You know, TT, we're always talking about what we believe. Yes, I think one of my favorite things that you say is it's okay to change your mind. It's okay to say you don't know and to start something new, unlearn, relearn. Yes, and I think it's time to bring that message to the masses. I'm TT, and I'm Zachiah and from Spotify. This is Dope Labs. Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science, pop culture, and a healthy
dose of friendship. This week, we're talking all about changing our minds. Specifically, we really want to know more about how we may make up our minds, what happens when someone tries to change it, and why we often see such strong reactions when people are trying to convince one another of something different. Let's get into the recitation. So what do we know? I know, at least anecdotally, it
feels like people's minds can't be changed. They're in the comment section acting a fool marker on the Twitter threads. I told you so, right, it's wild. I mean, social media is a prime example of people not changing their minds. It doesn't matter how many facts you bring, there's still gonna be people who are very adamant about their perspective.
That's the nice way I'm going to say it. There's always been this type of polarization around really big issues that are really complex and loaded, but it feels like now we're even seeing this same type of energy. People are bringing a lot of smoke for small issues that normally we would say we're trivial. People are just grouping up in a way that I feel like we didn't used to see right, And I don't know what that says about us. I don't know what it says about
our brains. It's like something is happening to us. And we talked about this in an earlier episode Lab thirty seven with doctors Hofer and Sinatra about how even when folks are presented with information that is actually true, they will still decide to believe the opposite. And we also know that a major part of how people get the misinformation and choose to stick to it is related to our cognitive biases. Doctor Hofer and doctor Sinatra told us that too, And so it feels like all that stuff
is somehow kind of related to changing minds. So what do we want to know about changing minds. I want to know what is happening in the brain when we change our minds, both over time and in the moment. What is actually going on? The superhero of me wants to know how to change someone's mind. I want to know how to do it. How do I breach folks
who are seeing things differently. I want to know what the science says about shifts in public opinion like widespread beliefs and regional norms, and when folks are refusing to change what's happening there, even when they sometimes have the evidence that they should change. It's a lot to learn. Let's jump into the dissections. Our guest for today's lab is David McRaney.
I'm David McCraney. I'm a science journalist and author and podcaster, if that's even a thing people say anymore.
David has written several books, including You're Not So Smart, which is also the name of his podcast. His latest book is called How Minds Change. But before we can talk about how our minds change, let's talk about what happens when we make up our minds in the first place. And this has to do with epistemology. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. It's a branch of philosophy that is all about what it means to know something, and it's a lot of what David writes about in his book. Now,
epistemology is really complex. Our brains are constantly processing new information, and we touched on this in some earlier labs. You might remember this with Lab ten of lie to me how people can have totally different memories of the same event, or Lab fourteen in the Art of the con with doctor Lsana Harris, where we talked about scams and why we fall for them. So before we jump into changing
our minds, let's really construct how we make up our minds. Well, the first thing to consider is how our brains are working to decide what we know in the first place. In some of our earlier episodes and in David's book, there's the understanding that our brain is never as it
was before. It's constantly changing. With each interaction. Neurons are firing, creating new connections or reinforcing old ones, physically changing the brain from one interaction to the next, and that's what's called neuroplasticity.
The brain is this thing that it creates a virtual reality in your head, and that virtual reality gets more and more complex over time as we grow up and experience things and learn things and start forming identities and group identities.
And so when we consider how we experience and learn things, David turned to twentieth century psychologist Jean Piget PSA is considered the father of what is known as genetic epistemology, and this type of epistemology is basically studying knowledge that centers your interaction with the environment. Pha developed two concepts which are really helpful in understanding what's going on when we change our minds or resist changing. Those concepts are assimilation and accommodation.
Assimilation is when something's ambiguous or uncertain or unfamiliar. We we often will try to interpret it as just another example of what we already think, feel, and believe. Often is confirmation that we were right already. Accommodation is when something keeps coming around, like the counter attitudeinal counterfactual information. Just so many anomalies build up that you must accommodate to make sense of them.
David provides a great example of both assimilation and accommodation.
What a child sees a dog for the first time. Oftentimes they'll point at it and say, you know, what is that and you say a dog, and in their minds something categorical happens, something like non human walks on four legs, furry, has a tail, it's alive. That's a dog.
But if you see a dog that's a different color, it still fits what you know. It's furry, it walks on four legs, it's got a tail, But now you have this additional layer of oh, it can be another color. But David says, sometimes it's more than just adding that single layer, and you have to bring in a lot more information. Let's say you see something else that fits your example of what a dog could be.
So then later on when they see a horse, they might point out it and go dog, or they might say big dog. If they're a really sort of advanced child, that's assimilation, Like this seems to fit with what I understand. It's walks on four legs, it's furry, it's an animal, it's live a dog, right, And you're like, no, no, that's horse, and so they have must accommodate to bring that into their model.
Here we get an example of both assimilation and accommodation. The interesting thing is that it's always happening, and we're doing that right now in this podcast. We're always updating our model of reality. And the older we get, the more information we consume, the more complex this process gets, and the higher the stakes get.
Your model reality gets so complex that you start being careful when you walk this tightrope, as I describe it in the book, this tightrope of if you update when you shouldn't, then you will become wrong, and if you don't update when you should, you'll stay wrong. So we're very careful on this tightrope. But at a certain point the model is so complex that it's better to err on the side of well, it got me here at least,
so I will be careful about updating. So that's the baseline resistance, and it's very rational, it's not weird, it's not unusual. It's a logical good thing to do. But that resistance starts bumping up from that baseline depending on all sorts of other motivations that come into play.
And this makes sense. It aligns with what we learn from Doctor's Whole Friend Sinatra in Lap thirty seven about how cognitive biases help us stay in the models that our minds have already created and predicted about the world around us. Remember like we talked about with doctor Wendy Suzuki in our lab about good anxiety. If your brain doesn't know what's going on, it's on constant alert. We can't take that type of alerting new thing, new thing,
new thing, it's too much. So it makes sense for your brain to want to be able to predict what should happen and to kind of dampen those alerts and say, Okay, this is supposed to be like this, This fits my model of what should be happening in the world. Your brain wants to have some predictive power so that it won't be startled or alarmed. Right, It's like when you're in bed at night and you might hear your air
conditioner cut on. If your brain doesn't store that sound as a sound that you know, you're gonna wake up ready to fight. Every single night.
You are building your model of reality each experience that you have, and that means that there are more opportunities when you're young to encounter things that are ambiguous, uncertain, and unfamiliar. But the same things that you do as an adult, you'll do as a child, you will base your updating on how much does this match what I already understand? How much does this counter what I saw before? How new is this? And then you also think how
will this reflect upon my identity? You also have different sources of trust as a child. Mostly it's your parents and the culture that you're steeped within.
And that makes a lot of sense. A lot of what we believe as adults is based off of how we were raised by our caregivers, our parents, our grandparents, whatever community that we are a part of. But then we're also developing a model of reality as we grow. So maybe in your house every Friday it was pizza night. That's the culture of your family. But then as you get older you say, you know, maybe I'm not gonna
do pizza. I'm gonna do something else. You can overlay that with things that you know or things that you are experiencing as you are moving through life. And not only are you creating this social framework, not only are you building this physical neural network in your brain, there is also chemical changes that happen when things are as expected or different from expected. We ask David to tell us what chemical is involved in the brain and related to changing your mind.
Dopine is often looked at as the reward chemical, but it's really not how that works. It's the chemical that alerts you as to whether or not your expectations have been parted. So it's more than the chemical of surprise. Now, oftentimes those surprises are positive when something happens that doesn't
matter for expectations. Basically, the brain sort of sits in a soup of dopamine and the levels go up and down all throughout the day, depending on how what we experience match what we expect to experience.
Okay, so now you may be thinking, I know what happens when I learn. I know what happens when I know things, or at least when you think you know things. I know some of the chemical underpinnings of when things go as expected and when they don't. But when are y'all going to tell me how to convince somebody else that they have it wrong and they should see it my way. That's after the break. We're back, but before we get to the rest of this lab, we have
to let you know what's coming up next. Next week, we heard the call. We will be talking about monkey pops, So make sure you check it out to get the truth about Monkey Pock's not just what's being spread on Instagram. Let's get back to today's lab. We've been talking to David mcraaney, a journalist, lecturer, and author of the book How Mine's Changed.
In David's quest to understand how Mine's changed, he talked to canvassers, people who are in cults, you name it, anybody who's changing someone else's mind.
What blew my mind about doing that was all these different groups had never met each other, and most of them were not aware of any of the psychological literature that helped explain what was working. Yet they all came up with pretty much the exact same thing, and if they had steps, the steps were pretty much the exact same steps.
So we've arrived at the pivotal question how to change someone's mind. First things First, ask yourself why you want to do this?
This is really important. I know we all believe we have the moral high ground. I know we all believe that we are factually correct and everybody else is dumb. I know that's part of being a person. For each issue, ask yourself, why do I want to do this? And then socratic method of your way all the way down. Like my dad was really into the birth or conspiracy theory back in the day. He's, you know, a white man in the Deep South, and he's got all those
things to go with that Vietnam VET. And I remember really getting upset about this and wanting to change his mind about it. And I was like, well, why do I want to change his mind? Well, because he's wrong, Like, well, why does that matter to you? Well, because he's being told things by people that are causing harm in this world?
Why is that important to you? And then I just keep going down, down, down, down, And at some point I had to admit I just wanted to be able to trust this person the way I trust other people. I didn't want it to be an US versus them thing with my own father. And that's much more base than what I may have assumed at first was my motivation.
David said that really opened up conversation with his dad in a way that probably wouldn't have happened if David had just insisted he was right. So step one is bill rapport. Don't try to manipulate people. You have to be transparent, tell them what you're trying to pomplish and involve them in the process. Yes, ask them to be a part of the process with you and explore why you disagree with each other.
You and I can get together and try to solve the mystery of why do you think we see this differently? Are you in on that? Could you be on that? And like, ask them, don't tell them, don't push You have to pull the string, not push it.
Step two is the frame the issue as a number. This gets us out of the right verse, wrong, all or nothing to a more nuanced approach to an issue.
If the issue is an attitude claim, you would say how strongly do you feel about this? Like on a scale from zero to ten. If it's a fact based claim, say how confident are you? How certain are you this is true? From zero to ten? Give it a number. That's that next thing that I want you to do, which is why does that number feel right to you? Which is that moment that most people will go mmm, and you start thinking in a way that you haven't considered before it. But also it gets you out of
the debate frame. It gets you out of the argument frame. Now we're exploring something together.
David did this to me? Okay? Asked me what my favorite movie was. I said it was a Rival. He said, how do you rate it? I said a ten. He said why a ten and not an eight? I said, cause it's good. But then he was like, well, what did you like about it? I was like, maybe it isn't eight. I'm sorry. I doubt it Arrival, but it really got me out of debate mode and more to
exploratory mode. He actually agreed with me that it was a good movie before I gave it a number, and so he was kind of working and pulling apart, like why I gave it a ten? And I guess that helps him understand my value system. When I tell him why it's important to me, you.
Just listen and repeat and reflect and hold space. And I'm telling you, it seems like this can't be enough. I have watched videos from street epistemology and deep canvassing and smart politics, and then in therapeutic models motivational interviewing, which much of this is based on, and I have watched people talk themselves out of their position over and over and over again by just holding space.
In this way. Of course, there is a caveat when you're dealing with prejudice, racism, sexism, or really hot issues like guns or abortions. You might not want to do this, especially if you're the target of that prejudice. And that is totally fine.
I get that you feel this way and that it's not weird to feel that way. But if you want to change someone's mind, if that's your goal, do you have to approach it in this non judgmental, listening sort of way. And I know that sucks. It's weird. It's easy to justify any of your behaviors, and it's easy to rationalize what you want to do without introspecting the antecedents of all those things. Why do I want to do that? And that's also true in arguing. Why do
I feel so strongly? Why does that person feel so strongly? It's very easy for a person in an argument to come up with justifications and rationalizations, and then I'll take my justifications and rationalizations and I'll throw them at yours and we'll do one of those things where we If you're online, I share links, you share links, I share videos,
you share videos, and nothing happens. The reason nothing happens is because we are motivated reasoners, so we have some motivation at play that let us look at all the information available and cherry picked the evidence that supported the emotion that we felt regarding that issue. Then we put all that into a collection.
David explains that motivated reasoning causes us to judge information differently because we're biased emotionally, so even if the evidence isn't really there, we want it to fit what we've already decided. I know plenty of people like that.
And then we meet another person. We take stuff out of that collection and go, this is why I believe this, But that's not why you believe it. That was something you found after the fact, that was at the end of the process. But they also have done the same thing, and so they're like, oh, really, well, here's why I believe what I believe And you start throwing this stuff back and forth that never actually was the reason why you feel the way you feel.
That's really interesting, and David talks about the truth being tribal in his book Yes. A lot of this has to do with your identity and how the truth aligns with your identity about you and your own group. He talks about this experiment where people are challenged with an issue and they have to choose a side or decide what the truth is. When that happens, their fight or flight mode is activated. Wow. And interestingly enough, the more they're asked to think about ideas that are associated with
their own identity, the more the response ramps up. And that's because your brain's primary job is to protect yourself, and that extends past your physical self to your psychological self. We're social people, and part of being social is to make groups. And you can imagine groups where resources are limited. It's us versus them, and research has found that no matter how big or small a difference is between two people or two groups, folks will lean into that us
versus them mentality. Yeah, and so as a result of that, because it's us versus them, they will do whatever it takes in order to establish a hierarchy that we are better than you, even if it's to our own destriment. So, now that we know that we have this us versus them, are we stuck in our own groups? Well, we argue forever. I don't want to argue.
Reasoning is not flawed or irrational. It's biased and lazy, and that's actually a good thing. Arguing is a good thing. I think all the arguing we're doing online is the greatest thing ever and it's going to lead to a better world. I really truly believe that. I do also believe the context in which we find ourselves performing these arguments is not suited to the way that we evolve to interact with other human beings who disagree with us, and we'll have to fix that over time.
David says we have two systems when it comes to debate, deliberation, and arguments. One is for producing them and the other is for evaluating them. And the system that produces these arguments has to be done on an individual level.
We're individually producing our argument, but we're never individually evaluating arguments. I mean not really, because an argument sits out there for anyone to see and think and consider.
So while arguments may be useful, the context around arguments, so in online discussions, might not be the best. So David is saying that arguing is a good thing and that we can all learn and grow from it depending on the context. But we can also see we're arguing and grouping and even arguing publicly can go wrong, and that's when the brain is overprotective it's protecting its social
self even over its physical self. And David says that based on a study, the fear of social death is greater than the fear of physical death.
At the baseline, a lot of resistance comes from something that's way simpler. It's almost outside of all those it's just something in psychology they call reactants. If you into it that your autonomy is at risk, you become motivationally aroused to remove the stimulus object, which is a fun way of saying, if you push, I will push back.
What often happens is when I push back, you react, and so then you make me push harder, and we get into a loop where eventually go, let's agree to disagree, which I hate that language because you already agreed to disagree.
Let me tell you reactants has been haunted me my entire life. If I wanted to clean up my room and then somebody came and said, hey, clean up your room, I immediately don't want to do it. I don't like my autonomy to be taken away. Well that doesn't sound too different from present day Zekiah, you know, talking about a long time ago, But actually today I don't see already I'm reacting about what you're saying. I don't. I don't even know what I don't. I just don't, Okay,
I don't. Oh wait, I don't know what your truth is. But David talks about concerns about us becoming a post truth societ where you have true versus false, honesty versus lying, and depending on who you're talking to, what they say is going on may be completely different. But I think another thing is how people perceive things, like you saw it with their own eyes, and somebody it may be
described somewhere. We saw this like inauguration crowd size. It was huge, everybody was there, and it's like, how many is everybody? What do you mean by that? I saw a lot of floor space? So what does this mean? Are we truly living in a post truth world?
This is what Tom Stafford said to me about this. Germs were always a problem for human beings in groups, and then we built cities and it became an existential problem. So to solve that problem, we had to at the level of society develop things like sanitation, and the level of the individual, we had to develop things like boiling water and washing your hands. And we overcame it, and he said, misinformation has always been a problem for people
in groups. Then we got the Internet and it became existential. So we will have to generationally learn the equivalent of sanitation and washing our hands when it comes to the exchange of ideas and information.
You know, this is perfect. I think it ties in all the things we've been trying to do with dope labs. I want to hear other people's opinions. I want to understand the experiences they may be having that are different from me. I want to take that into account when I'm considering my own experiences. I also want to see what's factually happening. I want to know that what I'm experiencing and what you're experiencing these things might not be isolated.
They may be part of a bigger pattern. And just because I've observed something thirty times on that thirty first time, it could be different, and I want to be open to seeing that truth. Yeah, there has to be a process, and I'm hoping that we can eventually get to that point where checking sources, not just reading headlines and reading the whole article, becomes a part of how we consume
information on the Internet. And it feels hard. I feel like I can't fight evolution and what our brains telling us to do, which is to use all these cognitive biases. And so we asked David, should we just give up? I mean, this feels tiring.
No one's unreachable, no one is impossible to persuade, and most of us share very common values, and most of us will agree that the problems that are the problems are the problems. If you in research where they have people look at the UN survey of values, they find incredible agreement on those issues. A lot of our assumptions of us versus them are lose rey to the point
of causing real harm in the world. That's not to say there aren't bad actors people who do not wish to engage you in good faith and who actually do want to cause harm and would be totally okay with your harm. I feel that those people are in a fringe that has been magnified by the way we engage in discourse today. Their numbers are few, and their power is we can it'll stay that way if we keep
it that way. And traditionally, over the course of our long history, there have been moments where those bad actors have risen to power and have exerted political and influence, and it was the work of people who are diligent and indefatigable and refuse to give into hopelessness, who push.
That stuff down. I really like what David said, to not give in too hopelessness. Yes, and you know we're both human. Well you know I'm a little bit more human than you. Yes, I'm a little bit more martian. It's easy for us to also, you know, watch the news and watch conversation about things and be like, what that's not true. I feel like, I know we both have been looking at the conversation around monkey pox, you know, and saying, what that's not true? Are we going to
make these same mistakes from before? And so it can be easy to slip into that hopelessness. But David says, stand up. Yeah. So I actually had a conversation with you about this where someone that we both know had posted something on their Instagram about monkey that I was like, this is not true. When we had just talked to David and you were like, hey, David would say say something. So I went back and said, hey, y'all, that ain't this, This ain't right, because we cannot give up hope. We
have to keep pushing truth. I think we maybe have this unrealistic expectation that everybody will be on board. I think it's never going to be one hundred percent. But what we do want to do is to equip folks who are in that middle area that are just uninformed. We want to equip them with some tools to be able to know how to evaluate information and to be able to even recognize bias for themselves, confirmation bias. I
am good for that. If I think I need a thing and then I see an Instagram post for it, I say, I knew I needed it. Look when really the internet knows what you're doing, right, Yes, And so I think we're all susceptible and it's easy to fall prey, and so I think we just got to remain diligent. All right, y'all, it's time for one thing. What is our one thing this week? Zee? Our one thing this week is David mcrainey's book, How Minds Change. The Surprising
Science of Belief, opinion, and Persuasion. I really enjoyed this book. We're gonna link it in the show notes. Please please please check it out. We're also gonna link some other books that we mentioned in this lab that are linked to previous labs that we also think you should check out. Okay, that's it for Lab seventy five. Did I Change your Mind?
Are you ready to change other people's minds? Call us at two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight and tell us what you thought, or give us an idea for a lab you think we should do the semester that's two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight. And don't forget that there is so much more to dig into on our website. There'll be a cheap key for Today's life, additional links and resources
in the show notes. Plus you can sign up for our newsletter check it out at dope blabspodcast dot com. Special thanks to today's guest expert David mcrainey. You can find him on Twitter at David McRaney. Also check out his book How Mind's Changed. Wherever you get your reading materials and you can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Dope Labs Podcast. TT's on Twitter and Instagram at dr Underscore t Sho, and you can find Zakia at z Said So. Dope Labs is a Spotify original production
from Mega Own Media Group. Our producers are Jenny Rattlet, maass Lydia Smith and Izzy Ross of Waverunder Studios. Editing and scoring by Rob Smerciak and Griffin Jennings, Mixing by Hannes Brown. Original music composed and produced by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugier from Spotify. Creative producer Miguel Contreras. Special thanks to Shirley Ramos, Jess Borison, Yasmine A Fifi, tillkrat Key and Brian Marquis. Executive producers from Mega Oh Media Group, r us T t Show, Dia and Zakiah Wattley