Summary

How Minds Change is about how individuals and society at large change their opinions—often quickly and dramatically. I wanted to learn how to share new perspectives on sensitive topics, in an age of increasing polarization and misinformation, when every opinion seems fraught with righteousness and tribalism.

David McRaney starts by illuminating how the same piece of evidence can be received very differently by two people with different priors—upbringings, histories, and resultant belief systems. 9/11 “truthers”, when presented with evidence that should have disproven their beliefs, actually received it in a way that strengthened them.

New information is at first absorbed into one’s existing belief system. With repeated exposure, small incongruences grow larger until they can no longer be ignored—at which point one’s mental framework must change to accommodate the new information.

Community also plays a large role in maintaining, or renouncing one’s beliefs. Humans instinctively form groups, and we value being part of a group more than being right. Departing a former community can trigger the conditions for rapid mind change, especially if there’s a new community that can take its place.

Though humans evolved to reason and find the truth through group argumentation, persuasion works in subtle ways. Facts alone can’t change opinions. There are two routes—the central route and the peripheral route. For an engaged, motivated audience, the central route appeals to their values and motivations with facts to create enduring change. The peripheral route use simple emotional cues and heuristics to produce fast, but easily reversible results. For the central route, the speaker must also contend with the receiver’s group identity—the message cannot appear to threaten it, else the central route will remain barricaded.

McRaney explains several structured frameworks for persuasion, which share the following features: an engaged, compassionate listener who can accurately reflect his audience’s perspectives in a nonjudgmental way; genuine curiosity; exploring each other’s reasoning structures (guided metacognition), and sharing personal anecdotes.

Social change is individual change scaled up. It happens through cascades of different subgroups changing, starting with those with the lowest thresholds and ending with those with the highest. “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.” Due to network dynamics, “some ideas can appear over and over again and go nowhere until one day, they change everything.”

My takeaways are:

• Empathy is key. Different people have different life histories, and will see things differently as a result. Recognizing and validating that reality is the first step.
• Group identity is overwhelmingly powerful. You need to “fit in” to your audience’s group, or at least appear to empathize enough with them, to even have your message heard.
• The central route creates lasting change, but the audience must be primed for it. The peripheral route works best for quick behavioral changes (like making a sale).
• No single person can control a social cascade, but one can choose to keep advocating for change until the network becomes vulnerable. One might also choose to proactively identify the “early adopters” and the most hesitant, though approaching them in different ways.

Full chapter highlights - How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

Introduction

• Humans evolved to reach consensus through argument
• “Punctuated equilibrium”: there are long periods of stability interrupted by sudden shifts

Chapter 1: Post-Truth

• Different people, when presented with the same information (even what we might consider an “objective truth”), can react to it in different ways.
• E.g. Charlie Veitch, a 9/11 truther who changed his mind after talking to experts and witnesses while on a 9/11 documentary trip, while his companions remained unmoved
• “Despite widespread access to information, polarization and disagreement seem to have increased.”

Chapter 2: Deep Canvassing

• The Leadership LAB in LA, a pro-LGBTQ organization, developed a technique called “deep canvassing” to change people’s opinions about gay marriage.

• After the failure of Proposition 8 in 2008, their breakthrough came when they realized that arguing facts was ineffective. Instead, they found success by:

  1. Building rapport
  2. Asking open-ended questions
  3. Listening non-judgmentally
  4. Encouraging voters to recall personal experiences related to the issue
  5. Connecting on shared values
• The technique helps people work through their own reasoning rather than pushing facts at them. Deep canvassing was studied by political scientists and found to be remarkably effective, producing lasting attitude changes in just one conversation. Studies have confirmed that deep canvassing works, showing effects 102 times more powerful than traditional persuasion techniques.

Chapter 3: Socks and Crocs.

The neuroscience behind disagreement: Why can people look at the same information and draw different conclusions?

• “Reality itself, as we experience it, isn’t a perfect one-to-one account of the world around us. The world, as you experience it, is a simulation running inside your skull, a waking dream.” Each person’s brain disambiguates ambiguous information based on their prior experiences, “a hallucination informed over our lifetimes by our senses and thoughts about them, updated continuously as we bring in new experiences … and think new thoughts about what we have sensed”

  • Example: “The Dress”, a viral photo where some people saw it as black and blue, others saw it as white and gold
• The chapter introduces the concept of “umwelt,” coined by biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll, which describes how each creature’s subjective experience is confined to a private sensory world determined by their sense organs. Because no organism can perceive the totality of objective reality, each animal assumes that what it can perceive is all that can be perceived. (This extends beyond different humans, to different species having vastly different umwelts.)
• For brains, everything begins as noise. Brains notice patterns in this noise, then patterns in how those patterns interact, building layers of pattern recognition that create our understanding of the world. Our brains strengthen neural pathways with each experience until we come to expect certain elements of reality and make sense of them in context.

