Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser — Fact and Prejudice: How to Communicate with Esoterics, Fanatics and Conspiracy Believers

212 published claims from this book.

• A belief’s psychological basis determines how changeable it is
• A clinician’s presence itself is an effective treatment factor
• A company reversed its barcode-altering practice after customer backlash.
• A famous saying about things in heaven and earth is a misattributed Hamlet paraphrase.
• A genuine emotional outburst can win more credibility than consistent success
• A parent’s alarm about cults can be triggered by ordinary adult separation
• Accommodating superstitious compulsions escalates them until therapy is demanded
• Aggressive rebuttals can push curious people toward pseudo-scientific views
• Agreeing with a prejudice’s underlying value can disarm the prejudiced person
• Asian-produced herbal remedies often contain dangerous heavy metal levels
• Assuming a partner’s beliefs are fixed forces a rethink of the whole relationship
• Attacking only strengthens the negative antihero identity
• Attacking patients’ alternative beliefs provokes defensive resistance
• Attentive listening without judging is itself a rare gift
• Automatic categorization is necessary for managing everyday cognitive load.
• Basic worldviews originate in childhood and resist later revision.
• Being a scientist does not shield one from publishing pseudoscience
• Belief change begins inside the believer before outside conversations matter
• Belief in healers can override needed medical care for children
• Belief in natural remedies is defended by conspiracist insider knowledge claims
• Believers experience their truths as felt certainty, not testable belief.
• Believers routinely demand proof of nonexistence for supernatural claims
• Believers view science as fixed dogma while seeing beliefs as personal experience
• Biographical narrative conversation outperforms argumentative persuasion in deradicalization work
• Blue lies strengthen in-group cohesion by attacking rival groups
• Brains evolved to detect patterns, including patterns that are not there.
• Burden of proof in paranormal claims rests with the claimant, not the skeptic
• Bystanders remember that an objection occurred, not the arguments behind it
• Changing someone’s mind is inherently difficult because it requires changing one’s own mind
• Children’s refusal to visit a parent often signals loyalty conflict, not real objections
• Chronic outrage erodes the ability to grade disagreement by real danger
• Claims without evidence cannot be refuted by counter-evidence.
• Closer relationships make objective criticism more likely to feel personal.
• Coaching schemes weaponize urgency and sunk-cost thinking to extract large payments
• Cognitive dissonance is tension from inconsistency between behavior and values
• Compliment-framed warnings trigger desire to meet good opinion
• Confident authority in assessments can relieve decision-makers of accountability
• Confirmatory filtering operates already at the level of perception and memory.
• Consistent crowd-reporting of hate content leads to eventual blocking
• Conspiracy beliefs erode democratic participation and breed extremism
• Conspiracy theories convert vague existential dread into manageable concrete fear
• Conspiracy worldviews corrode the shared trust reality depends on.
• Contradicting false claims serves the claimant, not just the audience
• Criticizing a comforting false belief can harm more than it helps
• Cult-like dynamics share recognizable behavior changes in adherents
• Cults attract people whose identity pillars have collapsed in a crisis
• Cultures historically conflated ignorance of local custom with stupidity
• Debaters can demand written evidence instead of refuting unsourced claims themselves.
• Debates with believers often target bystanders, not the interlocutor
• Deconverts often become bitter toward their former belief community.
• Deliberate analytical thinking cannot run multiple tasks in parallel.
• Discussion is never purely factual but also about power and autonomy
• Diverse critics may each plant one seed of doubt that together converts
• Dressing like subordinates lowers perceived leadership capability.
• Each religious community experience is unique and resists generalization
• Emotional benefits sustain worldviews that good arguments cannot dislodge
• Emotional outbursts during argument trigger defensive flight-or-fight responses
• Empathizing with others’ stories can implant false autobiographical memories.
• Empirical and historical evidence fails to persuade flat Earth believers
• Enforced obedience converts children’s suffering into psychosomatic illness instead of rebellion
• Environmental groups do collaborate with universities despite media claims otherwise
• Esoteric logic can invert institutional language into a self-fulfilling illness narrative
• Even direct evidence of failure cannot shake committed believers’ convictions.
• Experiencing unconditional love can break the grip of conditional religious belonging
• Explaining contradictory behavior as audience-dependent exemplifies moderate integration
• Explanations for historical failures depend strongly on political attitude
• External challenges to justify beliefs can trigger belief transformation
• Factual argument alone fails to change entrenched workplace decisions
• Faith communities’ illness beliefs hinder especially mental health treatment
• Fake-admiration criticisms weaponize imagined lost fandom to force justification
• False consciousness makes people hold beliefs contrary to their own interests
• Family discussions of irrational beliefs hinge on relationships, not just being right
• Family interventions into spiritual involvement can humiliate rather than persuade the target
• Fanatics outcompete moderate parents because certainty is attractive
• Fatalism about workplace pseudoscience blocks regulatory change.
