How Minds Change by David McRaney
1419 words, 7 minutes.
Along with ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’, I’d recommend How Minds Change as essential reading. The foundations of human behaviour understanding come from Kahneman’s book, and here McRaney builds on it with real world examples. Through meeting various interesting people, McRaney paints a picture that tells a simple truth:
For one thing, from writing my previous books, I knew the idea that facts alone could make everyone see things the same way was a venerable misconception.
I made 63 highlights in this book. There are many small gems that can serve as useful guides for better thinking. Here, I’ve picked out a few of those highlights to discuss.
reality as we experience it isn’t a perfect one-to-one account of the world around us. 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 and think new thoughts about what we have sensed
It’s quite profound to realise there is no single, true, reality. What we think of as reality is just perception. And our perception of the world is context sensitive. That context is made up of years of experience and the situation we find ourselves in at the time. Have you ever held back on an opinion, thinking it clashes with a peer group at that moment? Not spoke up in a meeting, because everyone around you thinks something is a great idea, when you feel it’s anything but? Context, shaping your reality.
A fine example of our reality being shaped by context, is The Dress. Do you remember that bizarre phenomenon, and how you could easily argue with somebody stood next to you that it was white and gold, when they were 100% sure it was black and blue?
when the 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.
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman’s work showed that our — emotive, reactionary — System 1 has a reality it knows, and when it comes to defending that reality, we’ll simply draw on the experience we have. This is why we tend towards confirmation bias.
It’s useful to think of confirmation bias as the goggles we put on when we feel highly motivated by fear, anxiety, anger, and so on. In these states we begin looking for confirmation that the emotions we feel are justified.
I once read an interesting take on what happens when one tells somebody ’they are wrong’. The uncomfortable sensation they feel, is down to their reality being smashed in that moment. It’s a shock to System 1 — and the fight between it, its reality, and the new information System 2 has received, begins. Cognitive dissonance.
If you add any conflict over resources of any kind, humans will instinctively enter us-versus-them thinking, even if that’s not the overall most beneficial strategy.
‘Conflict over resources’ can render itself as a disagreement, or the urge to be right, come what may. That’s a whole other discussion, principally around ego, but we’ll leave that for now and recognise something obvious about the way our brains default to tribalism.
Homo Sapiens have existed for around 300,000 years1, yet it’s only for the last 100 years or less that we’ve not had to mostly focus on survival. To put that into context, baked into our brains are instincts that have been in control of our behaviour for over 99.96% of our species’ existence. Those instincts don’t always fit neatly into the modern world, but they do find parallels to relate to.
Most of the time we see the world as we expect to see it, and most of the time that’s fine; but the brain often gets things wrong because it prefers to sacrifice accuracy for speed.
The ’laziness’ of falling back to System 1 (our ‘gut’ reaction) has an economical reason. Conscious thought — System 2 — takes more energy2. It can literally be tiring trying to question our System 1.
Throughout the book McRaney meets various people whose job it is to “change people’s minds”. From their experience, he offers some guidance.
No matter the message, face-to-face messaging is far and away the most effective channel. We are biologically hardwired to respond to the human face.
Maybe this explains the growth of video-based marketing3 and the success of YouTube (the world’s second largest search engine, the largest being its parent, Google).
A few years ago I ran a fully-remote Product team. If I was asked a question on our internal Slack, I would often reply with a short video. I chose to respond this way as I felt it would present the information clearer, and with the intent I wanted. As Jason Fried recently quoted in a blog post:
anytime there are two people conversing, there are actually six people in the conversation:
Who you think you are
Who you think the other person is
Who you think the other person thinks you are
Who the other person thinks they are
Who the other person thinks you are
Who the other person thinks you think they are.
When we read words we apply our own emotion to those words. If we think the author is angry with us, we’ll read it angrily, even if that’s not the way it was intended at all. I found a message carried far more clarity of intention when delivered by video, especially when many of the recipients didn’t share a common language or have English as their native tongue. In this modern day of geographically dispersed, remote working, teams, asynchronous communication leaves far more opportunity for ‘Chinese Whispers’. Short form video goes some way to alleviating misinterpretation.
Very early in the book, McRaney explains its purpose, lest you think you’re about to learn devious techniques for coercing people to do thy bidding:
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.
This, once again, comes down to ego, and that’s not the topic of the book, nor of this blog post. As an introvert, I’m not driven to ‘win’ arguments, I seek truth. Understanding how our mind works is useful for seeking truths versus winning arguments. Everyone has their own reality, remember. The ability to understand that, and empathise, will always render kinder discussions.
[he] 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. It was there, and only there, he said, that a single conversation could change someone’s mind.
This was an interesting chapter about ‘Deep Canvassing’, an area where the canvasser is trying to get somebody to change their mind on a topic in a short space of time. Usually the topic is highly emotive too, so initial reactions are strong. But this is a key takeaway from the book — changing minds isn’t about bludgeoning people with information. It’s about finding common ground, or helping a mind to absorb new information and draw alternative conclusions in its own time.
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.
Challenging another person’s reality will initially be discomforting for them. Attempting to bludgeon with facts, to get them to see your point of view, will have the opposite effect. They’ll dig in to their reality, seek confirmation bias, and appear to try to change your mind (that’s not what they’re actually doing, really they’re defending their reality). This was discussed in Thinking, Fast and Slow, and I’ve mentioned it previously.
Sometimes a discussion in the moment won’t yield the result you desire. Give people time to introspect though, and you may find that they change their mind. Trying to force the point will cause them to remain overconfident in their understanding of the topic they’re passionate about, and overconfidence becomes certainty in our heads.
Ask questions. Plant seeds. Give them time to grow.