David McRaney || How Minds Change

and stuff. Today, we welcome David McRaney on the show. David is a science journalist fascinated with brains, minds, and culture. In twenty twelve, he created the podcast You Are Not So Smart, based on his two thousand and nine internationally best selling book of the same name and its follow up, You Are Now Less Dumb. David is also an editor, photographer, voiceover artist, television host, journalism teacher, lecturer, and Tornado survivor. His most recent book is called How Minds Change, and

that's the topic of our conversation today. In this episode, I talked to David about the science of belief and persuasion in this day and age of onnoine tribes and echo chambers. Changing people's opinions seems like an impossible task. Instead of arguing over facts, David encourages us to use empathy to understand why we disagree. He explains pha's framework behind knowledge building and shares the use of technique rebuttal for sincere conversations. It was a great honor chatting with David.

He's someone who's inspired my own podcast, the Psychology Podcast. He has been in this podcast based so long and he has thought so deeply about psychological issues that it was great to riff with him on such an important topic, especially in society today. So I now bring you David mcrainey. David, so great to finally have you on those psychology podcasts. I am happy just to see who Scott. I am so comfortable doing zooms that I'll just drink coffee while

we're talking. Look at this, me too, me too. So yeah, I'm really happy to be here. You know. I love you. I love your show. I'm seeing the puzzler and how my is changed back there in your bookshelf. You're killing it. Thanks. Wow, what a great book and how timely it is. Before we jump into it. Can you kind of tell our audience a little bit about yourself and who are you? What is your background? What does tell us about your own podcast? Sure, I'll do. I'll truly be mostly brief.

I call myself an author. Now I'm a journalist. I'm a writer, I and podcaster and lecture, you know, content making, individual person thing. I started out in journalism with working in newspapers and television, but I went to school to be a psychologist. I switched to journalism at the very end of my degree after being allured by the student newspaper. My first thing I wrote, and this is how I jumped into all this was they they were asking for

opinion pieces. I don't know if this is replicated or it's still around or anything, but we had learned in psychology class that when your supports team loses, that sperm counts go down. I don't know if that's actually true anymore, that ever was true, but I I thought it was a great article because our university had lost every one of its football games that year, and so I had this headline that was sperm counts reach record lows on campus,

according to scientists. You know, then you read the article and it's like speculation based off this thing. I remember one of my professors like, have y' all seen this? Have you read about this? And that was it. I was like, Ah, that would be fun to write about these topics, but I didn't. I ended up going into getting that degree, and then I worked on like cops and courts and higher education, and eventually I was on TV working on the back end on like social media

and stuff like that. But I started a blog and they went back to my what I really wanted to write about, and it got surprisingly popular and led to a book deal, and then that led to me starting a podcast where I get to talk to people like yourself and just explore this endlessly. I tried. I carved out the niche of motivated reasoning, psychology, reasoning and judgment,

decision making, biases, fallacies, uistics, that sort of stuff. And then somewhere along the way I started becoming incredibly fascinated with persuasion and opinion science. Of course, because of all the polarization and all the arguing and bickering, I just wanted to understand it better. And there's the way that led to this book. How mine's changed, So it's been

years of working it. There were two incepting points for this new book, which is I was giving a lecture and someone came up to me and asked, my father has fallen into a conspiracy theory. How can I get him out of it? And I remember saying, you can't, which was not true, but I felt it as I was saying it. I knew I didn't like what was coming out of my mouth, but I also realized that I was saying it because I didn't understand it very well. I shouldn't be giving advice. So I wanted to go

into that. And then at the same time, the norms surrounding same sex marriage and LGBTQ issues in the United States were shifting very rapidly. Around the time I said that, I looked the polling, and at the time I looked the polling, sixty percent of the country had flipped over the last three years from being opposed to in favor.

And if you weren't part of the activism that led up to that to the many decades, it seemed to a lot of people on the outside that it just happened overnight, and it really was one of the fastest changes of public opinion in American history, but it really happened over the course of a decade or twelve years, the fast part, the rapid change. And I just imagine, what if you took all those people who were the sixty percent and put them in a time machine and

sent them back ten years ago. They would disagree with themselves. And I wanted to know what happened between this point and this point in their brains. And I just was just this massive thing I didn't understand. I wanted to understand. I thought if I did understand it, maybe I could suggest ways that we could catalyze that. And that led to a very long obsession that ended up being that book.

Thank you for taking us through that journey. I do wonder why the interest in what's happening in the brain. I know that it sounds sexy in neuroscience people think it's but what value does that give us above and beyond knowing psychologically what's happening when we change? Why is the brain so exciting for me? It's just like how I it's the thing I've chosen, or that shows me to how I understand, how I try to make sense of being a stumbling, fumbling weirdo. In this you know,

in this meat sack mix suit. I grew up very isolated, only child latchkey parents in the woods of Mississippi, like I was. I had a hermitage childhood, and it was like I was just constantly in that Like that state I think people go to the woods to be in was my whole upbringing, and I was I always have been. It was when I discovered psychology and all the things that are surrounding it in neuroscience, and I was like, oh, this is a portal into understanding myself in a way

that I really want to understand. And when it came to like another aspect of growing up in that world was there was a lot of racism, a lot of sexism, a lot of anti LGBT attitudes, a lot of anti

science attitudes, a lot of conspiracy thinking. And I wanted a window into why that was because it seems so clear to me that for like that wasn't true of the world at large that I was finding through television, movies and books and everything the brain though it just felt I guess growing up as a sci fi nerd. It just felt like that was the way in like my dad had had a subscription to Discover magazine. And he was an electrical engineer and he had a subscription

to Discover magazine. And they had the used have this cartoon in the back that would just be like a science fact, but it was like a six panel cartoon, and one of them was on like why advertising works, and it was about how they're the cookie company, Like it seems silly, like we all know that you have cookies. Cookies are great. What are you trying to tell me?

But they were. They the cartoons said, yeah, but when you go to the store and it's a choice between when you've never heard of and one you've seen on TV a lot, which will you pick? I was like, wait, that's not even Like there's something way deeper than what

I thought was going on is going on. And from my sensibility going into starting at neurons and then working your way up to abstractions and ideas, and working all the way back up to interactions between people, and then working all the way up to nations, it just feels like that's my version of some sort of that's under the strait. It's like a holy reductionism for me, Like I find there's something nice and as long as you're okay to go to both sides of that spectrum and

play around and not always reduce. There's something, there's something there that excites me. Yeah, well, your new book, you argue that we have the power to shift our thinking in a lay of new evidence, to have conversations and staff debates, and to replace old ignorance with new wisdom. It certainly doesn't seem like humans have that capacity these days. I mean, who's doing that, who's utilizing those facility right now? Well?

