How Minds Change Quotes

“HERE ARE THE STEPS: Establish rapport. Assure the other person you aren’t out to shame them, and then ask for consent to explore their reasoning. Ask for a claim. Confirm the claim by repeating it back in your own words. Ask if you’ve done a good job summarizing. Repeat until they are satisfied. Clarify their definitions. Use those definitions, not yours. Ask for a numerical measure of confidence in their claim. Ask what reasons they have to hold that level of confidence. Ask what method they’ve used to judge the quality of their reasons. Focus on that method for the rest of the conversation. Listen, summarize, repeat. Wrap up and wish them well.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“When we first suspect we may be wrong, when expectations don’t match experience, we feel viscerally uncomfortable and resist accommodation by trying to apply our current models of reality to the situation. It’s only when the brain accepts that its existing models will never resolve the incongruences that it updates the model itself by creating a new layer of abstraction to accommodate the novelty. The result is an epiphany, and like all epiphanies it is the conscious realization that our minds have changed that startles us, not the change itself.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“Persuasion is not coercion, and it is also not an attempt to defeat your intellectual opponent with facts or moral superiority, nor is it a debate with a winner or a loser. Persuasion is leading a person along in stages, helping them to better understand their own thinking and how it could align with the message at hand. You can’t persuade another person to change their mind if that person doesn’t want to do so, and as you will see, the techniques that work best focus on a person’s motivations more than their conclusions.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“I couldn’t shake the idea that I, too, was probably one conversation away from changing my own mind about something, maybe a lot of things. But I also recalled how many conversations I’d had that only made my convictions stronger. I thought about the truthers and all the conversations they had in New York. I wondered what made these interactions different.
In the training, after the videos, Laura handed things over to Steve, and I got my first clue. He opened by telling the crowd that facts don’t work. A serene man with a gentle and patient spirit, Steve put away his persistent smile and raised his voice to address the audience on this point.
“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 changing their own mind—by talking themselves through their own thinking, by processing things they’ve never thought about before, things from their own life that are going to help them see things differently.”
He stood by a paper easel on which Laura had drawn a cartoon layer cake. Steve pointed to the smallest portion at the top with a candle sticking out. It was labeled “rapport,” the next smallest layer was “our story,” and the huge base was “their story.” He said to keep that image in mind while standing in front of someone, to remember to spend as little time as possible talking about yourself, just enough to show that you are friendly, that you aren’t selling anything. Show you are genuinely interested in what they have to say. That, he said, keeps them from assuming a defensive position. You should share your story, he said, pointing to the portion of the cake that sat on top of the biggest layer, but it’s their story that should take up most of the conversation. You want them to think about their own thinking.
The team tossed out lots of metaphors like these. For instance, Steve later said to think of questions as keys on a giant ring. If you keep asking and listening, he told the crowd, one of those keys was bound to unlock the door to a personal experience related to the topic. Once that real, lived memory was out in the open, you could (if done correctly) steer the conversation away from the world of conclusions with their facts googled for support, away from ideological abstractions and into the world of concrete details from that individual’s personal experiences. It was there, and only there, he said, that a single conversation could change someone’s mind.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“But no status quo is eternal. Every system occasionally grows fragile. The key to changing a nation, or a planet, is persistence. At any one time, for any given system, thousands of us are banging away at it hoping to make the difference that changes the world, but no one knows where the vulnerable cluster is at. No one can will the system to cascade for them. The system must become vulnerable. When it is, with so many people banging away, it is inevitable that someone will start the cascade that changes everything, but that someone isn’t preordained. You need no special privilege to start striking at the status quo, because no one is in control. What you are in control of is whether or not you stop striking.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“Recognize within yourself the ability to understand anything, because that ability is there, as long as it is explained clearly enough. And then go and ask for explanations. And if you are thinking right now, ‘What do I ask for?’ Ask yourself if there is anything in your life that you want changed. That’s where to start.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“She called it the Change Conversation Pyramid, modeled as a hierarchy in which each motivation must be met before moving on to the next, with change at the top. At the bottom is comfort. Next is connection. Then comprehension, compassion, and finally change.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“When Anthony showed me a pyramid that he used in training, with WHAT at the small part at the top, WHY in the middle, and HOW at the bottom, indicating the relative importance of the claim, their reasons, and then their method as topics of discussion, I was reminded of a deep canvassing layer cake. It became clear to me that all these people had independently discovered the principles that work best when it comes to persuasion.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“It’s uncomfortable for me to see you uncomfortable. There’s an urge to move on. Don’t move on though, because that’s where the seeds get planted.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“Conspiracy theorists and fringe groups may hold individually coherent theories, but there is no true consensus, just the assumption of consensus. If they hung out together, they might catch on to that, but since they rarely do, they can each keep their individual theories and still assume they have the backing of a tribe.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“Once invested in ideas that seem far-fetched to their peers, people begin to feel the threat of ostracism, and the embrace of those who share your reality becomes increasingly inviting, until you eventually identify more with the conspiratorial community than any other.