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Survival instincts are powerful things. We know on a very basic level that if other people aren’t on board with our needs, our chances of survival go down quite a lot.
(I’m laughing a bit because this morning a discord I run got very into telling one person in another timezone to go to bed, and I had to step in and go, “Is this argument actually keeping you up longer? Should we stop?” and that person admitted that it might be midnight where they were, but they weren’t going to go to sleep for another few hours so no amount of pushing would make it happen)
A lot of reactance comes out of repeated interactions with people or systems that have not understood what you needed or what makes sense, and pushed you into doing things that were aversive or harmful. It’s the common pairing of “person says to do a thing” and “having a bad outcome” that triggers irritation, anger, and the will to resist.
The antidote is accurate empathy, which means the ability to understand another person’s mental and emotional state, and then the ability to act in a way that is not unpleasant or harmful for them. Usually, that means presenting them with the information they need and then letting them decide for themselves.
The people I really think this is important for is flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, and climate deniers. I don’t know if you’ve seen the Netflix documentary “Behind the Curve”, but it got me thinking along these lines. These people make sense as people with ingrained reactance to arguments from authority. They’re people with a deep-seated aversion to “this is the way to do things Because Science Says.” They’ve had experience of science making them feel less-than, or being applied in a way that crushed their own need for independence. For them, denying an obvious part of established science is their way of saying, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.”
This is why so many of the obvious arguments tend to backfire with them: because those arguments are saying, “You are wrong, you don’t know the truth, you need to submit to authority.” Which they quite naturally resist as more of the same bullshit that got them into this position in the first place.
So the way to engage them is way more to encourage curiosity and open thought–to say, “Come here, look at this, what do you think? What decision will you make because of it?” That’s why public health authorities fund games like The Scientific Method or Vax!, which try to engage adults in a vaccine simulation that lets them experiment and observe. That way they can reach conclusions that don’t feel so much like submitting to a foreign authority.
Being willing and able to understand other people, and to have the patience and kindness to let them work things through themselves instead of just shouting DO WHAT I TELL YOU ALREADY, really are the tools to building a better world.
(And it works for you, yourself too. A lot of the things that are good for us, we resist because it means squashing some essential inner experience that needs to be listened to. If we listen to it, it can often be appeased in a different way. Humans need to be heard and understood. After all, if someone doesn’t understand a baby is hungry and feed it thousands of times, over and over, that baby will never grow up into an adult.)
Survival instincts are powerful things. We know on a very basic level that if other people aren’t on board with our needs, our chances of survival go down quite a lot.
(I’m laughing a bit because this morning a discord I run got very into telling one person in another timezone to go to bed, and I had to step in and go, “Is this argument actually keeping you up longer? Should we stop?” and that person admitted that it might be midnight where they were, but they weren’t going to go to sleep for another few hours so no amount of pushing would make it happen)
A lot of reactance comes out of repeated interactions with people or systems that have not understood what you needed or what makes sense, and pushed you into doing things that were aversive or harmful. It’s the common pairing of “person says to do a thing” and “having a bad outcome” that triggers irritation, anger, and the will to resist.
The antidote is accurate empathy, which means the ability to understand another person’s mental and emotional state, and then the ability to act in a way that is not unpleasant or harmful for them. Usually, that means presenting them with the information they need and then letting them decide for themselves.
The people I really think this is important for is flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, and climate deniers. I don’t know if you’ve seen the Netflix documentary “Behind the Curve”, but it got me thinking along these lines. These people make sense as people with ingrained reactance to arguments from authority. They’re people with a deep-seated aversion to “this is the way to do things Because Science Says.” They’ve had experience of science making them feel less-than, or being applied in a way that crushed their own need for independence. For them, denying an obvious part of established science is their way of saying, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.”
This is why so many of the obvious arguments tend to backfire with them: because those arguments are saying, “You are wrong, you don’t know the truth, you need to submit to authority.” Which they quite naturally resist as more of the same bullshit that got them into this position in the first place.
So the way to engage them is way more to encourage curiosity and open thought–to say, “Come here, look at this, what do you think? What decision will you make because of it?” That’s why public health authorities fund games like The Scientific Method or Vax!, which try to engage adults in a vaccine simulation that lets them experiment and observe. That way they can reach conclusions that don’t feel so much like submitting to a foreign authority.
Being willing and able to understand other people, and to have the patience and kindness to let them work things through themselves instead of just shouting DO WHAT I TELL YOU ALREADY, really are the tools to building a better world.
(And it works for you, yourself too. A lot of the things that are good for us, we resist because it means squashing some essential inner experience that needs to be listened to. If we listen to it, it can often be appeased in a different way. Humans need to be heard and understood. After all, if someone doesn’t understand a baby is hungry and feed it thousands of times, over and over, that baby will never grow up into an adult.)