All we are? We all we are? That's true. I know a lot of this is preaching the choir because you're you're the expert on these topics and I'm the diletant journalist. But the way I've made sense of this, the ways I found we into was through Puget. I think I actually have the book closet. Oh yeah, this is such a great geneticist. The principles of genetic epistemology is what he just telled up. I love, who are

just listening? Nice? You know, most people remember pug from the If you took any CEC one of one class. He's the one that was like you pore the if you've experienced this if you're ever going to a bar and they give you the nice tall glass, like, oh, look at how much of the drink they gave me? Like like that, he would do that with kids and see, like when did they figure out that it's a wide, short glass and a tall, skinny glass have the same

amount of liquid and it's not magically growth. He wanted to like understand how does knowledge build up in the mind, How do minds create a structure of understanding the world. And he wanted to understand the stages so they could understand all the stages and all the way through adulthood. And there's these two principles that came out of that that I found really compelling, assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is

this all involves ambiguity and uncertainty. And when a mind approaches something that's ambiguous and uncertain, one way you can disinbiguate it and arrive at some level of certainty is just interpreted as another version of something you already understand. Whereas but sometimes that's anomalies built up or something that's so outside your understanding or counters your models so much that you need to accommodate to fit it in there.

And the example that I like to use to get out of all this psychological terminology is when a child sees a dog for the first time and you say, hey, that's a dog, and they something sort of categorical might be happening there where they're thinking non human walks on

the fore legs, furry dog, got it, thank you. And then they see a horse for the first time, and kids often say things like look dog or if they're you know, really advanced, and I say, big dog, And that's an attempt to assimilate, like I have this category walks the four legs, it's fury, it's non human, fits right in there, thanks a bunch. It's more of what I already understand about the world. But then you say,

no, no no, that's a horse. Well now, oh, I have to create a new category for both horse and dog to fit into. And they may not articulate it yet, but it's creature or animal or something. And so you really have to expand your mind to accommodate this new concept. And so we're always doing that at all times. That's how we build up this robust model of reality to interact with that whatever's going on outside our brains. And

it's as similation of accommodation all day long. And so everything we do change is our minds, every experience, everything we learn, every conversation. In some way, sometimes we're changing it to confirm what we already think, we know and understand and feel, and then sometimes we're challenged to update.

But as it becomes much more robust, as that becomes much more complex, that type walk that we wrote that we walk of become dangerously incorrect by changing mind when you shouldn't, or you could remain dangerously incorrect by it and not change your mind when you should that that we start to air on the side of assimilation as a because this is such a complex model. It has taken us so long to get where we're at, and

it got us here, might as well preserve it. But then there's all these other motivations that will come into play, and we can get into that where that baseline resistance is in the is in maintaining the model, But then there's other motivations that will bounce up that baseline resistance very high depending on the topic, depending on what the mental model is. That the mental structure that we're working

with Brick Harrington to launch us. And to answer your question, I think she gave me something that I love repeating. She's a sociologist, she said, But her estimation the eagles mc square of social science is the fear of social death is greater than the fear of physical death. So if the if the ship is going down, we'll put our reputations on the lifeboat and we'll tow okay with

our bodies going to the body of the ocean. That's such a strong motivation to avoid shame and guilt and ostracism, to maintain group identity, to keep your reputation safe, to manage reputation, to signal that you're a good member of your group. That if if that becomes the motive, if that's strong about the issue that play, it bounces the

top and resistance becomes very strong in that regard. And that's what I keep trying to say in the book is that we focus a lot on the conclusions that people bring forth, the reasons they put forth as justifications and explanations for how they what they think and feel.

But the motivations often get lost in that, and our conversations will kind of stay in that conclusion space where nothing fruitful will take place because no one's helping each other go backwards through that chain to well, why did I choose those facts as the ones that justify my fields? And that's that's sort of the entry point into the whole topic. Cool, So that's funny. You start off talking about what happens in the brain, and you did go

to the psychological level. And we can keep going because because brains are erect with brains, and then we have social structures. Yes, but in my view, people overstate the excitement of a neuroscientific finding when it's just like a thermometer. It's just a pattern of brain activation and reflection of the psychology. So the psychology is the meat in my God, that's great. This is what you've already done to me. This pin is about to write that. Note, this is

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Barnes and Noble, Indie Bound, and all major retailers. If you're in the UK and Commonwealth, you can go to her now at bookshop dot org dot UK. We truly hope this book helps you grow and thrive and become your best self. Okay, now back to the show. So I want you to explain to me what you found in your research and in the book as happens in our brain when our minds change, because maybe you're going to change my mind about this sure by explaining to

me the neuroscience of it here an open mind. Yeah, yeah, do you see the meta sort of thing happening here? I mean I will be I'm more in your camp. I mean, like most of the books, I'll move out of neuroscience very quickly. In the staying in psychological space, the neuroscience chapter focuses mostly on the dress is a

way to get us through that part I want. I wanted this book to stay on the ground and be a lot of conversations when real human beings be in real situations, visiting cults and people that left cults, visiting activist groups, visiting scientists, and so my interest I think when it comes to if I discuss the neuroscience side of things, is the inevitability of the neuroscience of it. So you know, we have It's like I have toes and feet, and I can't get away from the biology

of my entity. And that's also true of the substrate that is generating mind or that mind is manifested amongst or whatever. So the inevitability of it that I wanted to talk about because of the processes that lead to these psychological phenomena is there's very little opportunity to introspect, if any to witness the process. It's the outcomes of the process or sort of that space we live with it. The way I got into it was through the work

of Pascal Walash and Michael Karlovich at NYU. They were deeply fascinated with the dress and they wanted to know why everybody disagreed on the dress and how come they couldn't change each other's minds about the dress, and which seems like a strange topic, but the arguments that people were having about the dress were intense and very similar to how the people argue about wedge issues in the sense that when you see the dress one way, if

people aren't familiar. There's a image that went around the internet in twenty fifteen. I think almost every human being seen it. Some people see this black and blues, and people see this white and gold. But whatever you see, that's how you see it. And you can't just like go, okay, now let me see it the other way. It's just your brain resolves the ambiguity of that image is in one way, and other brains resolve it in another way.