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“When a person’s core expectations are massively subverted in a way that makes steady change impossible, they may experience intense, inescapable psychological trauma that results in the collapse of the entire model of reality they once used to make sense of the world. Psychologists who study this kind of trauma have discovered that afterward people tend to take one of two paths. Some go down a maladaptive spiral, turning to drugs or other kinds of self-destructive behavior, circling lower and lower until they hit a dark stasis.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“The belief in the barnacle goose didn’t immediately evaporate because a few naturalists found evidence to the contrary. At first, people assimilated. They interpreted the evidence as confirmation of what they already thought they understood. It took the addition of novel, disconfirmatory information, a series of anomalies from multiple sources that couldn’t be explained by the existing model, before beliefs like goose trees gave way to new explanations.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“The only problem is that, after doing all this for so long, we know a whole lot, but we still don’t know how much we don’t know. Worse still, we also don’t know that we don’t know that we don’t know. Since we can only create a consensus reality out of what we do know, or believe we know, when wildly incorrect we often have no way of knowing. In both individual minds and groups of minds that agree, to paraphrase the Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer Kathryn Schulz, until we know we are wrong, being wrong feels exactly like being right.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“For brains, everything is noise at first. Then brains notice the patterns in the static, and they move up a level, noticing patterns in how those patterns interact. Then they move up another level, noticing patterns in how sets of interacting patterns interact with other sets, and on and on it goes. Layers of pattern recognition built on top of simpler layers become a rough understanding of what to expect from the world around us, and their interactions become our sense of cause and effect.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“The world, as you experience it, is a simulation running inside your skull, a waking dream. We each live in a virtual landscape of perpetual imagination and self-generated illusion, a hallucination informed over our lifetimes by our senses and thoughts about them, updated continuously as we bring in new experiences via those senses and think new thoughts about what we have sensed.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“That’s when he decided it was time to bring in some scientists. That decision would lead to a torrent of publicity that nearly destroyed everything Fleischer had worked for since the LAB knocked on its first door.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“Once people see where their ideas come from, they become aware that they come from somewhere. They can then ask themselves if they’ve learned anything new in the time since they last considered them. Maybe those ideas need updating in some way.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“As they had explained in the two hours of training that morning, sometimes the work was like trying to urge people to evacuate before a hurricane: in the time it would take to motivate one obstinate holdout, you could persuade a dozen others to pack up and head north.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“Once that real, lived memory was out in the open, you could (if done correctly) steer the conversation away from the world of conclusions with their facts googled for support, away from ideological abstractions and into the world of concrete details from that individual’s personal experiences. It was there, and only there, he said, that a single conversation could change someone’s mind.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“Brian Greene, a physicist who studies string theory, to tell Wired, “We’ve come to a very strange place in American democracy where there’s an assault on some of the features of reality that one would have thought, just a couple years ago, were beyond debate, discussion, or argument.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“when the bathroom scale gives us bad news, we reweigh ourselves a few times to make sure. When it gives us good news, we step off and go about our day.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“...they coudn't leave their worldview behind until they felt like there was a community on the outside that would welcome them into theirs.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“Before scientists began researching the Leadership LAB’s technique, few studies supported the possibility that campaigns could change voters’ views on polarized, partisan, politically controversial issues, especially not with door-to-door canvassing.
The academic literature in political science is aggressively pessimistic in this regard. In their book Get Out the Vote! , political scientists Donald Green and Alan Gerber examined more than one hundred published papers detailing attempts to influence voters’ opinions with mailouts, canvassing, phone calls, and television ads. Green and Gerber concluded it was highly unlikely any of them made any impact. Zero. In the rare instances in which a communication technique did alter people’s opinions, people tended to revert back to their original position within a few days after their social networks reasserted their influence.
Fleischer paid Donald Green a visit at Columbia University and showed him what the LAB had been up to over the last few years. After seeing some of the videos, Green was astonished.
“One day, Dave announced to me that he thought that he had had this insight,” Green told me. “He had found what was lying behind resistance to same-sex marriage and what kinds of things could encourage a change of opinion. I, being the skeptical sort that I am, said that you really need to test it rigorously before I, or anyone else, is going to believe you.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“Why do you want to change a person’s mind? What are you doing here? Ask yourself, If I want to leverage the power of one hundred years of psychological research into persuasion in a way that is very effective, why? What are my goals? What are the thoughts, feelings, and values I’m exerting in this dynamic?”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“It’s an illusion that you are talking about facts,” she told me. “You both think that you are talking about the issue, but what’s more important is the person.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“No matter what someone said, “everything that looks bad is bad and everything that looks good is also bad. So, if the action isn’t wrong, then the intent is wrong. The heart is wrong.”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

“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 are right and they are wrong?”
― David McRaney, How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion