YOU CAN'T PUSH A STRING
A BETTER WAY TO COUNTER DISINFORMATION
YOU CAN’T PUSH A STRING
A BETTER WAY TO COUNTER DISINFORMATION
Everyone has that brother-in-law. Or grandparent. Or neighbor. You know, that one person you can count on to insist with preternatural confidence that GMO’s are toxic, windmills cause cancer, or more recently, Haitians are stealing pets and eating them. The natural reaction to such claims (other than dismissing them), is to present evidence against them. I mean, there’s plenty, Alternately, you might ask your brother-in-law to show you even one credible scientific study that confirms the harms of windmills. No doubt you have tried these strategies.
And no doubt they have gotten you nowhere. And while dammit, that’s just not fair, it’s nonetheless true. You simply cannot push a string. That is, argument cannot move an opinion or attitude away from the person holding it. Combatting disinformation head on situates the battle on your opponent’s turf. A better strategy is to reposition the conversation so that you are pulling the string. A recent nature.com study of this technique, called bypassing, shows its effectiveness.
GIVE IT YOUR BEST SHOT
Consider anti-vax attitudes. Almost 30 years ago, some people latched onto a now-widely discredited theory that vaccines cause autism. Despite incontrovertible proof the single study that produced these results was a deliberate fraud, and the study itself was retracted, no amount of logical argument is likely to change the opinions of adherents to such quack science. This vaccine skepticism laid the groundwork for widespread public resistance to vaccination during the Covid pandemic, again despite clear evidence of the vaccines’ safety and efficacy.
Now what if instead of arguing against such mythical harms you instead do an end run and tackle the issue from another angle? For example, rather than cite the gazillion studies that support vaccine safety, you might try, “In 1950, almost 60,000 Americans died from polio, but that number fell to ZERO by 1968 because everyone got vaccinated.” This change in tactics has two key effects.
First, it shifts the battlefield; it’s always harder to engage the other team on their home turf (especially in Philly—GO PHILS). More importantly, ` positive counterclaims about the issue does not require the other person to give up their views, however misinformed. You cannot push them away from those views anyway, but bypassing allows you to pull them around that obstacle to your side. They can continue to think that vaccines are unsafe yet come to accept their necessity based on the benefits you have shared.
HEARTS AND MINDS
Will this strategy work every time? Sadly, no. However, the study demonstrated it to be much more successful than trying to counter false claims with (horror) facts. A distinction should be made also between opinions and beliefs. Someone who holds a religious belief in the sanctity of all human life, with such life beginning at conception, will not be persuaded to support legalized abortion by any argument or tactic. Such beliefs are not based on misinformation but conviction that something transcending human thought determines truth. Most disagreements we encounter regularly are not based on differences in belief but differences of opinion. And opinions are open to change.
Ready to give bypassing a try at the next family gathering or PTA meeting? Hell, now that we’re all doing our own fact-checking, you can even use it on social media. Check out the scripts below that show how to use bypassing for common topics, or as a model for your own talking points. What have you got to lose?
