Keeping track of Dear David

Prompted by my post a few days ago about a visit I made to a haunted pub, wherein I saw almost one ghost, a reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to the website of KIIS-FM (Los Angeles), where there's a story about a resident whose apartment is plagued by an evil ghostly child...

... and he's telling everyone about new developments in the haunting on Twitter.

The hauntee is one Adam Ellis, who is a cartoonist, and who started out by having bad dreams.  A series of tweets on August 7 mark the beginning of all this.  They're creepy, but more a case for a sleep study than for an exorcist:

• He started appearing in dreams, but I believe he's crossed over into the real world now.
• The first time I saw him, I was experiencing sleep paralysis and saw a child sitting in the green rocking chair at the foot of my bed.
• He had a huge misshapen head that was dented on one side.
• For a while he just stared at me, but then he got out of the chair and started shambling over to the bed.
• Right before he reached the bed, I woke up screaming.

Ellis then drew a picture of him (being that he's a cartoonist), which is pretty scary-looking, but in the interest of protecting his right to his own work, I'll simply direct you to the website if you'd like to take a look.

He also recounts a dream of being in a library, and a little girl came up to him and said, "You've seen Dear David, haven't you?"

Ellis replied that yes, he'd seen him.  The girl then told him that you can ask him questions as long as you address him as "Dear David," but you can only ask him two questions.  If you ask him three, he kills you.

All of which remind me of the idiotic "Bloody Mary" game that kids have played for ages, wherein you are supposed to stare at a mirror and say "Bloody Mary" some specific number of times, and in place of your face, you'll see a blood-smeared ghostly woman.

Which, trust me on this, doesn't work worth a damn, because I tried it a couple of times when I was twelve, and all I saw was my own rather unfortunate face looking back at me, which was scary enough.

The actual Bloody Mary, who doesn't appear in the mirror either [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Anyhow, on the next appearance of Dear David, Ellis followed the little girl's directive, asking how he'd died (an accident in a store), and what had happened that killed him (a heavy shelf was pushed over onto him, probably explaining the huge dent in his skull).  But then Ellis asked a third question (*gasp*), namely who pushed the shelf, and Dear David just glared at him.  Then Ellis remembered the prohibition on asking a third question, and "woke up terrified."

But at least he didn't wake up dead, which is what the little girl predicted.  I guess even spirits can have incorrect information at times.

So by now Ellis was completely freaked out.  He did some research to see if he could find a kid named David who died by being crushed by a shelf, reasoning that such an event would make the news.  He found nothing.  Then, to his relief, he was able to move to a different apartment in the same building, and he thought Dear David didn't know where he'd gone.  All was quiet for a while, until...

... his cats started acting weird.  Every night at midnight, his four cats would gather at the front door and stare for a few minutes.  Then there was the time when one of them was completely calm, then jumped up in terror and ran off, tail bristling.  Ellis's contention is that apparently Dear David is at it again, and the cats are sensing his presence.

Well, I've owned a lot of cats, and I can say with some authority that all cats act weird, pretty much all the time.  We had one cat who did the sudden-leap-and-run thing with great regularity.  Our suspicion was that she had an idea, and that was such an unfamiliar sensation that it startled her.  Another cat would frequently Sing Us The Song Of His People, often at two in the morning.

But Ellis was convinced Dear David was back.  He took a photograph through the peephole of the front door while the cats were staring, and there's a gray blur on it that is either a ghost with a misshapen head or a smudge on the peephole lens.  He ran an audio recorder all night long, and got back some "strange electrical sounds" and something that sounded like a single footstep.  A Polaroid camera generated nothing but photographs that were solid black (reminding me of one of Stephen King's best, the novella The Sun Dog, which you should all read, and if it doesn't scare the absolute shit out of you, you're made of sterner stuff than I am).  He took a video of the green rocking chair, and it moved with no one anywhere near it.  (Again, if you want to see the video, I direct you to the website.)

So Ellis was getting desperate.  He tried smudging the place with sage.  This had no effect except to piss Dear David off even worse.  Ellis had a dream of being dragged through a warehouse by the kid, and woke up with a bruised arm.  He got strings of calls from an "Unknown Caller" -- he let most of them ring, so they show up as "Missed Call."  He did answer one of them and, he heard nothing but "electrical static" for a time -- and then a little voice said, "Hello."

Okay, skeptic though I am, that would have been my cue to piss my pants and then have a stroke.

Further Twitter updates from Ellis describe more feline hijinks, more noises in the middle of the night, and a couple more videos of the green chair moving.  He's still tweeting, @Moby_Dickhead (yeah, I know...) if you want to keep abreast of the latest that Dear David is up to.

A couple of things occur to me, here.  Besides the whole thing about acting weird being cats' raison d'être, we also have the fact that this whole thing has garnered Ellis 413,000 followers on Twitter.  Not bad as a publicity stunt for a budding cartoonist, if that's what it is.  The phone calls can be explained by someone who knew Ellis was claiming to be haunted (which over four hundred thousand people now do), and decided to shake him up a little.  Videos can be faked, and for the rest -- well, we have only his word about it all.  Not that I'm casting aspersions on Ellis's truthfulness, but as Neil deGrasse Tyson said, "As a scientist, if you want me to believe you, you have to have more than 'I saw it.'"

So I'm in the "unconvinced" column.  I would be, of course.  I did follow Ellis on Twitter, to see if anything else interesting comes up.  Until then, my general response is, "... next."  

But if tonight I get visited by a pissed-off little kid with a huge, misshapen head, I guess that's no better than I deserve.

Ideology vs. hurricanes

There are several topics about which I think, "Okay, I've said all that needs to be said about that.  I've plumbed the depth of absurdity and foolishness on that particular subject."

And then things keep getting worse.

It will come as no surprise to long-time readers of Skeptophilia that what I'm referring to once again is climate change.  What touched off this particular salvo on that topic was the announcement two days ago that any research grant awards from the Environmental Protection Agency have to go to a Trump administration aide to make certain they're consistent with the party line before they're officially approved.

Yes -- we're at the point where science is being held hostage to the standard of ideological purity.

In particular, the aide in charge, one John Konkus, says he looks for the "double c-word" (guess what that means) and automatically eliminates from consideration any grant proposals that mention The Piece Of Reality That Shall Not Be Named.

The EPA isn't the only place this is happening.  Last month, the Department of the Interior cancelled a $100,000 project by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to study the effects of surface mining on the environment and on people living nearby because it doesn't jibe with the "Drill, Baby, Drill" policy of the current administration.

It probably bears reminding people what happens when the politicians start requiring science to abide by party agenda.  You end up with Trofim Lysenko, who became rich and famous under Josef Stalin by falsifying experimental data to make it look as if the environment could change the genetic makeup of an organism (you might recognize this as a latter-day Lamarckianism).  This idea, of course, was in line with Stalin's hatred of the idea of heredity-as-destiny, and it also bolstered his goal of revolutionizing Soviet agriculture.

Unfortunately, it was based on incorrect science and bogus data, invented because Lysenko knew what side his bread was buttered on.  The result was that Soviet scientific progress was stalled for decades, not only in genetics but in other fields, when researchers recognized how Lysenko had succeeded -- and what happened to the people who dissented.

All of this, however, is part-and-parcel of Trump's determination that ideology comes first, profitability comes second, and reality is dead last.  Especially ironic that all of this is happening while the Gulf Coast of the United States is still cleaning up from one of the costliest storms in history, and Hurricane Irma has broken every record for strength in Atlantic storms, and besides Irma there are simultaneously two other hurricanes brewing in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.

Oh, but none of that has anything to do with climate change, according to noted meteorologist Rush Limbaugh, who said (and no, I'm not making this up) that hurricanes are part of a liberal plot to push a climate change agenda.

