Does anyone really change their mind anymore about anything?

After her book was published on “how to have fearlessly curious conversations in dangerously divided times,” Mónica Guzmán was surprised to come across a one-star review on Amazon expressing concern about “offensive language.” The reviewer was alarmed that in a book about cultivating respectful conversation, the author had been casual about violating the biblical commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”
“Why not show some respect,” the commentator asked, “for the feelings of readers who are religious?”
As the first time she was receiving that feedback, Guzmán “immediately disagreed with it” — feeling “defensive” and wanting to “push back” at this objection to her single usage of profanity in the book as being “too sensitive.”
But after seeing 15 others liking the comment in agreement, this Seattle-based writer got thinking, “You grew up pretty religious, Mónica. You know the (third) commandment” — even remembering a “time when that was really important to me, where it would offend me.”
Although she found this language “exciting and edgy” in the past as the way she spoke to a lot of her friends (most of whom were “not very religious”), Guzmán had to admit, “Here I am … trying to do work to stay open to different perspectives” while encouraging people to “hear each other.”
Ultimately, the first-time author ended up agreeing with the reviewer — so much so that she asked her publisher to issue a reprint without the usage of God’s name, “because she was right,” she said. “And it was really a humbling thing.”
These kinds of mind shifts happen more than most realize, especially at the incremental level, according to David McRaney, the author of “How Minds Change” and host of the popular “You Are Not So Smart” podcast.
Nonetheless, many people today see attempts at individual persuasion as a waste of time, for some obvious reasons. “Our politics looks like it’s so much shouting and so little budging,” Guzmán said, “that I can’t blame anyone for thinking that our ability to persuade each other on big issues these days isn’t just weak but broken” — taking for granted that others’ “minds are such well-guarded fortresses that nothing we say or do could possibly lead them to consider a different point of view.”
McRaney once shared the same cynicism about persuasion as more or less a waste of time — something you “don’t even try.” He recalls being approached after a lecture by a young woman concerned about the direction her father was going, and being asked, “What do I do about that?”
“I gave her the worst advice ever,” he said. “I was like, you can’t. You’re out of luck here. Like, you can’t reason a person out of a position.”
Even as he said it, however, McRaney could feel how wrong it was. “Ah! I don’t think that’s good advice because I don’t think I actually know if that’s true. And I also don’t like this pessimism. I don’t like this feeling.”
That regret motivated years of research that ultimately led this science writer to effectively change his mind about mind changing. “I used to think that you couldn’t do this,” he told Guzmán. “Now I think that anybody’s mind can be changed. … It’s a complete flip.”
McRaney joined Guzmán on the ”Braver Way” podcast earlier this month for a conversation about persuasion — a media project the Deseret News is helping promote this fall before the election, in partnership with KUOW, Seattle’s NPR news station.
In the first chapter of his book, McRaney described a surprising experience that instilled new hope about people’s ability to experience genuine perspective change. Charlie Veitch had made a name for himself on YouTube promoting the idea 9/11 was an inside job perpetrated by the government, rather than terrorists.
At the time when he felt like a “cog in the machine” with a “meaningless existence,” Veitch found his videos with bold claims would draw a big audience, for example, arguing that steel beams couldn’t melt without a much higher temperature than was present at the twin towers that day.
His popularity caught the eye of one of the first reality shows — a British program called “Conspiracy Road Trip,” which exposed people like Charlie to various places, experts and eye witnesses. For instance, Veitch went to ground zero and spoke with architects of the World Trade Center, along with experts on explosions, manufacturing and engineering. He was provided with “everything you could imagine you’d want a person” to experience to help them see another view. “Here are the facts that do not comport with what you assume is true.”
The Ph.D.-level engineer, for instance, helped him understand more about metal beams, saying, “Well, here’s how that works. … There’s a whole building’s worth of weight above this metal girder, it just has to slightly bend and all that weight will do the rest of the work.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that,” Veitch said.
Across all the other episodes, producers were shocked the show didn’t change anyone else’s mind — with participants at the end most often concluding, “I believe it even more now.”
Except for Veitch — who told them, “I think I’ve changed my mind.”
Sociologist Brooke Harrington suggests that if there’s an “E equals MC squared” of all the social sciences, it would be, “The fear of social death is greater than the fear of physical death.”
“We are far more concerned with seeming like a good person to the groups to which we feel like we owe allegiance, than we are our own physical well-being,” McRaney summarized.
“My high school friends completely freaked out when I told them I had become conservative,” remembered April Lawson, director of debates at Braver Angels. “But the really difficult conversations were with my family. That was the part where it was painful for years.”
Overriding any commitment to truth or accuracy, McRaney added, are these deeper “belonging goals,” which “will always supersede” and “absolutely titanically rise above anything else.”
In all our various arguments and debates over facts, this science journalist observes, we’re missing other key questions operating under the surface: “Will this make me look like a good member to my group if I believe this? (or) If I am skeptical about this?”
Veitch would have been wise to think at least a little about this. Because after posting his next YouTube video from Times Square, where he told his viewers that he had “changed his mind” … his audience lost it — going after him “with a vengeance” to the point that when the journalist met him to hear his story, the former YouTube star was in hiding.
So why would Veitch ever do something so socially dangerous as changing his mind, given this reaction he must have anticipated from his formerly adoring fans?
Because he hadn’t been siloed in one social group alone. About this same time, Veitch had embraced another community focused on figuring out “the truth itself about existence and reality.”
