Your comment on statistics reminds me of that Kalesan paper published in The Lancet about a decade ago. Cherry picked data, some of it flat wrong. But it was picked up as gospel by the popular press. Or for that matter, a book a college math major friend of mine had on his shelf: How to Lie With Statistics.

There seems to be a lack of good, impartial peer review in this field.

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As for me, I supposed I became predisposed to support the pro-gun side even when I had never owned a firearm upon being disgusted by people claiming that high rates of burglary and robbery were things we simply most tolerate because — What could anyone do about it?

American pioneers and settlers had not police and few neighbors, yet were able to deal with rattlesnakes, packs of wolves, bears both black and brown, cougars, bobcats, hostile Indians, and all sorts of desperados. If we could tame the Wild West, it’s just not plausible to me that Americans today can have not choice but to live at the mercy of street criminals.

And when I learned that “shall-issue” concealed handgun carry permit laws did not cause any problems (beyond those inherent in a society where gun ownership in the home is permitted) — yet were viciously opposed — I realized that it was the intention of those on the other side to force us to live at the mercy of street criminals.

And I don’t think that’s ethical.

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No one wants to feel stupid, or credulous in believing false information, particularly if that belief was based on emotion and might have been seen as obviously wrong if they had bothered to look at the situation at all. “What a fool I was!”

Debate Clubs work because you are essentially playing a game. Debating normal people with an emotional or ego investment in their beliefs, particularly if they have a rational degree of not really “caring” about the subject except in the abstract, is unlikely to generate anything more than resistance and a shutdown. The facts may crack the ego wall later, but it takes a lot of character to admit being wrong even if they do.

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Thanks for this comment, Michael…..it really saved me a lot of writing.

The “common ground” issue reminds me of the “Dodo bird verdict”; “Everybody has won and all must have prizes.” Such “common ground” is often good for community relations and a kumbaya moment, but less so with regard to productive outcomes. Just because all move together, it does not validate the direction. Lemmings would tell us that.

I also agree that individual differences – the “biopsycho” part – genes, environment, and their interaction – of a “biopsychosocial” model are often neglected. Much of this seems to reflect work on persuasion from social psychology. How the information is presented is one thing, but the characteristics of the receiver are also critical. For instance, different routes to persuasion are more or less effective based on individuals’ intrinsic motivation to engage in effortful cognition. I suspect such interest is at an all-time low.

Statistics? Based on my long history in academia, as statistics have gotten “fancier” they have become less believable. They should be viewed with a high degree of skepticism. I often have to remind my students that their dissertation is not a project about what they can do with statistics, but about human behavior. Then I ask them to persuade me that I should care.

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In my experience, “common ground” is often some sort of blended average of a diverse range of opinions that often doesn’t amount to much. In my corporate career of almost 25 years, I’ve learned that “common ground” type “solutions” are generally good in very high risk situations where risk avoidance is paramount, but in most negotiations that’s not a “win” for either side and it generally doesn’t usually yield a good result. Maybe it’s different in this context, but I’d need to be persuaded of that.

In terms of this book: does the author talk at all about the five big personality traits and how this can cause different people to see the same issue very differently? To wit: I rate very low on the trait of agreeableness, while my wife rates very highly. This one small facet of our personalities often colors how we an approach and solve problems so differently. I imagine that fear (or my preferred term: risk aversion) would also be colored heavily by a blend of these personality traits and one’s lived experiences, in the same way that a photograph is just as much about the film and the lens as it is about the subject matter.

As for statistics: I am not in favor of throwing statistics at policy issues. Statistics, too, are like photographs: they’re as much a reflection of the person taking the photo as they are of the subject matter being photographed. It’s far too easy in statistics to tell the story that one wants to tell, and for this thin veneer of “science” to become a cudgel against differing opinions. The CDC study about “guns being the number one killer of kids!!!” is an excellent example of this: if one peels back the emotional bullshittery and looks at the data, what one finds is a single statistical outlier (black kids in their late teens) that skew the mean pretty wildly.

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Stories are more able to engage people than facts, as they put a human face on danger, thus triggering that “harm gene”, but as you show with the Trump example, one can make up stories out of whole cloth, i.e., propaganda for political purposes. I guess we’ve known about that since that Schicklgruber guy figured it out with The Big Lie.

My empirical evidence about the dangers of guns was formed early on, when the only living being in danger of being shot was a grouse or pheasant. If one grew up in a high crime inner city area, one’s empirical evidence of gun harm would be based on seeing the wrong end of the gun.

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