Today on the Cognitive Dissidents Podcast we talk about the backfire effect. The backfire effect is a cognitive bias that causes people who encounter evidence that challenges their beliefs to reject that evidence, and to strengthen their support of their original stance. Essentially, the backfire effect means that showing people evidence which proves that they are wrong is often ineffective, and can actually end up backfiring, by causing them to support their original stance more strongly than they previously did. As such, the backfire effect is a subtype of the confirmation bias, which is a cognitive bias that can cause people to reject information which contradicts their beliefs, or to interpret information in a way that confirms those beliefs.

The Backfire Effect: Why Facts Don’t Always Change Minds

The Backfire Effect

The post Cognitive Dissidents: 005: The Backfire Effect appeared first on Cognitive Dissidents.