“This Article Won’t Change Your Mind,” lamented a March 2017 headline in the Atlantic, atop an article in which Senior Editor Julie Beck explained how in “charged situations, people often don’t engage with information as information but as a marker of identity. Information becomes tribal.” Beck surveyed social scientists and activists across the political spectrum to sound the alarm about the depredations of motivated reasoning. In the wake of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, when terms such as “post-truth,” “alternative facts,” and “fake news” suffused the discourse, Beck’s hypothesis seemed reasonable indeed.

Enter David McRaney. “I was making a good living telling people that there was no point in trying to change people’s minds,” writes the journalist in How Minds Change, his penetrating examination of the psychology and neurobiology behind the evolution of viewpoints on both the micro and macro levels. McRaney sets out to discover “what persuades us and how? What breaks through resistance so powerfully that we not only see things completely differently, but wonder how we saw it any other way?”