> To help individuals with delusions, the current findings suggest, it may be more effective to examine their sense of control and choices than to try to convince them with contradictory evidence—which, over and over, has not been shown to work.

Oh god. If that's true, you can't possibly do this at scale like you'd need for coronavirus things or global warming. I'm sure we all have delusions about something at some level. That's why trust in public institutions is critical and those institutions need to be above reproach in their conduct. That doesn't mean no bad conduct but an evidence-based belief that bad conduct is identified and punished. That could explain why American society has been crumbling. It's taken a beating on the trust aspect by abuses from those in power for a long time. More importantly there haven't really been meaningful reforms to address that abuse which has eroded the trust that was built up for so long. The "small government" movement has taken a long time but it's finally winning in America because it identified trust as the weak point & systematically kept attacking it & used media to amplify the fight. A countermovement did not form in time so here we are with so many decades of damage. I'm not sure if it's possible to rebuild that at this point.