Inoculation Works

[Linked]

Just saw an article about a study on using a "mental vaccine" to protect against fake news. The test consisted of giving groups different information about climate change and seeing how their view changed. By showing a pie chart of the percentage of climate scientists who conclude human-caused climate change is happening (97%), and pointing out that some people have political reasons to deny climate change they were able to inoculate a group against information that made those without the inoculating information disbelieve human-caused climate change.

The church has been using this for years. And the essays continue the trend. The big hole in the church's strategy is that they are the fake news, so if people decide to dig deep enough they will break through the inoculation and see that they were mislead.

Article

[Silver Girl]

I agree with you - some will dig deeper and question. I wish more would do that. I keep running into the brick walls - people who shift their eyes one way or another, say they are "happy" in the church and then shut down that topic. However, they don't smile. They don't look happy. When a piece of information hits that they didn't know or haven't thought about, the look of internal recognition is unmistakeable. Then the wall is constructed.

Still - I think the bricks are getting more and more fragile.

[Not Buying It]

Yep, it will work for many, it won't for some. It will work for my wife, all I can do is undermine the inoculation by giving my children the straight story they won't get from the Church. The Church will give them a vague idea that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy against his will - I will tell them that he had sex with orphans, foster daughters, housemaids, and married women in ways that would be considered sexual harassment in our time and was coercive even for his time. I will tell them his youngest wife was fourteen, that he had sex with his first "plural wife" before he even had the sealing power, that he sent men on missions and married their wives while they were gone, all the disgusting crap the Church won't tell them.

Inoculation only works when the Church leaves out the sordid details. I will give my children the sordid details so they will see it for what it is.

[wtfluff]

The big hole in the church's strategy is that they are the fake news, so if people decide to dig deep enough they will break through the inoculation and see that they were mislead.

This is brilliant! (I missed it on my first read through this thread...)

Correlated material from The Corporation of the President™ = Fake News!

[moksha]

Apologist's Creed - Feel the truth and deny it anyway.

[Corsair]

Apologist's Creed - Feel the truth and deny it anyway.

This sounds like the astonishingly boring sequel to the Assassin's Creed game series.

Inoculation is going to work in many instances. But I'll bet it causes as many problems as it solves. It lowers the bar for divine involvement in LDS religious life. I think the teenagers know that the level of baloney is rising. The trend for Millennials leaving organized religion is a bit slower for LDS youth than many others, but it's still catastrophic for the demographic survival of the LDS church long term.

[alas]

Inoculation might work for those who want to stay in the church no matter what. But I think they have a strong tendency to stay anyway, so inoculation is not needed. The people who stay no matter what tend to be happy in the church culture, put tribe loyality above truth, and be extroverts who don't think too deeply. Luckily that is a big percentage of the population. So, for them, it is not really needed because being happy in the church, they tend to disbelieve and ignore anything that makes them question.

But it will fail and make the exit quicker for people who are uncomfortable in the church culture, are more introverted than normal, and those who put truth above tribe. Those personality types are already heavily over represented on NOM compared to their percentage in the larger population. Their not fitting in at church tends to send the looking to find out why they are not happy, and they find the historical mess.

Then there are those who already have a tendency to question authority and think critically. For them, inoculation will backfire and give them all kinds of things to look into and research at a deeper level and will hasten their exit.

There is a small percentage of loyalists who accidently stumble onto things that make them question, and inoculation may help the brush off the questions the first few times they stumble onto things. But it will also make it much more likely that they will come across things that are problems for them personally even in the inoculation material and decide to do more research.

Then there are all the people who leave because of how the church handles LGBTQ issues and how sexist it is, and I don't think historical inoculation makes a bit of difference for them. In fact, as they get more and more unhappy, it will give them a long list of issues to research.

So, my opinion is that I don't know that inoculation actually prevents anyone from leaving. But then what do I know? I just spent six years studying psychology. Inoculation on historical problems is like teaching people to watch out for fake news. It doesn't work when you are the source of the fake news. As long as the church's actual history is not faith promoting, the church has a problem that white washing will never cure. Inoculation is just trying to white wash with gray paint instead of white. It does not change the actual history.