“There is no superior argument, no piece of information that we can offer that is going to change their mind. 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.”
That quote comes from Steve Deline, a man who has had more than 15,000 recorded conversations trying to change people’s minds on contentious social issues. He’s an activist with a clipboard, not a psychologist or a political scientist. He and his team at the Leadership Lab in Los Angeles stumbled onto a persuasion technique that independent researchers later measured as 102 times more effective than traditional canvassing, television ads, radio, direct mail, and phone banking combined.
Steve has no doubt what it takes to change someone's mind.
It takes the recipient.
We think we can change someone's mind with the right argument. Persuasion is something you help someone do to themselves. But the evidence, as rolled out in David McRaney's book, How Minds Change, says otherwise.
McRaney is a science journalist who spent years telling people there was no point in trying to change minds — that motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and tribal psychology made it essentially impossible. Then the shift in public opinion on same-sex marriage broke his framework. In 2012, the majority of Americans opposed it. The very next year, the majority supported it. If minds can't be changed, how do you explain that?
The book is his attempt to answer that question. And the answer he found, across deep canvassers, street epistemologists, cognitive scientists, and conflict negotiators, is remarkably consistent: the techniques that actually work all share a common structure. They create conditions where people re-examine their own reasoning and discover its weaknesses themselves.
Blaise Pascal figured this out four hundred years ago: "People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others." Four centuries, and we're still designing campaigns around the information deficit model: the assumption that people disagree because they don't have enough facts, and that providing those facts will bring them around.
It won’t. And McRaney shows why.