Primary value shift

At the heart of any group, community or society, there exists a set of primary values that inevitably steer the fortunes of that group. Good examples are: religious groups that engage in activities or make decisions based around their religion, or stock-trading company employees that work together to increase profit yield for their company. In each case, there are common core values among the members that decide the activities and fortunes of the group.

So (in theory at least), you can quite readily alter the direction of the group by merely shifting the primary values of its members. eg. If the stock-trading company employees individually lose interest in the company, the company will inevitably falter. Of course, shifting people's perspectives is not so easy in practice, and often the reasons for someone to shift their position on any given topic have to be truly overwhelming.

Apart from being social creatures, we are also very much creatures of habit – whether in our daily rituals or in our beliefs. We tend to identify strongly with our beliefs to the point that we feel like an attack on our beliefs is a personal attack on us. Generally, a person who can readily alter their beliefs in light of some new given information is the exception rather than the rule.

Value shift experiment

Try this simple value shift experiment:

Imagine if I were to try to convince you that, say, all humans arrived here from Mars in the seventeenth century. This claim would (presumably) fly in the face of everything you believe about history, archaeology, evolution, religion, etc. So, what would it take for me to convince you of this new 'truth'? What would I need to do for you to accept this new information as valid and shift your beliefs accordingly?

I'm guessing that a Youtube video probably wouldn't cut it, right? Nor perhaps any amount of books on the subject - even by reputable authors. No, I'm guessing at a minimum that you would probably want to see the freshly uncovered crash site of our ill-fated Martian ship and look at the artefacts yourself, right? That would seem a reasonable request, given the extraordinary nature of the claim.

But there may be another way to convince you, that doesn't require any hands-on experience of the evidence. What if I was somehow able to control all the information you were receiving, through TV and radio, and arrange for all the people you know to begin acting as if this story were true. You would be watching endless TV reports on the 'new discovery', and all your neighbours and friends would be talking about it.

Habitual as we are, our social urges usually win out. We have all seen the psychological experiments where paid actors are asked to sit in a room and perform some silly task on cue, then when 'real' people are added, they almost invariably join in the silly task - even when all the original actors are removed. Our desire for social acceptance is overwhelming.

Given the scenario of controlling people's social perceptions of the Martian story, the evidence stacks that most people would be convinced sufficiently and change their beliefs without ever having examined the evidence.

We are malleable

We humans are much more malleable than we would care to admit. Recent manipulations of elections and public opinions through social media are testament to this. This can be a scary thought - that we can be manipulated so easily. But it's also a very useful vulnerability that can be exploited to the good, not just for the bad.