• Wallisch and Karlovich created “SURFPAD” (Substantial Uncertainty with Ramified Priors And Disagreement) to explain how humans disagree. When encountering novel, ambiguous information, our brains unconsciously disambiguate it based on past experiences. Different life experiences lead to different disambiguations and thus different subjective realities, causing vehement disagreements where each side feels certain they’re right.

  • The scientists created a controlled experiment with socks and Crocs under specific lighting conditions to replicate the divisive effect of The Dress, what Pascal called “the cognitive equivalent of the nuclear bomb.” The experiment demonstrated how prior experiences (like exposure to white socks) could cause people to see the same image completely differently.

• Naive realism: the belief that you perceive the world as it truly is, free from assumption or bias, because we’re unaware that different priors can lead to different disambiguations. This explains why people on each side of debates believe their perspective is the only one rooted in reality.

  • Cognitive empathy: “Contentious issues are contentious because we are disambiguating them differently, unconsciously, and not by choice… arguments over conclusions are often a waste of time. The better path, they said, would be for both parties to focus on their processing, on how and why they see what they see, not what.”

Chapter 4: Disequilibrium

How do minds change when presented with new information?

• Because we don’t know what we don’t know, until we (somehow) know we’re wrong, being wrong feels exactly like being right.
• Assimilation and accommodation (Jean Piaget) are the two processes that drive all mind change: we either fit new information into existing mental frameworks (assimilation) or restructure our frameworks to accommodate information that doesn’t fit (accommodation).

• How minds change: we assimilate small incongruencies, feel viscerally uncomfortable as they increase (when expectations don’t match experience), and resist accommodation until our existing models clearly cannot resolve the incongruencies.

  • Bruner and Postman’s playing card experiment
  • Historical example: medieval people thought barnacle geese grew on trees

  • “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.”

    • This happens at assimilation’s natural upper limit, the affective tipping point (Redlawsk). This tipping point is different depending on many variables, but the important points are that 1) this point exists, 2) before that level, incongruences paradoxically make us feel MORE certain, not less.
• Side note: Posttraumatic growth (Tedeschi and Calhoun) is rapid mind change after a sudden challenge to one’s assumptive world. When our assumptions completely fail us, the brain enters “epistemic emergency,” leading to active learning where one constantly considers other perspectives. “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”

Chapter 5: Westboro

What conditions make minds susceptible to being changed?

• McRaney interviews Zach and Megan, two former members of the Westboro Baptist Church, known for its extreme anti-LGBTQ stance and funeral protests.
• Both Zach and Megan initially left the church for reasons other than disagreeing with its core teachings. Zach left after a back injury when the church refused to let him seek proper medical care. Megan left after growing frustrated with increasingly authoritarian rules. Only after leaving did they change their views on LGBTQ issues and other church doctrines.
• For both, what prompted their departure was the loss of community. This loss opened them to reconsidering evidence they had previously dismissed. But even after experiencing doubts, they needed outsiders who showed kindness to pull them away. For Zach, a gay waiter paying for his meal demonstrated unexpected kindness that challenged his assumptions. For Megan, conversations with David Abitbol, a Jewish blogger, on Twitter helped her see contradictions in the church’s teachings.
• Their stories reveal that people often need a social safety net outside their original group before they can change fundamental beliefs. Without the fear of ostracism, they became open to evidence they had previously rejected.

Chapter 6: The Truth is Tribal

What role does group identity play in belief formation and resistance to change?

• When subjects were challenged about political wedge issues in an MRI scanner, their brains went into fight-or-flight mode. Blood rushed to regions associated with identity and emotion regulation. “The brain’s first and primary job is to protect our selves,” explains neuroscientist Jonas Kaplan. “That extends beyond our physical self to our psychological self.”

• The chapter examines research on group identity, including Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments, Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies, and Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment. Henri Tajfel’s minimal group paradigm research demonstrated that people form group identities around any difference, no matter how trivial. Once people become an “us,” they begin to loathe “them.”

  • Trivial examples include preferences for eye color, hats, randomly assigned even or odd numbers. “There is no salient, shared quality around which a group will not form. And then, once people become an us, we begin to loathe a them, so much so that we are willing to sacrifice the greater good if it means we can shift the balance in our group’s favor.”

