How Minds Change

A great book on how to help others change their minds. Put shortly, it’s never about giving them the facts that you find useful, but always about creating a safe container and then really listening to them while they investigate their own process of reasoning.

How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

David McRaney (2022): Oneworld Publications

I have listened quite a lot to the “you are not so smart” podcast where David McRaney talks to people who study people and minds. It’s usually good content and I have a couple of unread books on my shelf that I have shopped after hearing the presentations on his show. One of them was David’s own book “How Minds Change” that I just finished recently.

This was a really good read for me. It’s one of these amusing and engaging books that still get the subject matter communicated well. He starts off with some basic brain science on how people disambiguate (that was a new word for me) differently and why that makes it impossible to change the mind of someone else by presenting your favorite facts. Then uses the example of the famed dress meme (you know the one that is either blue/black or gold/white) to show how this works in detail. It’s complex of course, but one way of seeing it is that “when truth is uncertain our brains resolve that uncertainty without our knowledge by creating the most likely reality they can imagine based on our prior experiences”.

Its also a pretty funny book with some great examples. I love the one about the barnacle goose cited below.

“Centuries ago, people often found a certain type of barnacle floating on driftwood. It featured a long tube that extended out of a white shell with a smidge of yellow streaked down the side, and for at least seven hundred years, people across medieval Europe thought that this barnacle was some kind of proto-goose, because it looked somewhat like the necks and heads of the familiar geese that lived in the same area where the barnacles regularly appeared”... ”Learned monks who had supposedly recorded this process further solidified the belief. To prove it, they drew the mysterious goose trees and the strange growth process in illustrations that made it into some very nice-looking books. Those same monks also claimed that you could eat a barnacle goose during Lent because it wasn't a bird. The belief was well-established and quite popular because in 1215 Pope Innocent III announced that, although everyone knew they grew on trees, the church still strictly prohibited the eating of barnacle geese, effectively closing the loophole created by those wily monks.”

David McRaney 2022:101-102

The book contains lost of interesting reflections (based on talks with various scientists) on how humans are reluctant to update our maps of reality. Even when we are faced with information that challenges our understanding the tendency will be to somehow incorporate that new information into our current understanding of the world rather than go through the painstaking process of an epistemic emergency where we actually have to change.

The book then goes on to investigate people who have left cultish environments and what made them leave. In my reading the conclusion is that it has much more to do with being welcomed into other groups than about having their facts challenged. Largely someone was nice to them in unexpected ways and that (along with a lot of other factors) made it possible for them to leave the high-social-control environments they were in.

Lastly the book goes through ways of helping others change their minds. Put shortly, it’s never about giving them the facts that you find useful, but always about creating a safe container and then really listening to them while they investigate their own process of reasoning. One of the quotes I really like from the book is this one:

“I want to live in a world where people believe true things. But I have realized that ridicule, being angry and telling people that they are mistaken, is not going to help them. We are all sort of in the same boat. We are just grasping for reasons to justify the views that we have already built. Once you know that, you begin to feel empathy, you really do. You begin to have epistemic humility about what you yourself believe.”

Anthony Magnabosca (in David McRaney 2022:251)

I found this to be a very inspiring read. I have been struggling a lot with all the misinformation I see repurposed and spread all around me and I found the approach in this book very useful and aligned with how I actually want to be with other people. Taking them seriously, listening, really trying to understand why and how they think the way they do. And allowing myself to be changed by the process, rather than holding on to my own stiff beliefs.

Selected Media about the book

Thank you For reading this!

This article was written by Peter Munthe-Kaas. If you feel like something is missing or want to add something feel free to get in touch.

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How minds change

Selected Media about the book

Thank you For reading this!

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