"There is a desire to advance this climate-change agenda, and hurricanes are one of the fastest [ways] to do it," Limbaugh said.  "You have people in all of these government areas who believe man is causing climate change, and they’re hell-bent on proving it, they’re hell-bent on demonstrating it, they’re hell-bent on persuading people of it...  Unlike UFOs, which only land in trailer parks, hurricanes are always forecast to hit major population centers.  Because, after all, major population centers [are] where the major damage will take place and where we can demonstrate that these things are getting bigger and they’re getting more frequent and they’re getting worse.  All because of climate change."

Hurricane Irma [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It's funny, I always thought that gays were the most powerful force known to nature, given that they've been blamed for causing earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires.  But that's apparently incorrect.  Liberals cause all of that stuff.

You know, I kind of wish that were true, because if I could create a hurricane, I'd send one to Rush Limbaugh's house, and also one to Mar-a-Lago.  But I'd want it to be a really focused hurricane, so no one else gets hurt, because I'm just a bleeding heart snowflake that way.

What gets me most about all of this is how much of this political posturing is based on ignorance.  I'd be willing to bet cold hard cash that most of the Trump supporters who are snarling about "government inefficiency" and "government red tape" and "bureaucracy" couldn't give you facts about a single specific example.  It's why bloviating gasbags like Rush Limbaugh are still around; he can make idiotic claims like the one above, and people just nod and go, "Yeah!  Damn liberals!  That all makes sense!"

So here we are, once again discussing climate change deniers.  All of which makes me feel like we're moving backwards, that our leaders are actually getting progressively stupider.  And I'd like to say this is the last time I'm addressing this in Skeptophilia, but chances are, circumstances will prove me a liar.

The face in the mirror

Like many people, I've at times been in the position of having to interact with narcissists.

I'll not name names, but two, in particular, stand out.  One of them frequently said things like, "Of course, I know I'm wrong all the time," while in point of fact never admitting to being specifically wrong about anything.  Ever.  This individual never budged so much as an inch off any claim, up to and including ones that were demonstrably false and complete matters of opinion like tastes in music and even food.  (If you differed in those opinions, you were "entitled to your opinion even though it's wrong.")  Everything became about being perceived as the most smart, cultured, savvy, and astute person in the room, so every conversation turned into a battle for dominance, unless you refused to play (which, eventually, is what I did).

The second had a different strategy, albeit one that still resulted in the role of Center of the Entire Universe.  For this person, negative attention caused a complete emotional breakdown, which resulted in everyone having to circle the wagons simply to restore order.  Worse still was when something this individual said made me upset; because then, the focus shifted to someone else's needs, which was unacceptable.  My expression of annoyance, anger, or frustration was turned around into my having unreasonable expectations, which precipitated another emotional breakdown, returning me to the role of caregiver and he-who-pours-oil-on-the-waters.

It's a relief that neither of these two are part of my life any more, because being around narcissists is, among other things, absolutely exhausting.  The incessant focus on self means that no one else's needs, and often no one else's opinions, ever get heard.  Worst of all, neither one had any apparent sense of being narcissistic; I heard both expressing, at one time or another, how unfair it was that they didn't have many friends.

Funny how that happens when you don't consider anyone but yourself.

This lack of self-awareness makes narcissism difficult to study, because it's hard to analyze a condition that the patient doesn't know (s)he's got.  But now a team at the University of Graz (Austria), led by psychologist Emanuel Jauk, has not only looked at what it means to be narcissistic -- they've done neuroimaging studies to see what's going on in a narcissist's brain.  The result was a paper that appeared last week in Nature.

"Narcissism is a topic of increasing interest to science and the public, probably because cultural changes in the past decades favor narcissistic behavior," Jauk says.  "Our study was aimed at taking a closer look at the self-image of narcissistic individuals using neuroscience, which might help to unveil its less conscious aspects."

