One of the biggest reasons that it’s so hard for facts to change people’s minds is that people have an incentive to keep believing what they already believe, especially if it’s a belief that’s deeply tied to their identity.

The mental gymnastics they do to achieve this are known in psychology as “motivated reasoning.” It’s something that’s extremely hard to get around.

Wow! When you have Shell Oil telling you that climate change is real, you’re either having a bad dream, an acid flashback, or the world has gone mad. But that’s exactly what happened recently when twenty-five U.S. companies signed a letter that appeared in full-page ads in the Washington, D.C. editions of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, exhorting the president not to exit the Paris Agreement.