Here’s What It Takes To Change Someone’s Mind

Image by Elisa from Pixabay

When’s the last time you changed your mind about anything substantial? Was it another person that convinced you or an unexpected experience that changed your perspective? What led you to stop seeing something one way and start seeing it in another? I’ll bet it doesn’t happen often. We rarely change our minds.

Now think about how much time we spend trying to change other people’s minds. From sales pitches and political discussions, to what we’re going to have for dinner and when the kids should go to bed, we put a lot of time and effort into shaping the opinions of others. Most of that is probably wasted.

The truth is that we can’t really change anyone’s mind. Only they can do that. Yet as David McRaney explains in his new book, How Minds Change, there are new techniques that can help us be more persuasive, but they don’t require brilliant sophistry or snappy rhetoric. They involve more listening than speaking, and understanding the context in which beliefs arise.

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We don’t experience the world as it is, but through the context of earlier experiences. What we think of as knowledge is really connections in our brains called synapses which develop over time. These pathways strengthen as we use them and degrade when we do not. Or, as scientists who study these…