The results were fascinating.  In the authors' words:

Subclinical narcissism is a personality trait with two faces: According to social-cognitive theories it is associated with grandiosity and feelings of superiority, whereas psychodynamic theories emphasize vulnerable aspects like fluctuating self-esteem and emotional conflicts...  While social-cognitive theory would predict that self-relevant processing should be accompanied by brain activity in reward-related areas in narcissistic individuals, psychodynamic theory would suggest that it should be accompanied by activation in regions pointing to negative affect or emotional conflict.  In this study, extreme groups of high and low narcissistic individuals performed a visual self-recognition paradigm during fMRI.  Viewing one’s own face (as compared to faces of friends and strangers) was accompanied by greater activation of the dorsal and ventral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in highly narcissistic men.  These results suggest that highly narcissistic men experience greater negative affect or emotional conflict during self-relevant processing and point to vulnerable aspects of subclinical narcissism that might not be apparent in self-report research.

The upshot is that this study suggests narcissism doesn't result in feelings of pleasure when you think of or view yourself; it increases your anxiety.  "Narcissism," Jauk explains, "in terms of an inflated self-view, goes along with negative affect towards the self on an involuntary level."

Which certainly makes sense given my interactions with narcissists.  Above all, neither of the individuals I mentioned seemed all that happy.  It appeared that the returning focus on self came out of insecurity, fear, and anxiety rather than conceit -- that it was more about reassurance than it was about praise.

So the condition itself is a little misnamed, isn't it?  The word "narcissism" comes from the Greek myth of Narcissus, who was a young man whose appearance was so beautiful that he fell in love with a reflection of himself, and couldn't tear his eyes away -- he eventually pined away and died, and the gods took pity on him and turned him into the flower that now bears his name.

Narcissus by Caravaggio (1598) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The reality is sadder.  Narcissists, apparently, think of themselves not out of self-love, but out of a constant uneasy sense that they aren't actually beautiful, intelligent, competent, or desirable.

Which is kind of a miserable way to live.  Knowing this defuses a lot of the anger I harbor from my experiences with the narcissists I described earlier.  For all of their desperation for attention, at their core they were deeply fearful people.

The authors make reference to an alternate version of the Narcissus myth that is more in line with what true narcissists experience.  They write:

In another prominent version by Pausanias, the myth has a different ending: Narcissus is gazing at himself, when suddenly a leaf falls into the water and distorts the image.  Narcissus is shocked by the ugliness of his mirror image, which ultimately leads him to death.

This more tragic ending is much closer to what the study found:

Considering the two versions of the ancient myth of Narcissus, our results are in favor of the less prominent version, in which Narcissus is shocked to death by the ugliness of his mirror image when a leaf drops into the water.  This myth can be seen to metaphorically reflect the ongoing critical self-monitoring that narcissists display when confronted with self-relevant material, presumably due to a lowered intrinsic coupling between self-representation and self-reward/liking.

Which makes me feel like narcissists are more to be pitied than scorned. 

The haunted pub

Last week my wife and I did some hiking along beautiful Skaneateles Lake, and decided to stop for a pint and some chow at Wayside Irish Pub in the village of Elbridge.  The food, beer, and atmosphere were all great, and we also got a chance to check out a place that has a well-established reputation for being haunted.

While enjoying our drinks and pub grub, we struck up a conversation with a woman down the bar who was apparently an off-duty bartender (we never quite established what her connection to the pub was except that she works there, but that's what I think she was).  And it turned out that she is quite certain she has had more than one encounter with the pub's spectral residents.

The story is a curious one, if you compare it to other alleged hauntings, for its lack of information.  Most haunted places have a definite story they claim is behind it all; murders and suicides are the most commonly-cited causes of ghostly presences, and any information about the identity of the spirit and how (s)he ended up there is quickly forthcoming, often along with considerable embellishment.

Here, though, the story is that there are two spirits at Wayside, a man and a woman, and nothing more is known about them.  Many people have had spooky experiences there, including some folks that beforehand were staunch disbelievers.  The woman we were chatting with said she's seen wine glasses fly off the rack over the bar, and once on the second floor kept having someone touch her neck when no one was there.  She told me I was welcome to wander around, and recommended checking out the staircase between the first and second floors, which is apparently is one of the most common places for people to have creepy experiences:

But I didn't see anything or anyone.  I was hoping that when I got home there'd be a translucent figure in the middle of my photo of the staircase, but no such luck.

I was encouraged to go up to the second floor, which was currently not being used, so I did.  It was quite atmospheric.  There's a room done up completely in red:

A hallway that certainly seems like it needs a ghost:

And a banquet room that looks like it should be at the Overlook Hotel:

But despite wandering around there by myself for some time (my wife preferred to stay downstairs and continue the conversation with the off-duty bartender), I saw nothing untoward.

What I find most interesting about this is how completely matter-of-fact the woman was in telling us about her experiences.  She told us about the flying glasses as if it was just something that happens sometimes, although she admitted that the touch on the neck "scared her pretty good."  And what struck me was that she had no particular reason to make stuff up; it wasn't (frankly) that good a story, just a couple of strange things with no explanation and no follow-up.  I know eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable even when they're trying to recall things accurately, but all I can say is that this woman spoke with the ring of truth.

Still, I can't say I was turned into a believer, or anything even close.  I was hoping I'd given the ghosts plenty of opportunity to blow in my ear or untie my shoelaces or whatever, but nothing happened.  Maybe they were napping or something, I dunno, but I sure wish that if there is some odd presence at Wayside Irish Pub, it'd have shown itself.  After all, I really do want to believe, even if so far I haven't been given any particular reason to.

Anyhow, it was worth going.  After a long day's hiking the cold pint was wonderful, and I can definitely recommend the nachos.  If you're ever near Skaneateles and don't mind a twenty minute drive farther north, give it a visit.  Bring along your camera.  Maybe you'll have better luck photographing the pub's ghostly residents than I did.

The Satanic Symphony Orchestra

Here at Skeptophilia, I try not to focus day after day on people who believe crazy stuff.  After all, loony ideas are kind of a dime a dozen, and loony people just as common, so at some point this kind of thing starts seeming like low-hanging fruit.

But every once in a while, I run into an idea so loony that it almost seems kind of... inspired.  Which is why today we're going to discuss: how the Freemasons are altering your DNA using a musical pitch to make you hate Donald Trump.

This may sound like a ham-handed attempt at satire, but sadly, it appears to be real.  According to a link sent to me by a long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia, this is the claim of one Mark Taylor, self-styled "firefighter prophet," who has this to say about his own credentials:

I am no longer simply Mark Taylor, but also Shakina Kami, a name that translates from a combination of the African and Indian languages into “Beautiful One Whose Desires Are Fulfilled, and in Whose Life the Lord Dwells with the Divine Wind of Providence.”

So I think we can all agree that sounds pretty authoritative, even though I have to admit that I speak neither "African" nor "Indian."  Be that as it may, Taylor/Kami used his Divine Winds of Providence to write a book with the somewhat cumbersome title The Trump Prophecies: The Astonishing True Story Of The Man Who Saw Tomorrow… And What He Says Is Coming Next, wherein we find out that not only is Trump the Anointed One of God, Taylor himself had a vision in which he saw how Trump would win, and how this would be a tremendous defeat to the Forces of Darkness.  It's filled with passages such as the following:

The Spirit of God says, ‘America, get ready, for I AM choosing from the top of the cream, for I AM putting together America’s dream team, from the president and his administration, to judges and congress to ease America’s frustrations!’  The Spirit of God says, ‘Rise up, My Army, and get in the fight…  Rise up! stomp the enemy’s head with bliss; send the enemy back to Hell and into the abyss.’

All I can say is that even if we're being ruled by the Dream Team Cream, lately the news has made me want to Scream.  Overall, I can't say my frustrations have been eased much.  In fact, most of the time I feel like I need to double my anti-anxiety meds just to make it through the day.

Anyhow, I guess Taylor et al. didn't stomp the enemy's head blissfully enough, because the Bad Guys are now fighting back.  According to an interview he gave on right wing activist Sheila Zilinsky's radio program, Pass the Salt Live, last week, we are now being bombarded by "frequencies" designed to alter our DNA:

I believe what happened on November 8th is that the enemy has sent out a frequency, if you will -- and if you'll remember, when we did your show on "frequency" we literally got shut down and had to start over again... those who are tapped into this frequency, and it agitated and took control of those who had their DNA that was turned over to the enemy.  And that's what's happening.  The Illuminati, the Freemasons, their main goal is to change the DNA of man, and they're doing it through these frequencies, whether it's the bombardment of the news media, whether it's rock and roll music, I mean we could go on and on with these frequencies as we've talked about before.  So you need to surround yourself with the good news, not the apocalyptic messages right now.  Not to say that things aren't going to happen, because we're always going to have fires and earthquakes and hurricanes.  It's not the apocalyptic message that everyone's talking about.   

I'm being bombarded by emails from Christians right now, saying, "Look, I support Trump.  But everybody in my family has isolated me.  Everybody in my church is not talking to me."  It's because their DNA is being controlled by the enemy.  By broadcasting the news media, the audio part of it, at 440.  That's why when you watch the news media you get agitated.  It creates fear, it creates panic.  And this is what is going on in the church.  The body of Christ has got to stop being vulnerable to this stuff.  You've got to stop listening to the mainstream news media.  Look, if I want to know what's happening, I'll go to Fox's website to catch the headlines...  That's not being broadcast, where I'm hearing it in a frequency or anything like that.  See, the thing about that 440 hertz is that it will damage your body organs.  That's another reason why people are so sick.  It changes your DNA.  That's the goal of the Freemasons, the Illuminati.  They want you to be part of that Illuminati bloodline.

Okay, I have only one question about all of this, which is:

What?

A news broadcast sent out solely at a frequency of 440 hertz wouldn't be damaging so much as it would be annoying, because it would be a single continuous musical tone at A above middle C, which would make it a little hard to glean information from, good or bad.  Also, if 440 hertz caused DNA to change, orchestra members would undergo horrifying mutations every time the oboe plays an A so the rest of the musicians can tune their instruments.

Which could be kind of entertaining, even if it wouldn't really be conducive to a good performance afterwards.

Also, you really get the impression here that, besides the fact that Mark Taylor is nuttier than squirrel shit, he also has no concept of how DNA works.

Or maybe I've just listened to too many symphonies in my life, and I'm now part of the "Illuminati bloodline."  Which, now that I come to think of it, would be kind of cool, especially if it came with evil superpowers.

But I'm guessing that's not really all that likely, because here I sit, drinking coffee and trying to reboot my brain with only marginal success thus far, instead of cackling maniacally while shooting lightning from my fingertips, which would be a lot more fun.

The real problem, of course, is that once you start looking into this stuff, you very quickly go down the Bottomless Rabbit Hole of Lunacy, and start watching videos with names like "432hz vs 440hz pt 2 Nazi Fluoride How Illuminati 440hz Music Poison Pineal Gland," which not only has to do with Nazis, fluoride, the pineal gland, and "frequencies," also involves astrology, the All-Seeing Eye, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, John Lennon, Elvis Presley, the year 1776, and pacts with the devil.  It ends by asking, "Did they deceive the mass and Themselves while they didn't knew IT?", which I think is a pretty good question.  After watching all of this stuff, I'm not sure what I knew anymore, myself.

So many thanks to the loyal reader who sent me the link, which has left me feeling like I need a double scotch even though it's only eight in the morning.  I suppose I should buck up, as I have a big day ahead, retuning all of my musical instruments to 432 hertz so that my pineal gland doesn't freeze up and turn me into a Trump-hating Nazi Freemason.  I hate it when that happens.