• Humans are “ultra-social animals” who survive by forming groups. “Much of our innate psychology is about grouping up and nurturing that group… If the group survives, we survive.” Research shows “humans value being good members of their groups much more than they value being right,” sometimes choosing to be wrong if it maintains good standing with peers.

  • This feature is known as tribal psychology, extreme partisanship, or cultural cognition
• Psychologist Dan Kahan’s studies reveal that even fact-based issues become tribal once framed as partisan. “The research into tribal psychology is clear. If a scientific, fact-based issue is considered neutral—volcanoes or quasars or fruit bats—people tend to trust experts. But once tribal loyalties are introduced, the issue becomes debatable.”
• Charlie Veitch was able to change his mind about 9/11 conspiracy theories because he had already found a new, separate community. “In New York, the evidence that seemed like confirmation of a conspiracy to others seemed like disconfirmation to Charlie. He was free to question his beliefs because he was free from the fear of ostracism.”
• Research on identity maintenance shows that “reputation management is the glue that binds us to peer groups. When accepting facts could damage our reputation or get us excommunicated, we become highly resistant to updating our priors.” Self-affirmation of our deepest values, or affirming a separate group identity can reduce this resistance.

Chapter 7: Arguing

Why did reasoning and argumentation evolve?

• Back in the Ice Age, rapid environmental changes forced early humans to develop flexible thinking and social learning. Our ancestors evolved the ability to pool insights through language and argumentation, allowing groups to adapt faster than genetic evolution alone.
• Cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that reasoning evolved not for individual cognition but for group argumentation. “Reasoning is biased in favor of the reasoner, and that’s important, because each person needs to contribute a strongly biased perspective to the pool. And it is lazy, because we expect to off-load the cognitive effort to a group process.” This social division of cognitive labor makes groups smarter than individuals.

• In experiments, individuals often fail at reasoning problems, but groups succeed because one person who sees the correct answer can convince others. “If people couldn’t change their minds there would be no point in bringing arguments forward,” notes Mercier.

  • Individual reasoning is subject to confirmation bias: “the more intelligent you are, and the more educated, the more data at your disposal, the better you become at rationalizing and justifying your existing beliefs and attitudes, regardless of their accuracy or harmfulness. Basically, when motivated to find supporting evidence, that’s all we look for. When we desire to find a reason for A over B, we find it.”

• Online environments can distort the natural context of reasoning. Groups who form around shared attitudes tend to follow “the law of group polarization,” becoming more extreme over time as members shift to distinguish themselves from moderates.

  • This is because people who want to be centrists, when they realize there are extreme people in the group, shift in the direction of the extreme to remain centrist. The extremists shift even more extreme in response, and so on.

• However, McRaney remains optimistic about reasoned dialogue. Researcher Tom Stafford suggests that “like germs, the misinformation was always there, and the truth has always been hard to come by. Cities created a crisis around sanitation… and we will have to generationally learn the information equivalent of washing our hands.”

  • This would require “better online environments, ones designed to increase the odds of productive arguments instead of helping us avoid arguing altogether”

Chapter 8: Persuasion

How does persuasion work?

• This chapter explores the science of persuasion, focusing on the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) developed by Richard Petty and John Cacioppo, which explains when and why persuasive messages work.
• During World War II, it was discovered that facts alone don’t change opinions. When Frank Capra’s propaganda films were tested, they successfully taught facts but barely changed attitudes. This led to the realization that beliefs and attitudes are separate mental constructs.

• The ELM proposes that persuasion happens through two routes, which both depend on how deeply the audience is engaging with the message:

  1. The central route - when people are motivated and able to process information carefully
  2. The peripheral route - when people use simple cues and heuristics

• “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 easily, which is great for making a sale or getting people to go vote, but the changes they produce are weak. They fade with time and can be reverted with minimal effort.”

  • “Luttrell said this was why it was so important to sort out a person’s values and motivations. If you asked someone to support a petition for Walmart to stop selling baseball caps, they likely won’t be persuaded. But if you ask them what matters to them, and they tell you they are highly concerned about the environment, telling them baseball caps are the number one contributor to climate change would engage their active processing of the message.
• Today’s challenge is that “many more issues are now tied to people’s self-concepts and group identities.” A scientist speaking on climate change now “would need to seem trustworthy by the standards of their in-group or completely politically neutral. The message can’t seem threatening to a person’s group identity, or the central route will remain barricaded.”

• The chapter also introduces the Heuristic-Systematic Model (HSM), which complements the ELM by suggesting people are motivated to hold “correct” attitudes where “correct” is defined as self-serving or group-serving (reputation management). However, unlike in the ELM, the HSM proposes that one can reason on both routes simultaneously, but will default to the simpler heuristic route to save energy.

  • Both models have the insight that, at the end of the day, it depends on how deeply the audience is engaging with the message. And that hadn’t been considered until these models.”

McRaney outlines key principles for effective persuasion:

• Who: The communicator must seem trustworthy, credible, and reliable.

  • Trustworthiness can be broken down into source credibility: is the speaker an expert? Are they trying to trick us in some way? Do they agree with the groups with which we identify?

• What: a message is more impactful when paired with popular counterarguments: a two-sided communication.

  • “If people are initially skeptical of a persuasive message, sharing counterarguments alongside the message works best.”
  • “Given that it is better to provide both sides of an argument, which side should come first? The research suggests that presenting the argument most in line with the audience’s current attitude is the most effective. That way, a person feels confident and positive about their own attitudes and will be far more tolerant of counter-attitudinal appeals.”

• To whom: “A message must match the processing abilities and motivations of its audience.” Here there are so many exceptions that the ELM and HSM became necessary.

  • “Making messages clear and simple improves ability, and making it seem impactful to people’s lives increases relevancy. But the simplest trick is to frame messages as rhetorical questions. “Wouldn’t it be nice if marijuana was legal?” encourages people to produce explanations and justifications for their attitudes.”

• In which channel: the message should fit the medium in which it’s conveyed, e.g. an essay vs. a Youtube video. Face-to-face is the best medium.

  • “No matter the message, face-to-face messaging is far and away the most effective channel. We are biologically hardwired to respond to the human face. Newborns show a preference for human faces and recognize them above all other patterns from the moment they arrive in the world.”
  • As Susan Pinker explains in her book The Village Effect, we evolved as group-living primates who depended on our ability to read gestures and facial cues, mostly to determine intent. When paired with voice intonation and body language, and as long as things seem to be going smoothly, face-to-face communication causes the brain to produce oxytocin on both sides of the exchange. Take that same message and deliver it via any other channel, even Zoom, and the oxytocin will not flow as well. The more oxytocin is flowing, the less guarded we become.
  • Not all media campaigns can go door-to-door, nor can they hold seminars and face-to-face meetings, but the research is clear that if you can produce content that encourages the people who hear your messages to interact with one another and have conversations among themselves about your product, message, or candidate, then you can increase the odds of your persuasive message changing their minds almost as if you

• Claude summary

  • Present two-sided arguments
  • Match messages to audience’s processing abilities and motivations
  • “Make messages clear and simple to improve ability, and make them seem impactful to people’s lives to increase relevancy.”
  • Use rhetorical questions to encourage active processing
  • “Face-to-face messaging is far and away the most effective channel” due to our hardwired response to human faces
  • If face-to-face isn’t possible, encourage peer-to-peer conversations about your message

Chapter 9: Street Epistemology

• McRaney explores “street epistemology,” a technique for changing minds through guided questioning developed by Anthony Magnabosco. The approach focuses on helping people examine their own reasoning rather than challenging their conclusions directly.
• Magnabosco demonstrates the technique by engaging strangers in conversations about their beliefs. The method includes:

Street epistemology

1. Building rapport and asking for consent
2. Identifying a specific claim to discuss
3. Asking for confidence level (0-100%)
4. Exploring reasons for that confidence
5. Examining the reliability of their method for determining truth, “the method they’ve used to judge the quality of their reasons”
6. Reflecting and paraphrasing
7. The technique encourages guided metacognition—thinking about one’s own thinking—and helps people discover flaws in their reasoning without feeling attacked.

8. McRaney also meets with Karin Tamerius of Smart Politics, who developed a similar approach for political discussions.

   • “In any persuasion attempt, your priority should be to curate the conversation in a way that strengthens the relationship between you and the other person, and every second work to demonstrate to the other person that you are not an other, that you are not a member of what they consider them. At the same time, do the same thing within yourself. Try your best not to see them as an other and not to frame them within the category of them.”
   • Her method follows similar steps: asking open-ended questions, listening, reflecting, finding common ground, and sharing personal narratives.

Motivational interviewing

1. Build rapport, assure the other person you’re not out to shame or ostracize them, and ask for consent

2. Ask: from a scale of 1-10, how likely are they to do X?

   1. If 1, ask why would other people who aren’t hesitant, be higher on that scale? (You can’t continue with persuasion until they are above 1, at which point they will be open to contemplation)
   2. If above 1, ask: why not lower?
3. 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’re satisfied.

