Houston Southard

David McRaney - How Minds CHange

I changed my mind about changing minds.

We know arguments over conclusions are a waste of time. The better path is for both parties to focus on how and why they see what they see, not what. People want to be right and think they already are. Certainty gives an air of objectivity to the subjective, but that's not a conclusion, it just feels like one.

It's common to hear we live in a post-truth society, when really we've become post-trust. Facts lost their ability to support consensus. Polarity correlates with online engagement, because change requires contact. Face-to-face communication spikes oxytocin on both sides in a way that not even video chat can.

The brain thinks in story-telling. Persuasion is just helping others realize change is possible. We don't empathize unless nudged because it goes against cognition to do whatever's cognitively effortful, but help offload others' cognitive baggage in a mutual effort to root out why we believe what we do and that changes. We don’t need an atom bomb to start an avalanche. Once the conditions are met, any bump will do.

People have to change their own mind, something we can facilitate by exploring their position and coupling it with personal stories that showcase how they arrived at their beliefs. When they see where their ideas come from, they become aware that they come from somewhere. People want to be respected and heard, and when both parties share, a small space is created where self-nudging is possible.

We're trying to eject someone from a loop. We can’t copy+paste our reasoning into someone. We have to be guided through our reasoning in order to understand it. We might not agree with an argument, but can still share we too have values, fears, anxieties, concerns and goals like they do.

Equal parts overview and strategy on deep canvasing, radical hospitality, street epistemology, contact hypothesis, honor worlds, and technique rebuttal, along with the neuro-evolution of plasticity, abstraction, metacognition, theory of mind, argumentation, consensus realities, cognitive filibusters, narrative transport, reputation management, and tribalism, somehow, yet again, McRaney delivers a book that has it all.