So the first step in dealing with a moron is not to tell him he's a moron?

Stephan Lewandowsky is a psychologist at the University of Bristol and the author of The Debunking Handbook. Here’s how she suggests dealing with someone who doesn’t believe in climate change:

There’s a couple of things I can suggest. The first thing is to make people affirm their beliefs. Affirm that they’re not idiots, that they're not dumb, that they’re not crazy — that they don't feel attacked. And then try to present the information in a way that’s less conflicting with [their] worldview. 

One of the problems I've been working with is people's attitudes toward climate change. For a lot of people, the moment they hear the words "climate change," they just shut down. But there are ways that you can get around that. For example, it’s been shown that if you show the health consequences of climate change or if you can have market-based solutions to the problem, that does not challenge their worldview too much. 

If you tell people that there is an overwhelming scientific consensus that 97 out of 100 climate scientists agree on the basic notion of global warming, it seems that is a gateway belief that enables people to recognize the importance of the issue. 

More often than not, that is effective with people who are ideologically disposed to reject global warming as a fact. In general, people are very sensitive to what they perceive to be the majority opinion around them.

Read the full interview at Vox.

Call me wonky, but I like to read scientific studies.

Here's one about links between the Tea Party and anal eroticism. Fascinating!

From the US National Library of MedicineNational Institutes of Health, W.W. Tilden wrote "The psychohistorical roots of the American 'Tea Party' Movement." And what an abstract!

“Extreme resistance to governmental taxation and authority is derived, according to Freud’s theory of anal characterology, from premature and harshly coercive toilet training, in which a child is forced unfairly and against its will to surrender the products of his eliminations (which represent money, among other things, in the unconscious) to parental authority. Among these individuals anal eroticism plays a significant role in the psychogenesis of paranoia and conspiracy theorizing, which may represent a defense mechanism erected against repressed fears of passive submission.”

Republicans are prone to being enraged—it's science!

I felt a little guilty about that previous blog post, so I went searching for some recent research that would show liberals and conservatives are more alike than we'd think.

What I came across was research by Lafayette College professor Elizabeth Suhay. Her work suggests that liberal blog comments do more to enrage and conservatives than conservative comments do to enrage liberals.

Conservatives. Ha! What a bunch of short-fuse lugnuts, hating on the environment and worshipping their bank accounts.

*cue outrage*

Science explains so much.

Via.

Newsflash: Powerful people lack empathy

No, really. Science says so.

How does a Small Mind think? Not very well.

The following is from the book Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) by Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris:

In 2003, after it became clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Americans [who supported it] were thrown into dissonance: We believed the president, and we (and he) were wrong. How to resolve this?  

For Democrats who had thought Saddam Hussein had WMDs, the resolution was ... the president lied, or at least was too eager to listen to faulty information... 

For Republicans, however, the dissonance was sharper. More than half of them resolved it by refusing to accept the evidence, telling a Knowledge Networks poll that they believed the weapons had been found.  

The survey's director said: "For some Americans, their desire to support the war may be leading them to screen out information that WMDs have not been found. Given the intensive news coverage and high levels of public attention to this topic, this ... suggests that some Americans may be avoiding having an experience of cognitive dissonance."

That's one way of putting it.