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How Minds Change: Make People Listen Without Losing Your Voice

Author: David McRaney

Publisher: Oneworld Publications

Genres: Psychology

Publish Date: May 2, 2019

ISBN-10: 1786071649

Pages: 352

File Type: Epub, PDF

Language: English

Book Preface

We are about to go on a journey together to understand how minds change. By the end of this journey, you will not only be able to use what we learn to change the minds of others, you’ll also change your own, I hope, because that’s what happened to me, in more ways than one.

After writing two books about cognitive biases and logical fallacies, and then spending several years hosting a podcast about those topics, I had settled into a long and comfy pessimism that you may currently share. Onstage, behind a microphone, in articles, I often said there was no point in trying to change people’s minds about topics like politics, superstitions, or conspiracy theories—and especially not a combination of the three.

After all, when was the last time you tried to change someone’s mind? How did it go? Thanks to the internet, we have more access to people on the other side of the issues we care about than ever before. So the odds are pretty good you’ve recently been in an argument with someone who saw things differently, and I bet they didn’t change their mind when you presented them with what, to you, seemed like clear evidence of their wrongness. They likely left that argument not only angry, but more convinced than ever they were right and you were wrong.

Growing up in Mississippi, like many in my generation, these kinds of arguments were part of our daily lives long before the internet introduced us to the wider world of disagreement. The people in movies and television shows seemed to routinely disagree with the adults who told us the South would rise again, homosexuality was a sin, and evolution was just a theory. Our families seemed stuck in another era. Whether the issue was a scientific fact, a social norm, or a political stance, the things that seemed obviously true to my friends, the ideas reaching us from far away, created a friction in our home lives and on the holidays that most of us learned to avoid. There was no point in trying to change some people’s minds.

Our cynicism wasn’t abstract. In the Bible Belt, there were real stakes to breaking taboos, and from time to time we each had to make a choice about how—and when—we’d defy them.

As a teenager, I spent a summer delivering flowers for my uncle, who had bought a florist shop in the middle of our small town with money he had saved working as a paramedic. When the landlord began to bully him, my uncle called my father for help. As he hung up the phone, my dad grabbed his car keys and asked me to join him, and then we raced to the shop. He parked, walked into the middle of the confrontation, made it clear there would be trouble if the intimidation continued, and returned to the car. But the thing that stuck with me was that he said nothing on the ride back, nothing the rest of the day, and never mentioned it to the rest of the family. He didn’t need to ask for my silence. I knew why we had to keep it secret, and I did.

A science and science fiction nerd, my cynicism only grew stronger after I left home and began working for local newspapers, and then local television, just as social media entered our lives. Before becoming a science journalist, one of my responsibilities was moderating the Facebook page for the small news operation at WDAM-TV in Ellisville, Mississippi. For years, I spent a portion of every day reading the disheartening comments of angry viewers threatening to boycott the station after any science story that challenged their worldviews.

I realized just how far our viewers were willing to take these arguments when a meteorologist explained on air why climate change was real, and most likely the result of carbon emissions from human activity. The comments overflowed with rage after I used the station’s official Facebook account to share links from experts. Like most people, I thought the facts would speak for themselves, but a slew of angry commenters countered my links with links of their own, and I spent the afternoon playing fact-check whack-a-mole. The next day, a man confronted one of our news crews out on assignment and asked who ran our Facebook page. They gave him my name, and then he drove to the station and asked to see me in person. Sensing he was potentially dangerous, the receptionist called the sheriff. The angry viewer drove away before police arrived, and local law enforcement added the station’s parking lot to their patrols for the rest of the week, but I spent months looking over my shoulder when entering and leaving the building.

While still at the station, curious about the psychology behind all this, I started a blog about it. That led to a few books, then lectures around the world, and a new career. I launched a podcast to explore all the ways that people refused to accept evidence or empathize with others, and under the brand You Are Not So Smart, I made the psychology of motivated reasoning my beat as a science journalist. I was making a decent living telling people that there was no point in trying to change people’s minds.

But I was never comfortable with that pessimistic viewpoint, especially after witnessing the sudden shift in opinion about same-sex marriage across the United States. That shift that eventually reached my hometown, allowing my uncle to live as an openly gay man, and my LGBTQ friends to post photos of their weddings.

