David McRaney

I don’t need to know how we got here, how things got this bad, how Trump got elected a second time. The past is written and it’s etched in stone. What I need to know is how to change it. And that means changing the minds of other people. This book is asking the same thing, and it has answers.

Yes, there are cases where those conspiracy theory nutjobs on YouTube and TikTok actually changed their minds about something when presented with evidence. How did that happen? Can it happen again? show more How can we use this power for good?

It all comes down to something called “deep canvassing”. You might have heard about it (or something similar) on an NPR podcast. To sum up, it’s basically having a mini-therapy session with the person whose POV you want to change. You don’t thrust any arguments on them, you make them re-examine their own beliefs and if their life experience matches up. Figure out why they feel the way they do.

Because the MAGAs are right–facts don’t care about your feelings. But feelings don’t care about facts. You can give someone all the evidence in the world, they’ll bring up counterevidence like a hydra (cut off one head, two more appear). The active ingredient is in not letting the victim ruminate on what they’re receiving. No time to digest, only acceptance. The mini-therapy gives them that time.

It won’t change everyone’s minds. I think the book said that, in one state, it only caused a 3% shift in the opinion polls. That sounds like nothing, but according to poli sci heads, that’s a tremendous difference. So there is hope to deprogramming these morons, if we can get them away from Fox News. If you need to learn how to do it, this is the book for you. show less

Somewhere around the 10% mark of this, I said to my wife, "I bet this author has a podcast. I bet this book is based on it." The chapters just felt like a certain kind of podcast segment -- short, under-researched, and designed to make people feel like they learned something without going into too much depth. I googled McRaney and felt very smug when I saw that yes, he does indeed have a podcast.

But then some textual clues -- like a mention of Blockbuster (!) -- made me check the publication show more date. Turns out when this was written, McRaney didn't have a podcast, he had a blog, because this is a fifteen-year-old book. And that's a problem. Several of the landmark studies he's relying on in these chapters have been debunked, found unreplicable, or rethought in the last decade and a half.

(If you want an example: Take the Marshmallow Test, that vaunted study that says that kids who can't wait five minutes for a marshmallow at the age of five will end up sad shadows of their more patient peers. In the decade and a half since this was written, scientists have tried and mostly failed to replicate the original study's results. Meanwhile, a number of people have pointed out that the study has some serious problems, including the fact that what the Marshmallow Test may actually be measuring, at least in part, is how much the subjects trust the adults in their lives. (If you don't believe the second marshmallow will ever come, why bother to wait? Also, if in your household food uneaten is food that's lost -- maybe because of food insecurity -- waiting is an actively bad strategy.) Not being able to trust your adults is a known predictor of worse outcomes in life. So is growing up without enough food. In other words, the Marshmallow Test may actually just have found that oldest, most replicable result: poverty is bad for people.)

This isn't necessarily McRaney's fault, but it does mean this book has been rather overtaken by events. It's a decent summary of some of the stuff you'd learn in a Psych 101 class, yes, but in that class you'd ideally have a professor who is keeping up with the latest in the field and changing their syllabus as a result. Basically, this is a light read that shouldn't be trusted too much.

I don't know. Maybe try his podcast? show less

There are so many things about this book that I loved on so many levels.... let me list the ways :)

Topic-wise:
It's a very relevant topic for the social climate. Pretty much any book about changing minds and opinions written before 2017 or so can be thrown out the window, because almost all of them presupposed the reason for 'wrong' beliefs was a lack of information. Even now, in the internet age, I'm shocked to see how many people still believe that if someone is given the right show more information in some sort of ancient-greek debate setting, they'll be swayed. Such books talk about reason and debate. They mention things like being respectful, but the 'meat' of most of these books is still about logical fallacies, rhetoric techniques etc.

