Belief change begins inside the believer before outside conversations matter
Evidence
The fear of criminal prosecution prompted her to do more in-depth research, including coming across a book by critical complementary medicine professor Edzard Ernst, and eventually distancing herself from alternative medicine in direct exchanges with Ernst and other skeptical authors that lasted several months. As an important step she mentions the spatial separation from her previous environment, which had consisted almost exclusively of believers. … So conversations with skeptics were very important to her transformation process, which she estimates to have taken about 9 months in total – but she didn’t seek out these conversations until she was already well into her turnaround. — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 201
Categorization
- XREF: Mirrors the pattern in A Very Minor Prophet and general cult-exit accounts where an internal crack must precede external influence. — connects to: Independent testimonies agreeing closely can convert a skeptic into a believer — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False…, 11