Changing minds with street epistemology

One organization that has enjoyed surprising success in changing hearts and minds on a deeply controversial issue is Learn Act Build, the political arm of the Los Angeles LGBT Center, which in the wake of the 2008 California referendum outlawing same-sex marriage, set out literally on a door-to-door basis to gently but firmly convince opponents to revisit their views.

“There is no superior argument, no piece of information that we can offer, that is going to change their mind,” LAB’s Steve Deline explains. “The only way they are going to change their mind is by changing their own mind — by talking themselves through their own thinking, by processing things they’ve never thought about before, things from their own life that are going to help them see things differently.”

LAB employed “deep canvassing,” a technique of lengthy, in-person conversations designed to elicit the reasoning behind respondents’ opinions, the personal motivations underlying their reasoning, and their willingness to consider alternative viewpoints. Two political scientists who observed these efforts published a 2016 article in Science, concluding, among other things, “that a single approximately 10-minute conversation encouraging actively taking the perspective of others can markedly reduce prejudice for at least 3 months.”

What magic did LAB unlock, exactly, considering how entrenched our views can become about the most trivial things?

Take the famous blue-and-black/white-and-gold dress that broke the internet in February 2015 as partisans of each color combination ranted and raved for days at the idiots on the other side. New York University neuropsychologist Pascal Wallisch became obsessed with the phenomenon, devoting two years to a study involving more than 10,000 subjects.

His fascinating conclusion? According to McRaney: “The more time a person had spent exposed to artificial light (which is predominantly yellow) — typically a person who works indoors or at night — the more likely they were to say the Dress was black and blue. That was because they assumed, unconsciously, at the level of visual processing, that it was artificially lit, and thus their brains subtracted the yellow, leaving behind the darker, bluish shades. However, the more time a person had spent exposed to natural light — someone who works during the day, outside, or near windows — the more likely they were to subtract blue and see it as white and gold.”

Each group unconsciously but definitively resolved the ambiguity in a specific direction that reinforced the certainty of their beliefs, a tendency Wallisch (somewhat infelicitously) labeled Substantial Uncertainty with Ramified Forked Priors or Assumptions yielding Disagreement or SURFPAD: Once we apply a previously established framework to a novel and ambiguous situation, we can emerge with fundamentally different, or even mutually contradictory, conclusions. SURFPAD disputes can encompass everything from COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy to debates over whether Michael Jordan (clearly) or Lebron James is the greatest basketball player of all time. In each case, McRaney maintains, “when we disagree in this way, we don’t know why we are disagreeing. … [W]e argue endlessly over our subjectivity to convince one another of something that doesn’t feel subjective.”

So, given the impregnable walls we erect, subconsciously or consciously, how can we change our minds? How can we overcome the many obstacles strewn along the road to open-mindedness?

McRaney points to the gradual process of assimilation and accommodation — or what neuroscientists call “conservation” and “active learning.” When, in considering issues of controversy, we encounter factual anomalies or data that conflict with our priors, we tend to downplay or disregard them as mere outliers (or the exceptions that prove the rule). But the more these inconsistencies accrete, the greater the difficulty we confront in assimilating them into our preexisting worldview. At a certain level (what David Redlawsk, the head of the University of Delaware’s political science department, labels the “affective tipping point”), we recognize the fundamental impossibility of maintaining our original frame, and we accommodate the new facts by adapting our perspective.

One example of such thinking is embodied by Megan Phelps-Roper, the impassioned and eloquent survivor of the cruel and hateful Westboro Baptist Church, of “God Hates Jews and F**s” fame. Phelps-Roper tells McRaney that her metamorphosis happened “little by little” as she was “trying to take in this new information and make it fit with what I believed. It was this process. And at the time, I remember thinking that it took such a long time, and now I think, ‘A year and a half. Is that really all it took?’” Through the Twitter invective she hurled as a proud exponent of the church in 2009, she began what became a respectful dialogue with a Jewish interlocutor who gently but persuasively challenged her priors. Around the same time, she grew disillusioned with her parents’ harsh punishment of her sister’s indiscretions, and she began an online dalliance in contravention of the church’s teachings. Each separate interaction, McRaney reasons, represented “an anomaly that alone could have been assimilated, novel information that created a mounting cognitive dissonance that at one point in her life could have been assuaged by interpreting it as confirmation of her worldview in some way, but taken together it felt like overwhelming disconfirmation.”

In another example, McRaney travels to Manchester, England, to meet Charlie Veitch, a onetime leader in the 9/11 Truther movement who repented of his ways and came to embrace the conventional, and true, account of the attacks — at tremendous personal cost. Veitch entered adolescence and early adulthood without any real community, which the minuscule but intense group of conspiracy theorists furnished generously when he first encountered them through a viral video. Once aligned with the likes of Alex Jones, his prior beliefs grew entrenched and were reinforced by his ideological allies in a process that the Yale law and psychology professor Dan Kahan calls “conveying group allegiance.” So how did someone in such deep thrall to such a noxious and hermeneutically impenetrable worldview come not only to abjure it, but to campaign aggressively against it? Veitch reveals that the door cracked during a visit to New York, when his previously online community encountered the real world both of real-world conspiracists and of 9/11 widows and when, “meeting all those people, I started to see that perhaps the tribe that welcomed me so much were not mentally healthy people.”

So what can we do to change other people’s minds?

As McRaney puts it, persuasion is a “superpower, a step-by-step script of how to change people’s minds on any topic, without coercion, by simply asking the right kind of questions in the right order.” These scripts, whether they’re called “deep canvassing” or “street epistemology,” contain several common features.

First, establish rapport with your interlocutor in a friendly, good-faith manner. Then ask for a claim and confirm it by repeating it back in your own words; paraphrasing the claim accurately reinforces the goodwill you’ve built with your disputant. Next, ask if you’ve done a good job summarizing, which further strengthens rapport and ensures the debate is taking place on a level playing field. After that, ask your interlocutor to provide a numerical measure of confidence in their claim, which pushes them to consider how strongly they hold their position. Then ask them what reasons they have to hold that level of confidence in order to get at the core of their beliefs. Next, ask what method they’ve used to judge the quality of their reasons, which compels them to wrestle with the reasonableness not only of their beliefs, but of their underlying bases. Finally, listen empathetically, summarize precisely, repeat, wrap up, and wish them well. (McRaney illustrates these principles through an actual debate in which he participated opposite a flat-Earther.)

What about changing minds on the macro level? “Cultural change occurs because environments change,” according to Lesley Newson, a psychologist who studied the rapid change in attitudes toward same-sex marriage. In the United States, as divorce and cohabitation increased while fertility rates and family size declined, the notion that people should be free to marry same-sex partners swiftly became acceptable to a majority of people.

Then, too, “contact changes minds,” McRaney reckons: “When LGBTQ people began to come out and live openly, people across America discovered over the course of a few years that their bosses, coworkers, and employees were already part of their communities.” When the putatively unfamiliar becomes embedded in the familiar, the unfamiliarity inevitably dissipates. The combination of larger environmental changes and personal encounters can yield powerful changes.

Beck concluded her Atlantic piece by asserting “that no matter how strong the evidence is, there’s little chance of it changing someone’s mind if they really don’t want to believe what it says. They have to change their own.” McRaney’s careful analysis reveals just how true this is.

Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel and an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.