The key ideas

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

David McRaney, 2022

You bring irrefutable facts, and the other person only digs in harder. Science journalist David McRaney believed for years that changing people’s minds was pointless, until he met people who do it in twenty minutes on a stranger’s doorstep. The book explains why the brain resists new facts and how to talk so that people reconsider their views themselves.

Who it is for

For anyone tired of arguments that go nowhere: with family, friends and strangers in the comments. And for anyone who wants to understand why they hold on to their own views so tightly.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.

Charlie, who changed his mind

In the summer of 2011, the BBC took to New York five believers in the theory that the US government staged the September 11 attacks. Among them was Charlie Veitch, a YouTube star of the movement. For ten days they met with demolition experts, the architects of the towers and relatives of the victims. Four went home even more certain. But Charlie recorded a video and admitted he had been wrong. His former allies declared him an intelligence agent and for months harassed him and his family.

Science journalist David McRaney had spent years telling audiences from the stage that changing people’s minds was pointless. Charlie’s story made him doubt that. He went to see canvassers, neuroscientists, psychologists and former cult members to understand one thing: why the same facts change one person’s mind and only make others more certain of their own view.

The answer turned out not to lie in the facts themselves. Certainty rests on how the brain interprets the world and on the people around us. It changes when a person reconsiders their own reasons in a conversation where they aren’t at risk of humiliation. What follows is about why the brain digs in and how to talk so that people open up.

The brain fills in reality and keeps quiet about it

In 2015 the internet fell out over a photo of a dress. Some saw it as black and blue, others as white and gold, and each side thought the other was blind. Neuroscientist Pascal Wallisch surveyed more than ten thousand people and found a pattern. Those who spent long stretches under yellow artificial light were more likely to see the dress as black and blue. Those who spent more time in daylight were more likely to see it as white and gold. The brain decided on its own what the lighting was, and nobody noticed there was any ambiguity at all.

Wallisch believes arguments about politics, vaccines and conspiracies work the same way. When the picture is unclear, the brain fills in the gaps with past experience and presents the result as obvious truth. Psychologists call this naive realism, that is, the certainty that you see the world as it is. This is where the arguer’s main mistake comes from. It seems that the other person simply doesn’t know the facts, so we bury them in links. But they think the same about us.

There is a second reason facts bounce off. In an experiment by political scientist David Redlawsk, people followed a made-up election campaign and learned bad things about their candidate. When there was only a little bad news, their liking for the candidate even grew. For most people, opinion flipped once the negative items reached about 30 percent of all the news. Redlawsk himself cautions that the number depends on the person and the topic. What matters is this: up to that threshold, every inconvenient fact makes a person more certain.

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About the author

David McRaney, an American science journalist from Mississippi, hosts the podcast You Are Not So Smart and writes books about cognitive biases. This book grew out of the fact that he changed his own mind about whether a person can be persuaded.

All books by this author: David McRaney

Terms from the book

  • Mercier
  • Veitch: Charlie Veitch, a British video blogger who from 2006 to 2011 was a well-known proponent of the theory that the US government staged the September 11, 2001 attacks. He publicly renounced it after a trip to New York with a BBC film crew.
  • Wallisch: Pascal Wallisch, a neuroscientist at New York University who studies perception. He spent several years researching why people see the color of the famous dress differently.
  • Naive realism: A psychology term: a person’s belief that they see the world as it is, without interpretation or distortion. Because of it, people who disagree seem poorly informed or biased.
  • Redlawsk: David Redlawsk, an American political scientist who studies how emotions affect voters’ decisions. In 2010 he and his colleagues described how much bad news it takes for a person to become disillusioned with their candidate.
  • Kahan: Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale University, studies how group membership shapes attitudes toward scientific facts.
  • Phelps-Roper: Megan Phelps-Roper, granddaughter of the founder of Westboro church, left it in 2012 together with her sister. She later wrote the memoir Unfollow and speaks out against extremism. Her brother Zach left the church later.
  • Westboro: Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. A small congregation made up mostly of relatives of its founder, Fred Phelps. Known for pickets with offensive signs, including at funerals.
  • Abitbol: David Abitbol, a web developer and activist, creator of the blog Jewlicious and of a directory of hate sites. He argued with Megan Phelps-Roper on Twitter for several years and became her friend.
  • Deep canvassing: A method of doorstep conversations with voters developed by the Leadership LAB team at the Los Angeles LGBT Center. The canvasser doesn’t argue but listens and exchanges personal stories with the other person.
  • Deline: Steve Deline, a member of the Leadership LAB in Los Angeles and one of the people who developed and taught deep canvassing.
  • Broockman: David Broockman, an American political scientist who tested deep canvassing in field experiments together with Josh Kalla. Their paper appeared in the journal Science in 2016.
  • Kalla: Josh Kalla, an American political scientist and David Broockman’s coauthor in the research on deep canvassing.
  • Magnabosco: Anthony Magnabosco, an American promoter of street epistemology who posts recordings of his conversations with passersby online.
  • Street epistemology: A method of conversation in which a person uses questions to test how well-founded their certainty about a claim is. Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know.
  • Sperber: Dan Sperber, a French anthropologist and cognitive scientist, Hugo Mercier’s coauthor on the theory that reasoning evolved for arguing within a group.

All terms

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