Eleanor Gordon Smith
Appearances
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
Thank you so much for having me. What a pleasure.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
I mean, you've put your finger on a large part of the problem just there, which is that we have this kind of self-congratulatory notion that we are reasonable, that the people who we disagree with are the ones who aren't being reasonable, and therefore we're the ones who must be being reasonable.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
But part of my motivation in calling on us to let go of that thought is that I think it turns out to be really much more complicated than we might have imagined to work out what it in fact is to be reasonable. So we have a lot of
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
pretty simple slogan type ideas about what it might be to be reasonable, things that boil off to pretty simple injunctions like you should doubt more or you shouldn't believe what you've been told or you should be thinking with your brain and not with your emotions.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And these ideas, I think, if you push on them even a little bit, they turn out to be much more complicated than we might have imagined. And those turn out to not be necessarily the best rules for what it in fact is to think well or to change your mind well.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
For me, the interest in how people change their minds is really quite a personal one. And it started, I guess, about three years ago now when I started working on this catcalling social experiment. And basically, the idea was that I would go out. I'm a radio reporter in a previous life. And the idea was that I would go out and take a recorder and a microphone and a certain amount of
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
familiar skills as an interviewer and I would go out and I would try to interview men who cackled me and more specifically I would try to change their minds.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
I would wait for them to yell something kind of vulgar or sexual or crass or you know just the stupid things that men yell when they're hanging out of the windows of cars or they've had a couple drinks and I'd go over and I'd say like come back, tell me what you just said, tell me what you were hoping for when you said it and most importantly tell me what I would need to say in order to get you to change your mind about that.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And this was an idea for the radio program This American Life. We thought it would be a kind of fairly simple mission to try to get some good tape of interactions with these men, a bit of a disagreement. And it turned out to be far more complicated than I thought it would be.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
I have a bit of a background in high school debate and critical thinking and argument construction and those sorts of formal tasks where you spend a lot of time doing rigorous argument construction. So I went in honestly pretty cocky. I felt like this would be...
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
fairly straightforward for someone with my kind of training to be able to pull off it sounds like the hubris on that as I say it now makes me embarrassed and in fact what happened was I spent close to six weeks walking around talking to cat callers and just having no success whatsoever just being unable to get them to understand that they were doing something that most women don't enjoy.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And it really started out for me, this journey into thinking like, when people do change their minds, what is it that manages to get through to them? Because everything I thought could get through to these men turned out not to.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
They said this really weird kind of mash of things. So I actually wound up getting quite different answers to this from different guys. Some of them said that they were looking for a relationship, like they genuinely wanted to meet their girlfriend by yelling something at her in the street. Others of them were a little more like playful about it.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
They would say things like, oh, it's just, you know, like I'm doing it for my mates or I'm doing it to get a reaction or it's just like me being silly. Others of them said it was...
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
While they granted, you know, not something that was likely to get them a girlfriend, at least it was attention and there was some sort of camaraderie that they could get going between them and a woman that maybe then from there they could say something a little more likely to instigate a relationship. So I got this weird, inconsistent mash of motivations from them.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
But one thing they all had in common, which is when I said to them, do you think that women like this? Like, is part of your motivation the sense that women, too, are enjoying what you're doing? To a man, they all said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm totally confident that women are enjoying this, and I wouldn't dream of doing it if they didn't.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
It's so that she can have fun and enjoy the night, which made it all the more peculiar that when I said, hey, buddy, I don't think that they are enjoying it, that they weren't receptive to that.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
You know, I mean, if you have a stated motivation, which is to give a certain kind of person a good time, and then you find out they're not having a good time, well, by your lads, you should care about that. But they didn't.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
Yeah, I mean, I was baffled by it as well. And so that's kind of the next question that I pursued was to say, like, well, what evidence do you have for why you think women enjoy this? And it was really striking to me that the thing they all said was this kind of conclusive proof was the fact that the women that they did this to smiled and laughed.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And that's striking and it really resonated with me because I know that I smile and laugh when men do this to me. And I kind of, I don't like that about myself. It makes me feel quite embarrassed and like I'm capitulating to something that I shouldn't be capitulating to.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
But it's true that one reaction that women can have to feeling frightened or put on the spot is that in order to kind of de-escalate the situation, you do laugh and you smile and you just do what's necessary to kind of get out of there in a relatively frictionless way. So I would try to explain this to these guys. You know, I would say like, Yeah, you're right.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
You are seeing some smiles and some laughs. But let me authoritatively tell you, as someone who also does these smiles and laughs, that they're in fact precisely evidence of discomfort rather than evidence of the fact that she's really having fun. And they just didn't.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
believe me, you know, I would say this over and over to different men and they would all come back with some variation on the theme that I was particularly sensitive and that I couldn't speak for all women, which was funny because it implied that they could.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