Deep canvassing

1. Establish rapport, assure the other person you’re not out to shame or ostracize them, and ask for consent
2. Ask how strongly they feel about an issue on a scale from 1-10
3. Share a story (can be anyone’s, not just yours) about someone affected by the issue
4. Ask again how strongly they feel. If the number moved, ask why
5. Ask “why does that number feel right to you?”
6. Repeat their reasons back in their own words, ask if you’ve done a good job summarizing, repeat until they’re satisfied
7. Ask if there was a time in their life before they felt that way, 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
11. An engaged, curious, and compassionate listener is far more persuasive than any fact or figure.

12. These techniques are grouped under the label “technique rebuttal” (Schmid and Betsch)

    • Overall, there’s some combination of nonjudgmental listening and reflecting, genuine curiosity, exploring the other person’s reasoning structures, and sharing personal anecdotes (on both sides)
    • Street epistemology → beliefs in empirical matters like ghosts, chemtrails etc.
    • Deep canvassing → attitudes, emotional evaluations, policies
    • Motivational interviewing → changing behaviors, like getting vaccinated or starting to recycle

Chapter 10: Social Change

• The final chapter examines how individual mind changes scale up to create social change. Humans evolved the ability to adapt culturally rather than genetically during the environmental pressures of the Ice Age.

• Cultural change occurs because environments change, but often lags behind. Economic development following the industrial revolution changed family structures and values, creating environments where marriage norms shifted from being about reproduction to being about love and happiness.

  • “Research at the University of Wisconsin in 1939 found that men ranked “mutual attraction and love” as the fourth most desirable trait in a wife, and women ranked it fifth in a husband. The most important trait? Women said they wanted “dependable character” in their partners, and men said they wanted “emotional stability” in theirs. When that same research was repeated in 1977, “mutual attraction and love” had risen to number one for both men and women: a major change in marriage norms that took about thirty-eight years.”
• Same-sex marriage: “At first people resisted and tried to apply their current model of reality to the new evidence. Anti-LGBTQ sentiments grew weak in the face of compelling evidence: twenty years of activism, positive media portrayals, and most importantly, widespread personal contact with LGBTQ people. The categories most of the country used to make sense of LGBTQ issues had to be updated to accommodate.”

• Contact is the first step to changing minds. It’s the fundamental argument of one of psychology’s most robust theories, the contact hypothesis by psychologist Gordon Allport.

  • “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, they 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.”

• The creation of new conceptual categories is the greatest sign that accommodation is occurring on a large scale, and thus social change is imminent.

  • For instance, the term designated driver was invented by the Harvard Alcohol Project as a public health initiative and then seeded into popular television shows like Cheers and L.A. Law. Seeing characters put a name to a particular behavior created a new conceptual category in the viewer. If you accepted the term and used it, then it created dissonance with the urge to drink and drive. Why would there be a word for a person who drives his friends around while they drink if it’s perfectly okay to drink and drive? To resolve the dissonance, the existing model had to be updated—people who drink do not drive.

    • According to the Project, after introducing the term to the public in 1988, alcohol-related fatalities dropped by 24 percent in four years, an extremely rapid shift in attitudes. Today most Americans say they’ve served as the designated driver at least once in their lives.

• Social change happens through cascades of different groups changing.

  • “Each group that changes adds to the total population of the changed, and thus the strength of the influence of your peers. This network effect, sometimes called diffusion and sometimes called percolation, is the force behind all major public opinion shifts. Large groups of people change their minds in a sequence that goes from innovator to early adopter to mainstream to holdouts, and it always happens in that order. The trick is getting enough early adopters who are deeply connected to the community as a whole to flip and adopt the attitude, which then creates an influential social unit that can kick off the cascade.”
  • So 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.

• Using network theory, McRaney explains how cascades of change spread through interconnected groups with different “thresholds of resistance.” When the network reaches a certain configuration with the right mix of connections and thresholds, even a small shock can set off a network-wide cascade. “This explains why some ideas appear over and over again and go nowhere until one day they change everything.”

  • “But if everything lines up in just the right way so that people with low thresholds of conformity are in regular contact with people among a few interconnected groups, it leaves the surrounding network vulnerable to a global, or network-wide, cascade.””
• In reality, though, anyone can start a cascade. 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 need thought 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. As Watts says, you don’t need an atom bomb to start an avalanche. Once the conditions are met, any bump will do.

Coda

• McRaney reminds us that the most effective approach is to frame discussions as respectful collaborations toward shared goals, based on mutual fears and anxieties.
• The book closes with the insight that changing minds on a large scale requires persistence. No single person controls when social cascades will happen, but everyone can choose to keep advocating for change until the network becomes vulnerable to transformation.