On Changing Beliefs in the Closed Human Mind

About a hundred years ago, the world was faced with a pandemic that would ultimately infect 500 million people and kill 50 million. Today, we face a potentially similar situation. Although at times like these, the discipline of communication is essential to promoting public health and welfare through its knowledge of persuasive messaging and mass communication campaigns, to increase our effectiveness, we need to be more aware of and better account for the influence of political ideology on response to messaging. In this essay, I look to lessons from the foundation of our discipline and draw on a variety of ideas across psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics to suggest a way forward.