How Minds Change by David McRaney

The average person will never be in a position where beliefs on gun control or climate change or the death penalty will affect their daily lives. The only useful reason to hold any sort of beliefs on those issues, to argue about them, or share them with others is to “convey group allegiance,” Kahan told me. If holding alternative positions might cause you to lose friends, lose advertisers, lose a job, or face public shaming, rejecting what would otherwise be neutral, empirical evidence would be a very rational decision For issues about which your tribe has formed a consensus, others will use your agreement as a measure of how much they can trust you. If your values seem out of alignment with the group, “you could really suffer serious material and emotional harm,” explained Kahan.

-p.168, the author discusses the work of psychologist Dan Kahan, an expert on tribal psychology