And if you never meet somebody who sees it differently than you might not never know that it could be seen differently. And when you do meet someone like that, there can be like the sad existential thing that takes place where like like how can that be? How can people see something that two see different colors? And then some people take another step further, which is like your bonkers and I see it like there's something wrong with you, but or ways second, maybe there's something wrong with me.

That's why I loved all that as a way to get into sort of the nature of what is the lowest level of disagreement are the most reductionist level. What they discovered was that the reason people see that differently. It was great because they had backgrounds in like vision research and sleep research, that the image was very ambiguous in the same way that a lot of those color illusions are, like the strawberries illusion and the checker shadow illusion.

Most of those have are tied to color constancy in some way or another, where the luminance of the image is either there's their cues in the image that encourage you to assume a certain luminance, or the image is very ambiguous and there's a urge to resolve what the luminants must have been. And on your Behalf, this is why I talk about it in the book On Your Behalf, the brain's like, okay, but this thing is over is overexposed, and it's hard for it's hard to see things that's overexposed.

I mean, anthem were warrifizing all of those because that's how I have make sense with things. The brain is like, we know a pretty good bit about how we tend to do this. And there's a lot of speculation as to why. Maybe it's was to see blood and low light conditions or identify fruit, or there's all these evolutionaries, equity speculative ideas, but we do what does seem to

happen has been something's over exposed or under exposed. We will, at the level of subjective experience, take the perception that whatever's all that chain that went from electromagnetic waves to eyeballs to retinas to brain. At the level of subjectively experiencing it, the lumints will be turned up or turned down.

It would be subtracted, some rooms will be subtracted or added to to try to tell us what it ought to look like, which I like to think of that as a lie your brain tells you in order for you to understand the truth that it assumes must be there.

But it has to be based off something that there is a set of prior experiences you've had with overexposure and under exposure that dials in that so that in those moments of ambiguity, you can resolve it like something beforehand, and it uses all these cues in the image to do so. In this or in real life it would do so. So in this case, it was the you're

determined by getting a lot of participants. I think it was thirteen thousand participants that the more exposure that a person had had over the course of their life to things being overexposed in sunlight, the more they would subtract the luminance as if it was overexposed in sunlight. So this image was overexposed, but it was ambiguous, and they disinbiguated it by saying, I think it's over supposed in sunlight, there's more blue in that spectrum. Subtract the blue, you

get white and gold. If you spend more time in artificial light or incandescent light, it's more in the yellow spectrum over exposed and yellow. Subtract the yellow you get black. So what I love about that is your life experiences have led to these priors. You're in an ambiguous moment, and then you disinbiguate the ambiguous and it resolves as a subjective experience. But all you get is the last part of that processing chain, and the ambiguity never registers.

The fact that you disinbguated never registers. It just seems like they're raw, true to reality. And yet this upctual prejudices of what led you to that particular interpretation of the evidence in front of you, and another person who's from has a different life experiences will do it differently than you, and they have this model called surfpad substantial uncertainty and the presence of ramified or fort pryor assumptions

lead to disagreement. They love cheeky acronyms. There, it's basically a line, and above that are all your experiences leading up to that, all your nature nurture. Underneath it is an ambiguous experience. Two different people with two different life experiences disambiguate it differently, and they disagree on the conclusions

they reached. And I use that as a starting point to say, Okay, this is a lot of neuroscience to help you get to the point of saying, like, because we are because the brain is trapped in the skull, and subjective reality is this virtual, illusory landscape of perceptions. Everything is interpretation in this way to a degree, and then we build on that with layers and layers of

abstraction and we build up minds. That's where you get in psychological space, and disagreement has a really, really reductive root in that spot. But we have, thanks to the fact that we're social animals, there are ways that we have negotiated to take advantage of that. Whereas if we're

in a group. This is where I get this. We're in the book I get into the Hugo Mercy and Dans Berber stuff about the interactionist model and Tom Stafford's stuff about the truth win scenario, where Mercy Ansperber argue that the in their model that we have two systems, one for producing propositions and arguments and one for evaluating them.

And the production one is very individual like from an individual perspective, we produce a bias and lazy arguments, and then in groups we offload all the cognitive labor to the group evaluation of all that, and the whole purpose of that is to are The function of it is for setting communal goals, plans of action, to disinbiguate as a group. And we need to interpret something that all of us are finding mysterious and strange. And in a way, it's like I think of it like the muscles of

your arm. Weren't the selective pressures weren't such as to create a appendage for painting paintings. But we can do that with it. And these argumentative psychological mechanisms are more for like group goals and planning, but they can be employed for things like logic and philosophy and science and so on. But at it's really, it's like, it's great at deliberating, it's great at arguing in a way where we compare our perspectives and try to determine what the

truth is. And the dress comes back around in that because I imagine if you had two people trying to argue that Okay, the way I see it is the way to see it. I'm right and you're wrong, nothing truthful really comes out of that. But if you had two people approach that same situation and say, okay, let's go shoulder to shoulder on this and try to understand

why do you think we disagree? Why would we see it differently, that's the only investigation that will lead to that amazing deeper truth of oh, this has to do with sunlight and priors and stuff. So the debate frame people should be frustrated with that because oftentimes that is not a fruitful way to make sense of the world. Whereas the let's compare our perspectives and try to determine why we disagree, it turns out as an incredibly fruitful

way to make sense of things. And it's also the way the persuasion that the kind of persuasion I talked about the book that actually works. That's almost always what it's built on top of. It just seems like it's so hard to convince people of facts that yeah, contradict their ideology. Well yeah, that makes sense though, right, Like, here's if I can keep going on a long rance

with you, I can fall back on motivated reasoning for this, Scott. Look, when you fall in love with somebody, all their little nuances, the way they talk, the way they curl their lip, the way they comb their hair, the way they walk, the way they cut their food, the songs they like, the dumb joe they tell. Those are reasons why you like them. When you're in that first stage, that honeymoon,

motivated by all these drives and all these emotions. If something happens with the course of that relationship falls apart and you're starting to break up, the reasons why you want to break up with that person are the way they talk, the way they walk, the way they cut their food, that stupid song they like, the dumb jokes they have the evidence, the facts of the matter remain the same, They remain as neutral as they ever were, But you're using them as reasons and justifications for one thing.

