Changing minds

[Robert Roaldi]

This is tangentially related to some of the "political" discussions that have taken place on these pages. Many have pointed the futility of trying to change other people's minds. It is an interesting topic in an of itself.

This is an interesting podcast from the CBC IDEAS program, a discussion with Ken Dryden and Steve Pinker primarily about head injuries in hockey, but veers more widely into how people make up their minds about things.

The podcast can be heard here: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/from-seat-belts-to-hockey-masks-7-changes-that-once-seemed-unthinkable-1.4580419.

Or, you can download the mp3 from this page: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcasts/documentaries/the-best-of-ideas/. You will need to scroll down to the download link, it is the 2nd or 3rd from the top at the moment, but new podcasts are placed at the top so this will eventually migrate down the page. A text search of either "Dryden" or "Pinker" will find it.

The works of Steve Pinker may also be useful to read for those here who believe that things are getting worse and that we cannot fix anything. A Google search will find his books. He also has a Ted talk, I believe, and there are probably several podcast interviews with him around the interweb, which should be relatively easy to find. Sorry, I don't have those links handy.

[texshooter]

It's easier to avoid people than to change them.  And always have an exit plan lest you go down with the ship.

[Schewe]

This is tangentially related to some of the "political" discussions that have taken place on these pages. Many have pointed the futility of trying to change other people's minds. It is an interesting topic in an of itself.

And one worthy if discussion and research...

At Yale, we conducted an experiment to turn conservatives into liberals. The results say a lot about our political divisions.

In a new study to appear in a forthcoming issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology, my colleagues Jaime Napier, Julie Huang and Andy Vonasch and I asked 300 U.S. residents in an online survey their opinions on several contemporary issues such as gay rights, abortion, feminism and immigration, as well as social change in general. The group was two-thirds female, about three-quarters white, with an average age of 35. Thirty-percent of the participants self-identified as Republican, and the rest as Democrat.

But before they answered the survey questions, we had them engage in an intense imagination exercise. They were asked to close their eyes and richly imagine being visited by a genie who granted them a superpower. For half of our participants, this superpower was to be able to fly, under one’s own power. For the other half, it was to be completely physically safe, invulnerable to any harm.

If they had just imagined being able to fly, their responses to the social attitude survey showed the usual clear difference between Republicans and Democrats — the former endorsed more conservative positions on social issues and were also more resistant to social change in general.

But if they had instead just imagined being completely physically safe, the Republicans became significantly more liberal — their positions on social attitudes were much more like the Democratic respondents. And on the issue of social change in general, the Republicans’ attitudes were now indistinguishable from the Democrats. Imagining being completely safe from physical harm had done what no experiment had done before — it had turned conservatives into liberals.

In both instances, we had manipulated a deeper underlying reason for political attitudes, the strength of the basic motivation of safety and survival. The boiling water of our social and political attitudes, it seems, can be turned up or down by changing how physically safe we feel.

The conclusion of the article and study said:

Our study findings may have a silver lining. Here’s how:

All of us believe that our social and political attitudes are based on good reasons and reflect our important values. But we also need to recognize how much they can be influenced subconsciously by our most basic, powerful motivations for safety and survival. Politicians on both sides of the aisle know this already and attempt to manipulate our votes and party allegiances by appealing to these potent feelings of fear and of safety.

Instead of allowing our strings to be pulled so easily by others, we can become more conscious of what drives us and work harder to base our opinions on factual knowledge about the issues, including information from outside our media echo chambers. Yes, our views can harden given the right environment, but our work shows that they are actually easier to change than we might think.

So...regardless of the difficulty in trying to change somebody's mind, giving up trying only feeds into the narrative that it's impossible–which it clearly isn't given the right circumstance and environment...

(And before anybody writes off Yale as being a bastion of radical, leftist thinking it should be noted that some interesting people graduated from Yale including; William F. Buckley, Wilbur Ross, Dick Cheney, Ben Stein, John Ashcroft, John Bolton, George H & W Bush to name a few from the right–although recently the conservatives on campus have been pretty whiney that they don't feel "welcome" :~)

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... At Yale, we conducted an experiment to turn conservatives into liberals...

Mao Zedong called... he wants his re-education camps back

[Arturo]

I've heard it said that, "A liberal is just a conservative who's never been mugged and a conservative is just a liberal who's never been arrested."

[texshooter]

Mao Zedong called... he wants his re-education camps back

Xi Jinping called to congratulate the effort. Right after banning the phrase "I disagree" from social media. 

https://www.vox.com/2018/2/27/17058074/china-banned-words-jinping