This book puts it on its head. Without basic respect, the chances of changing minds is close to zero, so it goes in to depth about that, and doesn't really go in-depth on all the innards of human reasoning, fallacies etc (most likely because the author has spent most of his life covering those exact things, I'll talk about that later)

Anyways, a very topical and, if nothing else, a good place to point you to other resources about other people who are (effectively) changing minds.

Research-wise:
I love this too!! I feel like most books are either too personally anecdotal or too detached and academic.

"Personally anecdotal" books are books where someone is basically writing "this is what works for me" and pads it out with old tried-and-tested studies we've read about 1000 times before. These are annoying because there's no way to know if the factor that leads to the author's results is because of the things they're aware of, or whether there's some other factor in there that's unique to them.

"Too detached" books are usually ones written by academics. They usually try to give a gigantic, 'objective' view of whatever it is they're covering (also usually with the same handful of tried-and-tested research results we've all read about 1000 times) and offer a weak opinion, and usually an untested one. It'll be a book full of research trends and then some sort of "so maybe this would work in the real world, but I dunno, I never tried, and there's so many factors in the real world that make it hard to say. So, (shrug) that's the book".

This book does none of that. It's overwhelmingly information I've never been exposed to before, presented with strong real-world aspects that are from the author observing the effects directly. In fact, 2 of the major groups mentioned (deep canvasing and street epistemology) started from a real-world approach and iterated rigorously (which would make them scientific in my book), rather than starting with established research and theories. That's also how you innovate... I'm glad he looked at innovators first instead of researchers first, made for a better book.

Presentation-wise:
Love this as well!

He's telling a personal story of learning. It's how he learned what he did, the threads he followed and the results he got from it.

Other books (again, mostly academic ones) feel like they're arguing. They're trying to convince you of something, they present the pros and cons, because they want it to be a fair argument. Even if it's not really an argument.

This book could have been written as an argument: it could have been "these are the reasons why you should engage in discussion this way", with pros and cons and imagined rebuttals and all that. But it's not written that way. He's not trying to convince you, he's just telling you a story. And in that way, the convincing becomes that much stronger. That's also sort of the actual message of the whole book itself, so you see it work through the book too. Again, incredible.

Author-wise:

He's the guy behind You are not so smart the book and the podcast. It's mostly about reasoning fallacies and it's presented that way, even in the title. "Look at you with the broken brain! Hahaha" (I don't interpret it maliciously and I quite enjoy all his works, but knowing what I know now, I see that it can also come across this way both directly and indirectly)

In many ways, this is the exact attitude that has spurred the 'post-truth' world. Some of us see past this attitude and decide to learn about why our brains work as they do; we take it as a challenge and call-to-action to learn. But some of us only see the arrogant attitude. Evidently (as this book shows in detail) some would prefer a welcoming community (no matter how indefensible their beliefs) to that kind of attitude.

Reading this book, you really get that this message has hit home with the author. He's spent so much of his life talking about 'broken' cognition, only to finally realize it's not 'broken' at all -- it serves a purpose and serves it well. In fact, it's pretty impossible to change someone's mind if you don't understand that they're not 'broken' to begin with.

Title-wise:
It's How Minds Change and not How to Change Minds. I think I missed the subtlety of the difference for a while, but the book clearly shows that you can't change someone's mind if they don't want you to.

The best you can do is treat them with respect and hope they change themselves and be a supportive witness to that process. There's a huge difference between that and "how to change minds".

I just finished the book so I haven't fully internalized that difference yet, but I hope to.

I'm going to follow-up with some of the resources presented. show less

"The research suggests that the average person thinks she is not the average person. She thinks most people are dumb, and that she is not like most people."

My favorite thing about this book is not just the neat psychological tricks we nearly all play on ourselves (although that too!) but the fact that the author, David McRaney, describes them in a way that even I, brain fog girl, could understand. His writing style is playful and sometimes and even laugh-out-loud amusing. (As in, "Magical show more amulets do not exist, and even if they did, think about how expensive it would be to hire a factory full of wizards to enchant enough of them for worldwide distribution.") You don't get that in many psychology books! show less