In one situation, there reasons and justifications for another and another because the motivation changed, the emotion changed, the attitude changed. And this is also how we approach evidence in these political debates, where you start with some motivation. You may not even be aware of, some attitude, you may have never articulated. They may not be salient to you in all the evidence in the world you go, are you picking it and saying, that's a good justification for owl field.

That's a good justification for owl field, that's a good justification. And the other person on the other side of the issue has been doing the exact same thing while you were doing that. And when you meet, if you meet saying the reason I feel this way is because of and then you produce one of these justifications, that's not the reason you felt that way. That's some justification you

felt you found along the way. And we have these intractable debates because we stay in that space where we throw all our facts into a little arena and let them fight each other, as if that's why we ever thought that in the first place. But we're not having a debate or even a meeting of minds over the motivations that led us to these things. These attitudes that came from somewhere, and that's why we argue so much, is because the platforms in which we argue, like Twitter,

they don't facilitate that kind of discussion. Not really. Well no, no, they're the opposite. That's really insightful. Do you really think we're living in a post truth world right now? I don't. I think we're living in a post trust world. That's what I say in the book. I think that that's good. That's good. There's a great researcher, Kate Starbird, who studies what people do during crisis. Is a crises like whether it's like a tornado or a hurricane, or a building

on a fire or something like that. We seem to switch over into this like there's so much information coming at us and it's it's difficult to termine what to go with. But also the anxiety is very high, so there's a compulsion to be like, well, we do need to make a decision when you need to go with something and rumors are everywhere, are just to nonstoff. I can I remember I lived through Katrina, I lived through

a tornado. I remember that the aftermath where like you know, you hear all these rumors about what's this is when the power is coming on, or this is what's going to happen next, this is when the firefighters will be here. And if your neighbor across the street is like, hey, here, the power is coming back home Tuesday, you're like, maybe maybe not, maybe maybe not. I mean, I know, I

know that dute. He's a pretty cool guy. Yeah. Then if like a police officer comes through, they're like, hey, just let me let you know power is going to be back on Tuesday. I hope you all doing okay. You're like, oh okay, Like and we're modulating all of this at all times or just tie trading our like

our skepticism. And I feel like she makes the argument that, like whether or not we we should be in a state of high anxiety, we certainly are thanks to sort of the information ecosystem getting really chaotic and new with all the new tools we have, and then the also it's very chaotic, it's nothing but information coming at you

at all times. That we've sort of gotten acclimated to that rumor space where we need to modulate and tie trade by trust because and then at the same time, all that stuff got fragmented and disrupted, Like there's not just three news channels or two newspapers with all the with all the Pulitzer prizes, Like I can click right off of New York Times onto a flaming Eagle, you know, plato factory dot com, which also has some news stories on it. Like it's a it's tough, right, So how

do you modulate all that? It's it's I feel like, in a very Marsha McClue in a way that we'll sort it all out. But we're in that middle phase between the old and in the next where we're modulating by trust. And I mean facts still work in places where people trade in the currency of facts, like medicine, you know, medicine science were like where they're playing that game of lots of evidence, hypothesis, hypothesis, testing the chips for all what they may. I vet you, you vet me.

But in the wider scale of things, it's really I feel like it's really being modulated by trust. And since we can group up so easily on the Internet, like we can find a group of people who have the exact same anxieties we have, are the same prejudices we have, And then now we can like leave everybody and go hang out by ourselves, and then that becomes the group I trust, or that becomes in the information sources that everybody says are the good ones, that's the ones we trust.

It feels like post truth, but I feel like it's more a case of like, I'm not sure who to trust, so I'm going to kind of edge my bets and that creates a strange world to pass ideas back and forth. Yeah, the group we should trust the least is our in group. That's true. I don't know if that's true, but I saw group. I guess yes. I saw a study recently showing that especially when a group reaches a group a point of collective narcissism, they're more likely to betray each

other within Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I tweet. I tweeted that one. I tweet out some chestnuts, my friend keep up as much as I can. So much of this just seems to come down to this deeply tribal chip in our brain. Right, how do we change our minds in large groups? And can that kind of change be catalyzed. I'll take that in two different directions and an attempt to do it simultaneously. The whole tribal thing, and I understand that. I understand a lot of there's there, it's out there to not

use tribal anymore. And I get that. So we can just say in group, out group if we have to. But the the thing we're talking about that in group affinity outgroup, you know, fear and skepticism, even hate, I hate.

Like in the book, I talk all about taj Fell and his research into how how quickly we willformed groups over literally any identifier, the old minimal group paradigm where he was like hoping he'd he it would take forever to find it, and it was like he found it, like first try with the page of dots, it was like how many dots do you see? And then he took it away real fast and said he randomly assorted

people the overestimators are under estimators. And then once they were in, once they'd been told they were in one of the other, everything that came after that was about us versus them. If the outcome of the next experiment that he did would benefit the in group, that's what they went with. If it would hurt the outgroup, that's what they went with. Even though they had just been labeled this and it wasn't even real. And particularly Leah Mason talked to me about all this, it was like

they give them a chance to like was it. They weren't gonna get any money, but they were allotting money to another task that other people had done, and they told them there was over estimators, and their estimators they would choose the thing that would give less money to their in group if it gave even less money to the outgroup. Like that's we will choose the worst outcome if we think it'll hurt the outgroup more. And that's

at such a minimal level. And that's been replicated so much with from like showing people different paintings and telling them what kind of fan they are just put giving people hats and armbands. It seems like it's very very foundational, and I'm assuming it's gonna have It has to be something to do with our ultrasocial primate nature, the s versus them framing. Once it's there, it becomes a high

motivator for everything else that comes after. Yet we still do change our minds in very large We weighs them very rapidly, and I couldn't make it's just this is the thing that took the longest for me to wrap my head around. I had to go into network science for this and talk to people like Duncan Watts. That's great, great Douga Wats was immensely helpful of all of this. And Greg Stel, if I'm saying his name correctly, has

a great book about this called Cascades. Yes. The short version of this is to make sense of it, is, Okay, if you've ever tried to get into a college classroom or a restaurant or something's imagine it's a classroom and there's a lot of there's like a lot of people waiting to get in, and so you just go, okay, I guess I'll stay. Something's going on, and then let's go by, and it's good bye. And then the door opens up and the professor is like, what are you doing?

