SIO31: Why We Ignore Facts, with Sara Gorman

Serious Inquiries Only

Thomas Smith

News, Atheism, Skepticism, Democrat, Left, Liberal, Politics, News Commentary, Progressive, Religion

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2017

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Joining me today is Sara Gorman! Sara is a public health expert and author based in New York. She is the co-founder of Critica, a community committed to making rational decisions about health and security. Critica’s mission is to develop and test new methods of advancing public acceptance of scientific evidence and promoting informed health decision-making.

Sara’s first book, Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us, was published in September 2016. It looks into the psychology of healthcare decision making and how people draw conclusions about perception of risk. It includes tips for the general public about how to discriminate between valid and invalid science and for public health professionals and doctors on how to communicate with people who don’t believe the best current scientific research. The book and her work have also been cited in articles about how to change people's minds about many other things, including politics.

We discuss her book, and the possible lessons we can learn about how to convince people of things they don't necessarily want to believe!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to serious inquiries only. Oh, Hello and welcome to serious inquiries only this is episode 30. I'm your host
0:33.9	Thomas Smith. All right today I've got a really cool interview for you with
0:38.3	Sarah Gorman she's done some work on why people believe possibly silly things how to maybe
0:45.4	change their mind she comes at it from specifically more medical research but
0:49.7	also there's other areas of focus for her and it's one more step in my quest on this
0:56.8	show to to really learn more about why people believe the things they do and how we
1:01.7	might go about changing minds.
1:04.0	So with that said, I bring is Sarah Gorman. How you doing Sarah?
1:18.0	I'm great, how are you?
1:20.0	Doing excellent. Thank you so much for coming on the show. You know lately on this
1:24.7	podcast I've been and just personally I've been doing a lot of thinking about
1:28.8	why people believe what they believe and you know what can be done if anything to change people's minds on stuff and I think along
1:37.2	those lines you have some real expertise to share with us so before we get to
1:41.4	that though would you mind giving the
1:42.8	listeners a little bit of your background? Sure my pleasure and I'm not
1:47.1	surprised to hear you are thinking about those issues as I think many are.
1:50.8	So my background is I'm Sarah Gorman I have a background in public
1:57.6	health primarily and I published this book called Denying to the Grave
2:03.0	Why We Ignore the Facts that will save us
2:05.2	that came out with Oxford University Press
2:08.0	in the fall shortly before our US election of Donald Trump actually and the book is really
2:16.7	about exactly what you're asking about which is some of the broad reasons why the psychological reasons why people basically believe things that aren't true or aren't evidence based and we focus really on science and health in the book but there's a much wider applicability of a lot of
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