Avoid “feedback” in an Argument by Appealing to a Worldview
Stating facts can never change someone’s mind. In fact, counter-evidence can actually make a person more confident in their point of view. In this case, appeal to their worldview, rather than just fight on the basis of facts.
As the scientific communications site Scientific American explains, people are more likely to question their worldview when presented with evidence to the contrary, than to abandon their ideas altogether. On an individual level, this makes sense. You are unlikely to give up everything you believe in just because a random person on the Internet has stated otherwise, so why would anyone else? However, this can complicate matters if someone’s worldview gets in the way of the facts. In such cases, certain arguments can backfire if you ignore the other person’s point of view.
To combat this, the site recommends not only discussing the facts of the dispute, but also explaining the point of view from the point of view of another person. For example, you may not be religious, but you can accept that the other person is religious and use that as a starting point for argumentation, rather than deny their beliefs because they do not fit your own case:
In these examples, skeptics believed that the most deeply rooted worldviews of the adherents were in danger, and the facts were an enemy to be destroyed. This power of belief over evidence is the result of two factors: cognitive dissonance and backfire. In the classic 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, psychologist Leon Festinger and his co-authors described what happened to the UFO cult when the mother ship did not arrive on time. Rather than admitting a mistake, “the group members desperately tried to convince the world of their beliefs” and embarked on “a series of desperate attempts to erase their agonizing dissonance, making predictions after predictions in the hope that one of them would come true.” Festinger called this cognitive dissonance, or the uncomfortable tension that arises from holding two conflicting thoughts at the same time.
Of course, this does not mean that you should give up your ideas or even treat something wrong as right. Eventually you will meet someone whose worldview is wrong and there is nothing you can do about it. Finding common ground, however, is a better starting point for persuasion than just calling someone an idiot for misinterpreting certain facts.
How to convince someone when the facts are not true | Scientific american