No Point B by Caleb Gardner

Author:Caleb Gardner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781637741009
Publisher: BenBella Books
Published: 2022-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

Facts & Shame

On New Year’s Eve 2020, the passengers of the PV Delice Party Cruise ran into trouble. Celebrating the New Year off the coast of Puerto Vallarta, the sixty passengers prepared to head back to land when the rear of the boat began taking on water. The captain sent out an SOS, and ten small boats in the area came to help. The entire scene was documented on social media by the partygoers themselves. They never expected to become famous. When images from the story were reshared on the Instagram account GaysOverCovid, the internet celebrated as if the ocean itself were shutting down a party that was putting people in danger.

GaysOverCovid and accounts like it developed massive followings during the pandemic because of their use of schadenfreude as entertainment. Followers reveled in the misfortunes of those they felt were flouting health requirements, projecting anxieties about the pandemic onto strangers they felt deserved the ridicule. But shaming actually does little to change people’s behavior. In fact, it’s often counterproductive.

When we want someone to behave differently, we tend to unload what we perceive as logical arguments on them, trying to convince them of our way of thinking. But when people are presented with facts that go against the narrative they’ve already convinced themselves is true, it can counterproductively reinforce that narrative, rather than tear it down.

We all have a set of beliefs that reinforce one another, a way of seeing the world unique to us, held together by what psychologists call coherence, meaning we see how all the pieces work together. An assault on those beliefs can cause a backfire effect because our core beliefs can be so critical to our identity. Instead of changing our minds, we search for any contrary evidence to the argument that confirms our existing beliefs, no matter how specious those arguments may be—and in the age of internet disinformation, many specious arguments are readily available. Or, as in the case of responses to coronavirus mandates, we’ll downplay our own behavior as not as bad as those around us and look for any whataboutisms that may justify the decision we’ve already made.

The fact is that facts are only so helpful when trying to change someone’s behavior, especially if we don’t have a strong relationship with that person. We live in a world of counterfactual arguments, and anyone desperate to confirm their own beliefs is able to find others in concert who also believe the same thing. Third-party validation of just about any belief is possible in a world of infinite information and alternative facts, and as we’ve already covered, journalistic gatekeepers only have so much credibility, depending on who the audience is.

In late 2020, a group of MIT scientists ran a Twitter experiment. They wanted to see whether or not presenting counterfactual arguments to those spreading political misinformation would help adjust the behavior of the spreader, leading to more informed opinions. Over the course of a year, they used a massive volunteer army to respond to

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