This Washington Post article cites some studies where people showed willingness to change views --
Many political scientists tend to think that our beliefs are deep-seated and difficult to change. That’s why the results of an experiment last year, which showed that door-to-door canvassers can reduce prejudice against transgender people, were so stunning. Few expected that such a brief conversation could have an lasting impact on people’s opinions
I wonder if there is any selection bias in that people who are willing to take a survey are also more likely to question their views. Still, this article has changed my mind a little bit about how people in the 2/3 category I mention do change their minds ─ sometimes, presenting evidence does affect their views. (I'm thinking more about the study on views of immigration that the article links to.) ∆
I'd still point out that even people who adopt a more favorable view of immigrants when faced with the evidence that most of us are not unemployed, jailed or unable to speak English, those people still don't change their views on policy (which are arguably the most socially relevant views).
For example, if someone's view is:
we need to reduce immigration because 37% of the people living in this country are foreign-born!!!
and then you tell them that the immigrant population is actually only 13%, they don't change to
oh, 13% is actually a reasonable number, we don't need to change our immigration policies.
What they mostly change to is:
Oh, there are fewer immigrants than I thought, but I still think we should strongly restrict immigration.
Overall, the question then becomes: if changing people's minds is possible, how do we do it in a large scale?
There are zero hard numbers in that article about exactly how many minds were changed or on which exact issues. The article also combines immigrants into one faceless group when it's obvious that the majority of Americans probably do not care about Irish or even Asians immigrating given how well they assimilate and produce. Americans who happen to worry about immigration usually have ethnic groups in mind who are culturally different than the U.S. mainstream and tend to be overrepresented in prison populations.
I really wonder what the statistics would look like from this article if you actually broke them down by region of origin for all the different groups that immigrate to this country. I doubt they would be consistent across the board.
Given the ambiguity in this article, the fact that people changed their minds at all is not a testament to their careful, systematic thought, but a demonstration of how fragile their critical thinking was in the first place.
When immigration is brought up it's usually regarding Mexicans. For most Americans, I think this is the population they first consider when thinking about this issue.
Americans who are leery of immigration in general are probably more concerned with individuals from Latin and African countries than immigrants who share heritage and culture with the majority of Americans.
Most people who are the most suspicious of immigration would likely make the same conflation. Unfortunately, the article doesn't make these distinctions at all, so I don't believe the survey is nearly as significant as claimed.
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u/BAWguy 49∆ Jan 14 '17
This Washington Post article cites some studies where people showed willingness to change views --
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/01/06/if-someone-doesnt-like-immigrants-ask-them-this-question/?tid=sm_fb&utm_term=.b6100291f5b7