How People REALLY Change Their Minds? (Backed up by Science) | Negotiate Anything

Today's episode of Negotiate Anything.

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Welcome to this negotiation masterclass edition of Negotiate Anything.

With over 1600 episodes featuring some of the world's brightest minds, we've carefully curated three powerful conversations for you.

What makes this so special is that you'll hear how different experts from different industries approach the same challenge in their own unique ways.

Our goal is to give you multiple perspectives so you can build your own unique style.

Success doesn't look the same for everyone.

And in this masterclass, you will see exactly why.

Let's dive in.

Andy, thanks for joining us today.

Hi, yeah, happy to be here.

So how about you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Sure.

So I'm Andy Luttrell.

I'm a professor of psychological science at Ball State University.

I study persuasion, influence, and public opinion.

And I also host the podcast Opinion Science, which features interviews with folks and explorations of ideas all around the idea of public opinion and how our opinions can change and how we communicate them.

This is great.

So essentially everybody.

Andy is the man I wanted to be when I was in undergrad, because my undergrad is in psych.

And I remember, actually, you'd probably find this interesting.

The first podcast I ever started listening to was The Psych Files.

Really, I love that show.

And so I said, one of these days I'm going to have a podcast on psychology.

And so now listeners, you understand why I talk about psychology so much.

And also make sure to check out Andy's podcast.

It's really, really great.

And I want to be clear about my bias.

One of the reasons I think it's great is because I was on the show.

So we'll put a link to both the show and my episode on the show in the description below and to the courses that Andy does as well.

Andy is a friend who is very modest.

So, Andy, please tell us about the courses you have, too.

Sure.

So the newest one is an audio course called The Science of Persuasion, which you can get online and listen to.

And it's sort of a nice course entry point into the psychology of persuasion from all the research that's been done from the very beginnings of this work, where really scientists started to ask the question how do persuasive messages work?

How can they work better?

All the way up to all the kinds of experiments that we're doing today to understand how people can be persuaded and how you could use that information to craft your own messages.

This is great.

Yes.

So links in the description below for that too.

So we are having Andy on the show today to talk about the science of persuasion as it relates to deeply held beliefs and strongly held opinions.

And so when we think about this, I think really...

As psychology nerds, it makes sense for us to start off with operational definitions here.

And so, when we think about these deeply held beliefs, or strongly held beliefs, what does that mean to you?

Sure.

So I will say that I may slip into psychology speak by talking about these as attitudes.

That's sort of the word that we use in psychology, but that doesn't always translate as well.

So when I say attitude, I mean basically opinion, right?

It's just an evaluation you have.

So I have a positive attitude toward my favorite TV show.

It just means I really like that TV show, right?

I have a negative attitude toward other things, and those are things I dislike, right?

Those are my least favorite TV shows, and it goes beyond TV shows.

And so strong attitudes or strong opinions the way that we define them in social psychology is really two things.

One is that that attitude tends to be durable, meaning if I tried to change it, it would resist being changed.

And if I just kind of waited out a while and checked back in, it would be unlikely to have changed, right.

So that attitude was durable.

It was strong.

It lasted a long time.

And the other component is influence, meaning that your attitude influences the way you see the world and the actions that you take.

So if I have a strong attitude toward a politician, I'm especially likely to vote for that person.

My behavior follows from my support for that person.

But if I have a weak attitude toward that person, I may, You know, I would say on a survey that I like this person, but I may not actually do anything about it.

Right.

So a strong attitude is one that is both durable and influential for the choices that we make.

This is great.

And I think it's so important for us to start here, because I think oftentimes we can be distracted by the perceived strength of the emotion behind the attitude.

And so if we think about somebody having a strong opinion about something, we just assume by the amount of emotionality behind what they're saying, that it means that it is durable and influential.

But it sounds like and you correct me if I'm wrong here, Andy.

It sounds like they can be very they can sound very emotional and passionate about something.

And it might be durable.

They might maintain that same feeling one year, two years down the line, but it still might not be influential, in that it doesn't change the way that they navigate the world, in that they don't really do anything about it.

Yeah, it could be.

So I'll reframe that a little bit, which is to say that there's a little bit of a difference between what a strong attitude is and the things that we look for to try and suss out which attitudes are strong or not, right.

So the metaphor I like to use in talking about this is the three little pigs story, right?

So the big bad wolf wanted to, I don't know, break into these pigs' houses.

I don't actually know the backstory.

Yeah.

So one of the pigs' houses was made out of hay, one of them was made out of sticks, one of them was made out of brick.

And so ordinarily we would look at that and we would go okay, based on the building material, I'm gonna make a guess that the brick one is the strong one and the hay one is the weak one.

But we don't actually know which house is strong until we try to blow it down.

Once the big bad wolf comes around and tries to knock those houses down and discovers that one house stays standing while the other one knocks down, only then do we know that one of them was strong and the other was weak.

Right,

We use the building material to make a guess about which one was going to be strong, but until we actually look at what happens, that's when we can say that it's strong.

So I say that, to say that things like emotionality can be a pretty good indicator of which attitudes are strong.

So we had a paper come out this year where we found that in fact, when people hold an opinion for highly emotional reasons, that opinion is way less likely to change when you check back in later.

We did some cool stuff where we looked at Yelp reviews and you can update your Yelp review if you go back to the restaurant.

And so we looked at the language people were using when they wrote their first review.

And then we saw, did their summary rating of that place change?

And we found that the more emotional people's first review was, the less likely their review was to change later.

Right,

And we have this in surveys as well.

So emotionality in this example, it's kind of like the building material of the house, right?

I can look at how emotional you are and make a fairly good guess that your opinion is gonna be strong.

But it's not until I check back in a year later or try deliberately to change that opinion That I'll actually know if it's strong, right.

So it's one of those things that sounds like a very fine distinction, but theoretically it does mean something, right?

Because those indicators of strength don't always perfectly predict strength.

Absolutely yeah, that makes a lot of sense and i think it's really important essentially what it is.

Again, thinking like a scientist, we are generating a hypothesis based on what we observe.

Okay, i see a high level of emotionality.

I'm pretty sure that this is a durable, strong attitude, but until i test it, i can't be actually sure.

And so it's the big bad wolf trying to blow down the house.

Okay, this opinion didn't change.

This is a durable opinion.

This is a strong opinion.

And I'll give another example too, from other work that my lab has done.

Which is probably the indicator of a strong opinion that people look to the most is confidence.

So when people say I'm sure this is the best movie I've ever seen, that sure seems like a strong opinion, right?

Strong meaning that's probably going to be hard to change in that person, right?

And that person's probably going to go back to the theater and see it again, right?

Their behavior follows from it because they say, I'm sure, I'm confident, I'm certain.

We have some studies where we look at this and even though, in general, when people say that they're sure of an opinion and we check back in, that opinion is less likely to change.

The ones that they were sure about are the ones that changed the least, unless you look under the hood a little bit to what that attitude was made of.

Was it one-sided or was it a two-sided opinion, right?

In other words, you can be ambivalent about something, right?

So when you're not ambivalent, it means that I only see this as good.

There's nothing about this that's negative, but I could be ambivalent, right?

Meaning overall, I like this, but I'll be honest, there's some stuff that's not so great.

And so what we find is that certainty was only a good clue to how strong people's opinion was going to be, so long as they were not also ambivalent about it, right.

If they were, certainty suddenly sometimes predicted more change, right?

It's the confident attitudes that were the weakest.

If they were confident in an ambivalent attitude, right.

So again, this is a little technical, but it just makes the point that you'd think certainty is a shoo-in.

You'd go, that's the thing that's going to tell me how strong this opinion is.

And yet, Just like a brick facade, could deceive you, and that actually is a weak building.

A confident attitude might actually be weak under some circumstances.

This is fascinating, especially when you think about changing beliefs and behavior.

Because everybody listening to the podcast Negotiate Anything.

We're talking about how to change hearts and minds, how to change behavior attitudes beliefs, those type of things.

I want to persuade you, and a lot of times what ends up happening is we see a level of confidence in somebody else and that in turn, has an impact on us, and so we say they seem incredibly confident in the way that they are approaching this and they might be.

I might say they are so confident, in fact, that i'm not going to try, or i'm not going to try my hardest, so we're not as persistent in trying to change that attitude or belief when, in fact, that confidence is not the only indicator of how difficult it will be to change that attitude or belief.

Yeah, people's perceptions of persuadability can be misaligned to someone's actual persuadability.

Now, granted, confidence is pretty good.

If you were going to place bets.

Yeah, the confidence stuff is less likely to change, but it's imperfect, right.

And so in some ways, that's a meta point about psychology, right?

We make these bold claims about stuff, but they're all relative and trends, right?

There's...

Hard to find a hard and fast rule of always always, always.

X is true, because there's almost always going to be a case where X is not perfectly true.

Exactly.

No, that makes sense.

Now, let's say we find ourselves in a situation where we want to change somebody's attitude on something, but it is a strongly held belief.

So let's say this is a situation where they are.

We're talking about politics or religion race, concepts of fairness and justice, those type of things.

Those are tied closely to morality.

And so oftentimes those beliefs or attitudes are a lot stronger.

And so how do you change somebody's attitude on something if it is very strong, very durable, very influential for them?

That's the question, isn't it?

How do you do that?

You know, in some ways A criticism of the research on psychology is that it's focused on when people's attitudes are not super strong.

I'm trying to create an attitude, right?

The polar opposite of this is you've never heard of my product before.

I got a blank slate to come in and try and get you on board, right?

There's nothing in there for you to resist because I'm coming in totally clean.

And so there's lots of studies on that, right?

How do you persuade when there's no pre-existing attitude?

And then there's plenty of studies to show that some attitudes are just more open to change, right?

Those for which people are a little more doubtful, those that are not super important to people, those that a person hasn't really ever thought about before.

And so the lessons there are.

You know, most kinds of messages do a pretty good job of getting through to someone who doesn't already have a hard stake in it.

Your question is the big tough one, which is, okay, you already have a view on this issue.

And that view is strong, right?

I know it's strong.

I know it's probably strong, because you say you're sure, because you have a lot of emotion behind it, because you say that it's moral to you.

So I'll talk about that moral version, because that's the work that we've done.

And indeed, just like Emotional opinions tend to be harder to change.

There's evidence that moral opinions are hard to change, right?

These are opinions that people outwardly say, I think this because of my moral compass.

My moral convictions lead me to oppose this policy.

And sure enough, when people say that, they change much less when confronted with new information.

But we started to think well, how much of that is just because the messages that we're giving in those circumstances are just missing the point that this person cares about, right?

This person cares about the morality of the issue.

And so one of the studies that I had done looks at recycling, right?