Though in 2012 the majority of the country was opposed to legalizing same-sex marriage, the very next year, the majority supported it. Around 2010 opposition began to plummet. When the majority opinion flipped, the arguments evaporated. Just a few years earlier, I had been moderating daily arguments about how same-sex marriage would ruin America by destroying its family values. Clearly, I thought, people can change their minds, and quickly. So what was the point of all that arguing in the first place?

I looked for a scientist who could help me answer a question I had never really considered asking, one that was now making my brain itch. Why do we argue? What purpose does it serve? Is all this bickering online helping or hurting us?

I invited the famed cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier, an expert on human reasoning and argumentation, to be a guest on my show. He explained that we evolved to reach consensus—sometimes on the facts, sometimes on right and wrong, sometimes on what to eat for dinner—by banging our heads together. Groups that did a better job of reaching consensus, by both producing and evaluating arguments, were better at reaching communal goals and out-survived those that didn’t. That led to the innate psychology that compels us to persuade others to see things our way when we believe our groups are misguided.

Mercier told me that if we couldn’t change our minds or the minds of others, there would be no point in arguing in the first place. He asked me to imagine a world where everyone was deaf. “People would stop talking,” he said. The fact that we so often disagree isn’t a bug in human reasoning; it’s a feature. For examples of how arguing had led to sudden shifts, all I had to do was look at the history of change in America.

I found a book about public opinion by political scientist Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro that revealed since polling began in the early twentieth century, nearly half of the significant opinion shifts in the United States had been, as in the case of same-sex marriage, abrupt. Opinions about abortion, the war in Vietnam, attitudes about race and women and voting rights and smoking and marijuana and many others were stable for years. In each case, arguing had spread from small groups to large, from homes to the House of Representatives. Then all at once it seemed that stasis shattered. When the tide of public opinion turned on these issues, it shifted so quickly that if people could step into a time machine and go back just a few years, many would likely argue with themselves with the same fervor they argue about wedge issues today.

I started to see the push and pull of our incessant arguing as a form of punctuated equilibrium. That’s what they call it in biology. When creatures have the capacity to change but there’s little encouragement to do so, they remain mostly the same from one generation to the next. But when the pressure to adapt increases, the pace of evolution increases in response. Over long timescales, a pattern emerges, long stretches of sameness punctuated by periods of rapid change. Looking at the history of social change, revolution, and innovation, it seemed like the same pattern, and I wanted to understand the psychology behind it.

I wondered what was happening inside all those brains before and after they changed their minds. What persuades us, and how? What breaks through resistance so powerfully that we not only see things completely differently, but wonder how we saw it any other way?

How does a person, over the course of a decade, go from being opposed to the “gay agenda” to happily attending a same-sex wedding? How does an entire nation go from smoking on airplanes and in offices to banning smoking in bars and restaurants and daytime television? What makes hemlines go up and down and beards appear and disappear? How did marijuana go from a prescription for madness to a prescription for glaucoma? Why don’t you agree with the person who wrote your teenage diary, want or believe the same things, or cut your hair the same way as the person you were just a decade ago? What changed your mind? How do minds change?

I wanted to understand the psychological alchemy of epiphanies, big and small. I thought if I could explain the mysterious nature of how people do and do not change their minds—and why that change often comes in bursts after long periods of certainty—we could become better at changing them, our own included. And so began the obsession you now hold in your hands.

This is a book about how minds change—and how to change them—not over hundreds of years, but in less than a generation, in less than a decade, or sometimes in a single conversation. In the pages that follow, we will learn what we are doing wrong when we fail to change minds, by exploring the surprising psychology behind how people modify and update their beliefs, attitudes, and values; and how to apply that knowledge to whatever you believe needs changing, whether it’s within one mind or a million.

We will meet experts who study this sort of thing, and spend time with people who changed their minds, whether in powerful moments of epiphany or on long walks toward surprising insights. In the final chapters, we will see how these ideas combine to create social change and, in the right circumstances, sweep across entire nations in less than a generation. We will see that the speed of change is inversely proportional to the strength of our certainty, and certainty is a feeling: somewhere between an emotion and a mood, more akin to hunger than to logic. Persuasion, no matter the source, is a force that affects that feeling.

When we wade into the techniques, you might feel some misgivings about the ethics of it all. Even if we feel like our intentions are good or that the facts are on our side, persuasion can seem like a form of manipulation. But it may put you at ease to learn that by its scientific definition, persuasion is the act of changing a mind without coercion. As Daniel O’Keefe, a professor of communication, defines it, persuasion is “a successful intentional effort at influencing another’s mental state through communication in a circumstance in which the persuadee has some measure of freedom.”

