McRaney, D. (2022)

McRaney, D. (2022), ''How minds change. The surprising science of belief, opinion, and persuasion.'' Portfolio Penguin

(xvii) "... persuasion is the act of changing mind without coercion."

(xviii) "... the [persuasion] techniques that work best focus on a person's motivations more than their conclusions."

(xix) Important question: "Why do I want to change their mind?"

(xx) "... we must avoid debate and start having conversations. Debates have winners and losers, and no one wants to be a loser. But if both sides feel safe to explore their reasoning, to think about their own thinking, to explore their motivations, we can each avoid the dead-end goal of winning an argument. Instead, we can pursue the shared goal of learning the truth."

(11) Information deficit model "Each dreamed that one day we would all have access to all the same facts, and then, naturally, we would all agree on what these facts meant."

(25) Radical hospitality "a form of selfless concern and energetic friendliness"

(29) LAB - deep canvassing: "facts don't work". Steve Deline: "The only way we are going to change their minds is by changing their own mind - by talking themselves through their own thinking, by processing tings they've never thought about before, things from their own life that are going to help them see things differently."

(30) LAB Steve paraphrased "... spend as little time as possible talking about yourself, just enough to show that you are friendly, that you aren't selling anything. Show you are genuinely interested in what they have to say. That, he [Steve] said, keeps them from assuming a defensive position."

(30) "...Steve ... said to think of questions as keys on a giant ring. If you keep asking and listening ... one of those keys was bound to unlock the dor to a personal experience related to the topic. Once that real lived memory was out in the open, you could (if done correctly) steer the conversation away from the world of conclusions with their facts googled for support, away from ideological abstractions and into the world of concrete details from that individual's personal experiences. It was there, and only there, he said, that a single conversation could change someone's mind."

(33) "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. Deep canvassing is about gaining access to that emotional space, Steve explained, to "help them unload some baggage," because that's where mind change happens."

(35) "Steve would tell me later that they had learned over many conversations that reasons, justifications, and explanations for maintaining one's existing opinion can be endless, spawning like heads of a hydra. If you cut away one, two more would appear to take its place. Deep canvassers want to avoid that unwinnable fight. To do that, they allow a person's justifications to remain unchallenged. They nod and listen. The idea is to move forward, make the person feel heard and respected, avoid arguments over a person's conclusions, and instead work to discover the motivations behind them. To that end, the next step is to evoke a person's emotional response to the issue."

(36) "If people feel heard, they further articulate their opinions and often begin to question them."

(36) "As people explain themselves, they begin to produce fresh insights into why they feel one way or another. This indicates that they've engaged in active processing. Instead of defending, they begin contemplating, and once a person is contemplating, they often produce their own counterarguments, and a newfound ambivalence washes over them. If enough counterarguments stack up, the balance may tip in favor of change."

(28) "Before you wrap up, you must make it clear where you stand, but in a way that shows you and the other person may agree on what is important at the core of the discussion. If you've done your job, the other side will know you aren't aiming for a fight. Your position can be seen as just your perspective, perhaps one worth considering."

(44/45) Broockman & Kalla. Paper in Science. 2016

(47) "belief-change blindness: when people seemed unaware that their arguments from the beginning of the conversation didn't match the ones they shared at the end."

(47) "consistence bias: our tendency, when uncertain, to assume our present self has always held the opinion it holds today."

(49) "When we stop ourselves from going with our first instincts, or our "guts," when we are thinking about our own thinking, we become more open to elaborating, to adding something new to ourselves by reaching a deeper understanding of something we thought we already understood quite well. In short, deep canvassing likely encourages elaboration by offering people an opportunity to stop and think."

(51) "Giving up your own viewpoint for a while and trying on someone else's is difficult, and we don't do it by default. ... By empathizing, even hypothetically, people soften their positions - something subjects could have done at any time but, until prompted, never considered. Broockman and Kalla said people rarely engage in perspective taking, which is what makes it such a powerful persuasion tool in the hands of a deep canvasser."

(63) After operation on blind people. "When the bandages fall away, people don't suddenly see the world around them. Instead, they only see shapes and colors, like an infant. After a few weeks, though, they can reach out for objects and tell them apart ..."

(64) "For brains, everything is noise at first. The brains notice the patterns in the static, and they move up a level, noticing patterns in how those patterns interact."

(64) "... when novel information arrives via the senses, something unusual or ambiguous, it doesn't get added to subjective reality right away. It remains noise if it doesn't seem to match a pattern in that layered archive of prediction."