It seems weird that we tried to persuade people that recycling wasn't great, but it was a very logistically useful thing for us because most people think recycling is wonderful.

Some people think recycling is wonderful on moral grounds.

And so we created a handful of arguments that said, you know, recycling is not that great.

It's really expensive.

That means there's a lot more cars on the road trying to go pick up the belongings.

It's really inefficient because you have to fish through what is and isn't recyclable and it ends up taking more time.

So arguments why recycling isn't perfect.

When people had moral reasons to love recycling, they just didn't care.

They went, yeah, I hear what you're saying.

It doesn't change my mind.

I am morally committed to thinking recycling is great.

The people who liked recycling for different reasons that had nothing to do with morality.

They heard those arguments and they went oh okay well, interesting.

Yeah, I like recycling a little bit less.

I see some of the flaws in it.

And we thought well, is the problem necessarily that moral convictions led people to resist any and all persuasion?

They went, no, I will never change my mind.

Or did our persuasive approach... miss what that audience cares about.

That audience cares about the morality of recycling.

And here we did coming along saying it's expensive and it's inefficient and it takes too much time.

And they go, okay, but I just don't care.

That's not why I support recycling.

And so we had shown that in one couple of studies.

And then, a few years later, we ran the test to really push this to go OK.

What if our message directly grappled with the morality of recycling?

What if we made the case that recycling is not great, and it's not great for morally relevant reasons?

Would that do anything to get through to that kind of audience?

And sure enough, that's what we find.

So if we use those practical arguments, just like before, we show that people who are morally committed to recycling were not convinced by pragmatic arguments, but give them moral arguments, reasons to think that recycling could cause harm.

It could actually do harm to the environment.

It could do harm to wildlife.

It has these negative moral implications.

Now, all of a sudden, the people who were morally committed to recycling were no longer as resistant as they were before right.

And so this is a case where speaking directly to the basis for what made the attitude strong to begin with can be a way to move forward.

By acknowledging the actual underlying reason why those attitudes are strong, could be a viable road forward for coming to terms with attitudes that normally are resistant to communication.

That's fascinating.

And it seems as though, if we think about this in a literal sense of different languages, it's almost like this is what's happening.

And so we were speaking the language of pragmatism to somebody who was speaking the language of morality.

I cannot understand that because it's a different language.

And here we say, all right, I'm going to speak the language of morality.

More specifically, I'm going to speak your specific moral dialect.

And so some people have different moral convictions on the same issue.

But this person, for example, is saying, I'm in favor of recycling because...

I have a moral conviction to do what I feel is best for the planet.

And so you say, all right, my moral language now becomes what is best for the planet.

And so now you're creating an argument that speaks that specific language, and now they're more open to it.

Is that a fair synopsis?

Totally.

Yeah.

And it's one sliver of a huge swath of research and persuasion on the value of speaking the audience's language, getting to the heart of why the audience cared about this issue to begin with.

Because again, you could talk and talk, and talk, and we're so good at saying why we thought this thing was good.

That we don't always go like, wait, why do you think it's good?

Or why do you think it's bad?

Oh, okay.

Well, my reason to like it won't, you won't care.

I need to figure out why you resist it to begin with.

Then we can start to make some inroads, right?

And so in the political realm, as we've talked before, right these different moral dialects.

Some folks care a lot about moral issues of harm, right.

Who's being harmed?

Who can I care for?

How can I protect the well-being of people?

Other people care more about just doing as you're told, right?

Fitting in. abiding by the rules of your society.

That is what is moral.

And so those two perspectives can be at odds with each other until you take a second to go.

Oh wait, a minute.

Yeah, your moral compass can be different from mine and will never get anywhere until I acknowledge that.

Absolutely.

No, I think that's really, really helpful.

It's really helpful and it makes it a lot easier for people to understand.

And one of the things that we have to recognize is that people might listen to you Andy, and they say OK, I need to speak their moral dialect.

I get that.

Some of the things that that makes persuasion so difficult is the fact that we don't want to do that, even if we know it works, because we almost feel as though it's a moral concession on our part to speak a different moral dialect.

Yeah, either either people don't understand that there are other moral dialects out there.

Or as you say, you go, no, I can't live with myself if that's the argument that I make.

And you know I mean as hard as it was to try to convince people that recycling was bad.

It's another thing even to do that with arguments that you go like.

That doesn't even make any sense to me, but it's going to make sense to someone else, right?

And you know I've talked with students about this too before which is like, especially when you think about diversity and inclusion type things and like how do we get people to get on board with programs that are going to even the playing field, acknowledge historical disparities?

You'd go, I don't want to make concessions.

I don't want to pat some groups on the back and go, it's okay.

You'll be fine.

Because some of that resistance to these programs is like well, wait a minute, my group is going to get left out now.

And it's like, oh, no, no, no, everyone's going to get included.

And I've had students be like, I don't, that doesn't seem right.

Like, do we really have to reassure people that they're going to still be included in the conversation?

And my pragmatic take is whatever it takes to accomplish the goal is, is the communication strategy that is important right.

It's a means justify the ends sort of thing when it comes to persuasion.

I may not love that, this is the way I have to pitch this, but if it's going to be the thing that gets people on board with this program or idea, that to me, as a totally subjective perception, strikes me as just the pragmatic choice.

Absolutely.

And I know it makes a lot of sense.

And again, it comes down to pragmatism.

It comes down to what your major goal is.

Is your major goal to feel good about yourself or is your major goal to actually get something done?

And sometimes you have to do something that you don't want to do in order to get the outcome that you want.

As a married man, I know that sometimes I have to do things I don't want to do.

Take out the trash, you know, all these little things.

But I understand that's what is necessary to be part of a healthy, functioning family and have a great working relationship with Whitney.

You know, and so I think that's the question that we have to ask ourselves.

What's most important to us?

And it's tough to be able to step outside yourself in that moment.

But if we think about it again, trying to think about it pragmatically, the emotional discomfort we could maybe even describe it as dissonance that we experience when we use a different moral dialect is limited to ourselves.

Because, when you think about it, all right if the outcome exists outside of ourselves, but the discomfort exists within ourselves.

And I feel as though, in the situations where I've had to speak a different moral dialect, things started to feel a lot better when I started to see the outcomes that I wanted to have.

And so I want you to speak to the idea of dissonance and whether or not you think that's an appropriate term to describe it.

What do you think?

Because I have never once thought of it that way and we are beta testing this as we go.

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Yeah, there's a version of it that I could see being dissonance.

And I also haven't thought of it quite that way that the method I'm using not the point I'm making, but the method I'm using could result in dissonance.

It's a testable question.

I don't know if we know that.

I mean we have, I've got some evidence from some studies that we're still working on which I think are interesting and potentially relevant.

Which are when?

So, just to backtrack,

There's a long history of research showing that we like people more if they like the same things that we like, right.

So if we share our opinions, we'll get along fabulously.

If we have the same taste in movies, we get along really well.

If we both agree politically, we're more likely to get along than if we disagree politically.

Even if we both agree on coffee versus tea, we get along a little bit better.

But...

I had always wondered like, how far does that really go?

Like what if, and so the background for this is, as a longtime vegetarian, I always think about this, where you could be vegetarian for many reasons, right?

You could do it for your health.

You could do it for the environment.

You could do it for animal rights related reasons.

Some of those are more morally relevant than others.

So if I'm a like, moral vegetarian, right?

I've made this choice because it aligns with my moral values.

And I meet someone who also is a vegetarian, I should go, we're best friends.

Immediately, you know, because we agree on this thing.

But if I'm a morally driven vegetarian and someone else is a vegetarian for health related reasons, we find in circumstances like that that that punch of agreement doesn't go so far.

We go, I know we agree, but we agree for different reasons.

And so it's almost like, do we even agree at all?

On the surface, you'd go, these two people would get along.

But you go.

But actually under the surface it's a conflict which is sort of like what you're saying of.

There's this I'm attentive to the reasons why we do things, in addition to what it is that we're doing.

And so potentially there could be some dissonance where I go.

It doesn't feel right to be best friends with this person, even though they look the same as me on paper.

I know under the surface that our reasons for being this way are different.

That makes a lot of sense.

I think about it as...

I don't want you to just do the dishes.

I want you to want to do the dishes.

But that doesn't make sense.

Well, and so you know this has implications again for you know I have another foot in the diversity and inclusion world and psychology of prejudice, which is we want organizations to adopt policies that further the diversity of their company, right.

Should we care that they do that for profit-motivated reasons, right?

You'd go, I'm an activist.

I want to make change.

And you'd go as long as they say we're going to adopt this policy and implement it.

I should be ecstatic.

I shouldn't care why you're doing it.

And yet I get the feeling that in cases like that people go – you're not doing it for the right reason, right?

You're doing it for the wrong reason.

So can I really celebrate it if it's for a reason that I'm not super on board with?

And I would go, I mean, kind of, if it makes the change you're looking for, then that's great.

But sometimes we feel like, no, no, no, I don't only want this.

I want it for these reasons.

Exactly.

And I think that's one of the things that we have to recognize in a lot of these serious moral dilemmas that we find ourselves in as a society.

A lot of times the policy change or a pragmatic shift precedes the subsequent moral shift.

So, for example, when you think about Loving vs Virginia, the interracial marriage case out of Virginia, where at the time there were strong attitudes against interracial marriage

But since that Supreme Court decision those attitudes on a societal level have changed significantly.

And it's an example of Policy changing and then beliefs, behaviors and attitudes changing as a result down the road.

Same with with integration with Brown versus Board of Education.

Same thing.

A lot of people were against integration.

And then the attitudes have shifted as time has gone on, and so a lot of times we might have that um, there might be somebody who says no, i don't like the reason why you're making the right decision.

They might feel that way, but i think there's a little bit of consolation that says sometimes the uh the, the mind has to lead the heart in these situations.

Yeah, a couple other good examples.

One that I love is the work that Eric Heyman and others have done.

Eric Heyman was on my podcast so you can look at the episode.

Something, something geography of bias is what we called it.

And they had this cool paper where they were following legal decisions related to same-sex marriage in different states.

So this was at a time same-sex marriage laws independent of one another.

They sort of rolled out over time.

And they had access to this huge amount of data on people's implicit biases related to sexual orientation all over the country.

And they were able to show that, if you look state by state at the moment that a state legalized same-sex marriage, you started to see a decrease in implicit biases against gay and lesbian people in that place.

So this is another case where The law, the change, the societal change had to implement a policy and then hearts and minds followed.

Another favorite example of mine comes from Sweden.

There's like this paper that nobody's ever cited in Sweden.

And they were looking at seatbelt legislation, right?

So there was like a time it boggles my mind a time when seatbelts were not, were not required by law in cars.