And there's nobody in there, and everybody goes. They all rushian like this is an example of cascades affecting human behavior. So the first person that shows up, they're basing what they're going to do on an internal signal, as they put it, maybe in the past, to speak back to like priors and experiences and assimilation of accommodation. Like maybe in the past they did walk into a classroom once and there was like a whole class and they turned around and they were like, eh, and they got weirded

out by it. So they have that inside them, or maybe they're just nurture has they're an anxious person in this regard. They don't even try it out. Maybe it's both, but whatever it is, they have an internal signal. They show up, the doors closed, they don't want to try it out, so they take out their phone and start

playing with it. Well, the second person that shows up, they now have one external signal and one internal signal, and since we are social primates, that external signal is pretty strong and if they unless they are a super rebellious type person, they will go, well, there's somebody waiting that's got to have a reason to wait, and they play it on their phone. This is sometimes it's referred to as thresholds of conformity, sort of like that old

Solomon ash stuff. So this person, you know, their threshold conformity wasn't such that they were willing to buck anything, so they just went along with it. But now once there's two people waiting. It's really you'd have to be a real rabble rouser to a real punk to be like, I'm just going to walk past these people open the door, or maybe you can have to be very charismatic and say, hey, are you guys waiting? Is there anybody in there? But if you're not that person, you become person and three

you start to see what's unfolding. Each person who joins the cascade makes the cascade stronger for the next person who joins, and you end up with a self perpetuating cascade that once there's three people waiting, for four people waiting, it's almost inevitable at the entire class now it was going to wait. That's a one type of cascade. The other type of cascade is sort of that's that's a

cascade to not do something. There's also a cascade to do something, which would be like when a party empties and you don't know why, like especially if you're the host and you're like everybody just kind of leaves all at once, like, but it's a similar it's the same sort of phenomenon where like there's one person, you can think of them as an early adopter. If you want to go into like diffusion science, like those early adopters like I, you know what I I know, I'm ready

to go. I'm out of here, and the next person to go may They were just waiting for somebody to go, and then once that one person goes, they go. Now two people left, and there's somebody who like they were okay with being there, but you know, two people are gone and they are a little tired, so this is their chance to get out. Now three people are going.

There's there are people who each each person who adds to the cascade makes the cascade stronger for the next person, till people who didn't have any intentionally feel weird for

not leaving, and then everybody's gone. So it looks when you get into network science, and the way I visualize it is like one of those molecule models in chemistry where the little balls connected with sticks, the balls that are human beings and the sticks of their relationships, and it's usually reduced to being strong versus week I'll help you move, versus you know, I'll give you a kidney,

a kind of things. We all have these clusters of strong connections and then each one of us within that cluster is connected to other groups, usually weekly, sometimes strongly. And the way Duncan Watts made this make sense to me was he said that the tipping point model is way off. That's not how this goes because in that model,

if you're trying to you're pursuing virality. And virality is fine for like passing around news or where all it takes is one contact with another person for the idea to get transferred, but it's not great a great model for changing minds or because there's risk involved in that. There's risk and reward, and there's these thresholds conformity, thresholds of conformity. Yeah, so like some people, some people are early adopters, they'll just do it because one other person

is doing it. Some people, there were a lot of people are in the middle that I need a lot more people in my life to do that before I'll do that. And some people are holdouts like I ain't never get in a cell phone, you know, they still

have a fax machine or something like that. And the you take something like quitting smoking or even like obesity like the Farmingham study, the Great Christacus research he talked, he talks about in his book about you can just watch these things move through networks, and it's incredible how just having somebody in your net work gain weight will make everybody close to that person gain a little weight, and then that's the ripples through the notework. So these

specials conforming, you're part of that. Here's how Duncan Wats made it make sense to me. He said, it has nothing to do with somebody being super connected, or somebody being very charismatic, or being like just a connector or a maven or all those things. It's the susceptibility of the network itself to the particular change. And he said, imagine you're in a car and there's somebody in a car. They drive down a forest path. They drive down a road in a forest every day on the way to

work at the same point. Every day, they take their cigarette and they flick it out the window, and they've been doing that for ten years, and every day it bounces lands in the brush, nothing happens, and then one day they do that, flick it lands and it causes the wildfire that burns down six counties. So their behavior and that individual and what they were doing didn't change, but the network in which they were striking as they

put it in that parlance. Something happened there. Maybe there was a firefighter strike, or there was a long drought, or a tree, and that one particular spot fell over in just the right way to create just the right conditions. The fire hit it. When it caught fire, it dried out the stuff around it, it made it, and then

the cascade formed. So he said, if you think of human networks in that way, all those little balls and sticks as they undulate and move and people meet and unmeet and join groups and lead groups and all that stuff.

If enough early adopters catch on to switch on to something and they have neighbors who are similar and threshold level to them, and they flip over, then they become as a unit very influential to people who are a little more hesitant, And then they a little bit more hesitant will flip and now you have an even larger cascade, and so on and so on and so so. All this stuff related to like individuals when it comes to trying to persuade it one person to think in a

different way. Any flip that takes place in that regard has the potential to flip their neighbors, just by the sake that person flipped, and that can lead to a situation. They call it a percolating vulnerable cluster. A group of people whose conditions are exist right everyone's thresholds or at just the right spot. They're connected in just the right strengths, and they have connections out of their group into other groups.

It's just the right level that if the change takes place in that percolating vulnerable cluster, it'll be like the cigarette that lands in that one spot. And what since that percolating vulnerable cluster is always popping in and out of existence like it's like fireflies blinking in the network, because it can be percolating for a little while that it's not because people shift so quickly, our relationships move

so quickly. For a big change to take root and a large group of people, you need people who are committed to that change, constantly striking at the network. And it's some and if they may have to live their entire lives striking at it and failing, and then they pass down the effort to the next group of people did the same thing, and they put their effort in, how can I get as many people as possible to be striking at the network in as many different places.

That persistence often leads to that lucky strike that will lead to a massive cascade of change, And that seems to be true. Things like Stonewall were happening every week in the United States for years and years and years, and eventually happened in a place where the cascades set off. Things like massive moments in civil rights movement. Things were happening constantly, but the fact they were happening constantly and spreading to the activism was spreading made it much more

likely for the cascade to take root. And you end up with something that looks a lot like and I'll stop with that with this. Is it something like puncuity equlibrium is what it looks like. I think there's something in social science called a critical juncture theory that's very similar,

but it looks to me more like puncuaity calibrium. Biology where long periods of stasis where you think the status quo is forever, and then rapid moments of change, and then in stasis and then rapid moments of change, and if you're in the status quo period, it seems like, well this is forever. People in the change their minds, And if you happen to live through one of these rapid moments, you'll have that like you'll be blessed with the knowledge that, oh, no, change can happen very rapidly,

so fast that it's shocking. And we've seen that all throughout humanistry. Oh yeah, we've seen in the cultural chefs in just the past couple of years. How does this nerdy information that you're presenting to me right now apply? How does it apply? It's it's how do I'm curious how it applies to cults and conspiratorial ideas. I know that you've really you've looked into both. I think the left wing is a cult and I think the right right wing is conspiratorial. Happens, man, I might edit that out.

Don't edit that out. That's good. That's it. You pissed off both sides simultaneously. Yeah, that's how I would characterize both sides. It's a good characterization in that I think this is my own personal opinion. This is the same phenomenon. It's just you know, it manifests differently and depending on like what's up. Like we're social primates and we group up, and one of my metaphors I'm a very storytelling metaphor

Darmak and Jalade kind of guy. If you get the Darmak and Jalade reference, I will send you some delicious liquorice in the mail. That's that's a star Trek. That extra raised episode where the translators don't work. But even though we under they understood the aliens perfectly with English, they've spoken metaphor only, and so you had to understand their culture to get what they were saying. And they're like Darmak and Jelade tanagra and they're like, okay, you know,

like Tigo with his arms wide, like I don't. I understand the words, but not the reference. It was a great episode that like predicted meme culture because like if you just if you just duck out of meme culture for two days and come back, you have no idea what people are telling you. I remember somebody saying a wordle is the uh sour dough starter of the of the Omicron, And I was thinking, like, man, people one year before this and one year after this may not

understand what the hell that means. Sounds so darmic in July. So here's one of those let's say you're in a tent in the woods and you hear a strange sound, and your compulsion is you have this negative affect, these bad feelings, and your compulsion is, I want to go get gathered some more information to confirm whether or not

my anxiety is justified? Is reasonable? Well, just in that word justification and reasonable to whom to you are, It's more like you're doing it for an imaginary audience member. Because we're such social primemates, we often don't engage in behavior unless it feels like it's the most justifiable action, because it's almost like we're predicting we're going to have to defend ourselves later in front of some sort of

trial of our peers. And also, if it's something that's dangerous, we want to we want to bring other people into the fold because it may be dangerous to all of us. So your first compulsion is like, let me go see if that's what that sound was, so I can either confirm or disconfirm my anxieties or justify well. It was harder to do this in the past. You had to have likearismatic, glad, handsy people moving through town to get you on board. Coming through town with a van with

messages wrapped around bananas. That's literally how the Moonies used to get people. They would go to areas of town where they figure people had just moved there, like they had people that were like on their level. They'd offer bananas out of a van with a religious track wrapper around it and say, hey, come join us with this meeting. They do that here in Santa Monica. Wow. So say like the when you have an anxiety or a fear, or maybe you have a motivation for you need validation.

You want that nice group hug feeling. You definitely feel a lack of those things when you don't have if you feel the lack of getting those things resolved, and usually go looking for other people who share the anxiety. We'll talk with us about the anxiety. You go looking for the validation that you desire. On the Internet. It's very easy to do that now. If you have an anxiety or a prejudice, you can go looking for other people who have that same anxiety or fear. Maybe something

bad happened in your life. You're just looking for other people who are going through that to just see what they're saying, to see if you can get some meat to work through it. Yeah, there are all these motivational allures. Any Sternisco at NYU talk to me about this, and so did Joseph Yasinski at the University of Miami. One of the main motivational lures for going either into a

conspiratory community or a cult, or really any organization. You don't have a strong self identity and you're trying to create it, or you have a certain anxiety or fear of prejudice that you are. It's making you feel like you might be an untrustworthy member of your community, but you want to assure that you are, and you go looking for people that can like justify you, and these

allures get you into the group. You'll find your group very easily on the Internet, and the older days you would be a little bit more difficult, but there are ways to get people to find their groups or to get you into a place to meet up with other people. If it's a cult, what they will slowly do is is snip away all of your other sources of validation, all your other sources of group hugginess, and all your other ways of addressing your anxieties until they're the only place.

If it's a conspiratoral community. What usually happens is it's the same effect, but as you become more aligned with the group and you're spending more time with them, and you're hanging out with them more often, you're starting to entertain more ideas. It's other people in your life. You start to get that sense that they're they're not gonna like that, they're gonna shame you for it, So you start doing the snipping on your own, and eventually it

doesn't matter what got you into it. You're in it because you're in the community now, and those social goals that Brick Harrington stuff, that fear of social death becomes the new motivation, and all of it goes back to groupishness in that way. Like conspiratoral communities, what they believe, what they think, what they feel pretty much irrelevant to what's keeping them in the group. What's keeping the group

is the group cults. However they got into it. The things that they espouse, they proselytize pretty much relevant for while you're staying in the group. In the group, because you're in a group, it's the shame, the ostracism, the guilt, the fear, the social things that that that it doesn't. The onboarding is multifaceted, but the staying in is pretty much the same phenomena. The good news is that the

off boarding, the off ramp is UH. This with the caveat this is the hardest thing in the world to change somebody's mind about to pull them out of a conspiratory community or a cult. The off ramp is is the same way they got it, and it's uh. Everyone that spoke to people at Westboro aboutist church who left, people who are in conspiratory communities who left them, people

who were like pseudo conspiratoral pseudicults and conspira communities. I talked to people in anti vaxxer groups and the Moodies and nine eleven Truthers and the flat earthers. Yeah, I spent a lot time with other the other people. By the way, the flat earthers are the ones the most fun to hang out with, but everybody else not as much fun. The UH, the people who left those groups,

they all had pretty much the same story. They either entertained being part of another group for a little while and we're in both groups at the same time, or someone outside of that community offered a hand of them and offered them some non judgmental, compassionate listening, and they started to get the sense that their values could be affirmed in a different place than they were being affirmed and if there is anything that they didn't like about that group, they were already in and most of the

time there was a lot of stuff. It started that was sort of the crack that led in the light of I don't actually have to be here. There are other places that would welcome me. And that seems to be how you build a pretty stable off ramp to get out of a group like that. It doesn't happen to one conversation, and it takes a while to build that kind of rapport and to give a person a social safety net so they can do that kind of escape. But that seems to be pretty common. That's good to know.

I think we're all part of a cult, and we don't know we're all social privates. We wanted correcked. We want to if you chance to get will store on here. I really recommend. He has a new book out called The Status Game. It just came out of the United States, and that's all it talks about, is this one thing plugging away at this deeply human, primal desire to group up and what happens once you have and how people die on that hill of reputation management so often. Yeah,

thanks for that recommendation. What is technique rebuttal and what are some of the best actionable methods for persuading people of something you want to persuade them of? This is my favorite thing in the world now. Really, it is like, as part of this investigation, I wanted to reach out to people who were actually changing minds professionally, but I didn't want to be hang out with people who were I felt like we're doing using coercion. I spent some

time with the culpulation. Yeah, I spent time with culting programmers. I took the whole chapter out because I just it was just so gross and weird and I didn't feel like it added anything to the discussion. It's fascinating. I'll put it somewhere. But I spoke with Ted Patrick, the person who invented cult programming. He's up in his nineties now, and it's all a very pseudo scientist. Brainwashing doesn't have any like it's not well regarded as a real thing

that actually has ever happened. Culting programming is mostly kidnapping somebody and saying if you stop going back and meeting those people, I'll let you have a sandwich and you can go home. Like it's coersion. It's the same coersion that they're railing against, and it's bad and it's illegal, and it's the whole thing. But I did start finding these groups who were doing something else, and I found deep canvassing from the LGBT Center of Los Angeles' Leadership Lab.

I found street epistemology, which is everywhere, but it kind of really got started in San Antonio Smart Politics by with Karen Tamerius. And one of the things that astonished me was all these different groups, they had never met each other, most of them didn't have a really good understanding of any scientific literature that might be explained what they did. But they all came up with methods that were pretty much the same. And they did that because

they did a bunch of a b testing. They especially the Leadership Lab, they did seventeen thousand conversations, recorded them on video, kept what worked and threw away what didn't, and they all landed on something that after I took this to experts. They said, this is very close to motivational interviewing, the therapeutic concept that is, so that arose out of like addiction and alcoholism, like dealing with those problems.

Then two researchers, Cornelia Bach and her research partner, they group these up into one thing called technical rebuttle versus topic bubble. Technique rebuttle a topic a buddle is when you just trade facts back and forth the way two people behind electron in front of an audience would, or two academics who were in a good faith environment where we're all played by the same rules, would say, well, this, here's my evidence, here's this evidence, blah blah blah. We

had to invent those kinds of situations. When it comes to straight up I'm just talking to you, my friend, my family member, my person on the internet who's being mean to me, the topic a buddle doesn't go so well because we're dealing with all that justifications. Though. Technical buddle is instead of focusing on conclusions, that's assis saying what you leave, instead of debating that, instead of debating how you feel about the issue, it's why do you

believe that? What brought you to that feeling? What's the source of all this, what's the processing chain? The value you here? And so if you're doing some sort of copy paste thing, you open up a space that the other person introspect and explore in a way that they might not do otherwise. So it usually it goes in steps, and the steps are roughly the same. I think they shift if you're working on a differences of belief in

attitude or a value. They all open up with rapport in the sense that you're trying to not stimulate reactants that push away feeling that a person gets when they feel like you're taking away their agency or their freedom

to behave and the way they want to behave. If you suggest anything that along the lines, though, you should be ashamed of what you what you think, feel and believe reactance and I'm sure you felt this, like when somebody on the internet, It's like you should be ashamed of saying that, Like I don't necessarily want to engage with that person anymore. I just want them to stop.

I want them to stop talking to me. Block right. Then, in the psychological parlance, they say something like you become motivationally aroused to reduce the influence of the stimulus object. I love it. I love That's a perfect description of how I feel. So yeah, And it's just the thing. It's like algorithmic, like I reduced the stimulus object's impact, and now I no longer run the algorithm. We're good. And if they stick around, then I'll run it over

and over again ntil they go away. If you've ever been a teenager or had a teenager, you've felt this. Your parents may have really good advice for you. They love you and they care about you, and then they tell you this advice and you're like, don't tell me

what to do, and you push away. And then if if you push in a way that makes them feel reactants, then they'll push it you and then you push back, and then they push back, and then you get into a feedback deep until you eventually like, I hate you. I never want to talk to you again. Yes, Or you say something ridiculous like let's agree to disagree, like that's you already agree to disagree. That's how this whole thing started. Is just you're just saying something to get

out of talking anymore. To reduce the impact of the stimulus object. So you want to start out with that to get out of reactans. You have to say be very transparent. You have to say that this person's in control of the situation. They can leave at anytime, they choose to move forward to each step and keep saying that,

so build that report. Also, it's good to just hang out, like you know, you can go watch a movie with somebody that's your friend and you can watch it and love it, and then when you get out, they hate it and you're like, oh my god, you hated it. Why did you hate it? I don't feel like I want to never talk to you again because you hate the movie that I love. We can just talk about it, right. That's that's because you've built up a lot of rapport

and trust with that person. So if you have if you have a relationship with another person, your previous conversations have reached you have brought you to a spot where you are already at conflict. You're going to have to do some work to get yourself back into a trust state. So you can't even start this persuasion thing until you

return to that. However, if the person's a stranger, you can generate some real good, open early trust by just being transparent, and it's telling them, I'm just here, I just want to hear what you have to say. I'm actually interested in your perspective and if it's different from mine, I wanted to down. Why give them person to all of that freedom up front? And then you open up with something very simple. If it's a fact based claim,

you ask for the claim. If it's an attitude, you ask, you, know, how do you feel about this particular issue, And once they state that, ask them to sort of define it a little bit better for you so that you know that you're talking about the exact same thing. Some people like politics. If you say they're politics, your version of politics is like a Civics textbook, and there's is lizards in a dark room dividing up the country before golf.

