What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies

by Tim Urban

There’s also the “inoculation effect,” a term coined by social psychologist William McGuire in 1961. The trick of many of our vaccines is to expose a person’s immune system to a weak version of a dangerous virus. After the body defeats the weak version of the virus, it develops an immunity against all versions of the virus, including the strong ones. McGuire found that people’s beliefs worked in a similar way: being repeatedly exposed to weak arguments for a particular position makes people dismissive of all arguments for that position. In other words, if straw man arguments are repeated enough inside a political Echo Chamber, people come to believe they are representative of what the opposition thinks. After enough of this, any version of dissenting arguments—even the strong ones—will be disregarded as nothing more than better-worded versions of the well-known absurd arguments. People will have become “immune” to changing their mind. The same goes for motte-and-baileys—when people continually hear their own views reframed as ironclad mottes, it can make them feel so overconfident in their beliefs they become immune to self-doubt.