And it was a policy that people thought was stupid.

They were like, I don't want to wear a seatbelt.

That sounds crazy.

It's not going to do anything.

It seems uncomfortable.

And then the government said, well, we're doing it.

Now seatbelts are the law.

And then when you look at the public opinion polling, all of a sudden people are going oh yeah seatbelts, they help promote our safety and they're not that uncomfortable.

And all it took was going, we're just going to do this thing, guys.

We're just going to implement this.

And all of a sudden people go.

Well, I might as well be okay with this, because I have to do it anyway.

Or I see the norms around me, and that is going to push me to think about this somewhat differently than I had before.

This is great.

Andy, I feel like I could talk to you forever on this topic, which means you are certainly going to come back on the show, my friend.

I really appreciate this.

But before you go, can you remind the listeners about your podcasts and your courses as well, and how they can get in touch with you?

Totally.

Yeah.

So the podcast is called Opinion Science.

Esteemed guests, including Kwame, have been on.

And yeah, so most of those episodes that I've done so far are interviews with prominent social scientists, political scientists, social psychologists, communication scholars and communicators whose professional lives involve shaping opinion or just communicating opinion.

We had a film reviewer on in the early days, someone whose whole job is expressing their opinion about something, and so it's really just an excuse to talk to both people that i know and and don't know and learn about a bunch of cool work on the psychology of how we see the worlds and how that changes and how we talk to other people about it right, and so occasionally we do special episodes, like we did a big dissonance episode, so we talked about dissonance.

Episode 20 is that cognitive dissonance episode.

We trace the history of it.

We talk about what dissonance actually is, what it does, talking to the movers and shakers in that theory.

And other episodes like that are on the way.

So you can find that at opinionsciencepodcast.com.

Follow us on Twitter, Facebook at OpinionsciPod and on all the major podcast platforms.

And the courses, the online courses.

You can find information about that at opinionsciencepodcastcom as well.

Fantastic.

Andy, thank you so much, my friend.

Really appreciate it.

Sure.

Yeah.

Super fun.

That was the first part of today's masterclass.

Up.

Next we'll hear from another expert with a different approach, giving you even more strategies to add to your toolkit.

Let's keep it rolling.

Pam, thanks for joining us today.

Thank you for having me, Kwame.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you.

So how about you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Absolutely.

So my name is Pam Marmon and I founded a company called Marmon Consulting, which is a change management consulting firm.

We help companies transform.

I have been in this space of change management for over a decade, working with Fortune 50 clients as well as smaller startups and nonprofits.

And I absolutely love the process of transformation that leaders guide their organizations through.

I'm extremely passionate for it, and I'm so delighted to have this conversation with you today.

Yeah, and we're excited to have you.

Rumor has it you have a book that's come out recently.

Yes, I just published a book called No One's Listening and It's Your Fault.

It's a book on communications and helping leaders understand how do you lead your organization through a large transformation to get your message heard.

Because oftentimes leaders struggle with that concept of communicating and making sure people are engaged so that they can launch a large initiative successfully.

Today, the three things that we want to focus on.

First, we're talking about the origins of resistance, and then we're going to talk about mindset shifts that we need to make in order to be successful, focusing primarily on the belief that change is difficult.

I think that's so cool.

And then we're going to actually talk about, at the end, talking about behavior change.

What types of things do we need to do and say in order to actually change the behavior?

Yes.

So oftentimes we as people have been taught that change is hard.

Right.

And so this idea that change is difficult leads us to resist it because of this belief.

And so I'll just throw out a couple of different reasons why people resist change. status quo.

And so the moment you introduce change, it could potentially shift the status quo of the person.

There could be a threat of the security or a loss of control, or maybe there's some inconvenience or some failure that is associated with the change.

There could also be a lack of trust, maybe trust in the organization, trust in the leader, concerns about the work itself.

So if you're introducing something new and you're asking people to do something different, There may be a skill set also, a new skill set that they have to learn, or just unfamiliarity.

So, as we think about the different reasons why people resist change, I guess you could summarize it in terms of loss of power.

In some sense, there could be a loss of control.

There could be a loss of socialization, a level of unknown that you would have to overcome, the financial stability, and then also perhaps, a loss of knowledge, which knowledge is power?

And so if you are shifting the way people are doing their work, you could potentially be asking them to let go of something that they're very comfortable with and know very well and embrace something new that they have to learn.

Yeah, this is great.

And when we think about it from a psychological perspective, we know that people often conflate familiarity and safety.

Familiarity and what is good, right.

And so, when we're trying to take these initial steps toward making changes and recognizing these barriers, the sources of resistance, where do we even start?

Yeah, so that's a great question.

And I think we need to look at the behavior.

So what's associated with some of those behaviors?

Sometimes the resistance is active and sometimes it's passive.

And so we as leaders need to be able to understand, recognize what is resistance?

What does it look like?

What does it sound like?

And be able to evaluate, am I seeing resistance in my organization and my people?

Or is there something else that I need to address?

So, for example, active resistance could be just violence.

Or maybe there's a reduction in the work and so they're not performing.

People are not performing to the level.

Or hostility within team members.

And so oftentimes we see that under elevated stress.

We see hostility come up.

Or just people not responding to emails or not showing up to meetings.

Those are symptoms of active resistance.

When we think of passive resistance.

This one is a little bit trickier, because oftentimes it's people withholding information.

So maybe they're coming to the meeting, but they're not disclosing everything.

Maybe they're holding back.

Maybe they're not confronting people, but they're also lacking some productivity there as well.

Maybe they're not attacking an individual, but they're not supporting the change.

So their behavior is not following or they're nodding their head.

Yes, everything sounds good.

But then you go live with this initiative and there's no action taken.

So those are some of the passive and active resistances that we see in the workplace.

It's very important that leaders are able to recognize what would resistance look like.

And then, prior to launching a large initiative, how do you mitigate that along the way, so that you don't come to a point where it's too late?

You've built a system, you've opened up the new process, and then nobody is following through.

Right.

Oh, this is great.

And I love the fact that you really pushed on the preparation.

You have to anticipate resistance.

And I think a lot of times people make the mistake of thinking that their idea is just so brilliant that everybody's going to get on board.

And it doesn't work that way.

Yeah.

And everybody will get on board or I don't care if anybody gets on board.

And I think that's even more dangerous because, As a leader, our role is to be able to identify who is impacted.

So who are the impacted stakeholder groups?

To what degree are they impacted in terms of process technology people, so a skill set or something like that?

And then for the stakeholder groups that are highly impacted.

This is where we layer in extra communications, extra support, extra engagement, extra training that they need and guide them through that journey so that, when you do go live with a large initiative, you've overcome a lot of those barriers.

Right.

And I like that we're not looking at the organization and the people within the organization as a monolith.

There are going to be people who are going to be impacted in different ways, and different people are going to need different types of persuasion.

And again you, You can't allow yourself to be surprised by that reality in the middle of a conversation.

And for the listeners, if you haven't yet downloaded your free negotiation guides, there's going to be a link in the description.

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So you're not surprised.

And going back to active versus passive, this is a really interesting point, because it almost seems as though we would prefer to have active resistance, because at least we can see that, because it's hard to solve a problem if you don't know, it's there.

Exactly, exactly.

And so to me as a change leader, I think...

Because if you don't see it and it's not expressed and there's a culture of putting down resistance or shying away from conflict or shying away from negotiations, you go on this journey to a point where there's a point of no return now.

You're launching it.

It's about to happen.

Yet you fail to engage people and to bring them along that journey.

And if there is a place where there's a give and take, really with change, there's a give and take.

We're going to take something away from you.

We're going to give you something else.

We need you to embrace. it or whatever it may be, we have to be mindful of the people.

And we can't forget that there are individuals involved who are motivated by different things, yet not quite different.

So if I is really fascinating as we think about change.

On one hand, people want to know what their purpose is.

So they want to align to something big and grand and a beautiful vision that they can support.

They want autonomy.

They want to be able to be given the freedom to do the work that they need to do as they see best.

And then they want to master that work.

They want to be really good at it.

And so, if we couple motivation theory with resistance, with negotiations, with change like, it is such a beautiful space that we can truly, as leaders, help our people.

If we have this mindset that change is not hard with the proper process and this is what I talk about in my book with the proper process, change is not hard.

And it comes down to our ability as leaders to listen.

And that, to me, is such a key component of what I practice, because when we, as leaders, become good listeners, tap in and understand one of these people, what they need from us, what we can offer to them,

And this is the space of that negotiation that is truly beautiful because it doesn't have to be a win-lose.

You could have a win-win and frame it and stage it well throughout the duration of the change.

Right.

And what's really interesting about this is because when you talk about listening, we're not just talking about listening in terms of what people are saying with the active resistance.

We're also talking about listening to what they're not saying through passive resistance.

Exactly.

And one of the activities that I do with organizations that launch large change is It's called the Readiness Assessment.

And essentially, the Readiness Assessment is a set of interviews with highly impacted stakeholders.

And I walk through a set of questions, including role of the leaders within this organization.

Who are the influencers?

What could resistance look like?

What behaviors may surface?

What's the level of change saturation in the organization?

All of that, along with potential training that may need all of that.

When you bring it together and you look at holistically, how do we stage this change so that it's effective and so it sticks?

It really helps us to be well-prepared as leaders, to listen to the organizations, to hear what has worked in the past, what hasn't worked in the past and how can we improve.

How can we do this better?

And the part about engaging people never fails.

There is always this hunger and this need for people to participate participate in the decision making, participate in the design.

That ownership that we expect from people stems from us being able to give them that accountability which truly comes from decision making, because it's hard to hold somebody accountable to a decision they didn't make.

Isn't that the truth?

And so listening is critical, absolutely critical in this entire process.

This is fantastic.

And so for the listeners who are listening only on audio Pam, you can see a big smile when you said that.

I think that is the five-star quote of the episode.

So, listeners again, if you find something very valuable out of this, just leave us a five-star review so other people know that there is some good stuff in there.

And we can share the knowledge.

And this was this was fantastic.

I feel like I almost want to spend the rest of my time on this first point.

But I think it's important to transition because this next point is really important.

The mindset around the belief that change is difficult.

And we started to touch on this, but I want to dig deeper into it.

So tell us a bit more about what you mean by that.

Yeah.

And I've noticed over the years working with leaders that we have bought into this mindset that change is hard.

And so when we believe that change is hard and we start to behave like change is hard and this is something that is so dangerous for us as leaders, because the moment we accept that change is hard, we start to plant seeds of discontent and fear in our organizations

But if we believe that change with the proper process, change is not hard, that we can overcome any potential challenges that come way, we start to behave like that and leaders model behavior.

