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I agree with you that the feeling of being bombarded or manipulated causes people to close off and deny the opportunity to be persuaded. Another factor might be
by throwawaysea 5y ago
I agree with you that the feeling of being bombarded or manipulated causes people to close off and deny the opportunity to be persuaded. Another factor might be fear - if people feel that something they value is threatened by the other side's position, they will react to it like a cornered animal. I guess that means people can only be persuaded when something doesn't matter existentially to them?
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoPeople only have so much mental bandwidth. If you lived completely alone, and one day someone walked up and started talking to you, and it was the only person you'd seen that month, you might take hours to talk to that person. You might thoughtfully consider their position, even if you didn't agree with it. We don't live in that world. Even here on HN, there are sometimes really strident voices trying very aggressively to advocate and defend their viewpoint. But it's worse off of HN. It's everywhere. It's social media, and TV, and advertising, and spam phone calls, and and and. Nobody has time to fairly consider even a small fraction of the attempts to persuade us. We just reject without consideration all these attempts, because it's the only way to keep any kind of space for ourselves in our own heads.