How to actually change someone’s mind

Clip You’re listening to a Frequency Podcast Network production in association with CityNews.

Jordan I like arguing with people. I enjoy it when it’s friendly, and I think I’m good at it. Though I guess that depends on how you define good. Are my arguments often correct? I mean, I think so. Do I have facts and figures to back up my claims? objectively, yes, I do. Was I good in debate club way back in high school? You know it. But how often do my arguments actually change anyone’s mind as opposed to making them dig in their heels while also getting mad at me? See this is a problem that you may be familiar with if you’ve spent any time arguing with strangers on the internet. Because it’s easy to score points, it’s fun to dunk on somebody and to get your friends and followers to see just how right that position that you hold, which they also happen to hold, is. But it’s a lot tougher to win somebody over. And the more we score points and dunk, the fewer hearts and minds any of us are ever going to convert. And uhh… I don’t know if you’ve looked around at the handful of existential crises facing the human race lately, but we kind of need to win some hearts and minds and work together, or we’re all in a lot of trouble. So, how can we argue better? How can we really change people’s minds? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. David McRaney is a science journalist and an author. His latest book, How Minds Change, came out earlier this year. Hi, David.

David McRaney Hey there.

Jordan Can you start by explaining to me if we know that it’s becoming harder to change people’s minds? Like, we keep hearing that we’re more tribal and more stubborn than ever. How do we track that?

David McRaney Well, there are all sorts of places that track these sorts of things PEWD Research and other polling places, plus political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists. There are many, many people studying this from every possible silo and angle. The good news is that we’re not doing anything we haven’t been doing for thousands of years, doing it in new contexts. So while it is true in some domains, we’re becoming more polarized. In other domains, we’re becoming more open to hearing what other people have to say about things and looking at other people’s attitudes and allowing people to come into the conversation and talk about things the way they never have before. I think that in general, the concept that we’ve become so polarized we’ll never be able to do anything ever again is way overblown. But the fact that our conversations are taking place in new contexts like Twitter and Facebook and social media and that our governments are responding to that by trying to reach out to constituents in a way that will take advantage of the groups that have formed over what used to be just mild anxieties or deepest prejudices and these groups have political action power, like all that’s happening. So people are noticing something. They are feeling something that’s taking place, but it’s not the end of democracy, it’s the beginning of something new.

Jordan I think everybody kind of intuitively feels that arguments on social media are different from arguments you might have in person or you might have with a friend or at a bar. But can you give us some examples of how they’re different?

David McRaney Yeah, I talked about the book about there’s this group of scientists who are all part of a new way of looking at human reasoning and cognition. It kind of flows out of something called the Interactionist Model. And that’s Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. And then Tom Stafford has something that he calls Truth Win Scenario. And in all of these cases, what you have are human beings. When we were coming up through all of the pressures, the evolutionary problems that we had to face and all of the selective pressures that built what we are and how we think and feel. We did a lot of debate, argument and deliberation and groups with the goal of trying to decide what is going to be our plan of action. How do we achieve these group-based decisions? And you could kind of think of your arm, let’s say the muscles in your arm didn’t evolve to paint paintings or play piano concertos, but we’re really good at using them for that. Likewise, the cognitive mechanisms that both present arguments and propositions to other people and then evaluate those arguments weren’t really evolved to come up with logic and to use critical thinking in the way that is really important in this current information ecosystem. But we can use it for that. My friend Alistair Crowle, who runs conferences, a big startup guy, said if somebody on the Internet says, who wants a grilled cheese sandwich? They’re not asking to enter into a debate with everyone in a collaborative frame where we all get together and say, okay, I would like this, I would like that, I would like this, I would like that. Really what you’re saying is, I’m going to go to the grilled cheese sandwich room and whoever wants to go there, come with me. And what you end up with are people who could have discussed the issue and come to some sort of agreement and compare each other’s notes and overlap each other’s Venn diagrams. But instead, we break off into collectives where the one thing that we’re concerned about is the thing that we form the group around. Or, the one thing we want out of the world becomes the point of being in a certain collective. And once you’re in a group of people who are all there for the exact same reason, the reason that got you into the group becomes less important than getting together and staying together in the group. And a whole new set of psychological mechanisms and motivations will become more prominent. And then you start going down the same path that people have gone down for hundreds and hundreds of years to get you into cults and pseudo cults and conspiratorial communities and political ideologies that are impossible to break out of without considering other options and other viewpoints. And this is something that the Internet catalyzes more than anything else. It’s this grouping up element. And there’s a whole new set of psychology that comes into play that makes it very difficult for people to entertain other points of view in that space. This is something that doesn’t happen in person as easily in person. You’re much more likely to present your argument in a way that other people will then pick apart in a way that everybody’s kind of okay with it. It’s more of a deliberative process that doesn’t generate the sort of strong reactants that you see in online environments.

Jordan So a few minutes ago you said some of the concerns about our increasing tribalism were overblown. But hearing you describe how the Internet has catalyzed this actually sounds, I mean, to me, really troubling. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with the freedom convoy that we had up here in Canada, which is, I think for Canadians, the first manifestation of that online tribalism in real life. And it’s something we see in the United States a lot. And to me, it seems like that’s really concerning.

David McRaney Of course, it’s concerning, but I would urge people to see it as this is a phase we’re going through. This has happened many times throughout human history. When a new information technology becomes available, what it always does is lower the cost to exhibit behaviours that we’ve been exhibiting for millions of years. And then there’s a period of time where the old institutions of trading information back and forth start to well, it’s like an earthquake is taking place and only the strongest structure survives. And you have to rebuild in the wake of that with something new that takes into account this new way of interacting. We’re in the middle of the earthquake right now and yeah, it’s weird. I hope you hold on to something and go into a place where nothing can hit you on the head because it’s weird. It’s strange. It’s odd to be part of the three or four generations spread that have to figure out a better way of being. But Tom Stafford told me something that I’ve been wanting to, I’ve been trying to repeat as much as possible. He said that he’s a cognitive psychologist who studies the exact thing we’re talking about. He said that germs have always been a problem for humans and groups. But when we developed cities, it became an existential problem because you had outbreaks and plagues and so on. So we had to develop at the society level, sanitation at the city level, and at the level of individuals. We had to develop best practices like washing your hands and boiling your water, he said. When it comes to information exchange, misinformation and trust have always been problems for human beings and groups. But now we have this massive internet structure with all the social media outcroppings that come from it. And now misinformation has become an existential crisis. So at the generational level, we will have to develop the equivalent of both sanitation and washing our hands and boiling water. And that’s what we’re in the middle of figuring out right now.

Jordan Well, that’s one of the reasons we wanted to talk to you, actually. A listener wrote in and recommended your book, which I am in the middle of, and asked us if we could discuss with you ways to have more civil disagreements and ways to give people who find themselves co-opted by this kind of misinformation and led down the path that kind of lead into this tribal stuff find ways to give them a soft place to land. So maybe, can you describe what’s a pathway back from this or are we still trying to figure that out?

David McRaney Well, we do know the best way to interact with other people in a way that will get the results you’re looking for. If you’re hoping to pull somebody out of a conspiratorial group or you’re trying to pull somebody out of a cult or a pseudo cult are just trying to discuss the facts of the matter. Like you have a friend or family member who thinks the earth is flat, there are ways to talk about that that don’t entrench the person deeper into the belief system or entertain the attitude that led them into that belief system. And we also have the scaled-out version of everything, the scaled-up version. We have really good studies in psychology, not just psychology, but network science and sociology. We have the information in front of us, the evidence as to how to go about building the world we’re trying to understand and what we’re discussing right now, right?

Jordan So what kinds of discussion is likely to convince people to change their minds without pushing them further?