• Flat Earth arguments rest on naive sensory and gravitational misconceptions
• Flat Earth beliefs persist in groups with thousands of engaged online followers
• For conspiracy believers, the conspiracy is an axiom, not a conclusion
• Former believers are uniquely valuable sources on how worldviews actually change
• Former conspiracy believers can counter myths through humor
• Framing pseudoscience as a religious prohibition publicly challenges dubious offers.
• Fraudulent therapy cults demand unpaid labor framed as spiritual service
• Frequently recalled information is judged more probable and true.
• Future theories must reproduce current experimental results unchanged.
• General policies rather than case-by-case bans neutralize ideological disputes at work.
• Genuine belief change is possible and rare, centered on an initial crack of doubt
• German law lets untrained Heilpraktiker practice psychotherapy without evidence standards
• Guided mental imagery can build psychological armor against online hostility
• Hate comments lose their power when the target withholds attention
• Hate speech can express displaced personal unhappiness rather than genuine ideology
• Having better arguments and better manners does not win disputes
• Height is overrepresented among executives but not among founders
• Herbal compositions vary unpredictably in dose where synthetic drugs are standardized
• Hosting an event at a respectable venue confers undeserved legitimacy on pseudoscience.
• Ideological constructs are weaponized to sever the child from the other parent
• Ideologies attribute failure to the practitioner, never the method
• Ignoring hate messages carries no moral obligation to respond
• Internet health information has not produced better-informed patients
• Irrational belief adherents often hold more factual knowledge than skeptics
• Irrational beliefs tend to cluster with nationalist or prejudiced views
• Knowing the facts provides no strategy when opponents are immune to evidence
• Knowledge’s provisionality obligates claimants to unknown truths to provide evidence.
• Laboratory-reproducible effects deserve more weight than human trial results.
• Large online forums moderate almost entirely through self-learning algorithms
• Laughter at genitals masks shame over their involuntary passivity.
• Laughter disarms ideology because it dissolves fear and enables thought
• Leaving a belief system needs external confirmation of a life outside it
• Media coverage skews perceived risk toward rare dramatic events
• Medical persuasion operates emotionally rather than through factual information
• Memory is reconstructed each recall and is vulnerable to implanted false memories.
• Metabunk counters conspiracy claims through collaborative forum research
• MLM recruitment supplies surrogate family, status, and meaning that cost cannot undo
• Mosquitoes kill far more people annually than any other animal
• Most accepted knowledge rests on trust in sources, not verification.
• Most diseases improve on their own regardless of what treatment happened nearby
• Most people abandon clearly correct perceptions to match a unanimous group
• Natural origin provides no guarantee of safety or harmlessness
• Negative feedback outweighs positive feedback in how strongly people register it
• No simple trick can change another person’s worldview against their will
• Not every disagreement requires convincing the other side to achieve value
• Offering alternative explanations converts believers more than refuting claims
• Only the believer can exit a closed belief system, via an unplannable first crack
• Openness and diversity logically have limits at educational institutions.
• Oppositional thinking interrogates the assumptions behind authoritative questions
• Orders and accusations trigger defensive community loyalty
• Parents can counter a worldview without devaluing the other parent
• Parents enthusiastically embrace astrological talent charts presented as scientific
• Patient participation in treatment decisions boosts compliance
• People change their own minds; persuasion attempts play a small role
• People fear statistically rare dangers and ignore common ones
• People feel first and use reason only to justify formed opinions.
• People invest resources to maintain their initial views when surprised
• People mid-way out of a worldview need acceptance alongside facts
• People mistake their culturally tinted worldview for objective reality.
• People reduce dissonance by changing beliefs rather than behavior
• Perceived exclusion and injustice prime society-wide breeding grounds for radicalization
• Personal relationship changes can enable exit from vaccine-hesitant belief
• Persuasion requires entering the other’s worldview, not starting from one’s own
• Politifact rates false claims on a playful Truth-o-Meter scale
• Preconceived expectations filter what we physically hear in conversation
• Prejudiced remarks can be defused by acknowledging the shared longing behind them
• productivity of a discussion depends on matching goals to the audience
• Pseudo-medicine flourished in a clinic where colleagues practiced it tolerated
• Pseudoscience can weaponize past-life claims against living relationships
• Psychotherapists sometimes employ undisclosed esoteric diagnostic systems on patients
• Publication bias explains apparent effects in alternative medicine research.