Political backfires

The good news from yesterday's post, wherein we learned some ways of fighting the backfire effect and convincing people to change their minds, was immediately counterbalanced by a new (and discouraging) study out of Denmark that showed that for politicians, the more data they have access to, the worse backfire effect becomes.

A team at Aarhus University led by Martin Baekgaard was studying motivated reasoning, which is the thought process we engage in when we are presented with information either supporting or refuting our prior beliefs.  In the first part of the experiment, test subjects were given test score data from two schools, A and B, and asked to evaluate which was more successful.  A different set of test subjects was given the same data, but one of the two schools was labeled "Public School A" and the other "Private School B" -- like in the United States, the relative merits of public vs. private schools is a topic of heated debate.

This first bit of research generated results that were unsurprising.  When the two schools were given anonymous tags, the data was evaluated fairly by both people who supported public schools and those who supported private schools.  When they were labeled, however, the backfire effect kicked in, and the test subjects' prior opinions skewed their analysis of the results.

So far, nothing we didn't already know.  But the second part of the experiment not only looked at the quantity of data provided, and compared the results of 1,000 test subjects from a variety of professions as compared to 954 career politicians.  And this gave some results that were, to put it mildly, interesting.  Let me give it to you in the authors' own words:

Does evidence help politicians make informed decisions even if it is at odds with their prior beliefs?  And does providing more evidence increase the likelihood that politicians will be enlightened by the information?  Based on the literature on motivated political reasoning and the theory about affective tipping points, this article hypothesizes that politicians tend to reject evidence that contradicts their prior attitudes, but that increasing the amount of evidence will reduce the impact of prior attitudes and strengthen their ability to interpret the information correctly.  These hypotheses are examined using randomized survey experiments with responses from 954 Danish politicians, and results from this sample are compared to responses from similar survey experiments with Danish citizens.  The experimental findings strongly support the hypothesis that politicians are biased by prior attitudes when interpreting information.  However, in contrast to expectations, the findings show that the impact of prior attitudes increases when more evidence is provided.

Yes, you read that right.  Politicians, like other people, are prone to falling into the backfire effect.  But unlike the rest of us, the more data they're given, the worse the backfire effect becomes.  Show a politician additional evidence, and all you're doing is making sure that (s)he stays planted even more firmly.

Baekgaard et al. propose a reason for this result, and I suspect they're correct; most politicians are, by their very nature, partisan, and have been elected because of strongly supporting a particular political agenda.  Since the backfire effect occurs when people double down on their beliefs because of feeling threatened, it stands to reason that politicians -- whose jobs depend on their beliefs being right -- would experience a greater sense of threat when they find they're wrong than the rest of us do.

But that leaves us with the rather alarming result that the people who are directing policy and making decisions for an entire electorate are going to be the ones whose response to the data is worst.

"The Great Presidential Puzzle" by James Albert Wales (1880) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And, of course, this result is borne out by what we see around us.  Here in the United States, it seems like every time new studies are performed and new data generated, the determination of politicians to shout "damn the facts, full speed ahead!" only gets stronger.  Which can explain why any of a number of crazy policies have been implemented, ones that fly in the face of every rational argument there is.

But in the words of Charlie Brown, "Now that I know that, what do I do?"  And my answer is: beats the hell out of me.  As I said in a previous post, I think nothing's going to change until the voters wise up, and that won't happen until we have a more educated citizenry.

And heaven only knows what it'll take for that to come about.

Argue with me

In recent months, I've done several posts that reference the backfire effect -- the tendency of people to double down on their previous beliefs when challenged, even when shown hard evidence that their views are incorrect.  But of course, this brings up the question, if people tend to plant their feet when you offer counterarguments, how do you change someone's mind?

A quartet of researchers at Cornell University, Chenhao Tan, Vlad Niculae, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Lillian Lee, have studied this very question, and presented their findings in a paper called, "Winning Arguments: Interaction Dynamics and Persuasion Strategies in Good-faith Online Discussions."  My wife stumbled onto this study a couple of days ago, and knowing this was right down my alley, forwarded it to me.

