Feeling their identity threatened, belief holders double down and muster more ammunition to fend off the challenge. But since another part of the human mind keeps a person in touch with reality, as the counterevidence piles up the dissonance can mount until it becomes too much to bear and the opinion topples over, a phenomenon called the affective tipping point. The tipping point depends on the balance between how badly the opinion holder’s reputation would be damaged by relinquishing the opinion and whether the counterevidence is so blatant and public as to be common knowledge: a naked emperor, an elephant in the room. As we saw in chapter 10, that is starting to happen with public opinion on climate change. And entire populations can shift when a critical nucleus of persuadable influencers changes its mind and everyone else follows along, or when one generation is replaced by another that doesn’t cling to the same dogmas (progress, funeral by funeral).

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress, New York, 2018, p. 377