With a foot in two different worlds, Veitch had developed “two identities” and an accompanying “social safety net” that gave him more security to “sacrifice one of his social selves.”
For this man, McRaney summarized, “social death wasn’t complete social death,” since he still had another community to fall back on. That allowed him to approach new ideas with openness, saying for instance, “Oh, well, that is how steel beams work. I didn’t know that. … Wow.”
“He was updating his priors because he had the freedom to update his priors,” McRaney concluded. This underscores the importance of making sure “that we offer a home for an alternative” with those around us, Guzmán added.
It’s just the opposite that often happens in day-by-day conversation, she pointed out — where people “take something away” — such as a relationship or love or support “because of what someone believes.”
The sad irony is that “the more that we go apart from each other,” Guzmán noted, the more stuck people can get in their way of thinking, since they are likely to center their “entire social identity” on whatever social group does affirm them completely.
So, for instance, if a man or woman stepping away from their faith comes to feel estrangement from former friends and family in the faith, that makes the person even more likely to ground themselves firmly in their newfound nonreligious community.
Such an outside group thus takes on oversized importance, Guzmán said, making it so “no one can change their mind when maybe they should.”
The podcast summarized a few key conditions making it more likely that people will feel comfortable changing their minds.
No surprise that threats of estrangement and verbal aggression make perspective change less likely. That obvious fact reinforces the value of making sure to “signal” to someone else, McRaney said, that they are not “about to be shamed or ostracized” for what they now “think, feel or believe or intend to do, even if they ought to be ashamed.”
“You can’t be confronted with hostility or aggression and stick around. You can’t. Your sense of self is going to fly the other way,” Guzmán said.
At times when hard truths still need to be shared, people need to be aware others may ultimately choose to “push away” from the relationship, McRaney said — forfeiting chances for future conversations that may be needed.
That may still be necessary sometimes. But the science journalist points to an alternative way to proceed. For virtually all the people he witnessed experiencing profound changes in perspective, a key catalyst was someone from a different perspective who acted as a “nonjudgmental listener” with empathy and a willingness to hold “space” for their new perspective.
Guzmán recounted a story from her home state of Washington about a war protest with counterprotesters on the other side of the street. After seeing one sign on the other side of the street, a protester got curious and started asking a woman questions about her sign and her life too.
“A couple hours later, that woman just kind of smiled, got up, thanked the man, and left because she realized she didn’t even believe what was on that sign.”
“How rare of an experience that is,” Guzmán said, to have someone there “receptive to you and just asking you questions” without being overbearing in their own views.
That gives the other person the “gift” of understanding their own perspective (including, she said, potentially finding out what they’re wrong about).
“Our brains really would rather assimilate new information (fit new data into old categories) than accommodate it” (create new categories) Guzmán said in summary of the neuroscience — with it fair to say there’s “nothing more natural … than the human brain’s built-in stubbornness.”
That stubbornness can be a good thing, since it would be chaotic for any of us to change our mind willy-nilly, all the time, about everything. Those biological realities, then, help explain some of the resistance we feel to any change in perspective.
By the time people are adults, McRaney added, you’ve “built such complex models of reality that you can assimilate almost anything. You can fit things into your existing understanding.”
However good that may be to “protect yourself,” it can also become a barrier to new learning and mental shifts that would be healthy and positive.
“One of the reasons that we think changing our minds is so hard is because we don’t acknowledge all the little moments that it happens every day,” Guzmán said.
McRaney invited people to go back 10 years and ask themselves: “Would you give this yourself of 10 years ago absolute control over your life right now?”
Even if there aren’t “a lot of 180s during that where you suddenly had a grand epiphany,” what happens far more often is “little changes, which are changes that lead to grand changes later on. It just accumulates.”
McRaney also cited research confirming the value of reminding someone that they “they aren’t just one identity” and “contain multitudes” (as Walt Whitman and Bob Dylan put it). In other words, when people realize “there are several affinity groups to which they can find homes within,” that can often encourage them to say, “Hmm, I should really think about that.”
It’s also helpful to signal to someone else that “you and I share similar values,” McRaney said. “You and I both agree that this particular thing is a problem, or this is a goal that both of us would like to achieve.”
Once accepted, he said, “Now you’ve entered into this nice little ‘we’re in a little group together.’ We’ve already started to establish a sharedness,” which means “instead of going face to face, we’re switching to shoulder to shoulder.”
People often say, “I’m going to change your mind,” Guzmán noted. “But in a way that’s misleading. I can’t change your mind.”
She reflected on her own change in perspective about profanity, which happened not simply because someone had raised critique. “It wasn’t her or her review that changed my mind. It was the thinking that I did, the reflecting that I did, as a result of what she said, that changed my mind.”
Rather than pretending any of us can single-handedly change someone else, Guzmán said, “I have to ask different questions about how I can potentially play a role in influencing something that’s going on in (their) mind.”
Among other things, that invites more compassion in those making efforts to persuade, recognizing that “the things I’m doing that seem to be a failure might not be,” April Lawson said. And just “showing someone something” is important on its own, Guzmán added.
“And the fact that they don’t seem to change their mind right then doesn’t actually mean I’ve failed.”
“I cannot copy and paste anything into you,” McRaney agreed. “But what I can do is create a space in which that process will occur — and then help you navigate it and be the sounding board for you. And change happens there.”