What the researchers did was to study patterns on r/ChangeMyView, a subreddit where people post opinions and invite argument.  If someone does succeed in changing the original poster's view, the successful arguer is awarded a ∆ (the Greek letter delta, which in science is used to represent change).  By seeing who was awarded deltas, and analyzing their statements, the researchers were able to determine the characteristics of statements that were the most successful, and the ones that were generally unsuccessful.

Argument Irresistible, by Robert Macaire (from the magazine Le Charivari, May 1841) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And the results are a fascinating window into how we form, and hold on to, our opinions.  The authors write:

Changing someone's opinion is arguably one of the most important challenges of social interaction.  The underlying process proves difficult to study: it is hard to know how someone's opinions are formed and whether and how someone's views shift. Fortunately, ChangeMyView, an active community on Reddit, provides a platform where users present their own opinions and reasoning, invite others to contest them, and acknowledge when the ensuing discussions change their original views.  In this work, we study these interactions to understand the mechanisms behind persuasion. 

We find that persuasive arguments are characterized by interesting patterns of interaction dynamics, such as participant entry-order and degree of back-and-forth exchange.  Furthermore, by comparing similar counterarguments to the same opinion, we show that language factors play an essential role.  In particular, the interplay between the language of the opinion holder and that of the counterargument provides highly predictive cues of persuasiveness. Finally, since even in this favorable setting people may not be persuaded, we investigate the problem of determining whether someone's opinion is susceptible to being changed at all.  For this more difficult task, we show that stylistic choices in how the opinion is expressed carry predictive power.

More simply put, Tan et al. found that it wasn't the content of the argument that determined its success, it was how it was worded.  In particular, they found that the use of calmer words, statements that were serious (i.e. not joking or sarcasm), and arguments that were worded differently from the original statement (i.e. were not simply direct responses to what was said) were the most effective.  Quotes from sources were relatively ineffective, but if you can post a link to a corroborating site, it strengthens your argument.

Another thing that was more likely to increase your success at convincing others was appearing flexible yourself.  Starting out with "You're an idiot if you don't see that..." is a poor opening salvo.  Wording such as "It could be that..." or "It looks like the data might support that..." sounds as if it would be a signal of a weak argument, but in fact, such softer phrasing was much more likely to be persuasive than a full frontal attack.

Even more interesting were the characteristics of the original posts that signaled that the person was persuadable.  The people who were most likely to change their minds, the researchers found, wrote longer posts, included more information and data in the form of lists, included sources, and were more likely to use first-person singular pronouns (I, my) rather than first-person plural (we, our) or third-person impersonal (they, their).

Unsurprising, really; if a person is basing his/her opinion on evidence, I'd expect (s)he would be easier to convince using different evidence.  And the "I" vs. "we" vs. "they" thing also makes some sense; as I posted a couple of weeks ago, despite our technological advances, we remain tribal creatures.  If you engage that in-group-identity module in the brain, it's no wonder that we are more likely to hang on to whatever views allow us to keep our sense of belonging to the tribe.

The Tan et al. research, however, does give us some ideas about how to frame arguments in order to give us the greatest likelihood of success.  Stay calm, don't rant or ridicule.  Give your reasoning, and expand on your own views rather than simply responding to what the other person said.  If you have links or sources, post them.  Especially, show your own willingness to be persuaded.  If the person you're arguing with sees you as reasonable yourself, you're much more likely to be listened to.

Most importantly, don't give up debate as a completely fruitless and frustrating endeavor.  Vlad Niculae, who co-authored the study, found their results to be encouraging.  "If you’ve never visited [ChangeMyView]," Nicolae writes, "the concept that people can debate hot topics without getting into flame wars on the internet might be hard to believe.  Or, if you read a lot of Youtube comments, you might be inclined to believe the backfire effect, and doubt that graceful concession is even possible online.  But a quick trip to this great subreddit will undoubtedly make you a believer."