(65) "What research ... demonstrates is that each and every brain enters the world trapped in a dark vault of a skull, unable to witness firsthand what is happening outside. Thanks to brain plasticity, through repeated experience, when inputs are regular and repeating, neurons quickly get burned into reciprocal patterns of activation. It creates a unique predictive model in each individual nervous system, a sort of bespoke resting potential for those same networks to light up in the same way under similar circumstances. Together, they form an internal representation, an artificial model within that darkness of what the outside world must be like, via the regular and recurring information arriving from the senses."

(69) prior probabilities: "the layers of pattern recognition generated by neural pathways, burned in by experiences with regularities in the outside world"

(72) Substantial Uncertainty wt Ramified or Forked Priors (SURFPAD) "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"

(74) "When we encounter novel information that seems ambiguous, we unknowingly disambiguate it based on what we've experienced in the past. But starting at the level of perception, different life experiences can lead to very different disambiguations, and thus very different subjective realities. When that happens in the presence of substantial uncertainty, we may vehemently disagree over reality itself - but since no one on either side is aware of the brain processes leading up to that disagreement, it makes people who see things different seem, in a word, wrong."

(80) naive realism "the belief that you perceive the world as it truly is, free from assumption, bias, and the limitations of your senses"

(82/83) "When faced with uncertainty, we often don't notice we are uncertain, and when we attempt to resolve that uncertainty, we don't just fall back on our different perceptual priors, we reach for them, motivated / by identity and belonging needs, social costs, issues of trust and reputation, and so on."

(83/84) "Since subjectivity feels like objectivity, naive realism makes it seem as though the way to change people's minds is to show them the facts that support your view, because anyone else who has read the things you have read or seen the things you have seen will naturally see things your way, given that they have pondered the matter as thoughtfully as you have. Therefore, you assume that anyone who disagrees with your conclusions probably just doesn't have all / the facts yet."

(86) "we need a new culture of disagreement"

(87) "Contentious issues are contentious because we we are disambiguating them differently, unconsciously, not by choice."

(87) "... arguments over conclusions are often a waste of time. The better path, they [Pascal and others] said, would be for both parties to focus on their processing, on how and why they see what they see, not what."

(89) "Our experiences in the world bein with shapes and sounds and colors, and as we become increasingly better at perceiving them, we interact with objects around us and begin to categorize them. Later ... we add language."

(94) "As psychologist Michael Rousell told me, when experiences don't match our expectations, a spike in dopamine lasting about a milisecond motivates us to stop whatever we were doing and pay attention. After the surprise, we become motivated to learn from the new experiences so we can be less wrong in the future."

(95) Assimilation : add something new to the repertoire and then apply it to other situations. (96) Accommodate: new input compels to a major update

(101) "... when a group of brains all uses the same placeholder, good-enough-for-now construct to plug ... a hole, over time that provisional explanation can turn into consensus - a common sense of what is true and what is not. This tendency has led to a lot of strange shared beliefs ..."

(106) "It's only when the brain accepts that its existing models will never resolve the incongruences that it updates the model itself by creating a new layer of abstraction to accommodate the novelty. The result is an epiphany, and like all epiphanies it is the conscious realization that our minds have changed that startles us, not the change itself."

(108) Piaget "he saw mind change as a sort of Ship of Theseus, replacing things bit by bit while at sea so as to never risk sinking the vessel"

(109/110) "The brain is a plastic entity, always learning, always updating, but carefully so, at a pace that avoids danger by favoring neither stasis nor chaos. In those moments when this careful pace is interrupted, in moments of extreme environmental change or overwhelming uncertainty, we experience an excruciating disequilibrium. We become motivated to bring assimilation and accommodation out of the background of our mental lives. We focus on it consciously, purposefully, / even obsessively. It is in those moments that we witness the greatest change of all."

(112) "The assumptive world serves us in three main ways. First, it puts the immediate present into context. It tells us the who, what, when, where, and why of our second-by-second existence." (113) "The assumptive world also provides us with a library of if-then statements." (113) "And the third way the assumptive world aids our understanding of reality is it tells us how we ought to behave if we want to maintain our social support networks."

(112) Posttraumatic growth "In the end, so many of the facts, beliefs, and attitudes that populated your old models of reality are replaced that your very self changes."

(114) "When confronted with new information that seems inconsistent with our existing priors, cognitive dissonance draws our attention to the fact that those priors may need an update. If we couldn't experience it, we could never change our minds."

(116) "... the unfortunate truth is that experiencing the "I might be wrong feeling" does not guarantee that people will accommodate, only that their brains will become alert to a potential conflict. Unless otherwise motivated, the brain prefers to assimilate, to incorporate new information into its prior understanding of the world. In other words, the solution to "I might be wrong" is often "but I'm probably not"."

