If, like me, you got caught up in pop-psych climate comms in the denier-ridden haze of 2010-2014, you might have heard about the 'backfire effect', where giving a non-science-accepter facts entrenches them deeper....but since then, some more work has been done on it...

It is in fact not anywhere near as strong as once suspected - as discussed by one of the people who originally coined the phrase: https://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2017/07/on-the-media-interview-on-the-backfire-effect.html

It's not just one or two studies - quite a few have failed to replicate the 'backfire effect'.

People still hold badly-reasoned beliefs, but facts don't make them sink deeper into the hole:

https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2016/fact-checking-doesnt-backfire-new-study-suggests/

https://educationblog.oup.com/theory-of-knowledge/facts-matter-after-all-rejecting-the-backfire-effect

(obviously, even if it had been confirmed, it *definitely* doesn't apply to patiently explaining to someone why their racist meme is racist)

https://medium.com/@ketanj0/no-friendly-cups-of-tea-are-still-not-a-good-way-to-fight-racism-fb0d3b5f66db

"By and large, folks across the political spectrum were happy to move, at least some of the way, consistently with a factual intervention"

There is a 'spectrum' of responses. But things aren't as bad as first imagined.

https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2016/fact-checking-doesnt-backfire-new-study-suggests/

In general, it's good to basically check in on these things every couple of years, because psych really does have a bit of an...um problem, really.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://twitter.com/Bredgens/status/1273147705548816385