Is there any research on how to talk to these people? I know a flat earthed and anything I say just makes them dig in more.
The friendship part is probably the hardest. But what's the success rate of shaming someone into changing their mind? Pretty low to zero. It makes them dig in more.
The best example I know of is Daryl Davis (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis). He's a black man that befriends active Klan members. He invites them to bars and his home and gets to know them.
He intelligently refutes their nonsense but he never asks them to change their mind or leave the Klan. He simply waits until they want to do it on their own accord.
The problem is sometimes people get stuck in a group or culture for various reasons. The key is to give them a safe, friendly alternative rather than a violent disagreement.
This also happens to be the playbook you are encouraged to follow if you are trying to rescue someone from a cult or domestic violence situation.
Arguing gets you nowhere; they will defend their abusers. The best you can do is innocuously show them that the reality they've been brainwashed into internalizing does not work the way they were told. They will either come to their senses--on "their" own terms--or will prove to be a lost cause.
Risking Godwin's law, imagine the extreme case of Hitler. The best strategy to convert Hitler may well be Jewish people befriending him, rather than confronting him. But in the meantime, Hitler is radicalizing others and committing genocide. At some point, it makes more sense to just assassinate Hitler (or deplatform him, or depose him, etc.) rather than trying to save him.
Killing someone for their ideas sends the wrong message and grants them more legitimacy than anything. You elevate them to the same status as Jesus Christ, whose popular namesake religion is predicated on sticking to your beliefs in the face of any and all consequence.
An example from a blog on jewelry how to counteract astrological nonsense is to point out supposedly different stones like emerald and beryl, are actually the same mineral, just with impurities like chromium present.
By presenting neutral factual information in that fashion, you can ask how or why the chromium affects the spiritual flow of the thing or whatever. It remains up to the person if they are persuaded or not.
Good luck.
They have some kind of construct that generates happiness when they have some secret and/or contrarian knowledge. it's just disconnected from the actual truth value of that "knowledge."
You'd probably have to state something about flat earth "ideas" that has such an obvious flaw that they can't rationalize it. But not in a confrontational way.
Also, understand that it's not about flat earth. It's filling some other psychological need or some deeper issue.
edit: I had come across https://www.culteducation.com/ a while ago and found it useful. I don't think flat-earthers are a cult, per se, but some of the same techniques could still apply.
listening is far more important than talking to.
To reinforce one of the other replies: asking questions is pretty good, as long as one takes it slow and actually listens to the responses.
I've (very lightly and positively) engaged with flat-earth folk for years now, and it's been fairly interesting. Many are 'cranks', many are trolls, but many have something like an honest desire to really know and understand, though with some pretty big blind spots.
Even if they don't, who cares? By virtue of being a flat Earther you basically exclude yourself from any position where such a viewpoint might be relevant. They're not hurting anyone, so just leave them alone. Let people be wrong on the internet.
(Note that like many aspirational exhortations, this one is a little hypocritical. I've been known to have a problem with people being wrong on the internet before. But I'm trying to be better. :))
Right, I should have been more clear. I've spoken to these folks not trying to change their minds, but to attempt to understand human psychology better.
Among the various large scale conspiracy theories out there, flat eartherism has, in my opinion, some useful properties.
Did the US Government fly missiles into the world trade centers? No...but proof to the contrary isn't trivial.
How can I prove the world is round? Well, it costs some money, but it's trivial. At the moment, Air New Zealand 30 is flying direct between Auckland, NZ and Buenos Aires, Argentina. The flight time will be just under 12 hours. The aircraft is a Boeing 777-200ER. This is a fast flying aircraft, but it's not supersonic, which it would have to be in order to fly between NZ and AR in 12 hours across a flat earth.
Almost anybody with a few thousand dollars can conduct this experiment.
So, I have studied flat-eartherism as a way to study some fundamental natures of human thought.
I've run into true believer flat-earthers who were intelligent, (mostly) open minded, charismatic and curious.
I think that every human brain is packed with irrational beliefs and thoughtful fallacies. Even the best, most clear thinking of us is, I believe, saddled with (nearly) unbreakable irrational thought processes. For most of us, they're not very obvious.
This isn't an implicit call to give up on the goal of embracing rational thought in all things. Far from it. For me, at least, understanding that I have such weaknesses hidden inside is an even stronger motivation to do everything possible to think and act clearly.
She's not spouting this because it's rational.