(119) "Assimilation, they [Redlawsk and his team] discovered, has a natural upper limit. Redlawsk and his team call this the "affective tipping point," the moment after which people can no longer justify ignoring an onslaught of disconfirmatory evidence. Redlawsk told me no organism could survive without some failsafe for when the counterevidence becomes overwhelming. Once a person reaches the affective tipping point, the brain switches from conservation mode to active learning."

(160) Being confronted with challenging information brains scanners show fight-or-flight reactions. "Why such a bodily response? Because blood had rushed into a part of the brain called the default mode network, an interconnected set of regions that become active when people think about the self in relation to others."

(165) "For some ideas, the ones that identify us as members of a group, we don't reason as individuals; we reason as a member of a tribe. We want to seem trustworthy, and reputation management as a trustworthy individual often supersedes most other concerns, even our own mortality."

(168) "The research into tribal psychology is clear. If a scientific, fact-based issue is considered neutral ... [people] tend to trust what an expert has to say. But once tribal loyalties are introduced, the issue becomes debatable."

(168) "For issues about which your tribe has formed a consensus, others will use your agreement as a measure of how much they can trust you."

(169) "... it is impossible to know or evaluate everything. The world is too vat, too complex, and ever-changing. So, a hefty portion of our beliefs and attitudes are based on received wisdom from trusted peers and authorities."

(169/170) "Once we consider a reference group trustworthy, questioning any of / their accepted beliefs or attitudes quentions all of them ..."

(170) "We don't just use our previous experiences to maintain our balance on the tightrope between being dangerously wrong and dangerously ignorant, we use the people around us; when they refuse to change their minds, it's a greater barrier to chnge than whatever stubbornness our dogmas demand."

(171) "Anni Sternisko, a psychologist who studies conspiratorial communities, told me that broadly speaking, all conspiracy theorists start out by seeking others who share their views by way of two "motivational allures." Those who are happy with their current social identity "are drawn to the content of a conspiracy theory," the details and the specific narrative. Those who are still searching for an identity, those who wish to signal their uniqueness among peers, are drawn to the qualities of a conspiracy theory, the anxieties and viewpoints it seems to confirm."

(173) "When we feel it's ... our own peers who have become untrustworthy, we will consciously attempt to change the group through argumentation. If that fails, we reach for empathy, for connection, outside our group if we must. If we find it, we become open to challenging ideas of thoe who show us kindness: first about them, then about us. The beliefs, attitudes, and values we share with the group then become safer to question. If we change our minds about them, we then change our minds about us."

(177) "... it is rational to resist facts when one has no social safety net."

(179) "Though we change our minds constantly, we also change them carefully. For all learning machines ... updating one's priors is a risk-versus-reward proposition. If the brain assumes the risk of being wrong to outweigh any potential rewards for changing its mind, we favor assimilation over accommodation, and most of the time that serves us well."

(180/181) "For issues like climate / change ... appeal to their deeper values. Ask them why they joined the groups to which they identify."

(189) Mercier's "epistemic vigilance"

(194) Research shows that people are incredibly good at picking apart other people's reasons. We are just terrible at picking apart our own in the same way."

(195) Mercier on reasoning. "When reasoning alone, it only looks for reasons for why you're right."

(204) "Taken together, beliefs and attitudes form our values, the hierarchy of ideas, problems, and goals we consider most important."

(207) "Petty and Cacioppo's insight was that if elaboration leads to a positive evaluation of the reasoning behind an argument, persuasion will succeed. If it leads to neutral or negative evaluation, the persuasion will fail."

(208) Petty and Cacioppo "central route". "On the central route, we feel we need to go slow, pay attention, and navigate carefully."

(209)"Petty and Cacioppo found that the more motivated the students, the more they took the central route. On that route, they paid more attention, and so the stronger arguments were more persuasive. ... Unmotivated students took the peripheral route. ... Instead of paying attention to the content of the arguments, they paid attention to their number."

(210) "Research has found that successful attitude change via the central route may take more effort, but it also creates more enduring attitudes. Messages that persuade via the peripheral route tend to do so quickly and easy ... but the changes are weak. They fade with time and can be reverted with minimal effort."

(211) "... the message can't be threatening to a person's group identity, or the central route will remain barricaded."

(212) "The HSM's [heuristic-systematic model] major contribution to psychology was to show that people are motivated to hold correct attitudes, and by "correct," the HSM means self-serving or group-serving."

(214-217) What makes a persuasive message more likely to succeed? (214)"Who: The communicator must seem trustworthy, credible, and reliable." (215) "What: A message becomes more impactful when paired with popular counterarguments ..." (216) "To Whom: A message must match the processing abilities and motivations of its audience." (216) "In Which Channel: The message should fit the medium through which it is conveyed."

