Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

When people are motivated to hang on to a view, even vast amounts of counterevidence might not change their mind. Unfortunately, people are often motivated to preserve many socially and politically damaging beliefs, including prejudiced beliefs about marginalized social groups and polarized empirical beliefs that are badges of their partisan affiliation (e.g. “Climate change isn’t real”). How can we achieve widespread belief change in such cases?  I argue that widespread belief change requires structural interventions that reshape social networks in ways that change people’s sense of identity and change social norms on what one ought to believe. Specifically, if we want people to be open to counterevidence to prejudiced and polarized beliefs, we ought to invest in (a) social movements and alternative community spaces, and (b) promoting social integration and cross-group contact. This shows that social movements and integration play an under-recognized role in promoting democracy: they reshape our motivation in ways that make us more open to evidence. And it shows that, even if belief change is central to social change, we should prioritize structural interventions over individualistic interventions like implicit bias training or simply giving people more information.