From “How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion” by David McRaney When I asked Broockman and Kalla for a lead or two, they said to look deeper into something psychologists call elaboration, a state of active learning in which a person unpacks a new idea by relating to something they already […]
People don’t get a chance to reflect like this very often Read More »
From “How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion” by David McRaney Steve would tell me later that they had learned over many conversations that reasons, justifications, and explanations for maintaining one’s existing opinion can be endless, spawning like heads of a hydra. If you cut away one, two more would appear
“It’s like we are solving a mystery together” Read More »
From “How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion” by David McRaney Steve explained that after thousands of recorded conversations they had found that battling over differing interpretations of the evidence kept the people they met from exploring why they felt so strongly one way or the other. People could remain in
This almost entirely separate emotional reasoning process Read More »
From “How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion” by David McRaney “There is no superior argument, no piece of information that we can offer, that is going to change their mind,” he said, taking a long pause before continuing. “The only way they are going to change their mind is by
It was there, and only there, that a single conversation could change someone’s mind. Read More »
From “How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion” by David McRaney When they began their work, the debate about same-sex marriage was burning white-hot in the United States. As with any wedge issue today, people daily gathered online to trade arguments and call one another idiots, and the dominant sentiment was
Many people who supported LGBTQ issues in the media had given up Read More »
From “How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion” by David McRaney As the decade came to a close, a New York Times op-ed titled “The Age of Post-Truth Politics” argued that democracy itself was now in danger because facts had “lost their ability to support consensus.” The New Yorker examined “Why
What counts as dangerous ignorance or outdated dogma?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 can pursue the shared goal of learning the truth Read More »
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
All persuasion is self-persuasion Read More »
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
How do minds change? Read More »