More specifically, as psychologist Richard N. Perloff explained years ago in his book The Dynamics of Persuasion, we can avoid coercion by sticking to symbolic communication in the form of messages meant to alter another person’s attitudes, beliefs, or both via the “voluntary acceptance” of those messages. According to Perloff, you can differentiate coercion from persuasion when “dire consequences” are employed to encourage someone to act “as the coercer wants them to act, and presumably contrary to their preferences.” He adds that when people believe they are free to reject the communicator, that’s when ethical persuasion is at play. It’s only “when individuals perceive that they have no choice but to comply, the influence attempt is better viewed as coercive.”

Persuasion is not coercion, and it is also not an attempt to defeat your intellectual opponent with facts or moral superiority, nor is it a debate with a winner or a loser. Persuasion is leading a person along in stages, helping them to better understand their own thinking and how it could align with the message at hand. You can’t persuade another person to change their mind if that person doesn’t want to do so, and as you will see, the techniques that work best focus on a person’s motivations more than their conclusions.

We will learn that, in many ways, persuasion is mostly encouraging people to realize change is possible. All persuasion is self-persuasion. People change or refuse based on their own desires, motivations, and internal counterarguing, and by focusing on these factors, an argument becomes more likely to change minds. As psychologist Joel Whalen once put it, “You can’t move a string by pushing it, you have to pull it.”

This is why it is so important to share your intentions up front. Not only does that keep you on solid ethical ground, but it also increases your chances of success. If you don’t, people will assume your intentions. Whatever they assume will become your “actual” position in their minds, and you run the risk of not having the conversation you intended. If they believe that your position is that they are gullible or stupid or deluded or in the wrong group or a bad person, then of course they will resist, and the facts will now be irrelevant.

Early in the research, I applied some of this with my father in an argument over a conspiracy theory that had made its way into his politics. We were debating the facts—for a long time. Exhausted, I took a breath and asked myself what I actually wanted. Why did I want to change my father’s mind?

I said, “I love you, and I’m just worried that you are being misled.” The debate ended instantly. We then entered a conversation about who we can trust on the internet. He softened, and admitted he was open to changing his mind about the facts, just wary of where they came from.

When I asked myself why I wanted him to change his mind, my answer was, “I don’t trust his sources, and don’t want him to trust those sources either.” Why? “Because I trust other sources who disagree, and I wish he did too.” Why? “I want us to be on the same side.” Why? You can keep asking until you are contemplating quarks and gluons, but it’s crucial you at least share your intentions for challenging someone’s ideas, or else both of your positions will be: “I am right, and I think you are wrong.”

I hope you will carry that question—Why do I want to change their mind?—in your mental backpack as you travel with me chapter by chapter. And I hope that question will blossom, as it did for me, into a series of questions.

You are reading these words because we each have the power to give up old beliefs, to replace old ignorance with new wisdom, to shift our attitudes in light of new evidence, and to free ourselves from outdated dogma, harmful traditions, and the diminishing returns of defunct politics and practices. The ability to realize we are wrong is baked right into the gooey mess of neurons wobbling around in every human head. But when and what and who should we be trying to change?

What counts as dangerous ignorance or outdated dogma? What qualifies as a malignant tradition, defunct politics, or a misguided practice? What norms are so harmful, what beliefs are so incorrect that, once we know how to change minds, we should take every opportunity to do so? And here’s the kicker: How do we know when we are right and they are wrong?

But also, what does the phrase “change your mind” even mean?

We will answer all of these going forward, but I didn’t start this journey with these questions in mind. They came later, after a good deal of my own ignorance revealed itself. That’s why I think we must ask ourselves these questions here, before we begin, and bring them along to the lessons and conversations ahead.

The ability to change our minds, update our assumptions, and entertain other points of view is one of our greatest strengths, an evolved ability that comes free with every copy of the human brain. You soon will see why, to leverage that strength, we must avoid debate and start having conversations. Debates have winners and losers, and no one wants to be a loser. But if both sides feel safe to explore their reasoning, to think about their own thinking, to explore their motivations, we can each avoid the dead-end goal of winning an argument.

Instead, we can pursue the shared goal of learning the truth.