David McRaney So in the book, I really try to make the point that if we’re going to discuss persuasion, it’s important to stay on ethical and moral grounds that we can all agree to. Persuasion is not manipulation. It’s not coercion. It’s not trying to get someone to try to copy and paste something into someone else’s mind. It’s not trying to get somebody to do something against their will either. This is not some kind of weird brainwashing thing that I’m suggesting, nor is it how to win friends and influence people sort of thing. It’s totally outside of all that. And I wasn’t aware of any of this until I got into the research of this book. I discovered all these different organizations who were doing this work. They were a/b testing different ways of having conversations with people on wedge issues or in ways in which disagreement is more likely than not. There were deep people doing deep canvassing in California, the street epistemology in Texas, in the Northeast there’s smart politics and there are all these other groups who do things in therapeutic models like motivational interviewing and cognitive behavioural therapy. There were dozens of models where people had a/b tested either on the ground at people’s front doors or it had been tested through the therapeutic world. And I was astonished to see that almost all of these techniques were identical. And if they had steps, those steps pretty much floating in the same order which is miraculous and amazing. But it makes sense because if you were trying to build an airplane for the first time it’ll end up looking pretty much like airplanes look because you’re dealing with the same physics wherever you’re making it here, you’re also dealing with the same psychological mechanisms and the same kind of brain in every regard. So here’s what I would recommend you do. The first thing is don’t use facts. Facts are great in a good faith environment where everybody is playing by the same rules like science or academia or maybe in some sort of legal framework. Generally though, if you try to dump a bunch of facts on somebody what you’re really doing is dumping your justifications for how you feel and putting them into an arena where they’re going to dump their justifications for how they feel. And those justifications are going to do battle and nothing really is going to take place because neither one of you has addressed what motivated you to seek those justifications. The other thing that’s going to happen is if you suggest upfront that the other person should feel ashamed or foolish for what they think, feel or believe, then you will generate something they call them psychology called reactants. And they will, as they say in psychology, become motivationally aroused to remove the stimulus object, which is you because you have suggested that person they may get ostracized by that group for changing their mind or that you look down upon them in some way and we react very poorly at that. You can also generate reactants by just suggesting to the other person that they ought to think a certain thing because you want them to. The want in that is what generates the reactants. We feel sort of unhandy of you fools or sort of a teenager rebellion kind of thing when we are told we ought to feel a certain way because somebody else wants us to. So the first step in all of this is to establish rapport. An established rapport is being very transparent and open with the other person that you’re not interested in making them feel ashamed and you’re not interested in getting them to think a very particular thing. What you’re interested in is understanding why you might feel a certain way about it and more importantly, why you disagree. So instead of facing off, you’re going shoulder to shoulder and you’re saying, can we collaborate, you think, to investigate this mystery and the mystery is why we see this differently. And if it’s a fact-based issue, you should ask for a very specific claim. If it’s an attitude-based issue, it’s more about trying to say where do you see yourself. Either direction, though the way to bounce out of the binary way of discussing things, the way where one person is trying to win and you hope the other person will lose. Somebody’s trying to say I’m right and you’re wrong to get out of that, let’s say it’s flat earth. You would say on a scale of zero to ten, how strongly do you feel that the Earth is flat? How confident are you? How certain are you? And then whatever number the person gives, you ask, what does that number feel right to you? And then as they introspect, as they start to metacognize, then ask, okay, well then why not lower? Why not higher? And start having this kind of conversation. And there are many other steps that flow out of that that I talk about in the book. But those first two are all you really need to have the kind of conversations that actually will move people, will get people to think more deeply about the issue and reconsider their positions. And if it’s an attitude-based thing, say it’s the convoy or gun control or anything like that, you could imagine a zero to ten scenarios where ten is a very extreme position, zero is the least extreme position. And ask a person where they are on that scale, then ask why does that number feel right to them? And then if you’re really looking for them to move on that scale, ask them why are they not more extreme. If they’re a seven, you would say, why did you not say you were an eight or nine? And what they will do is produce their own counterarguments against the position to show that they’re not very extreme. And those counterarguments, the first time that they may have ever articulated those things, and they’re their counterarguments, not yours, which is the important part about this. You’re holding space for the other person and giving them an opportunity to articulate counterarguments on that issue that they are the author of. There’s no reactance involved in that. And then you can more deeply investigate it as that conversation unfolds. And I’ve seen this work hundreds of times. This is the method that delivers the results.

Jordan One of the things you write about in your book is that studies show that people are more able to critique their own ideas if they think they’re critiquing ideas from somebody else. Right?

David McRaney Yeah. There’s a great VR study where you put on a VR headset. You walk into a room and Freud is sitting there. And you sit down in front of Freud and he asks, what is the problem you’re trying to work out right now? And you tell Freud the problem, then the thing, the whole thing reboots and now you’re in VR and you are Freud and you see yourself, it’s all been recorded from earlier. You see yourself walk in, sit down and you hear yourself tell yourself all the problems you’re facing. And they have like an above 70% success rate for people having breakthroughs in that. The reason is that you can have a breakthrough in a situation like that is because we have two mechanisms for producing and evaluating arguments. We’re very biased and lazy when it comes to producing our arguments. But when we offload that argument, then into a group setting where everyone can contribute not only their positions and their perspectives, you also get the opportunity for everyone to pick and choose from the arguments available. And there’s a thing called the Truth Win Scenario that I mentioned earlier from Tom Stafford. I like to get a group of people in a room and I asked them one of the questions from the Cognitive Reflection Test. One of my favourite ones is if it takes five machines, five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? And then I ask everybody to keep the answer to themselves and I ask is there anyone in the room who really feels like they have the answer to the question? And usually, there are two or three people. I’ll pick one out and I say, okay, what is the answer? And they’ll say five minutes. And there’s a grumbling in the audience that people are like because a lot of people did not have that answer. And then I’ll say could you explain your reasoning? And then they’ll explain if it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, that means it takes one machine five minutes to make one widget. You got 100 machines working together, then each makes a widget in five minutes, 100 widgets and five minutes. And you get after that a collective and the whole room. And what’s amazing about that situation is a lot of the research done on human cognition, especially reasoning and the stuff that I wrote about in the past, many other books, pop science books have written about. That research was done in isolation in the sense that each person in the study is doing the work individually. That can make it seem like we’re very bad at this sort of thing, but that’s because they are doing it individually, they’re producing their very biased and lazy arguments. Then if you take that same research though, and you allow people to approach those questions in groups where they talk it out, work it out, same bad arguments, but they’re also good arguments and people can sort it out. And that sort of scenario is something that we could create on the internet and internet spaces. This is not sort of the emphasized or the sort of engagement that is encouraged on most of our platforms, encourages the individual arguing part of it, but not the collective sense-making part of it and that’s something that we’ll probably adapt to over time, but it also generates a lot of frustrations that we currently feel.

