 I'm Sadie Crabtree. I'm the communications director of the JRF. Could I get the slides up? As I said, I'm Sadie Crabtree. And if you want to tweet this talk with the TAM9 hashtag, I'm still Sadie Crabtree. I want to start this talk today by telling you about an email I got a couple of months ago from someone I met on Randy's speaking tour in Norway. This gentleman was asking a very serious question, and he wanted to know if we could give him advice. It was a tough question, and it took me a long time to figure out what to say to him. What he asked was, how can I best help spread the message and help people change their minds and join the side of reason? Every time I try, he said, I hit these obstacles. People are afraid of leaving their alternative views because they get meaning and comfort from them. It looks like we have nothing to replace the emptiness that they filled with pseudoscientific beliefs and nonsense. And I get accused of fanatically preaching another religion, that science is just another dogma. And I don't feel like I have the expertise I need to advocate for the cause. This last one is not true at all, by the way. This guy's a PhD. He's more prepared than most people to argue for a rational, naturalistic point of view. But he's frustrated because he feels like he's not winning these arguments. The frustration he's feeling, I think, is because he's trying to get people to accept reason by trying to reason with people who don't yet accept reason. And I think we've all had the experience of arguing with someone until you're blue in the face. Even though your arguments are strong and theirs are very weak, or maybe don't even exist, they just won't listen to reason and you can't figure out why. Well, here's why. They don't listen to reason. That's not the language they speak. Trying to argue people into being more reasonable is a little like trying to convince a student of literature that mathematics is a better field while using only mathematical proofs to make your point. You're just not speaking their language. So to put this another way, reason is a fantastic tool for making great decisions, but we can't rely on it for changing minds. We know that because of simply being logically correct, made an idea persuasive, there would be no wrong ideas left in the world and they're everywhere. So how can we ever win with these people? I'm a skeptic and I'm an atheist, but my background is not in religion or in science or in education, so I'm not gonna approach this from any of those perspectives. My background is in strategic communications, which is really the art and science of this question. How do we win? If you're trying to get a law passed, if you're trying to get a corporation to change its behavior, you're trying to help workers form a union or win a union election, you're trying to spark a revolution, the words that you choose and the values that you communicate will often determine whether you win or lose and you wanna choose those words very carefully and deliberately and not leave it to chance. And the words that we're using and that we're used to using may not be doing what we think they're doing. So I wanna talk about advancing science and critical thinking within that framework. I don't have the answer to how do we win. I don't believe there is one answer, but there are fixed questions that will get us there and that's what I wanna give you to think about today. These are the questions that are at the center of any strategic communications plan. We ask, what's the goal? What are we trying to accomplish? Who do we need to talk to to accomplish that goal? What do we want them to do? What are we actually asking? What values do they hold that we can tap into? And what beliefs do they hold that will be obstacles to us getting through to them? And finally, based on our answers to those questions, what do we say and who says it? Who is trusted to deliver the message? So first, what's our goal? The skeptics have a lot of different goals and your tactics will be different depending on what you choose is your goal. We might one day want to mobilize public support to defeat an anti-science education bill or we might wanna energize and recruit people to join our organizations who already consider themselves to be skeptics. But the question this talk is about is how to persuade more people to have a naturalistic scientific worldview and fewer people to subscribe to supernatural and pseudo-scientific beliefs. If we can figure out how to do that consistently, it's only a matter of time before we will control the entire world. So now we've got our goal. The next question is who do we need to talk to? In grassroots organizing, when you're mobilizing a lot of people to take action on an issue, you divide them up into three basic groups. You know, the people who support us already, the people who are firmly opposed to what we're doing and the people who don't feel so strongly that their views are fixed. And the most important group that we wanna talk to if we really wanna make more skeptics in the world is the people whose views aren't firmly fixed because our time and money are limited resources. When we're talking to each other or arguing in circles with entrenched opponents, we're not changing minds and we're not moving closer to our goal. If you wanna change as many minds as you can, you should be spending most of your time talking to those people who are persuadable. Obviously, we also need to talk to people who support us. A main reason is that we need to keep them energized, we need to get them involved in our organization so that they too can go out and talk to people who are persuadable. But the goal here is to change minds and not only to find the people who already agree with you. That can feel like progress, but on the outside, from the external view, we're not actually gaining ground. It's also tempting to argue with people who are dead set against your goals and your worldview. It can make sense. It's fun because we're skeptics. We like, you know, we like to argue, we like logical fallacies and we like pointing out when someone else does it. Unless people in that persuadable middle are listening and it's having an effect on them, it's not effective. That's a rare situation when that happens, it does happen. But I've seen canvassers on a petition drive, for example, argue with an opponent who is very entrenched for 10 minutes and during that