It didn't work. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I still, so since then, I embarked on this project, which the book is the kind of final combination of, which was I went out and I spoke to people who really did change their minds. I went to try to find stories where persuasion works and where we are able to get people back to the truth and to better sets of beliefs, I guess.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And I still have a lot of faith in the idea that we can reach each other with rational debate or with something like what I was trying to do in those conversations with catcallers. I just also think that there are a large number of missing ingredients that we can do ourselves a certain disservice by saying, forgetting to include when we set out on these kinds of persuasive missions.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
You know, things like emotional, things like what does this belief mean to you? I think something that I didn't really take into account when I was talking to these cat callers was that I was really asking them to let go of something that was quite foundationally important to the way they saw themselves.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
You know, it was really important to them that they were good guys and that they weren't the kind of guys who would do something that was frightening or upsetting to women. And realizing that you've done a bad thing is a very tricky realization. You know, a lot of us are very resistant to revelations that would reveal, you know, that we've been in the wrong.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And I think that I was not sufficiently attentive to the fact that these guys were basically standing in front of a woman in the street who was asking them to give up the idea that they were basically a good person. And that's really hard.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And if I had, you know, if I had the chance to do it again, I might try to be a little more attentive to what this belief in them was doing for the way they saw themselves.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
So this is the lesson that I've found after spending so many years interviewing people who have changed their minds, is that the process of changing a mind is two things. One, it's really, really complicated and hard to predict. And what works for one particular person won't work for another. And there's a kind of
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
tricky sludge that you can get where you try to pick apart what was it that actually did this significant mind change, like what was doing the work. And the same thing, aside from the unpredictability, is just how amazingly personal it is. So I spent weeks at a time interviewing these people about the ways that they had changed their minds.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And quite quickly, I started to feel like what I was doing was really quite an intimate project. I was learning a lot about what they hoped for and who they loved and how they saw themselves and the ways that they saw themselves moving through the world. And a lot of pain went into these moments of mind changing.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And it made me realize that I think too often we talk about changing a mind in a way which suggests that the mind is not tethered to the person. You know, when you hear the story of someone changing their mind, really what you're hearing is a story of someone who changed their life. You're hearing someone who radically altered the way they see themselves and the world.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And that's a very personal thing. So, I mean, I can answer some of your question by saying that over and over again what worked for these people were things that were quite strikingly emotional, things like who you believe and who you trust and who you love and your sense of self.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
But I also think it's really important to remember that when we set out trying to change people's minds, you know, both the things I just said, namely, It's astonishingly unpredictable and deeply, profoundly personal.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And if we forget that, then we run the risk of doing what I just did with my catcalls, namely just like spinning our wheels and getting more and more frustrated with the fact that we're not making progress while not in fact changing the strategies that we're using.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
Let me illustrate them with some of the stories. So The things that stood out to me in the research were things that were really emotional and really personal. So things like who we believe, as in like the way that we allocate trust in the world, things like how we see ourselves, our own picture of our own identity, the things that we hope for, the things that we wish were true.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
These kinds of things went into the ways that people change their minds in really quite surprising ways. One of the ones that stands out to me is the story of Dylan who left what is functionally a cult. It's a very strict religious sect that has very harsh punishments for people who leave or people who dissent in any way or people who speak to people who are outside the sect.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And Dylan had grown up in this sect. He had spent 20-something years only hearing from people who believed what this sect believed. And he ultimately left the sect. He left the sect kind of quite quickly. It was a matter of like three days when he ultimately changed his mind.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And the path to him changing his mind was really striking in the way that it focused on who he believed rather than what he believed. And here's what I mean by that. So Dylan met his wife, his wife now, whose name is Missy. They met when they were both working in a restaurant. And they had this... astonishing chemistry from the moment that they first met.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And Missy knew that she wanted to be with him. She knew that she wanted to marry him. But she also wasn't a member of the sect. And for her, the thought that Dylan was a member of this sect and would continue to be one was a really horrifying thought. So she kind of privately resolved that she was going to try to change his mind.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
She spent like close to six years doing this bizarre charade where she would pretend to him that she was a believer, that she was open to the teachings of the sect. And in fact, surreptitiously trying to sow doubt in his mind and to get him to start to question some of the things that he'd taken as orthodoxy since he was a kid.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And ultimately what happened was in fact nothing to do with Missy's own project. What happened was something quite different, which was that one of Dylan's elders came to Dylan and said, you have to choose between your salvation and your wife. Like we have thought about it and we think that your wife is a threat to the congregation and we want her gone.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
So you can either stay with her and lose your chance at eternal redemption, or you can stay with us and lose her, but you cannot have both. And Dylan had this moment of thinking, look, anyone who could look at my wife and not see a fundamentally good and loving person who is a wonderful influence on the people around her, must be someone who's capable of making mistakes.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