And so this is a critical component that I'm so extremely passionate about.

I have noticed that there's a significant amount of fear when it comes to change.

Fear from organizations and fear from individuals, whether it's in the workplace or at home.

There is fear.

And I want to help people because I truly believe that when we overcome the fear and we address the essence of why we fear change, which is, as we talked earlier power control, all of these things, then we can proactively mitigate it and we can catch ourselves.

And we're aware of our just mindsets of how we think about the world.

And we can stop that behavior.

We can stop those thoughts and we can redirect them in a positive way, so that we can get the outcomes that we want.

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This is fantastic.

And it sounds almost as if the belief that change is difficult serves as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Exactly.

And so if you walk into it thinking this is going to be hard, people are not going to like it.

We're going to have so much trouble launching this work.

Yeah, probably.

You're right.

You will.

But if you walk into it thinking, you know, we have a good idea of how we're going to do this.

We don't know all the right answers, but we have smart people that we work with and we care about them and we care about engaging them and we want to empower them to be part of this process.

We want them to be successful in the future.

We want to equip them with the right tools, not just our own interpretation of what success would look like, but for every single stakeholder.

That makes sense. play a little bit of devil's advocate here.

So how do we reconcile the potential of creating the self-fulfilling prophecy by believing change is more difficult than it actually is?

And then the other side of the other extreme, which might be maybe not recognizing the pitfalls or challenges that could be coming your way.

How do you balance those two things?

Yeah.

So I balance it with the proper processes.

And so if you have the process and you trust the process and the process works, then you can put in place the elements to lead to that successful outcome in itself.

Without the proper process, without the tools, without the activities,

But if you put healthy practices in place, such as leaders are engaged, leaders understand what's changing and they're able to advocate it across their different departments, so across the organization, that is a healthy activity to do.

If you can align on the vision, that is a healthy thing to do.

That's part of the process.

If you can identify the proper communication channels so that you're doing push communications and pull communications.

So push will be in the form of emails being sent out and a pull communication would be discussions and conversations and those organic dialogue that has to happen within an organization.

That is a healthy process.

And so I walk in the book.

I talk about this, the process of putting all of these things together so that you can be successful.

And you're not blindly walking into a transformation thinking all is well.

That is not wise.

But if you can assess where the potential pitfalls, both organizationally and also within that project, you can truly prepare for them.

And I guarantee you it will not be perfect be much, much better than if you hadn't done the activities themselves.

This is great.

And I think especially that last point that you made there about the fact that there will be some challenges.

I think that's really important for people to understand because a lot of times when we make the mistake of underestimating the amount of resistance that we will face,

When we do face that resistance, we say, wow, I'm failing.

I'm done.

I quit.

And so an important part of the process is anticipating the resistance, feeling it and saying OK, great.

This isn't something that's a threat to me.

This is more information that I need in order to be more effective in utilizing this process and moving forward.

Absolutely.

And sometimes it's systematic challenges that we face.

So the challenge and, as you mentioned it, it's so easy to say well, my project is failing, therefore I'm failing, therefore I'm a failure.

That is not true at all.

We don't want people to think that they're failures, because I know that we have good listeners on your show who want to do good work.

What we want to be able to do is step back and say what are the systematic challenges that we face in our culture.

Is there a culture accepting of decisions and how decisions are made?

Is there a culture holding people accountable?

Is there a culture OK with us telling people what to do, or do they prefer not to be told what to do and kind of figure it out on their own?

And then troubleshoot and continuously do that throughout the duration of the work, so that if something is not going down the proper process, then you can address it early on.

I do want to highlight, and when it comes to resistance, there's a really great book that I love called Beyond the Walls of Resistance by Rick Maurer.

And he talks about three different categories of resistance.

You have the intellectual, you have the emotional, and then you have the personal.

So with the intellectual resistance usually falls under this bracket of, I don't understand it.

And typically we address that with communications.

So you don't understand what the concept is of I don't know, that doesn't sit well with me or whatever.

Oftentimes, what we have to do is create space for people to process, and you or I don't trust the company.

That one is the hardest one to overcome, because if there's broken trust within leadership, what we have to do is rely on the help of other leaders to bring the organization along.

And for the leader that is mistrusted to take ownership of their behalf.

So I thought that was a beautiful way as we think of resistance, kind of at that level of intellectual, emotional and personal to just to categorize what we see in the workplace and to help leaders understand.

What tactics do I use, based on the type of behavior I'm observing.

This is great.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

And in your experience working with companies and, of course, confidentiality in mind, what was the biggest challenge for you persuasively?

Oh, what a great question.

I have worked with some incredibly smart organizations, really gifted people, people truly gifted, who are doing incredible work.

And the biggest challenge with organizations that I have faced is this need for every voice to be heard and every opinion to matter and every decision to be socialized at every level.

And that's challenging because it's difficult to move a, And so one thing that I recommend to leaders is let's think of ways that we can create engagement throughout the duration of the project without giving away necessarily the decision making rights.

And because that's important to leaders to to own those.

But we do want to be able to tap into the individuals throughout the duration of the work so that we don't surprise them.

And then they don't feel like this happened to them.

This is what we want to avoid change happening to people.

We want them to feel like they may change happen.

And so when we think of control what's internally, what we can internalize in terms of what is within my control, we want to put people in that position of feeling like they're in control.

This is great.

Yeah, makes a lot of sense.

And with the time remaining, because I know you have a hard stop, I want to move on to the third point, which is behavior change.

And we again, this is great because we've been touching on this a little bit.

But what are the differences now, when we're talking about behavior change on the micro and macro level?

Yeah, great question.

So we can talk about what leaders can do.

So, as leaders, what's within our control and what we can do as we look at different changes happening in the organization, we need to be mindful of change saturation.

And change saturation happens when we do too much change.

I don't advocate for that.

I think it's dangerous, but I do see a lot of ambitious leaders who want to bring on a lot of change at the same time.

So what we as leaders can do is stage the change as much as possible so that our people are not bombarded with too much change, because at some point they will shut down.

So that to me is a very important leadership skill that we can do.

The second thing that we can do is just pushing out communications or creating beautiful PowerPoint decks.

Talk to people, have a conversation with people, because I think this is where the true, rich dialogue happens when people converse.

Oftentimes people think that they communicate via email and it's so effective, but the reality is email is probably the least effective communication channel that we can leverage.

And it's very popular, but it should never be the only thing that we do.

So, if we want to change behavior, for ourselves and our people, make sure that you're engaging people through various different formats of communicating.

And then the last one would be around resistance.

So being able to recognize what does resistance look like within my organization?

How do I mitigate around it?

How do I address it when it comes?

So how can I proactively prepare for resistance and anticipate it, because I guarantee There is no change that goes 100 as planned.

It just doesn't exist.

So I think that's another mindset that we as leaders can embrace.

I will face resistance and it will probably look like this.

And this is my plan to mitigate it.

All of these things are important.

And then on the macro level, as we think about the organizations.

When we have strict rules about everything, and this is more around the culture of the organization we demonstrate lack of trust.

So there are strict rules about everything.

People are sensing that you don't trust them.

That's why you put all of these rules in place.

If you have unnecessary bureaucracy in your organization, that will lead to increased politics.

If you have burdensome processes that are heavy, that will lead to slower speed.

And if we pull ourselves out and say, as leaders, what is my role?

Certainly, on the macro level, we can talk to people, we can mitigate risk, we can help manage the change.

But on the macro level, if we can help the organization to allow people to flourish in their gifting in the right place so that they're thriving, that has significantly more impact long term for the organization.

I think this is where leaders truly get to add value to the people that they serve.

Makes a lot of sense.

And I really like that point about where there are too many rules that signifies a lack of trust.

And the people who are find themselves under that regime.

With all of those rules, they don't feel empowered.

And exactly who are placing these rules in place.

They clearly don't have a lot of trust or faith in the people's ability to operate without strict controls.

And so let's say hypothetically I don't think there are any of these in my audience, of course, but hypothetically if there is a leader who likes to have those strict controls and they may have gotten some feedback in the past

About the tight reins that they have on people.

What are some things that they can do internally?

I'm talking psychologically emotionally, to help them feel more comfortable releasing a little bit of that power to their people.

Yeah, that's such a great question.

So I would say the first thing would be awareness.

Oftentimes, leaders are just not aware that they're doing certain things that are holding back their people.

And so how do we get awareness?

Certainly through feedback from other people, but also through reflection on ourselves as leaders.

Have we been guilty of micromanaging people.

And also when we think of control, how much control do we exert on people's work, or how they do the work, or what it looks like, or if we're giving directions, but vague, and then we expect certain things to look a certain way.

All of that is really important, as we reflect on our own behaviors and then we gather feedback from our people to you know, so that we can actually resolve ourselves or release ourselves really from certain behaviors that are not helpful for the individual.

That's great.

And circling back to the concept of change saturation, I think that that's the first time I've heard those two words put together like that.

And it makes a lot of sense because if you overwhelm somebody with too much change at one time, you're going to have a point of diminishing returns.

And what's interesting in all of this is that there's clearly science behind everything, but there's a lot of art and a lot of finesse around it.

You have to blend the art and the science, and it's going to be a lot of feel.

And so sometimes you might have an ambitious plan.

But let's say you are aware of the concept of change saturation and you say to yourself I don't want to push too far, but this should be just right, just in that Goldilocks zone.

But then you realize people aren't handling this very well.

Now, how as a leader do you adjust your strategy while still saving face?

Yeah, so empathy has a lot to do with how leaders respond, because leaders who are empathetic and listen to their team, team members and especially right now, in everything that we're facing, the layers of complexity and the layers of change for individuals are enormous.

At home, parents who are homeschooling their kids, all of a sudden not being able to connect with their teams in person and all of the remote work that's happening and just how our world has shifted has added a level of just mental capacity that people are hitting.

And so what's important and my advice to leaders would be have those honest conversations with your team and just ask how are you doing?

Where are you at?

How are you balancing your responsibilities and the demands that we've put on you?

And where you can help them address any issues, Any levers or anything that would be holding them back from performing to their best level, certainly around workload, if you can, or performance, or if there's any help that you can get for individuals, I think that will be really helpful.

But empathy is truly the key. to demonstrate that you as a leader care about your people.

You care about where they're at and you want to meet them where they're at.

And it's very likely, and this is very important, leaders are people first, they're employees first.

And so leaders also go through that process.

And what we see is this rush, like we just want to rush people through the emotional piece.

And we forget that leaders are people.

And at the end of the day, they have their own change curve that they have to overcome.

They have their own burdens that are heavy on them that they need to address.

And they need the space and the proper way to address the mental heaviness that's on them as well.

Yeah, makes sense.