• Question-based debate techniques can backfire by humiliating the rhetorical rather than testing the belief
• Radical religious upbringing can destroy a child’s ability to feel their own emotions
• Radicalization is countered by empathy and resources, not by bans or information alone
• Reading one rigorous book can complete a belief change that discussion never triggered
• Realizing harm to one’s followers can trigger a leader’s deconversion.
• Reframing reveals the positive facet latent in every negative trait
• Refuting a conspiracy theory directly is useless; examining its origin works better
• Refuting someone’s core beliefs on facts is often perceived as a personal attack
• Rejecting a partner’s belief while valuing the person requires meta-level dialogue
• Relationship dynamics dominate factual content in communication.
• Religious and superstitious ideas profoundly shape trauma experience in both directions
• Repeated exposure alone makes false statements seem more credible to anyone
• Repeating a false claim to debunk it increases its plausibility
• Required secrecy about treatment content marks fraudulent therapeutic offers
• Research converted a homeopathy believer into a prominent skeptic
• Researching one’s own practice can overturn deeply held professional beliefs
• Respectful friendship changes minds more than argument does
• Respecting a person is a prerequisite for meaningful conversation
• Sagan’s extraordinary-claims rule fails because what seems extraordinary is subjective
• Science advances through collaborative effort, not isolated geniuses
• Science can illustrate but never substantiate its claims with emotional individual cases
• Science-skeptics misread science as memorized, unquestionable genius dogma
• Science’s trustworthiness rests on being intersubjective and collective
• Scientific correctness applies to investigations, not to the art they study.
• Scientific explanations win converts by being more interesting than paranormal ones.
• Scientific findings are provisional intermediate states that may later prove wrong
• Scientific methods exist precisely to counteract researchers’ inevitable personal biases
• Seeing a peer embrace a more extreme fringe view can trigger one’s own exit
• Self-research motivated by a challenge produced rapid belief abandonment
• Sequential coincidence is routinely mistaken for causation.
• Sexual taboos in strict religious communities drive guilt or early marriage
• Shared everyday experiences can counteract worldview-driven repulsion in couples
• Skeptic movements can alienate former believers they converted
• Skeptic movements selectively adopt the unscientific errors matching their ideology
• Skeptical standards can take years to apply to one’s own faith.
• Snopes grew from urban-legend encyclopedia into leading political fact checker
• Some irrational beliefs serve as stabilizing forces for survival.
• Some licensed therapists diagnose marital problems via past-life karmic claims
• Spiritual ideology can justify censoring a spouse’s news, books, and music within the home
• Spiritual ideology can mask obsessive-compulsive and despotic behavior
• Standard argumentation guides fail because opponents are often unwilling to engage factually
• Statistical significance marks deviations expected by chance less than once in twenty.
• Straw man arguments attribute unstated claims to opponents
• Stress, threat, and lack of information increase conformity to group norms
• Suppressed grievances for harmony’s sake poison relationships until an emotional confrontation releases them
• Synthetic products are better safety-tested than natural ones precisely because they are distrusted
• Taking public positions inevitably generates enemies and hostile responses
• Text-only communication strips conversation of the feedback cues that prevent misunderstandings
• The average-of-five-people aphorism can be weaponized to isolate a follower from critics
• The curious hold unscientific views as open, not identity-locked, positions
• The same emotional tactic succeeds or fails depending on audience empathy
• The will to understand, not refute, creates mental de-escalation
• Trolling is a situational social role rather than a fixed personality trait.
• Trolls attack based on trigger words without reading the content
• Trolls provoke for pleasure, not to persuade anyone
• Trolls seek engagement while haters seek only vented aggression
• True believers hold convictions as unquestionable faith, not fallible knowledge
• True informed autonomy requires clearly marking dangerous treatment boundaries
• Unchallenged assertions gain credibility with passive audiences
• Unconditional acceptance from outsiders drives defection from restrictive religious groups.
• Under conflict, hierarchical talk shifts to simplified claims hard to counter.
• Unproven claims are slander or quackery regardless of disprovability.
• Visual aids improve understanding, memory, and belief in medical communication
• Wanting to fit in is adaptive and drives most belief change.
• Youth work can counter radicalization and protect clients from exploitation
• Youth workers must offer uncompromised feedback within a safe, unbreakable relationship