Like you make sure you're on the same page, and whatever their definitions are use there, it's not yours, because remember, all of this is going to be on their side. The point of this is your opening up space for them to introspect, and then ask for a numerical measure of either attitude or confidence. If it's a fact based claim, ask for a measure of confidence. How much do you believe to choose er or to attend. If it's an attitude,

how strongly do you feel about this? And you might have to say, like all guns should be illegal, or you should get a gun on the mail every week, something to kind of get their attitude on a scale. And then this is where the magic starts. You ask whatever they say. If they say there are seven, ask

why does that number feel right to you? And that lead This is a technique rebuttal in its essence because I'm going to now help you introspect and metacognate and I'm going to take a step back, and my role in this is to hold space, reflect, paraphrase and help you do that work because you're going to generate the arguments and counter arguments. I'm not going to copy and paste any of mine into you. And just that feeling right off the bat is like it's it's really fun

to do. Like if you just I think the last movie you watched, like like a top Gun, Maverick, what would you give it on a scale under ten? And like you say, I give it an eight? Like why and eight? I love asking that of people and are asking of yourself because they almost always go, well, that ah, well thing is so powerful. That's a person engaging in a really different kind of thought process than that. Really quick, here's how I feel about it, well you know, I mean,

I mean, I love it. And they start just spooling out what comes to mind. And then that's when the motivational interviewing tricks come in. Like and I shouldn't use the word tricks, but like that's like in that techniques techniques in therapeutic practices, the person wants to change, that's when they came to the to the therapy, but they're ambivalent in some way. They both want to do it and not do it. Whatever it is the thing they're

trying to remove. And so what you do is you encourage them to generate self generate counter arguments in the direction of change. This is also true for a discussion of anything like like you know, flat Earth or whatever. Like you if you want them to go in the direction in one particular direction, ask them to generate counter

arguments on the other side. So like if there are seven you would say, depending on the issue, you would say like one out of six, one out of five, and they start generating arguments from why they're not going that way, which end up being arguments for going the other way, and that as they generate those counter arguments, those are the first time they articulate are those things, and they become counter arguments that wait them more in

that other direction, brilliant. And then if you want to go deeper, that's really as far as you have to go. But if you want to go deeper in something like street of pistemology and deep canvassing, they'll often ask things like where'd you first hear about this issue? Have you ever had any life experiences related to it? They're hoping to generate some sort of cognitive dissonance in there, because you'll remember things that aren't in line with the number

that you gave earlier, and you'll further articulate it. Or if it's a fact based claim, they'll ask after you give all these reasons and justifications, you'll ask what is the method by which you're vetting that these are good reasons?

These are good justifications, And oftentimes a person will feel the fragility of their epistemology in that regard, and you just repeat this as many times as a person's willing to do it, wrap up, wish them well, And I have watched so many of these conversations, and it's wild to watch someone articulate themselves out of what they think. We've probably all experienced that where you're like, did you like that play? We just watched it, and they're like, oh,

I loved it. It's like but and then like, what do you like about it? Like, well, it was good, you know, I mean I didn't really like how this happened. And by the end of it say like, well, you know what I think about it. I didn't really like it that much. Actually, like you could like run some sort of YouTube slider in your mind of like I

loved it, I didn't like it that much. Like that elaboration is very powerful if you can encourage that in other people, and if you disagree about the issue, you can finally get to that point where like, you know, I have a different respective without this, And it's astonishing to me how I can love you and respect you and care about you and we can see this so differently.

I wonder why that is. And exploring the mystery of why we disagree can be done in a way where the other person doesn't feel threatened and you don't have to compromise your values. That's the ideal isn't it. A lot of this, A lot of this is the is ideal. Yeah, I don't see much of it anywhere. I don't think we see much of it in the context where we're doing a lot of our engaging. But I meectually on social me. I'm optimistic that we'll sort it this out eventually.

But I do agree it's difficult to get into this unless you're face to face or or something. Well, maybe people reading your book will will have their own minds changed and will find ways of helping to change other people's minds as well. Really really timely book. Like I think I said earlier as well, really timely book, important book. I really appreciate the work you've done longer than me.

You're on the very few podcasts out there. I say, with all due humility that that's longer than the psychology podcast. I believe you're one of the real true ogs. I view myself as an OG, but I think you're like even the grandfather o G. I think, how many years eleven years? See, I've done it over seven years, eight years, but eleven twelve. I remember when I first entered this space, you were a big model for me, and no very

much so. And Scott, You've been incredibly like super influential my thinking, Like I will never forget when you came on my show, A and I had like a live spiritual awakening moment because our conversation was really injecting me from a lot of toxic self talk, I think, And that was a great chat. I really I really value as a human being. I really appreciate the work you do. Yeah, well, likewise me, it's a mutual admiration in society. It's nice when someone who inspires you to do the work you do.

You know, because I went there seventy eight years ago. Who else was in that space but you and me? It was you, And and to be able to hear such a thing from you that I may have played a role in your own thinking, it really touches me. It really does. So my only I have one last question is where's your pipe? My pipe? Tell you? Isn' there a picture of you? That picture I'll tell you very briefly a one minute story. That picture is of

a musician named Wes Borlaani. I didn't know the backstory many years ago when I sorted you were not so smart, I knew exactly the image. I wanted, want a smarmy person from a certain time period, who's going to look at me condescendingly. And that's what I wanted the image to be. Remember, And I went to is stock Photo, typed in my search and looked and looked and looked, and finally found the perfect picture. I was like, Wow, this is exactly what I wanted. I took it a

little photoshopping been my logo ever since. I found out later thinks that this person has a band called the White Ghost Shivers, that great name. He is out of Austin. They is stock Photo went from town to town in the early days to build up their stock by killing bands. We will give you free band photos if you give us all the rights forever to your the pictures we

take of you. Wow. And that was one of the pictures he took and his audience for it hasn't happened a long time, But in the beginning I kept getting all these messes like why are you stealing Wes's picture? Why did you do that? I was like, I bought it off I stock Photo. I had no idea. So that's how that came about. Oh my god, that is funny, is it? Still the picture. Uh cool, and in the UK version of the book it's the covers. Oh good,

good to know. I think I did know that. Actually, yeah, well, David, thanks again for coming on my show and you're always welcome back. Oh thank you so much, ma'am. I hope to see you again soon me too. Good luck with the book tour. Thanks much, ma'am. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast

dot com. We're on our YouTube page, the Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.