And you know what, after hearing you talk on this specific issue, I feel as though you should write a book.

Number two.

Absolutely.

I just want to I really want to help leaders overcome the fear of change.

And I want to help them see that it is within their power and within their ability to to lead organizations successfully through transformations and through change.

And with the proper process, they can do that and the proper tools in place.

They can find success and they can alleviate some of that resistance or the pain that people could feel if the change is not done well.

Right.

Yeah, this is great.

So, listeners out there, if this is something that you are struggling with right now or you're just curious, I'm genuinely curious about this topic.

This is great.

So check out the book Pam again.

Let them know about the book, what it's called, where they can get it, and so on.

Absolutely.

The book is called No One's Listening and It's Your Fault.

Here's a copy of it.

You can find it on Amazon.

And also you can reach out to me through LinkedIn or marminconsulting.com.

Fantastic.

Pam, thank you again for coming on the show.

We appreciate it.

Thank you, Kwame.

Thanks for having me.

You've just heard one powerful perspective and now we're moving on to the next.

A fresh voice with a new angle on the same challenge so you can keep expanding your skills.

Let's dive in.

David, thanks for joining us today.

Man, I'm so happy to be here.

This is really cool.

How would you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Sure.

I'm a science journalist, author, person who makes things that you can consume on the internet.

I'm in that category of people. i have a podcast called you are not so smart and a couple of previous books you were not so smart you're now less dumb and um this latest book how minds change so i typically write about psychology neuroscience social science political science basically brains minds culture that sort of thing and uh that's just what i do okay so i i have to ask now so with the the name of your podcast what inspired the name of the podcast I it's such a security business story.

The I was I went to school for for psychology.

I switched to journalism at some point and I had gotten into a place where I was no longer writing the stuff that I got into journalism for.

I moved up in the world and was teaching people how to operate computers, the back end of social media, and that sort of thing, as a social media guru person in television news.

And I really missed writing for a living.

I really missed writing in general.

And I'd got into a number of arguments with friends about different things or just long road trip type things where I would bring stuff out of psychology, the things that I was most interested in.

It was always dealing with reasoning, decision making, especially studies like the one where you have somebody on a college campus ask for directions.

And then the person who's talking to them, there's funny steps between and they switch places.

And usually they are holding up like a big sign or something and that obscures the switch.

And then the person just keeps giving directions to this new individual.

And then on the back end, they ask, did you notice the change?

And about half the time people don't notice.

And I just, all of this was very fascinating to me.

And I thought about it would be neat to start a blog about it.

And that was in those days of having blogs being a thing that people would do and start.

And I did that and it was going okay.

Just a small audience.

But then I got into an argument with my friends about which was better the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 360, and we got to that level of Argument where it felt like maybe we'll never talk to each other ever again, and I was so fascinated by how emotional And I just had access to the University Library.

I pulled all the research into identity, brand identity, the brand loyalty, and I wrote a post about it.

And that was what kicked off my entire career in this world, because that went viral and I eventually got a book deal out of it.

The idea of the blog, I wanted a title for talking about this type of content and I

I attribute 85 of my early success to just having a title that nobody had taken yet, called You Are Not So Smart.

That feels like you're being insulted by this inanimate thing.

And then you get into it.

But the writing style was never like that.

The writing style was very unity through humility.

The you I'm talking about is also me.

It's all of us.

And the title came from, I think it was Jon Stewart.

He kept doing as a punchline or as a side, he'd be like, ah, not so much.

And I just thought you are not so smart would be a good title for something.

And it ended up being a great title.

And it's carried me all the way through now.

This is great.

I love that.

I love that for a number of reasons.

So, like we mentioned beforehand and the listeners probably know this by now because I say it proudly on every episode of this podcast

So people think I get into negotiation because of my time as a mediator, my time practicing law and things like that.

But really, it's the the this love of psychology that gets me there.

I love this.

And when people ask, why do you like psychology?

I say humans are fascinating to me because I think we're the only animal that can regularly overestimate how smart we really are.

And the fact that we don't realize just that we're not as smart as we think we are.

It makes people ripe for persuasion.

And we have to understand that about For ourselves and for others too, because once you come to that, that humble realization is, like you know, my brain has some like some faulty parts of it.

Like this is just the one of the beautifully imperfect things about humanity.

And that's OK.

I can treat myself with a little bit of grace.

I can treat others with a little bit of grace.

And I don't overestimate that. what can be achieved in these conversations, you know?

And so I really love this because again, that common understanding, that humility, I think that's really really powerful.

Yeah.

If there were, like two principles and you're not so smart it's You're unaware of how unaware you are, because I love that in those studies like the person switching study the people were very adamant.

No, that did not happen.

And if they had never been debriefed, they would have never known if the rest of their lives had taken place.

So I love that aspect of it.

You're unaware of how unaware you are, which leads to you are the unreliable narrator in the story of your life.

And so those two principles are the twin pistons of my obsession in this space, because I'm I felt like if it was true for that study, it was probably true in so many other domains.

And it's the undeserved confidence in our perceptions and our thoughts, feelings and memories, even in our emotional responses to things that all became deeply, deeply fascinating.

And it also It makes me feel more connected to the shared family of humanity, in that this is something that we all experience, whether or not you realize it.

And I find that really compelling.

Absolutely.

Absolutely. a tiny shift in the conversation to talk about how minds change.

Because when you think about our purpose of the podcast, we define negotiation very broadly.

Anytime you're having a conversation and somebody wants something, it's a negotiation.

So really every single human interaction.

You see how I'm slowly bringing us back to psychology with this.

That's great.

This is our motto.

This is our approach with Negotiate Anything.

And so a key part of this process for us to understand, in order for us to become more effective negotiators, better in our relationships, better communicators in general, is understanding how minds change.

And, you know, as psychology nerds here, I mean, that is almost.

Believe me many times in writing this book, I considered you know, maybe I'll just go in the woods and make canoes.

Maybe I'll just start a pancake YouTube channel where I tell you about all the pancakes of the world, because you very quickly – just the phrase, how minds change.

I thought –

I thought this would be a project where I look into the literature, I spice it up, I make it easier for you to understand, get some jokes in there and then tell you what I read.

It's a pop psychology book.

It is not that.

It ended up being almost six years of work.

It's almost all on the ground.

I visit Westboro Baptist Church.

I visit people who've left cults and left conspiratorial communities.

I actually spend time with the scientists.

I go to activist groups.

And the reason it went like that is because I

The very first question I had was just, what does the phrase mean, how minds change?

And as soon as you start trying to unravel that, you're like, well, then what is a mind?

What does it mean to change your mind?

And I'm like, oh, wait, there's 2,000 years of philosophy.

And if there are books in philosophy about every word in that sentence, there are 200 books in philosophy about every word in that sentence.

So that's already daunting.

I was like, well, let me just talk to one scientist.

And I talked to Jim Alcock, who studies belief, and he had been studying it for 45 years.

And I remember this being the inciting moment of how the book actually turned out, which was I was like okay, old journalist trick.

What is a belief?

Just pretend I'm five years old and explain it to me very simply.

And he just leaned back in his chair and went, oh, yeah, that's a tough one.

And I felt my bones turn to ice because –

I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

You can't say that stuff.

You're the guy who studies belief.

And I, I asked him why was it hard?

And he he said, because I've been studying this for 45 years, I can't give you a single definition of this word belief.

And that's when I knew it couldn't be the kind of book I thought it was going to be.

And instead I changed direction and said okay, I will go spend time with people who have changed their minds in drastic ways and and people who've left cults pseudo-cults, religious communities ideologies, conspiracy communities and so on.

And then I will take their stories and take what they tell me and I'll take that back to researchers and say what do you see here?

And that ended up actually opening up all these doors to oh, I didn't even know the question I was actually asking.

I had sold an idea for a book, but the actual book that I was going to write was nothing like I had imagined it would be.

And So I ended up going into how minds change, but also why they resist and all sorts of things related to group psychology.

And eventually about page 200, we get into straight hardcore persuasion.

Because the most surprising thing in the whole process was I found all these different groups, street epistemology and deep canvassing and smart politics and so on.

And then also found therapeutic communities like motivational interviewing, cognitive behavioral therapy and so on.

All of these different groups, most of them were not aware of each other.

If they weren't scientists, they weren't even aware of the science underlying what they were under, depending what they were doing.

Yet they all had the exact same techniques, basically.

The techniques even were in the same order if they were listed out in bullet points.

I was like, this is something.

This is something I did not expect and didn't know about.

It felt like if someone was building an airplane for the first time, the very first airplane, it didn't matter where they were going to build that on Earth.

It didn't matter who did it.

It was going to end up looking like an airplane, because you're dealing with the same forces at play, the same physics.

This is what an airplane has to look like on Earth for it to fly.

I found that was true of the persuasion techniques as well.

These are the persuasion techniques.

This is what will work, because brains work in a certain way.

And then i want to understand well, okay then why is that so?

And i was able to fall into all sorts of neat stuff we could talk about, like from the interactions model, the truth wins model, to just neurons and so on.

So yeah, i come to you with wow, what a weird project i didn't expect i was going to get into, and i learned more about um, I changed my mind about how minds change.

In putting this thing together,

Because I do remember before I started this project, I was doing a lecture.

And after the lecture someone came up to me and she asked my father has fallen into a conspiracy theory.

How do I get him out of it?

And I remember telling her, you can't.

And that was my position back at that time.

And I deeply regret that.

I feel very ashamed of it.

But I knew, as the advice was coming out of me, that I didn't know enough about this topic to give that kind of advice.

And there was a pessimism and cynicism that unnerved me.

And That was part of what got me interested in this topic because I already had a podcast about it.

I could ask them experts.

And then, at the same time, the beliefs and norms around same sex marriage in the United States around the time that she asked that question flipped very dramatically.

And when I looked at the polling at the time, 60% of the United States, they were against it.

And then, of course, there's a longer timeline there.

Especially if you've been involved in the activism, it's much longer.

But as far as polling was concerned, it was the fastest flipping public opinion ever recorded at that point.

And I was like, clearly there are forces here at play that I'd like to understand.

And that's what got me into the entire topic.

I don't know if I answered any questions there, but I wanted to sort of lay some of the groundwork for you.

Oh, this is fascinating.

It's so fascinating.

A number of things kind of stand out in your response.

You talked about pancakes and you talked about cults, two things I'm fascinated with.

There's got to be a cult.

There's got to be a pancake cult out there.

Listen, let's start it if there isn't one.

So, yeah, this is funny.

I haven't told anybody this, but a couple of Saturdays ago, when I was making pancakes for my family Saturday morning and I wanted something to entertain myself and you know being who I am I said I wonder about the psychology of cults.