(226/227) Street epistemology "1. Establish rapport. Assure the other person you aren't out to shame them, and then ask for consent to explore their reasoning. 2. Ask for a claim. 3. Confirm the claim by repeating it back in your own words. Ask if you've done a good job summarizing. Repeat until they are satisfied. 4. Clarify their definitions. Use those definitions, not yours. 5. Ask for a numerical measure of confidence in their claim. 6. Ask what reasons do they have to hold that level of confidence. 7. Ask what method they've used to judge the quality of their reasons. Focus on that method for the rest of the conversation. / 8. Listen, summarize, repeat. 9. Wrap up and wish them well."

(235) Similarities "Most of all: encourage active processing and send people down the central route to ensure that when they change, they do so in a way that sticks and can endure."

(235) Karin Tamerius. Unclebot

(238) Smart politics - Tamerius "1. Build rapport. Assure the other person you aren't out to shame them, and then ask for consent to explore their reasoning. 2. Ask: On a scale of one to ten, how likely are they to vaccinate? If one: Why would other people, who aren't hesitant, be higher on that scale? 3. If above one: Why not lower? 4. Once they've offered their reasons, repeat them back in your own words. Ask if you've done a good job summarizing. Repeat until they are satisfied."

(240) "As with street epistemology and deep canvassing, step one, building rapport, is the most important. No one will enter into active processing or become amenable to learning if us-versus-them feelings abound."

(241) Philipp Schmid & Cornelia Betsch group the techniques together as "technique rebuttal", as opposed to "topic rebuttal". (242) "Technique rebuttal asks people to step backward through their processing to understand how they arrived at a conclusion and whether their reasoning is sound."

(246/247) Deep canvassing "1. Establish rapport. Assure the other person you aren't out to shame them, and then ask for consent to explore their reasoning. 2. Ask how strongly they feel about an issue on a scale of one to ten. 3. Share a story about someone affected by the issue. / 4. Ask a second time how strongly they feel. If the number moved, ask why. 5. Once they've settled ask, "Why does that number feel right to you?" 6. Once they've offered their reasons, repeat them back in your own words. Ask if you've done a good job summarizing. Repeat until they are satisfied. 7. Ask if there was a time in their life before they felt that way, and if so, what led to their current attitude? 8. Listen, summarize, repeat. 9. Briefly share your personal story of how you reached your position, but do not argue. 10. Ask for their rating a final time, then wrap up and wish them well."

(248) Research by Broockman and Kalla on the effectiveness of deep canvassing elements. Kalla: "Remove the non-judgmental listening and story-sharing, no effect. Put them back in, the effect returns." "The most interesting finding, he said, was that it didn't matter if the stories you share about the topic are your own or someone else's, only that it involves someone affected by the issue at hand. Even sharing a video of someone telling a story was effective. But removing this exchange from deep canvassing also removed all of its persuasive power."

(248) Respectful listening, rapport

(229) Narrative transport "Why does transport persuade us so? Because it can eliminate counterarguing. When we're engaged with a story, we don't prepare a rebuttal, because we feel swept up. A story isn't trying to change your mind. It isn't threatening to your autonomy or your identity."

(250) "Deep canvassing is best suited for attitudes, emotional evaluations that guide our pursuit of confirmatory evidence ... Smart politics is best suited for values, the hierarchy of goals we consider most important ... And motivational interviewing is best suited for motivating people to change behaviors ..."

(257) "Transparency leads to trust, he [Misha Glouberman] said, and trust assures that we are being heard, that our agency is not at risk, and that it is ok to show vulnerability. Once that kind of trust is established, or reestablished, disagreements become far more effective at opening both sides to considering challenging ideas."

(271) "[Gordon] Allport spent years researching prejudice, and in his book said that before minds can change concerning members of a minority or an out-group, they must make true contact. First, members must meet, especially at work, under conditions of equal status. Second, the must share common goals. Third, they should routinely cooperate to meet those goals. Fourth, they must engage in informal interactions, meeting one another outside of mandated or official contexts, like at one another's homes or at public events. And finally, for prejudice to truly die out, the concerns of the oppressed must be recognized and addressed by an authority, ideally the one that writes laws."

(275) "One of the curious aspects of moving from one paradigm to another is that the moment a better explanation comes along that can accommodate the anomalies that the previous paradigm couldn't assimilate, the anomalies simply become facts."

(277) "... the research suggests that to shift hesitant attitudes about vaccines or anything else, we must identify who is hesitant, what institutions they most trust, and then distribute the vaccine from the manifestations of those institutions that will appeal to the most socially connected groups within that population."

(280) Greg Satell Cascades

(285) "For an idea to spread across a network in such a way that it flips almost everyone from thinking in one way to thinking in another, you don't lead though leaders or elites. The crucial factor is the susceptibility of the network. If there are enough connected people with low thresholds across groups, any shock - any person - can start a cascade that will flip the majority of the population."