time 100 people who've walked past who probably would assign the petition. And the other side does this very well. Mormons, for example, will stop knocking on your door if you tell them that you're a Catholic or an atheist. Because millions of doorknocks have told them that they are not able, you know, except an extreme minority of cases to turn Catholics or atheists into Mormons. And they've got billions of dollars to spend on proselytizing and they've got an army of conscripted foot soldiers but they still wanna spend those resources wisely. So the next question is, the next question is what do we want people to do when they hear from us? In a political election, this is very simple. We want them to vote for our candidate. In a grassroots campaign, we might be trying to get people to sign a boycott or to sign a petition or join a boycott. We may not have right now in this talk a concrete action in mind for skepticism but I bring this up to say that strategic communications most often focuses on changing people's behavior and what they do rather than changing their values and how they think. Because it's very easy to change behavior and it's almost impossible to change someone's values. It's very difficult. For example, people tend to oppose tax increases and vote against them and if you want someone to vote for a tax increase you don't try to convince them that tax increases are good. You tell them the tax increase is gonna fix the potholes on their street. So you don't have to convince them to give up their belief that tax increases are bad and not to hate tax increases. They just have to hate potholes more. So you start with what they care about and you give them reasons that matter to them and they may or may not be reasons that matter to you but there are reasons that are true and that there are reasons that appeal to them. If workers at a hospital are going on strike and you want the community around the hospital to support the strike, you don't talk about how strikes are the most important tool that workers have to level the playing field with their employers. You talk about how the nurses are fighting for better staffing levels so that when patients go to the hospital they know there's enough staff there to take care of them and both of these things are true but you get to decide what you talk about and you don't have to get the public to support the idea of a strike. You just have to get them to support this strike. So what's the point of this is if what we really wanna do is change hearts and minds and not just change behavior. The thing is that changing behavior does change minds and it's one of the most effective things in changing minds because it sets up a cognitive dissonance and once you voted for one tax increase it gets harder to maintain the belief that all tax increases are bad and once you support it's striking workers on a picket line it gets harder to maintain the idea that union workers are lazy and selfish. So what does this mean for skeptics? It means that if we are trying to get superstitious people to think more critically there is value in getting them to use scientific thinking in small ways that don't require them to give up their entire world view and self identity to do so. So the question that this gentleman emailed me was saying that he had people in his family, people that he really strongly wanted to convince and it hurt him to think about them being consumed by these fallacies and these superstitions and so however much we wanna focus on these the most persuadable people many of us have people like that in our lines and what I said to him is that when it seems like someone believes in every ridiculous thing from homeopathy to guardian angels it can be the instinct is to say your whole world view is screwed up everything you think is wrong like the way you're approaching this is wrong and that tends to make people dig in their heels because people's identity is wrapped up in their world view the way people think about themselves and you're asking people to give up a huge part of themselves in order to do that. So it may be better to accept that we can't change the entirety of people who people are overnight back off for a while and in this particular situation instead present them with small individual examples of how scientific thinking can help them and is useful. If they're into homeopathy and they swear it works for them if you come at them and say it's all in your head it's a placebo they hear that as you're crazy like what you say is not you don't know what you're experiencing and that makes people very defensive so find something they haven't used yet tell them that you saw a video on ear candling that proved that it was fake tell them about the power bands where the manufacturer has admitted that there's no evidence whatsoever that they work and you can demonstrate the way that it's made to appear to have an effect help them use scientific thinking to feel smarter than their friends instead of using it to make them feel stupid and you give them a positive experience with critical thinking and the next time you come back to them to talk about this issue you will have some common ground to start from and it's a long-term process it's not as satisfying as winning a debate but it's more likely to change the way people actually think if they're truly dug in so back to the slide so our strategic questions about our strategic questions about those in the middle and who are more persuadable to get people to do what you want them to do you have to talk to them in terms of their own values and their own needs it doesn't mean pandering to people's worst views and ideas it means working with values we share and you also have to look at the beliefs that they hold which will be obstacles things so you can figure out how to get past them and I wanna show just a few examples of some widely held values we can use to encourage reason and critical thinking honesty people believe others should be honest and not mislead them people believe others should not profit by breaking the rules and people believe that there is virtue in helping those that we care about and taking care of them these are just a few examples and here's some other things that people want aspirations that they want for themselves that can be useful to us as skeptics people want to feel smart and respected people want to feel right and confident in their decisions and