And I was just looking into it because I think about the like, the ultimate persuasion that that's got to be it persuading somebody to join a cult and then persuading somebody to get out.

So I wanted to get into that.

And so it's really interesting that this is that's something that you focused on, too.

And in my, my book that's coming out, I quote Neil deGrasse Tyson where he says I'm going to butcher the quote but he says You know, whenever you add humans to the equation, things go non-linear.

And that's why physics is easy and sociology is hard, because when you put people in there, everybody's unique.

And then it's hard to understand what, why communicating and trying to persuade somebody in this way for this person works, but for this person it doesn't work.

But what I find that's so cool about what you've discovered after this year is these years of research is that you found communities that didn't know of each other, that have found a sequence to persuasion and influence and changing minds that matches each other, even if though, even though they are different in terms of objective, in terms of ideology and location, but there's still that commonality.

And I just want to really impress upon the listeners how important and how remarkable that is.

Because whenever we start with the psychology and we can identify essentially the psychological blueprint that's at play in these interactions, then we could reverse engineer, negotiation and communication strategies to solve the problems that we're facing.

So starting off with the psychology is so critical, and then moving to how to change minds this is, this is great.

So i guess, to make it really practical for the listeners when we, when we talk about this sequence to persuasion, what are some of those commonalities that you found?

Sure, let me set it up by a couple of psychological principles that i think are important.

One is the, the How do minds change in general?

The framework I prefer is something out of the old research of Jean Piaget.

It's called assimilation and accommodation.

Assimilation is whenever we encounter novel ambiguous, uncertain information, we will try to fit that information into an existing model, to make sense of it, to give it context.

And that's assimilation.

Whereas accommodation is acknowledging that The novelty and the ambiguity can't be resolved perfectly, which suggests there's something incomplete or incorrect in the models we've been using to make sense of things and it needs to expand to accommodate.

A good way to make sense of this with something that's not so full of psychological terminology is When a child sees a dog for the first time, it asks what is that?

Or you're having a conversation like you would have with a child.

You say, yeah, dog, dog, dog, dog.

And then something happens in their mind that's very categorical.

Non-human, furry, walks on four legs, tail.

These are all things that seem to say, these are perceptual groundwork, for this is the category that I'm trying to make for this thing I'm experiencing.

Later on though, they might see a horse, and they would have to love when children do stuff like this.

They'll point out and go dog.

But if they're very advanced, they might be like big dog.

So what's happening there is an attempted assimilation.

This seems to fit the category.

I already have.

Non-human, walks on four legs, furry tail, seems like dog.

And if you say no no no no, that's a horse.

The child must create a new category in which both the dog and the horse can fit.

And there's going to be something, even if they haven't quite our articulated it.

It'll be something along the lines of creature or animal.

So they literally must expand their mind to accommodate.

Okay, we need a new category to fit these multidimensional things of experience.

So you and I are doing this in this conversation.

Everyone's doing this at all times.

Every time we encounter anything new, we assimilate and accommodate back and forth, back and forth.

And that's the engine of how minds change.

After a certain point though, after doing this for a while, we would much rather assimilate than accommodate, if we can get away with the, Because our models become so complex, it's easy to find a way to interpret just about anything.

As another example of what I already understand

And you have to be something really outlandish for you to feel like, oh, I have to accommodate here.

You open the door to your house and there's just a bunch of snakes playing in a marching band and going around in your living room.

You're going to be like OK, I don't.

I clearly don't understand the world like I thought I understood it.

But you would, of course, attempt to assimilate at first.

You'd be like, okay, somebody's playing a trick on me.

This might be a hologram.

Maybe I'm having a hallucination.

There's all these things that fit into your previous understanding of the world.

But if you're denied that over and over again, you eventually have to accommodate.

So this means that When we already have a built in level of resistance when it comes to if there's a someone out there who is not coming in through our perception, but it's another human being who is suggesting OK, here's how things actually work.

Your model is incomplete or incorrect.

We have a built in level of resistance to that because we're going to try to assimilate what they're telling us.

We're going to try to fit it into our existing understanding.

And that resistance gets stronger and stronger and more and more intense the more motivations we carry with us to not update our understanding.

And the strongest motivation you're going to have is to not be ostracized or shamed by your most trusted peers, because we're social primates.

And as the great Brooke Harrington, a sociologist, told me when I was researching the book, she said if there was an E equals MC squared of social science, It would be the fear of social death is greater than the fear of physical death.

So when we feel like our reputation is on the line, our status is on the line, our image is a trustworthy individual among peers.

When that's on the line, it's the strongest motivation we'll have is to maintain that.

And in the end we'd rather be a good member of our group than would be correct.

Quote unquote on anything.

So you're dealing with many levels of resistance and there's a baseline resistance in there.

And when these persuasion models that we were talking about come into play.

This is something they all acknowledge up front.

And that's why the step one of every single one of them is establish rapport.

And it's a really easy catch-all phrase.

It's a very suitcase term where you open it up and the clothes explode everywhere, because there's a lot in that.

But the idea here is you need to assure the other person that you are not out to shame them, even if you privately and correctly feel like you should be ashamed.

You really – you are wrong factually, morally, politically, and this –

There are many things that we would like to change people's minds about where you're putting harm in the world.

But if you communicate to that person that they should be ashamed for what they think and feel, it's over.

The persuasion attempt will fail because they will respond with something I'm sure your audience is familiar with with reactants.

And there's a huge body of research into reactants.

It's one of the most fundamental things you learn when you're training to be a therapist the you put you, you push, they push back, you push back harder.

They push back harder feedback loop.

It's over.

And you, I'm sure we've all experienced that.

Uh, if you've ever been a teenager or talk to a teenager, you know what reactance is, which is Hey, you should do this because I want you to do this, as the way, is the other part of the phrase that you, because i want you to think this is what is on the other side of that.

You should change your mind, because i want you to change your mind.

You're, you should uh, believe this fact, because i want you to believe this fact.

It comes into the negotiation frame because you're suggesting that you want something and you're not asking them what they want, and reactance emerges from that.

Because we are very, as social primates, we're very concerned with agency.

We're very concerned with being uh, Being put into a corner where we're not able to pick and choose and think and feel as we would with our own volition.

And it's very easy to generate that.

And on top of it is this feeling of I better not say think or feel something that's going to ostracize me.

It's going to get me kicked out of my group.

And so the establishing rapport phase is very important.

Stage one is established rapport.

And I think if you wanted to get out of all this psychological terminology and say OK, but how could I think about how that would work in a way that makes sense to me in a one to one interactions and so on.

Like you're watching a movie, you're like, this is pretty good.

Like it's like you're watching Top Gun Maverick and you can't wait to get out and talk to the other person.

And when you get out of the movie theater, you're like, what do you think?

And they're like, oh, that was a piece of shit.

And you're like, oh, oh, no.

And you have that feeling.

Hmm.

I was totally sure that I saw this, the way I saw it was the way to see it.

Now I have another person who sees it a different way.

And when you have rapport established with someone, you don't feel the reactance feeling of okay, I need to have demolished my friend.

I need to destroy them in every way and show them that they're wrong.

And they don't feel that way about you either.

What you instead feel is like, oh, why did you think that?

What do you feel about it?

And then they'll ask you the same thing.

And you start to merge a little bit and Venn diagram a little bit, because your inclination when you have a rapport established with someone is I don't want to face off with you.

I want to go shoulder to shoulder with you and look at it together.

And that's what you're trying to encourage in that first step is, hey, I respect you.

I think you're a smart, capable human being.

We may disagree on this, but I'm interested in why we disagree.

I'm not actually interested in changing you or myself in any way pointedly.

What I'm curious about is like how can we both be smart people who care about this issue, but we don't see it the same way?

And I wonder if you'd be interested in exploring that with me.

That's the first step.

And that's the most important step.

Yeah, I agree 100%.

And it's so funny because when you think about the psychological language and the research that we're talking about and everything, it's so fascinating that it all comes down to build rapport, which seems fascinating of understanding the um, like what the first step is.

But then when you get an opportunity to listen to an expert like you explain the psychology behind what makes this such an integral part of every persuasion endeavor, it makes so much more sense and changes the way that we do it.

Because i think a lot of times people say, all right, i read a million books, they said i should build rapport.

Okay, i'll build rapport, i'm going to check my box.

It's essentially perfunctory.

But now we're saying no, I need to do this with intentionality.

I need to do this with the goal of the person seeing me walking side by side along this learning journey with me, so we can learn about each other.

We can we can empathize and that empathy is reciprocated.

And I want them to feel as though we're connected and on the same team, and understanding the psychology that substantiates the value of rapport changes the way that you go about building rapport.

Absolutely.

And I totally understand for certain issues.

This is this seems like, oh, yeah, cool.

I want to be a good, empathetic, nonjudgmental listener.

That's great.

We all I can I know for some issues, it's so easy.

But for the from the people that I learned this from initially deep canvassing.

These were people in the LGBTQ community who were going door to door, talking to people who hated them, who wanted to take away their rights, to prevent them from having rights.

And they had to accept something which was difficult for them to accept.

And I see this as being very difficult for almost everyone who first approaches these techniques.

For a lot of the things we care about in this world, things that matter to us.

The people whose minds we want to change are people who we don't want to afford that empathy.

And it's very difficult.

I totally understand.

There are people who I can't imagine...

We're extending a hand to and saying, I see you as a fellow human being, even though we disagree.

When the issue we disagree about is my own humanity, or the issue we disagree about is the harm that you're causing me and my family.

But if your intention is to change their mind, the jagged pill here is you must establish a rapport where you don't generate reactants and push them away, or you won't get the opportunity to do step two three four five, six.

And that was something that was very difficult for them to do as well.

And they developed their technique through going door to door and asking people why did you vote against this issue?

Why did you vote for this issue?

And what they were surprised to learn was, even when the person on the other side knew that the person they were speaking with was somebody who was in the LGBTQ community, they were very eager to talk about the topic.

And in talking about the topic, often just listening to the conversation.

They would change their own mind because you were holding space for them to think about it in a way they'd never thought about it before.

So it's odd that you could reduce some of these steps, some of these techniques, down to just two steps, the first one being build rapport and the second one being hold space for the person to work it out.

But the The building rapport stage, I just want to acknowledge a huge caveat.

I understand anyone who listens.

It's like I don't want to talk to somebody in QAnon and give them you know, I don't want to go to the reptilians.

I don't want to talk to somebody who's in a racist or anti-LGBT community and give them space.

I don't want to talk to a white nationalist who was like, I could really cause a ruckus.

I don't want to give that person space to work things out.

I totally understand that.

I just wanted to acknowledge that these techniques do work, and they work because that is so difficult to do in one way.

