five hours to find a sole voice who espoused it … But by the time we went on air we simply had one of each; we presented this unequal effort to our audience as balance. It wasn’t.’34
34 Emily Maitlis (2022), ‘When an Agent of the Tory Party Decides the BBC’s “Bias”, It’s a Huge Problem’, Guardian, 25 August, available at:
Goldacre noted, someone with the weaker scientific argument (in this case a conservative Australian MP) can appear just as strong as someone with the science, precisely because of the two-sided, debate-like format: You [the denier] will win every time. You can cherry pick data and there’ll be no time to point out the flaws, you can pull out dodgy science and there will be no time to point that out. You can pull out arguments that have already been resolved. You can find one of those [arguments] that the person you’re arguing with hasn’t heard of and then it will be next Tuesday by the time you have gone off to research it.36
You [the denier] will win every time. You can cherry pick data and there’ll be no time to point out the flaws, you can pull out dodgy science and there will be no time to point that out. You can pull out arguments that have already been resolved. You can find one of those [arguments] that the person you’re arguing with hasn’t heard of and then it will be next Tuesday by the time you have gone off to research it.36
‘I Can Change Your Mind on Climate’, The Science Show, radio programme transcript, ABC Radio National, 21 April 2012, www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/scienceshow/i-can-change-your-mind-on-climate/3963066 (accessed 20 October 2024).
Protesten hebben geen effect op de rest van de bevolking. Wel maken ze van de mensen die deelnemen aan protesten sterker gemotiveerde (en in zekere mate gelukkigere) mensen.
Er lijken twee uitzonderingen te zijn in het effect van protesten. Gerichte protesten die de campagne van een politicus volgen kunnen die specifieke persoon dwingen of het idee geven dat dit een topic is waar ze aandacht aan moeten besteden. En grootschalige protesten over langere tijd vereisen zoveel organisatie dat, wellicht in combinatie met de media aandacht voor de protesten zelf, er een effect is dat tot verandering kan leiden. O, en gewelddadige protesten zijn altijd contraproductief.
Gedwongen adaptatie aan negatieve omstandigheden kunnen ertoe leiden dat juist de mensen die het meest leiden onder die omstandigheden die kunnen gaan verdedigen.
Laurin and her teams’ research, and the research behind System Justification Theory, shows what happens when you limit people’s possibilities for action. If you shut down the range of possibilities in a person’s life, you may well restrict their views and ability to question too.
Which is not to say we are entirely determined. In fact, it’s probably a good idea to remind ourselves that there are always more options for our lives than we realize, because it appears that it is precisely when we think our circumstances are inevitable that our views harden. Laurin’s aforementioned research found that people reconciled their views with their reality most when they felt those circumstances were inevitable. For example, those who were told they probably couldn’t leave the country during one study were far more likely to rationalize whatever policies that country had.20 In fact, human beings often react negatively to any attempts to control or persuade them, experiencing the aforementioned phenomenon of ‘reactance’. It’s only if changes seem inevitable that our beliefs tend to shift. What this means, politically, is that a great deal hinges on whether people see their lot as inevitable and unchangeable. The scope of our political imagination matters a great deal, and our hope for a different outcome.
And that’s not all. If we’re cognitively overloaded, research suggests, we’re probably more likely to adjust to the world we’re already in, but if someone draws our attention to the way we might be being manipulated, we may become less likely to reconcile our views with the existing world.21 In short, our experiences and actions change our minds, and the less mental bandwidth we have to give to reflection, the more likely we are to align our views with our actions uncritically. Surely many overly busy people, without time or a particular reason to stop and question things, assume that the world has to be the way it is and align their beliefs with the status quo. But with time and a different understanding of their circumstances they might do differently. So while it may be depressing that our beliefs are so strongly shaped by circumstance and even by oppression, this is not inevitable, especially if we can discover that there might be another possibility for how to live.
20, 21 Laurin et al., ‘Response to Restrictive Policies’.
One of the reasons why action is so central to political thinking is that it is only in trying to change the world that we discover how it works.
Beetje onduidelijk verhaal over hoe actie (of collectieve organisatie voor praktische doelen die ook politieke aspecten of machtsverhoudingen onthullen) je mening veranderd?
Ik moest er aan denken hoe white supremacists die zichzelf organiseren op deze wijze kunnen ontdekken dat de federale overheid de vijand is de ze met geweld moeten bestrijden.
Ook platte aarde gelovigen die zich organiseren veranderen weliswaar hun mening, maar niet ten goede, integendeel ze raken overtuigt van hun eigen gelijk, vinden steeds meer manieren om confirmation bias in te bouwen in hun denken, tot het punt dat ze bewijs fabriceren omdat ze toch de waarheid menen te weten.
The fact that action changes beliefs points to another core concept: affordances. Affordances are the action-possibilities that a particular tool or technology permits or suggests; they are what a given situation or technology ‘affords’ their user. A motorcycle affords one the opportunity to go fast and travel alone; a car affords one the possibility to do the same, but with more people. This concept is often used in studies of technology; consider, for example, how the kind of conversation it’s possible to have on a landline is totally different from the various ways of communicating made possible on Instagram.
[I’m still reading]