On this episode of Plutopia, we welcome Michael Marshall — project director at the Good Thinking Society, editor of The Skeptic, President of the Merseyside Skeptics Society, and host of the Be Reasonable podcast — to unpack “compassionate skepticism”: why emotions drive belief, how pseudoscience and conspiracies spread (from flat earth to QAnon to the Rogan pipeline), and practical ways to change minds without shaming. He shares fieldwork — from exposing psychic scams to organizing homeopathy protests — and lessons on building resilient, rational communities in a post-truth world.
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Michael Marshall:
If you want to start to be an effective communicator and you want to start to be effective at helping people check their own biases and beliefs, you come through that because you realize that’s not the best tactic. Telling people they’re an idiot isn’t going to help them, and shouting at them, and acting like you’re smarter than them, is never going to help people out. So, if you really have the right goals in mind of trying to help people, you come through that adolescence into an understanding that, first of all, we need to know what it is these people feel. Because people are led first and foremost by their emotions and not by the facts. That’s true of them, it’s true of us. We train our emotions to be satisfied by good answers, but our our instincts, first and foremost, come from our gut. If I said something to you that sounded false, you’d fact-check it. If I said something to you that sounded true, you’d accept it, because your gut is telling you, yeah, that sounds about right, I won’t question it. So we all make these decisions based on emotion.