https://www.bakadesuyo.com/2019/12/change-someones-mind/
Before we commence with the festivities, I wanted to thank everyone for helping my first book become a Wall Street Journal bestseller. To check it out, click here.
If you could only tie that special someone to a chair and force them to listen. Or make them read that one thing that would finally change their stubborn mind. They’d finally see the light…
But that’s never going to happen. And even if that whole “it’s illegal to kidnap and restrain people” part wasn’t an issue, truth is, it wouldn’t work. There are no guarantees when it comes to changing people’s minds. So what does work most often?
Back in the 1970s, Portland State University psychology professor Dr. Frank Wesley, looked into why some US prisoners of war defected to North Korea during the Korean War. And it wasn’t because they were tortured. It was because they were shown kindness.
From How to Have Impossible Conversations:
His research showed that virtually all of the defectors came from a single US training camp. As part of their training, they had been taught that the North Koreans were cruel, heartless barbarians who despised the United States and single-mindedly sought its destruction. But when those POWs were shown kindness by their captors, their initial indoctrination unraveled. They became far more likely to defect than those POWs who either hadn’t been told anything about the North Koreans or had been given more neutral accounts of them.
Unexpected kindness, not restraints, changed minds.
But having a reasonable discussion these days seems impossible. The world is so increasingly polarized that “no furniture being broken” passes for a civil conversation. Everyone is so sure they’re right that they end up doing everything wrong.
We need more discussions where no one is demonized, shamed and both sides are open to changing their mind. Not only is it more pleasant, but that harsh stuff doesn’t actually work. It just makes enemies more vicious. Yes, some topics will always be controversial and things won’t always go smoothly, but they don’t have to go badly.
Now it would be great if someone had taken the time to pull all the insights from peer-reviewed research, professional negotiations, cult exiting and applied epistemology into one book… Oh wait, someone has.
Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay have written an excellent book titled How to Have Impossible Conversations. It would definitely make my “Best of 2019” list, right behind David Epstein’s Range. Frankly, this book taught me a great deal about the errors I personally make while verbally beating the hell out of people kindly sharing information. It’s short but packed with useful information and fresh ideas.
First we’re gonna quickly cover a lot of fundamentals so we can get to the cool new toys. This first section is gonna be a bit of lightning round. Some of it may sound obvious but if you neglect it, none of the subsequent ideas will work.
Let’s get to it…
Most of us go into a conversation with an unconscious “war metaphor” in our heads: someone wins and someone loses. Zero sum. But that rarely convinces anyone of anything. We need to shift our goal from winning to understanding. How does that lead to people changing their minds? To quickly summarize the grand strategy here: