Comment by kstenerud
17 hours ago
They're not wrong. Humans have many ways to display loyalty, and belief is one of those ways. This is also why facts can't change these kinds of beliefs (and in fact usually backfire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance).
Our evolutionary heritage is that shared belief and social unity (even when it's wrong) trumps independent thinking for group survival in a hostile landscape.
From 4chan:
People who can't defend themselves physically (women and low T men) parse information through a consensus filter as a safety mechanism. They literally do not ask "is this true", they ask "will others be OK with me thinking this is true". This makes them very malleable to brute force manufactured consensus; if every screen they look at says the same thing they will adopt that position because their brain interprets it as everyone in the tribe believing it. Only high T alpha males and aneurotypical people (hey autists!) are actually free to parse new information with an objective "is this true?" filter.
You are special! message straight from 4chan. Chilling effect affect everyone in authoritarian society. Also remind me of that XKCD about sheeples.
You're either a low T man or a woman.
I will go one step further. There are several evolutionary anthropologists that think the number 1 thing modern humans have over other homos that caused us to outlast them is not intelligence, or brain power or physical power, but that we are just more social. Being social it seems is our superpower and our greatest strength but the other side of the coin is that it is also our weakness.
> as of 2020 most researchers believe that backfire effects either are unlikely to occur on the broader population level, or only occur in very specific circumstances, or do not exist
from your link
the sentence before that is even better:
"A 2020 review of the scientific literature on backfire effects found that there have been widespread failures to replicate their existence, even under conditions that theoretically would be favorable to observing them."
queue Michele McLaughlin
[dead]