That person is expecting you to come in hot and they're ready for it.

And they're like, I can't wait.

They're like the person who walks around behind in the bar around the pool tables.

They can't wait for you to bump them because that's what they're looking for.

And when you don't, and you start opening space for them, it's incredible that that person starts to shift their own attitudes and even if you don't do much work.

So I just wanted to put that out there as a caveat.

I totally understand when people want to push back against the idea of offering building rapport with those with which we don't just disagree, but the disagreement is over us.

That's a really important part of it.

Yeah, 100%.

And I was smiling smugly throughout what you were saying, because I'm upset that we did not cross paths earlier, because you have given were like voice to some of the things that i felt like i had to create from scratch for my book, and i was like man david said it more eloquently than me, so i'm a bit annoyed on that part.

But you're absolutely right because when it comes down to what it takes to build rapport like the skill set behind it everybody has what it takes to effectively build rapport.

It's not hard for us to build rapport with people that we agree, with people that we like, we do that naturally.

But the thing is when you're having one of these really tough conversations and you're trying to change somebody's mind on something that is very, very important you talked about the social issues.

My upcoming book is how to have difficult conversations about race could be a difficult.

Just any type of negotiation we're having where it's a big deal for me there's a lot on the line, a big deal for you, there's a lot on the line and it feels like our, our goals are antithetical to each other.

But the reality is that The major barrier that we will face as individuals really comes down to the fact that in the moment, we will not feel like doing what we need to do in order to establish rapport.

It's not that we don't know how to do it.

It's that we will have some emotional resistance to doing it in the moment because we don't feel like they deserve it.

Whatever the fact might be,

In order for us to be able to actually execute on this, we have to get in the right mindset.

Based on your research.

How can somebody get to that point where they're willing to make that emotional sacrifice, to hold space and build rapport with somebody who has beliefs that you might find immoral or improper?

I feel you completely on this.

It's a very difficult question and i i have to always lean on the expertise of those who've gone before in this world, and that the the incredible people at the los angeles lgbt center, the leadership lab, dave fleischer and his team, who develop deep canvassing over time They – because once they had developed deep canvassing to discuss same-sex marriage was the original topic.

Then they moved on to talking about transgender rights, and then race and then so on, and then moved into the last presidential election.

They had to acknowledge – they had to have something called cognitive empathy, which is a little different than regular empathy in that –

And I talk about this at length in the book, by using the dress as the example to get you there, which is a long topic.

The dress that some people saw as black and blue and some people saw as white and gold.

The short version of that dress story is the reason people see that differently is because They've either spent a whole lot of time in their lives around things that have been overexposed in sunlight, or they've spent a whole lot of their time in their life around things that have been overexposed in artificial light.

And sunlight is mostly in the blue spectrum.

The sky blue spectrum and then artificial light is mostly incandescent, mostly in the yellow side of the spectrum.

So that photograph is completely ambiguous how it's lit.

But it is overexposed.

And the brain will go, okay, I know it's overexposed.

I want to reduce the overexposure so you can see it better.

I'm going to assume it's overexposed in sunlight, if I've had more experiences in my life around sunlight.

I'm going to assume it's overexposed in artificial light, if I've had more experiences in my life around artificial light.

It is all of that without your knowledge.

All you get is the outcome of all these processes.

That's what arrives in consciousness.

And if it wasn't for the fact that social media is social, people who saw the dress differently might not know they saw the dress differently.

That's why it became so viral because people are like, what do you mean?

It's black and blue.

Are you nuts?

I'm looking at it.

I am looking at it.

I have no choice but to see it the way I see it.

And people who saw it the other way were like, what do you mean?

It's white and gold.

I have no choice but to see it the way I see it.

You're asking me to deny the truth of my eyes.

What they were unaware of were that there are all these things that take place in the domain of visual priors that lead us to disambiguate the ambiguous in a way that makes sense to us.

But you're never aware.

You're disambiguating the ambiguous because it never seemed ambiguous to you in the first place, because you only get the result of the process.

There was a model for this in neuroscience called SURF-PADD.

And the CERF-PED model is substantial.

Uncertainty in the presence of ramified or forked prior assumptions will lead to substantial disagreement.

It's a very fancy way of saying when you don't know what you don't know, you see what you expect to see.

When you encounter something ambiguous, you would disambiguate it based off of all of your previous experiences.

And I'm talking everything the way you visually mentally, emotionally see, The way your culture has shaped you, the lack of experiences that you could have had, all those things when you're in a moment of uncertainty or ambiguity, will cause you to resolve it by leaning on those priors.

And the person on the other side who's doing that may be doing it with a completely different set of those things.

And you both arrive at what feels like the truth.

But you don't realize there could be a different version of the truth, until you meet someone like that.

So all of a sudden, this person is a grand opportunity for you to notice this.

Like you could step off of that and go, hmm, I wonder why we see it differently.

Because you can imagine an argument with the dress.

If two people are like, I have to convince you that there's only one way to look at this.

What you're actually doing is denying yourself the opportunity to understand why you disagree.

You're denying yourself the opportunity to see why you even see it the way you see it in the first place.

The only thing if you enter into a debate frame over something like that.

The person who wins the debate is the person who learns nothing.

And if you want to win that argument, all you're going to win is assurance that the way you see it is flawless in some way.

So I say all that to answer your question, in that At NYU, where they developed this SERPAD model, they discussed this concept of cognitive empathy, which is different from the empathy in the sense that it is exactly what Dave Fleischer and his team at the LGBT Center of Los Angeles were trying to get across to me is that they had developed that as well independently, that they started to recognize that these sexist racist, homophobic people were experiencing what felt like the truth to them without their knowledge, that they were disambiguating in any way, and that they had been influenced in any way, that they had any kind of received wisdom.

It did feel to them in the moment, there was just the outcome of the processes in their brain.

And they looked at it more as an opportunity.

It's like, I can step in and give them the chance to see for this for the first time.

And generate an opinion on this matter, that is.

It's okay if, at the end of this conversation, they have an opinion that isn't mine or we disagree, but I want to give them a chance to actually form their first true opinion on the matter.

And so that's how they developed their deep canvassing technique is I'm going to give this person a chance to see that it could be seen.

Not only can this be seen differently, but the way you see it is influenced in a certain way and is motivated by certain things.

And I'm going to do that in a way that doesn't generate any kind of resistance and reactance.

And you'll get a chance to evaluate.

How do you feel about this?

How do you see this?

Does this align with your values?

Like they give people they're actually giving people a service in a way.

And that's how they reframed it. to, that's how they were able to say, I can be empathetic.

I can be cognitively empathetic with this person without being okay with how they think or feel about this issue.

And in so doing I can offer them a space to okay.

I'm giving you a chance to form your first true opinion about this.

And if at the end of that process, your true opinion is, oh, I still hate you.

Then I'm like, all right, fine.

I walk away and you, that's how you are.

But I gave you the opportunity to feel differently and they have an enormous rate of success with this.

People almost never do that.

They, they.

I've watched so many other videos where you could.

If you, it was like if you, you probably experienced this, where you ask somebody Hey, what'd you think of the?

I'll use the movie example again.

Like, Hey, what'd you think of the movie?

It was great.

Like, what did you like about it?

Like, oh, there's this.

I mean, it wasn't so much.

And you can hear somebody like working it out.

At the end of it, they're like, well, I guess it wasn't that great.

If you had like a little YouTube slider for your friend, it would be like, it was great.

Well, I guess it wasn't that great.

It was great.

I guess it wasn't that great like, giving people space to introspect in that way often gives them a chance to form an actual, true opinion.

The knee-jerk response is rarely the actual thing that they would feel if they took a chance to look at it.

And a lot of these persuasion techniques, that's almost all there is to it.

You're giving a person the opportunity to truly introspect, metacognite and evaluate in a way that gives them a chance to go okay.

Well, this is how I do feel about this issue.

It I was repeating received wisdom.

I was trying to fall in line with a social group that I was worried about becoming ostracized from.

It's really astonishing that, if you see it in that way, it starts to become a lot easier to approach the people who truly wish to do you, harm or hate you or look down upon you or hold some sort of opinion about something that's poisonous to the world, that could cause, you know, from climate change to flat earth.

Like it gives you a chance to say okay, what i'm offering this person is not the kind of empathy that goes along with.

We're going to be chummy, chummy friends, friends after this.

It's a chance for you to actually reevaluate how you see this for the first time, and i can do that by holding space for you.

Oh, there's so much good here.

And so I'll start off with some quotes for A&I that jives completely with what you're saying.

So our motto is we believe the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations goes in line with what you're saying.

This is a pin that I'm writing that down with.

I'm glad you like it.

Because again, we're seeing that there's something bigger that we're moving toward.

It's not just the conversation.

There's something more.

And I love the fact that we talked about the mindset, because that changes the whole way you approach it.

This is a fight between good and evil.

Then amongst other things, it makes it much more difficult.

It makes it impossible to establish rapport.

You can't establish rapport with somebody who you think is an enemy who's evil.

I mean, that's hard to do.

Right.

And then when you think about the mindset to just saying, hey, this is a service.

OK, cool.

So if I don't see you as an enemy oh, that helps me to to maintain my emotional stability throughout the interaction and i'm not running so hot so i can actually stay in the conversation a little bit longer.

Because, at least in my experience, if i'm very, very emotional, then my patience goes down the like.

The amount of time i can allocate high level focus and stay in the flow state is very low in that.

So it's, it helps me to be in a better mindset and then also saying, if i'm here for you, a service for you, essentially almost like like therapy lights to a certain extent, allowing you to wrestle with these.

Yeah.

So I'm giving you space to wrestle with this.

Again, it changes the way that I show up in this conversation because I'm working with you.

And you talked about introspection and giving them the ability to metacognite.

And so metacognition is thinking about thinking.

And so the person is not going to feel comfortable doing that with you unless they feel safe.

Again, they need to be vulnerable with you in that moment.

And if they think, okay, during this process, I'm going to contradict myself a number of times.

And that's one of the things that's really interesting about human cognition.

We're just filled with contradictions.

And so in that process, I think of myself in these difficult conversations as I'm not Kwame.

I'm not your friend.

I'm not your enemy.

I am your internal voice and I'm helping you think through this in a way that you haven't thought through.

So, those quiet conversations you should be having with yourself late at night as you wrestle with these existential questions of humanity that you haven't done, i'm here with you, i'm going to help you think through that, i'm going to be your internal voice, you know, and and it helps them to wrestle through that and a mistake that people often make at this stage early because again, what we're doing is we're just building rapport, giving space and allowing them to come to the conclusion themselves.

People like to jump in.

