Name: How Minds Change
Rating: 4.6 (479 reviews)
Author: David McRaney

What’s in it for me? Learn why minds stay stuck in their ways – and how you can change them.

What makes a conspiracy theorist stop believing that 9/11 was a hoax? How does a former cult member decide to leave their old beliefs behind? What causes someone to go from strictly opposing same-sex marriage to being strongly in favor?

Often, these kinds of mindset shifts can seem like random, maybe even lucky, confluences of events. After all, how many times have you tried to change someone’s mind about something and gotten absolutely nowhere?

Despite how it sometimes seems, there’s a pattern behind when and how people change their minds. Thanks to neuroscientific and sociological research, that pattern is now much more visible –⁠ and we can use it to change even the most stubborn of minds.

In this Blink, you’ll learn

why people hold so tightly to their beliefs;
how a conversation can turn the tide of an election; and
how to get someone to really scrutinize their reasoning.

Even the most stubborn of believers can ultimately change their minds.

In June 2011, five British conspiracy theorists boarded a flight in London bound for New York City. They were accompanied by a TV crew responsible for creating the BBC series Conspiracy Road Trip. In each episode of the show, a different part of the conspiracy community travels somewhere in the world. There, they meet experts and eyewitnesses who challenge their beliefs with facts and evidence. The goal is to get them to have changed their minds by the end of the episode.

This particular episode focused on five “truthers” –⁠ people who believe that the official narrative of what happened on 9/11 is a lie. They traveled to New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, where they met experts in explosives, demolition, air travel, and construction, in addition to family members of victims, government officials, and architects. They also trained in a commercial airline simulator and took flying lessons that let them soar over New York City.

How many of them do you think ultimately changed their minds? On every other episode of Conspiracy Road Trip, the number was exactly zero. But this time, it was one.

The person in question was Charlie Veitch, a prominent thought leader within the truther community. At the time, Charlie was famous for his YouTube conspiracy videos – some with over a million views – and for his regular practice of hitting the streets with a megaphone, trying to recruit people into the movement. He had befriended and collaborated with well-known conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and David Icke.

However, something changed for Charlie during the filming of the episode. His certainty in his beliefs began to be eroded by his encounters with demolition experts, seeing the blueprints of the Twin Towers, and attending the flight school. His final epiphany occurred when meeting two people, Alice Hoagland and Tom Heidenberger, who had lost family members during the attacks. As he described it, the change in his opinion was like a sudden “bang!”

When the truthers reconvened later in the episode, none of them were on the same page as Charlie. They argued that Hoagland –⁠ one of the family members that Charlie had met –⁠ had either been brainwashed by the FBI or was a paid actress. They were firmly caught in the conspiratorial loop –⁠ a kind of logical prison in which people claim that any contradictory evidence is purposely designed and planted by the conspirators to mask the truth.

How, then, was Charlie able to break free of the loop? Was it the strength of the evidence alone that convinced him? It couldn’t have been –⁠ otherwise the other truthers on the trip would have been equally convinced. In fact, there was something else going on in Charlie’s life that set the stage for him to change his mind. To understand why, we’ll need to talk about why people begin to hold tightly to a set of beliefs in the first place.

People hold on to their beliefs because it feels psychologically safe.

What happens inside the brain when a person’s deeply held beliefs are challenged? In 2016, a group of neuroscientists –⁠ Sarah Gimbel, Sam Harris, and Jonas Kaplan –⁠ decided to find out.

First, they gathered together a group of participants who held strong opinions about a variety of topics. They placed them inside MRI machines and then presented counterarguments to their professed beliefs. Some of the beliefs the researchers rebutted were neutral. For example, some subjects strongly believed that Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb. Those subjects read that the lightbulb had in fact been “invented 70 years before Edison.” Other beliefs the researchers rebutted were of a political nature. Say a participant strongly believed in strict gun control. That participant would have been shown a statement like “Ten times more people are murdered with kitchen knives each year than are killed by assault weapons.”

Face-to-face discussions can change a mind in 20 minutes.

We humans usually feel very confident that we know and understand the reasons behind our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, motivations, and goals. We create a sort of biography for ourselves –⁠ one that tells us we’re reasonable people who reach conclusions by viewing and contemplating the evidence before us. If other people were as smart as us, we say to ourselves, they would surely reach the same conclusions.

But that’s not how it works. Instead, it’s much more like we’re the observers of our own behavior. We create rationalizations, justifications, and stories about what we think, feel, and believe after we already believe it.

Use conversations to help people think better.

Before you get too excited about the potential of deep canvassing, we need to add a disclaimer. While it is possible to make use of some deep canvassing principles in your everyday life, people who participate in the Leadership LAB all undergo fairly extensive training before they hit the streets.

Fortunately, deep canvassing has a lot in common with other methods of changing people’s minds and helping them think better. The one we’re going to explore here is street epistemology. It’s called that because the person who developed the practice, Anthony Magnabosco, started by stopping random people on the street and getting them to question their epistemology –⁠ basically, how they know what they know or, more accurately, think they know.

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