Jordan Well, you led into my next question perfectly, which is you’ve given us some best practices for talking with individuals and trying to let them de-escalate themselves. How do you do that at scale? It seems almost impossible. And more than that, and this is based on another interview we did a couple of weeks back, it seems antithetical to the entire business model of social media.

David McRaney It is antithetical to a lot of it right now because what is emphasized is engagement. And if you just let robots determine what engagement is the things that, on one side of it, you get TikTok kind of things where the algorithm slowly figures out that you like to look at parrots and people dancing and all that. And that’s all you ever get on the side of it where people are having conversations. It emphasizes the kind of conversations that unfurl into endless threads of bickering. And that’s great for engagement. That’s lots of clicks, that’s lots of refreshes of advertising space. The only way out of that is to at the cultural level of the institution is say, well this isn’t really what we want or the audience is the consumers of these things, the people who are us, the end users saying, I don’t like that environment, I’m not going to hang out there anymore, which you’re seeing a lot of that there are a lot of exodus in places like Facebook and so on, especially Gen Z. And then now we’re in the sort of corporate megaplex version of the Internet, and it’s just evolving as it goes forward. The things, it’s breaking a lot of the institutions that simply cannot survive in the 21st century and probably should have been broken already. It wasn’t just music stores in Blockbuster that were going to get demolished by all this. It’s going to be a lot of other stuff too. But I do have an optimistic viewpoint that on the other side of that, we’re going to have a really, really cool way to interact and everything’s going to be fine.

Jordan Before we let you go, I have to ask you for some professional advice while I have you here. And this is about how to introduce conversations that might not appeal to people who think a certain way. So a lot of what we do on this show, no matter how unbiased we try to be, I think can feel like preaching to the choir, you know our listeners are fairly progressive. We do cover the climate crisis, and I think that we have important stories to tell about these things that can change people’s minds. But how do I get people that might disagree with us to start and listen to them? I feel like they kind of see the title and they see references to climate change or something that kind of indicates that we’re probably pro-choice, and they might just say nope. And I guess what I struggle with is how to invite them into the conversation without sacrificing the stories that we want to tell which are true.

David McRaney Sure. I mean, if the issue is fact-based, that’s one thing. If it’s attitude based or it’s in the domain of pure politics and that someone has a problem they feel is more important than your problem, or they feel that their value structure has a different hierarchy than yours does, then that’s where you have the most precarious position. That’s where we have the most work to do. I would encourage is, before you start this process that you’re talking about, add a step zero to how many steps you want to take from the methods in the book, that step zero would be to ask yourself, why do you want to do this? It’s a really important question because we often haven’t examined our own motivations or owners. You can in good faith say, hey, I would like to talk to you about this. I’m not trying to defeat you. I’m not trying to win this discussion. I’m not trying to earn any points in front of my audience. I really legitimately don’t understand how I can feel so strongly about this and disagree with you in this way, how you could feel so strongly about this. Because I feel like you’re a smart person and you want good things to happen in this world and that we agree that there are certain problems in this world that we want to face. So how is it possible that all this could be true and yet you and I see this so differently? I want to understand that. Could you come on the show in such a way that we could figure that out shoulder to shoulder? That’s an invitation that I think if someone extended that to me, I would be much more likely to get on that program, even if it was some sort of program that I looked through their catalogue and think, well, this is not the kind of show I’d normally go on. Now, I feel like, oh, this person actually is trying to break out of their loop, and this is a chance for me. Maybe I could also break out of mine, and you have that opportunity to see that third thing that’s not your side. Maybe we’re both wrong. And if we’re both wrong, that means there’s a third thing we can’t see until we compare notes. And I think most people will take you up on that offer.

Jordan David, thank you so much for this.

David McRaney Hey, thank you. This is a great program, and I really appreciate you giving me time to talk.

Jordan That was David McRaney, author of How Minds Change. And that was The Big Story. You can get all the rest of our episodes at thebigstorypodcast.ca. You can find us and chat with us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. You can email us directly. I personally read them all at [click here!]. And you can call us on the phone. We won’t answer, though you have to leave a voicemail. The number is 416-935-5935. Suggest the topic, ask a question, leave a little rant, whatever you feel like doing. You can get this podcast wherever you get them. And if you have a smart speaker in your home, try asking it to play The Big Story podcast. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. Thanks for listening. Enjoy the long weekend. The Big Story returns Tuesday. Back to top of page