A denialist pamphlet sharply reduced students’ Holocaust-belief scores.

Evidence

The pretest mean among the other subjects was 60.4, which dropped to 52.3 after reading the Christophersen account (p < .001). To put this in perspective, if we consider the distance between the initial student mean of 60.4 and the neutral point of 40 to indicate how much the students positively believed the Holocaust occurred, Christophersen’s pamphlet cut that nearly The effect was general, both in content and in who was duped. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 3132

Categorization

• XREF: Empirical corroboration for the vault’s broader claims about how authoritarian-influenced persuasion works; connects to Altemeyer’s own RWA persuasion experiments.