The Secret Battle Of Ideas About GodSample

Step 3: Inform

William McGuire, a psychology professor in the 1950's, specialized in showing people how to resist bad ideas. He suggested that you don’t just tell people the truth; you also inform them about the lies that would stand against the truth. You give them a little of the disease so they can build an immunity to it. It’s called inoculation. Inoculation seemed to work against deadly viruses such as polio and smallpox. McGuire thought it might also help people resist bad ideas.

To test his theory, McGuire prepared arguments in favor of widely rejected claims such as “Brushing your teeth is bad for you.” He organized participants into groups. Members of the groups had the benefit of varying levels of preparation, from none at all to a complex mix of exposure, counterargument, and preparation to refute claims that would be made.

As you might expect, better-prepared participants were less likely to be caught off guard. But one disturbing finding emerged: just reinforcing what people already knew seemed to make them more susceptible to bad ideas.

How can it be that reinforcing a person’s preexisting opposition to a foreign idea is worse than doing nothing? Let’s say that all your life you’d been told the story of Noah’s ark. In Sunday school you even colored an ark with crayons as you sang about animals going in two by two. But then you got to college and found your professors proposing foreign ideas about Noah’s ark. “There is no evidence of a global flood,” one might have said. “Can you imagine a God so heartless as to let innocent people drown?” another might have asked. Just by their skepticism you might have concluded that intelligent people see the story of Noah’s ark as a crazy myth that only ancient people, who did not know any better, believed. If no one had ever prepared you to respond to such points but just told the Noah story over and over again, you might begin seeing your Sunday school teacher as holding childish beliefs that should be rejected.

The point is that we can’t just pretend bad ideas don’t exist and hope no one will believe them. It seems counterintuitive, but with so many bad ideas threatening to infect us, focusing on only what we know to be true doesn’t build up the immunity we need. Even the strongest of us is vulnerable.