How Does a Mind Change?
What is the point of writing on issues?
What are you achieving by posting in favor about Israel or Palestine or Ukraine or Russia? You have no idea what’s actually happening about the ground. You are not influencing any policy. You’re not convincing anyone, if anything you might make them less likely to support your cause because you’re being so morally righteous about it which is annoying to them.
I haven’t found that arguing with people is that effective in changing people’s minds; arguments often just solidify people’s positions. I remain curious about people’s beliefs and will share my perspectives when it’s a safe space or when I think they’re open to persuasion, but I’m not trying to risk relationships with friends by deliberately trying to change their minds.
When I self-published the first edition of The Three Languages of Politics, the impetus was the observation that most political commentary did not serve to change anyone’s mind. As I wrote at the time, people are not trying to open the minds of people on the other side. They are not trying to open the minds of people on their own side. Instead, the goal seems to be to close the minds of people on their own side.
So if you are a conservative supporter of Israel, harping on the barbarity of Hamas is not going to penetrate a progressive mind, but it will harden the opinion of your fellow conservatives. And if you are a progressive opponent of Israel, harping on the oppression endured by Palestinians will not penetrate a conservative mind, but it will harden the opinion of your fellow progressives.
We think we are trying to change someone’s mind. But we probably realize that we are not doing so. I suspect that the motivation for expressing opinions is to enhance our status within our political tribe. Also, there is an element of trying to justify our positions to ourselves.
How do you really change someone’s mind? I think that listening is probably more important than talking. In fact, it might be possible to change someone’s mind simply by listening and reflecting back what the person says, until he or she starts to think it over and reconsider.
But I have said before that people decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. That suggests that if I change the set of people you trust and admire, then that will change your beliefs.
Suppose you observe a teenage boy who is starting to get into trouble. Chances are he has fallen in with a bad crowd. To change his trajectory, you probably have to remove him from his current setting and try to get him involved with a better peer group.
My guess is that the same thing has to happen to change someone’s mind about politics. Someone has to become exposed to people with an outlook that differs from those of the people he currently relates to.
Why would someone be willing to change peer groups? I suspect that for many people a traumatic event makes the difference. For progressive Jews, the anti-Israel demonstrations after October 7 were such an event.
I was on the left, especially in high school. I remained on the left through graduate school in the late 1970s. The transition to where I am now was gradual.
I was first influenced by my father, whose political loyalties were set in the 1930s. For him, Franklin Roosevelt was the good guy and Father Coughlin was the bad guy. But as a political scientist, my father saw humans as prone to conflict and disorder unless there is a working government, and that is a very conservative outlook. You know the saying about people being conservative about what they know most about.
I think that I was always temperamentally conservative. In my high school and college years, it seemed that everyone around me experimented with marijuana, but I did not.
I was exposed to a wider range of opinions when I was an undergraduate at Swarthmore College in 1971-75. The leftist students began to strike me as naive and not particularly strong intellectually. More conservative professors (there was such a thing back then!) seemed wiser.
Jimmy Carter’s floundering Presidency (1976-1980) unmoored me from the left. The dramatic failure of Keynesian economics in the 1970s and the relative success of Reagonomics in the 1980s made an impression. But I still was not part of any conservative peer group.
In the early 2000s, my economics blogging connected me with Russ Roberts. The economics blogosphere became my peer group. Although it included Brad DeLong on the left, I became closer to Tyler Cowen, Megan McArdle, and Virginia Postrel. I think that is what brought out the libertarian/conservative in me.
> I think that listening is probably more important than talking. In fact, it might be possible to change someone’s mind simply by listening and reflecting back what the person says, until he or she starts to think it over and reconsider.
This is a very wise point. I volunteer to canvass for a political party, and my most successful interactions are with people who say "I typically voted for [your party] in the past, but I won't now." They're always keen to tell me why, and I listen politely, nodding and agreeing, and by the end, a good half of the time, they've talked themselves into voting for us again.
But this would never work on someone set against us.
Finding a better fit for one's own instinctive temperament is a big deal. I have always been instinctively anti-authoritarian, and was a youthful leftist because the left seemed at the time a better fit for that. I remember vividly the joy of discovering libertarianism in my mid teens and feeling I had come home. That has since become a much more complicated feeling, but that's another story.
Besides that, clearly exposure to either real-life people, or credibly attested facts, that complicate one's existing narrative can be an effective mind-changer. Unfortunately, because we love engaging with stories more than coolly analyzing data, we face two obstacles to getting closer to truth through that process. One is the temptation to under index on a single case by dismissing it as unrepresentative -- the "present company excepted" problem. The other is the opposite, taking a single shocking or heartwarming case to be much more representative or common than it really is -- the "ban this thing completely because it caused something heartbreaking this one time" problem.