If there's anything I learned from my experiences in organized religion, the skeptics' society, various mental institutions and a career in criminal justice, it's that confronting irrational targets (or salesmen!) just teaches them how to better-reinforce their own flawed arguments and behaviors. They learn what rational people will come at them with and learn how to counter or subvert it, which helps them become even more persuasive to their next mark. Now they sound more intelligent and authoritative, which is precisely what makes them so dangerous!
The same advice applies to internet trolls. It's hard because it's instinctual, but never engage-- smile and walk away. Don't give them an opportunity to learn how to exploit or undermine the thought patterns of a rational person. If you don't yourself drown in their sea of circular logic, you're just giving a malicious organic learning algorithm free training data at the expense of your time and sanity.
If you starve them of attention, they can only feed off of each other-- to predictably amusing ends. Without outside input, then like any cult, they eventually become an incestuous feedback loop of lunacy that deviates so far from societal expectations of normality that you no longer have to convince anybody of anything since they do it for you.
It's true that I generally don't engage with people who believe in a flat earth or who claim to be absolutely certain that the government is colluding with extraterrestrials, simply because I doubt any good would come of such an interaction.
IMO that excludes all flat Earthers, at least those who have received a primary school education.
Dehumanizing or disrespecting others is one of the easiest dangers, as is challenging with a incomplete or fallacious counter.
These only add fuel to the fire.
> The earth is flat? Why do people in Japan see the moon and a dark sky while I see the sun?
With enough of these types of questions that don't have sensible answers you may be able to get the person into a "maybe this is all bullshit" mindset. It's hard though. Especially with global warming skeptics.
Every sensible line of questions will inevitably hit this wall of incomprehensible undebunkable “understanding” of the world.
It’s better to dig into their understanding of what is a conspiracy and how do they determine where in the conspiracy chain they should stop and why. (Flat Earth conspiracy, flat earth conspiracy conspiracy and so on)
There is an interview floating around with a flat Earth dude saying exactly this: that even if he were convinced the Earth were round he would stick with it because they have a community.
Humans are not rational robots. We are hyper-social emotional beings. The classical wire monkey experiment shows that primates will prioritize affection over food to the point of near starvation. It's not much of a leap to consider that humans may also prioritize affection over truth to the point of folly.
We see circumstantial evidence of this constantly. Most people would rather be wrong and have friends than right and alone.
If rational ideas look like they are failing, perhaps it's because we have failed to construct positive and lasting communities around them. If anything it's the opposite: the rational worldview is linked culturally to isolating sterile social orders with sterile objectives like GDP maximization or abstract political goals. These may be rational but they are not human.
If the rational can't rationalize community and culture we will continue to see a popular flight from reason.
-Desire to be nonconformist -Desire to feel intellectually superior by 'knowing something others don't' -Mistrust in authority -Fear of accepting a truth that will upend their understanding or the world -Fear (or refusal) of accepting a truth that upends their place in the world -Outright mental illness
One thing I think the internet and social media does is that it allows people with singular causes of irrational beliefs to find others like them and that in turn reinforces their irrational beliefs. Not to mention that they can easily find misinformation on the internet that reinforces them.
Memetic immune disorder, if you aren't already familiar, is in agreement with this explanation.
Treat them like people, not specimens. Part of that means recognizing that each is an individual and there is no universal formula for how to effectively relate and communicate with individuals.
I mean un-nuanced thinking has done great for so many of our other problems like: war, homelessness, drug-use, and governance!
Joking aside, we might just need to write certain people off and just let them be. We might not have the resources to tackle climate change, feed and shelter an increasingly populated world, and individually talk people out of these entertaining delusions like believing in flat earth or doubting the efficacy of vaccines.
It reminds me of Sherlock Holmes, on being told that the Earth goes around the sun:
"Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it." [...] "What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."
Better a flat-earth obsession than getting into colloidal silver or those shoes with the little toes.
I have another, somewhat related, observation: there are a number of these issues, such as anti-vaxx, flat earth, climate change denialism, and the existence of a “deep state”, where the central premise is that there is some vast conspiracy to mislead the public, with huge numbers of people involved in perpetuating the lie. Once someone believes that these conspiracies are real, any attempt to provide evidence to the contrary is rejected as fake news/lies by big pharma/etc. I honestly don’t know how to reach someone like this.
Beliefs like this used to be a rare thing, something you’d only see in the tin foil hat crowd, but it has spread in recent years to a much wider segment of the population. I’m not sure what is to blame for that.