To test how expert opinion affects this debate, we constructed arguments for and against mandatory vaccination and matched them with fictional male experts, whose appearance (besuited and grey-haired, for example, or denim-shirted and bearded) and publication titles were designed to make them look as if they had distinct cultural perspectives. When the expert who was perceived as hierarchical and individualistic criticized the CDC recommendation, people who shared those values and who were already predisposed to see the vaccine as risky became even more intensely opposed to it. Likewise, when the expert perceived as egalitarian and communitarian defended the vaccine as safe, people with egalitarian values became even more supportive of it. Yet when we inverted the expert-argument pairings, attributing support for mandatory vaccination to the hierarchical expert and opposition to the egalitarian one, people shifted their positions and polarization disappeared.
Fixing the communications failure | Nature
Worth a read, especially if you consider yourself an activist/organiser/social change agent.
/via @owenpascoe
Source: nature.com
The Talking Night
Some days later, Sylvie, Andrew & I got together and nutted out the shell of an idea for The Talking Night, inspired partly by the cold Winter evening we’d spent in Newcastle and probably inspired by a hundred other things I couldn’t express. The broad concept is not really new, but I want to share with you my interpretation of what The Talking Night is and the particular medley of ingredients into which it has evolved. I believe it’s a concept that has great potential as part of the foundations we need to lay for a better world…