people don't wanna feel cheated or taken advantage of when we frame things in terms of these shared values it can go a long way toward making our point with the general public who don't consider themselves skeptics so if we don't play to these values and aspirations it won't connect with the people we're talking to and we need to spell it out as well and not just assume that people see the value of what we're offering on the flip side these are some obstacles there are needs and beliefs that act to stop people from listening to us at all we need that people have a need to feel in control they wanna have something that makes sense of an irrational and scary world for them the fact that lightning can strike and you can die at any moment you can lose your job and lose your healthcare and be on the street it's hard to deal with that without some sort of understanding of who's on the right side and who's on the wrong side in the world who's making the bad things happen if you're going to take that from people you need to offer them some understanding of the world that's a positive understanding of the world that helps them replace that next people wanna feel smart right and respected this is an opportunity as well I just put this up as people's values so but it's on obstacles because sometimes skeptics do things that make people feel dumb wrong and disrespected and when we do that people aren't in a place to listen and we can make people feel this way with the words we choose even if we're not intending to another obstacle is people's negative views about skeptics and I'll explain why this is important in a minute but some of the views that people have about skeptics that were just against everything and not for everything that were narrow-minded we back the establishment we're tied to big pharma right we you know we that we just say what the whatever the mainstream consensus is and that's not always right and that we're elitists we're arrogant we think that we're smarter than everybody else and we dismiss other people as stupid these are the some of the views that people may be inclined to hold against us when we first approach them if we say I'm a skeptic and I'd like to have a conversation with you so I'm I want to I want to give an example I want to illustrate this because we're in living in a time where we're constantly bombarded with conflicting information and ideas in order to make sense of this in order to function we have to instantly be able to sort things into whether or not we take them seriously or whether we don't so I'm going to go through a couple of scenarios so this is going to be an experiment and tell me do you if you were looking for a reputable online pharmacy do you trust what's on this web page wait do you trust what's on this web page okay why um would you read everything on this page before you decided whether or not this is reputable information or not great uh so is is this is this good health information are you going to learn stuff from this video do you need to listen to the video to make up your mind are you going to click play is this urgent it says it says it's urgent why why would you why do you think it's not urgent so it the point is it doesn't matter what's in the envelope it doesn't matter if the pharmacy reviews are real if the video is actually announcing a real breakthrough in quantum physics you saw something in each of those that look typical of something untrustworthy so it goes straight to your mental spam folder uh and and no matter how good the rest the message is you never see what's in that envelope and everyone does this we match new information with patterns we've seen before to figure out how we should interpret it and how we think about a moral or ideological issue can be completely different based on what pattern we match that to we have set ways of understanding the sides of an argument the narratives their stories that we've learned from society that we fit new conflicts into you instantly know that that web page is a link farm because it just looks like one uh... and we call these these narratives frames uh... so we have frames for talking about political conflicts right we have the little guy versus the establishment the reformer versus beltway bureaucrats we figure out when we when there's a race like what's going on here like which guy is on which side we have uh... frames for thinking about science mainstream credible science versus cranks groundbreaking science versus the naysayers who told you know the right brothers that we could never fly uh... and we have disturbing new findings versus a dismissive establishment right we've got uh... the guy in independent state who's decoded the message from the aliens knows they're going to attack but no one will listen uh... and either stories that we learn from society uh... and then we've got ways of thinking about economic issues individual rights versus government authority or corporate greed versus public good uh... public service employees versus corporate lobbyists or struggling taxpayers versus greedy public employees these are stories that uh... we tend to fit conflicts into these boxes so the same person can come down on two very different sides of similar issues just because the way the issues are framed and so i don't want your ideas to be put in the wrong box so for a second uh... think about the anti-vaccination movement in what box we get put in or or the the what box the pro vaccine vaccine movement gets put in this debate the frame anti-vaxxers are presenting to people is that of tool scientists as tools of corporate interests uh... which is a real thing that people understand because for years people heard that scientists told us tobacco doesn't cause cancer uh... and finally the public understanding of the science caught up to what everyone already knew and their scientists now doing research for oil companies saying there's no proof of global warming and global warming can be proved so it's this mistrust of corporate-driven science coupled with parents fears about their children and feeling this huge responsibility to protect them uh... that that drives this anti-vaccination panic and when pro-vaccination skeptics respond with the facts you know uh... that that vaccines are much safer than not vaccinating what the public can hear is trust the scientists you know they know better than you what's best for your children and that's what people can hear uh... and as long as we're stuck in that frame with someone we can't win with them because they put everything that we say into that box and we had so we have to get out of that box to get people a different way to understand the conflict it also matters who delivers the message uh... you will be dismissed if you're perceived to have a self-interested motivation in in saying what you're saying if you're a spokesperson talking about your protest and people perceive that you are associated with an economic interest in in the outcome of the conflict uh... people won't trust what you're saying people trust union workers much more than they trust union officials for example people trust consumers more than they trust a corporate uh... spokesperson basically people trust people with whom they feel they share common interests uh... and when people see you on tv uh... even if they don't know who you are they'll look at your clothes your age your tone of voice uh... and and a lot of other factors so they can try to decide if you're on their side or if you're on someone else's side uh... and it's not necessarily who you are who said you're on the matters it matters what people perceive it's the public perception with everything we say we're telling others something about ourselves when we talk about the other side we're also talking about us when we say that the people on the other side are stupid we're saying that we're know-it-alls and that we think we're really smart when we say that uh... people are gullible uh... and need to learn critical thinking because they'll believe anything we're saying that we think we're better than the smarter than everyone and if you make fun of dumb hillbillies in the bible about what you're communicating to a lot of people is that you're in a leadest coastal city dwelling lab city dwelling liberal who does not care about what life is like for the majority of people in the country so with the words we're choosing how we talk about an issue we're not just talking about our ideas but we're communicating who we are uh... and it's not what you say that matters is what people think they hear till i want to illustrate this a bit i can still remember the moment that i stopped uh... actively supporting john carry in the two thousand four presidential election and it was not anything that the opponent said it was anything that john carry said it was an image in a carry fundraising email and i'll show you this image look at the signature i find this i find this disgusting uh... i mean it reeks of the the snobbery of someone who's never worked a day in their life yet still feels their import their opinions are more important than everyone else's views it this i see this and and i i think of a rich kid in high school who sat and practiced the signature for hours you know until it fully reflected his own inflated opinion of himself and he was just convinced he'd finally gotten it right this is going to be my signature when i'm president this little hook the hook on the end of the case like a visual representation of a sneer of superiority i find it just it makes me angry to just to look at it and this is completely it's maybe completely irrational uh... but this plays into all the bad things that people said about john carry it you know he he's a millionaire elitist who's out of touch with ordinary americans and looks down on everyone but when i see that i don't see someone i trust to defend my interest as president i look at it and i can't get the taste out of my mouth i apologize if anyone is friends with john carry uh... i don't know if this is an accurate picture of him at all but the point is that it doesn't matter who john carry is really to his friends because most voters aren't friends with him we decide what we think of him based on the relatively small amount of information we have available mashed with patterns we've seen before and the frames and narratives that we've learned so i tell the story as an example of the things we say about ourselves without meaning to or even seeing that we're doing it to apply this to skepticism and critical thinking uh... we have to think about the language we use with each other and the attitudes we share and examine whether those are things that help or hurt us when we talk to the general public uh... people's uh... people stereotypes of skeptics may not be fair they may not be logical but it doesn't matter perception is is what matters when we're trying to persuade the public i know there's a lot of controversy around the right tone in the right words and the right approach to skeptics should use so i want to be clear that i'm not saying we should be pushovers and not say anything mean uh... a lot of this is not about tone it's about making sure that we're working with the values uh... in the shared values of the persuadable people we want to persuade instead of working against their values and against ourselves when you speak to someone in the values they understand you can take a much more aggressive tone and get away with it uh... when they perceive that you're on their side uh... whereas if you attack their values you'll be written off and you may even push them the other way what i would say is that there is a cost associated with arguing in a certain way uh... and we need to do the math on it for different situations in political communications when a candidate runs a negative campaign or a negative ad there's a cost that a certain number of people are going to be put off by attack ads it costs you votes to do attack ads what you have to make sure when you do attack ads is that you're costing your opponent more votes than you're costing yourself uh... and that that that can work uh... but when you're going negative because it's the right decision for a specific situation that's great just check to make sure your rationale makes sense uh... and if you if you want to reach other people use the words that are most likely to reach them instead of the words that are the most satisfying to say the words that we're just most comfortable with because we use them with each other because it's not what you say that's important is what people here so how do we make sure that they hear what we really mean uh... first prepare what we want to say ahead of time write down the ways that we want to express each idea and express in that way every time and then think twice about each word you're using once to