So for him, that moment was the domino that, you know, the first domino to tip and then it made the others cascade on downwards. And from that phone call, it was a matter of like three days before he was out of the sect forever because what had happened for Dylan was nothing to do with an argument or nothing to do with what he believed. It was entirely to do with who he believed.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And it was the situation where his trust in his wife was so great that
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
that it meant that he could realize that people who didn't like her must be capable of making mistakes and so ultimately what he lost was trust in his elders and it's so interesting to me and so I think like personal and kind of beautiful like it's a it's a it's a weird love story but I think in many ways it's a love story that the thing that saves him the thing that made him see the truth
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
had so much more to do with who he believed than what he believed. And that really stands out to me as a lesson about how we can set out changing people's minds, is that if we find ourselves trying to change someone's mind like Dylan's, often our best bet is to disrupt the trust allocations that people have rather than to try to present them with an argument.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
It is a really, it's a really daunting task. When people change their minds and... have to forfeit the part of themselves that was connected to the old belief. It's almost like a period of grieving. It's a kind of loss. They realize that they have to let go of the way that they've been seeing themselves. And a whole bunch of other things can tumble down with that.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
Things like the friends that you're keeping company or the ways that you structure your time. A lot of that changes when you forfeit a belief, particularly a belief of the kind that you just mentioned, something as foundational to your identity as your politics or your religion. You sort of almost have to help someone find their way to what life will look like after they've changed their mind.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And that can feel really hard because you don't want to help everyone to a new particular sense of self. You don't want to be the one to smooth the transition for every particular person. But I think it's often pragmatically the case that if people have other sources of self to draw on, then they don't need to rely so heavily on this particular belief.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
for me anyway, once I'd done all this research and spoken to all these people who changed their minds and realized just how astonishingly complicated and personal and long the process of changing a mind really is, it generates exactly this question. And I'm like, well, can I be bothered to do that for every person who has a bad belief? And the answer is obviously no.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
I mean, like we just don't have the time, nevermind the patience to do that. I do think though, that that's kind of a useful thing to realize in itself. You know, I mean, we have this
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
climate of public debate at the moment which tells us over and over again that if we only speak to each other more we'll be able to change people's minds and we see this played out over and over again in the political arena where we put people on stage you know one against the other and think that in a certain amount of allotted time we're going to be able to change the audience members minds in anything like a productive way I think it's
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
really valuable for us to reflect on just how difficult it is to really change a mind. And there may be cases where that's worth our patience and there may be cases where that's worth our time.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
But I hope that one thing that the final chapter of the book does is to make us consider that there may be cases where it's not worth our time and where our energy would be better spent dealing with the behavioral problems that result from beliefs rather than trying to deal with the beliefs themselves.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
I think that is the takeaway. And I think what's weird about that is that's something kind of we all already know that deep down. You know, we all already are well aware of just how peculiar it is to change a person's mind. I mean, we know it from when we've changed our own minds.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
Yeah, I mean, I think this comes back to the thing that we started talking about, like, way, way back at the beginning, which is that we are so convinced that we are the ones who are being reasonable. And when you think that, then every divergent belief strikes you as an affront. You know, everyone who believes something that you don't seems to you to be making a mistake.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And it's very difficult to have the patience to just watch someone make a mistake and think that that's fine. But as you say, you know, very often these things can be nothing more than futile exercises in mutual frustration. And if that's the case, well, then, like, maybe we should give up and watch TV together instead.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
You know, I have close friends who have, like, weird conspiratorial beliefs, and otherwise they're completely rational and ordinary people. And yet they have these very strange beliefs about like the truth of the moon landing.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And it's the kind of thing where you can either descend into the quicksand of trying to get them to see reason, or you can think that this is something which is a strange blip in an otherwise coherent person, and it will waste both of our time to try to unpick it.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
I age so much slower and you'll sleep better at night. Exactly.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
Right. I think it's really hard for us to see this because we live in this climate which encourages us so often to be pursuing debate and to be thinking that debate will be effective, i.e. that every time we try to debate someone and we fail, it's our fault. And it means that if only we did something slightly differently, we would have been able to get through them.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
And that means you can kind of spend your life sinking effort after effort. trying to persuade someone and we live in like a very combative time where so much of our political media is structured around argument as entertainment and I think it's really easy to forget in that climate that argument is not entertaining. It's catastrophically boring and it's very often a waste of time.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Something You Should Know
How Things Became User Friendly & Effective Ways to Change People’s Minds - SYSK Choice
The things that stood out to me in the research were things like who we believe, things like how we see ourselves, our own picture of our own identity, the things that we hope for, things that we wish were true. These kinds of things went into the ways that people change their minds in really quite surprising ways.