think about what it means to you and then twice to think about what it means to the people who aren't skeptics who don't understand skepticism don't consider themselves to be in our in our community and aren't science literate if those meanings do not match consider using different words and i want to put up a few examples of words that we use a lot with each other these are some words that we use a lot with each other uh... and some thoughts that on how they can sound at people outside the skeptical community first critical thinking uh... for people that don't understand that that's uh... you know one concept that people think being critical is being judgmental and mean uh... that's not so great and even when people understand what we mean by critical thinking we're still telling people that they're not thinking critically when we say we want to encourage them to think critically when you are arguing with the person uh... that you strongly disagree with and they tell you that i think your problem why you're not getting this is you're just not thinking critically how does that make you feel angry right like somebody just found some fancy words to call you an idiot and so so that's how it can be perceived when when people hear us uh... saying these kind of things when we describe our aims as encouraging people to think more critically we're opening up this possibility that people interpret this as a kind of insult uh... educate the word educate if someone you disagree with comes up and says hi would you like me to educate you so you'll agree with me it's it's kind of an insult you're saying that you know they're saying that you're not you're not educated and if you only were more educated you would agree with them uh... maybe that's true but it's it's it can be perceived as an insult and it also is a word that makes the people we're reaching out to into passive recipients of what we're doing instead of full human beings with agency in the situation and and so people can feel insulted uh... insulted by this uh... the word vaccination when when i hear a vaccination i hear think of a doctor coming after me with something sharp uh... i think that hurts right and it's not a pretty word and again it's about something being done to me rather than something i'm doing for myself so how about immunity right this is a word that everyone knows that immunity is great it describes the benefit rather than the process plus everyone knows that it's like the best thing to win on a reality show this is reinforced all the time that immunity is great nonsense hogwash wu wu gullible suckers credulous like when we talk about this we are in a way insulting the people that we want to reach we are telling people that they don't uh... these are words that we use as shorthand nonsense for example what we mean when we say nonsense things that have shut been shown to be false generally and if we say that we are not uh... we're not insulting the people that believe in it we're giving a piece of information right and and what goes a lot for farther toward explaining our point and i want to make one point about jargon words in other words that are specific to a certain community they almost always carry a different meaning outside the group and inside uh... in the labor movement unions have done research that shows huge differences in public support based on whether or not use the word union uh... if you or if you spell out what you really mean if you ask people to support workers at the grocery store forming an organization where they can work together to raise their wages and when access to affordable health insurance a lot of people support you get overwhelming support yes you will support the grocery workers union it plummets because people have all different ideas about what the word means and they apply that to to what you said so if you want to uh... you if you want to be clear the best way to have control over how the words are you are perceived is to say exactly what you mean uh... so i'll just give a couple of examples of how this can how this can improve for example we often say we're here to educate the public about pseudoscientific nonsense or something like this if we say we're here to help people defend themselves from pseudoscientific scams we're giving people agency we're helping you protect yourself this is something you know protect yourself and your family we're also well also putting the blame on the scammer and not on the person who believes it if you want to go a step further with this you can take out the jargon and say that we're we want to defend people from scams these scientific sounding language to mislead consumers instead of talking about pseudoscience uh... i'm running out of time so i'm not going to do these other pieces that we were going to sorry i'll do okay here's okay critical thinking if we want to say we want people to think critically an alternative is to say that we want to inspire an investigative truth-seeking spirit in others we we want people to understand that this is that this is a uh... this is a gift this is this amazing thing if we want to go totally off the rails with it we can tell people why science is awesome this is what we're inspiring this is about investigation this is about uh... you know it's about positive things and not just about eliminating the negative things so these questions are are useful uh... and they're an effective way of organizing your thinking about how to communicate with the public you may find them useful thinking about other issues too to sum up what i wrote to my friend in norway about skepticism here's what i think you should keep in mind if you want to gain ground against all the bad ideas out there and ultimately take over the world for skepticism don't rely on reason to reach reach the unreasonable with folks you care about who are really stuck try to move them one step at a time spend most of your time persuading the persuadable speak to people's own values and aspirations don't jump head first into someone's mental spam folder by making your message look like trash think twice about words not just what they mean to you but the different meaning they have to others and don't sign your name like john carey because everything you say says who you are thank you say the city crabtree folks i missed a little bit of that because i was practicing my signature but uh... i think it was uh... it sounded good so yeah cool