You're letting them say what they need to say and then giving them space to explore that themselves.

And likely.

If you ask the right questions in the right way, give enough time, then they come to a different conclusion themselves.

And it goes back to, I think it was the book by Lax and Sabinius, Negotiating in 3D.

They described negotiation as the art of letting them have your way.

So you sit back and you let them turn the tables on themselves and they say, you know what?

David didn't change my mind.

But after talking to David I started to see the world a little bit differently.

That's right.

You're nailing it all the way because this is one of the most important principles of therapy.

I was astonished at how many of these persuasion techniques were very similar to motivational interviewing, which is one of the most robust therapeutic models.

Uh, in motivational interviewing a person comes in.

It was, it was study at first, it was for the for alcoholism was mostly directed alcoholism, but it's used for a variety of things today.

But the person usually comes in.

They have a change they want to make uh, but they keep returning to the behavior they would like to extinguish and therapists were noticing that they were.

They kept uh Somehow in the conversation.

The person would leave more likely to do the thing.

They came to therapy to stop.

And they started studying, well, what am I doing that's causing that to take place?

And they started calling it the writing reflex, which is what you were talking about.

The person comes in and says, I want to stop this behavior, but I keep wanting to do this behavior.

And then the therapist will say, you know what your problem is.

You need to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And the person's like – they go straight to the teenager mode.

It's reactants.

They're like, oh, now you're telling me how to live my life?

There's an expletive, expletive, expletive.

So even though they came there for somebody to tell them how to live their life, they couldn't get over the fact that it's like being burnt by a stove.

This is something that the body responds to physiologically.

It's in our makeup.

We evolved to – push away from stuff like that.

Reasonably so, because you're just like oh, this is the unhand me, you fools feeling, you know.

Because what's the next thing that I ask?

What's the next thing that I ask me to do?

Then eventually, you know, I'm, you know, in their basement.

I don't want, and they're feeding me oatmeal.

I don't want this.

This is so, it's good to stop here.

You know, this is stage one of that.

This is how we react to it.

But what they started doing instead was something that's in all the persuasion techniques that I researched.

Most of them have a couple of steps.

A lot of them have steps before this, but they get here very early.

The street epistemology is mainly about questioning people's fact based beliefs.

It's very subtle.

It's something like, you know, is the earth flat?

Is karma real?

Things like that.

Whereas deep canvassing is much more attitude based.

Like, how do you feel about same sex marriage?

How do you feel about critical race theory?

That sort of thing and smart politics is basically is almost always about things that have already become super, super polarized, um topics that have become so politically charged that people feel an inclination to react to it a certain way, just hearing about it for a second.

But they all usually arrive like in, in motive, in street epistemology.

They ask for a very specific claim to get to the next step and then, In deep canvassing though, they typically jump right in.

And I'm saying all this to get to the step that, if I were going to reduce these to two steps, there's build rapport.

But then the next step is this beautiful framing.

And I've used this so many times and I love it.

If it's a very broad topic, you can talk about a person's intent.

So if it's like, let's say it's who they're going to...

Let me rephrase that.

You can think about the person's intent.

So if it was like a vaccination, you say, how likely are you to vaccinate the future?

So that's a good way to do it.

If it's a very broad topic, if it's something more specific, like is the earth flat, you can just say like, what is your specific claim when it comes to that?

And you can get something kind of carve something out of it.

Like the idea, the belief that the earth is flat is actually can be divided into a thousand smaller beliefs that are foundational to that belief.

Either way, you want to get to this step of, And we can use my movie example again, which is OK.

So Top Gun Maverick.

You know, if you were like give that a number like, like if you were a movie critic, like zero to 10, what would you give it?

Most people can very quickly land on a number.

They'll say something like, you know, I give it like an eight, maybe seven or eight.

Like, OK, let's say eight.

Why does that number feel right to you?

Now, all these persuasion techniques have some version of that, where they ask people to quantify it in some way which gets you out of the yes, no for against is good is bad binary dynamic.

And it makes it very difficult for you to go into the debate frame because now we're in some other frame.

This is a frame where I'm asking you, how do you feel about this?

And I'm not even suggesting that you're right, wrong.

I'm not suggesting I'm going to even counter you.

I'm like, yeah, why would you give it an eight?

What do you think about, like, why does that feel right to you?

And you can.

A person will start to, and you can do this to yourself, like well, and then they'll start producing reasons.

And this is one of the most important things I have in the book, which is there's several chapters before this where we talk about the psychology of reasoning, which is you.

It's important to note that in psychology, reasoning is not the same as in philosophy or in logic or the big R reason.

We're talking about propositions and something along the lines of something you might learn about in a philosophy class or a debate class.

In psychology, reasoning is coming up with reasons for what you think, feel, and believe.

And usually they're in the form of justifications and explanations.

That's all based on something called the interactionist model, which I go into really deeply in the book.

This evidence suggests that we evolved to produce arguments using one set of cognitive mechanisms and evaluate arguments using a different set of cognitive mechanisms.

And we tend to produce the most lazy and biased argument we can up front.

And then we depend on the conversation or the interaction with other people to offload the cognitive labor to sorting out what's the best argument in the pool.

You can imagine it's like three different people on a hill, like we imagine three proto humans on a hill looking in different directions and they're trying to make sense of should we go down and should we go hunt somewhere, and Each person has a different view of the world.

And so they already have a different perspective they can offer to the other two.

And they also have different experiences.

Going into the situation where one person is like I don't think we should go hunting down there because there might be bears down there.

Because they were attacked by a bear when they were four years old.

And there's another person who's like, oh, I would love to go down there.

I would love to go hunting in that region.

But this person's 18 and they've never had a lot of experience.

They say they've never been attacked by a bear.

And then you're in the third person.

You're like okay well, this person's all the way this way and this person's all the way this way, but they are offering good advice, which gives me an opportunity for me to make an even better decision than I would on my own, and I can offer something in the pool.

So there's a lot of evidence that goes into this.

There's a great literature into this.

There's a book I recommend everyone get, called The Enigma of Reason, by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, which goes deep into the interactionist model.

And the research is really clear on this.

People will.

If you give a person a chance to like answer a very difficult question and you show their answers to them and you trick them into thinking that their answers are somebody else's answers.

When it's their answer, they'll defend it to the death.

But when they think that it's somebody else's answer, they'll see all the flaws in it.

And Some of the most recent research to this.

They have people put on VR headsets and they walk into a room and there's Freud is sitting there in VR and they sit down in front of Freud and Freud's like tell me what your problem is.

And they tell Freud all their problems.

And then it reboots and you are Freud and you see yourself walk into the room and sit down in front of yourself and you hear yourself tell yourself all of your problems.

And they have a more than 70 percent success rate of people having breakthroughs with just this one experience of going.

I actually hear my problem for the first time.

It's very.

It all goes back to.

The production of arguments is different from the evaluation of arguments.

And.

Part of that is when we are producing our reasons, for we think, feel and believe.

We're producing them for an assumed audience of evaluators.

And those evaluators that we presume are going to be people who are in our trusted peer group and we don't want to look like an unreasonable person to them.

And so we try to justify and rationalize everything in a way that that presumed peer group will go okay, that seems like a reasonable way to look at it.

But the only problem with that is that we're very motivated reasoners.

And my favorite example of motivated reasoning is you know when someone's falling in love with someone and you ask them why do you like them?

And they'll say well, the way they talk, the way they walk, the way they cut their food, this crazy music they listen to, and what they do for a living, all this stuff.

And then, if that person's breaking up with that exact same person, you ask hey, why are you breaking up with that person?

They're like The way they talk, the way they walk, the way they cut their food, this music.

They listen to the job they do.

Same information, same facts, but they become reasons for or reasons against based off the motivation of the person in the situation.

That's motivated reasoning in a nutshell.

So you take all that together and what you do is you can take this after you've established rapport and the person feels comfortable with you and they feel like it's okay that we're going to investigate this together.

You ask them.

Basically this particular issue we're talking about.

It could be something like a movie is a good, neutral example, but I could talk about.

You know, is the earth flat on the scale of zero to 10?

How certain are you?

And the person says, well, I'm pretty much like a nine on this one.

I'm like, well, how come nine feels like a right number to you?

This switches gears for them to.

They are now in justification explanation reason mode and they're going to start producing those reasons.

And this gives you a chance.

This is why motivational interviewing is so incredible.

Once that person's laid that out, you can then ask.

This is the powerful question of motivational interviewing.

Let's say you're, you want to, you are looking to help that person change their behavior.

You know which way to ask this.

But if you're talking about it in a mind change situation with a flat earth, they said they were like a nine.

You're looking for them to go down there into the one zone.

Like you could ask, how come you didn't answer 10?

And the person must to answer your question produce motivation reasons in the direction of the counter argument.

And this will push them closer to the ambivalence of the middle ground, which means you probably got to have multiple conversations to continue moving them in that direction.

But if they already answer in the level of like a five or six or something like that, you know this could be an opportunity for them to go across that line.

And that's the power of motivational interviewing is they learn that to avoid reactants in the writing reflex, they could ask questions in a way that would get a person to produce their own counterarguments.

And that's exactly what you were talking about earlier when you said let them make your argument for you, in a way.

Like it's theirs.

You didn't copy and paste anything into their brain.

They wrote those sentences themselves.

They're their own voice.

They produced those counterarguments, and all you had to do was hold space for them to do so.

And it doesn't feel like there's any manipulation at play because there isn't.

You only offered a space for a person to produce a counterargument.

They would have produced if they had had that opportunity before you had walked along.

Gave them a chance to reduce the counterargument.

And in motivational interviewing.

Often what happens is they produce enough counterarguments from the position they already hold that it changes the balance.

And then they notice that within themselves and they can proceed forward to change their behavior.

But it also works in these negotiation persuasion frames as well.

And that's why that number exercise is so powerful.

It makes so much sense, David.

This is, this is fascinating.

And I love, again, that this is, it's so practical.

This is something that anybody can say.

All right, this is a two-step play with motivational interviewing.

Okay.

So how do you feel about this on a scale of one to 10?

Great.

All right.

Why wasn't it 10?

Right.

And then that you just sit back and listen and that's really it.

Right.

But it sounds simple.

You could tell somebody how to do this.

We The real techniques are like 10 steps, but those two are a good way to get started.

It goes much farther than that.

I mean, there are 20 steps when it comes to building rapport and all but in street epistemology.

The next thing is to help them evaluate.

What methods are you using to evaluate those reasons and consider them good reasons?

You can go deeper and deeper and deeper with it.

And deep canvassing after that, they ask people, what was the first time you heard about the issue?

The person's like, oh, and people often they're very surprised when you ask that question.

Like it's it feels like transgender bathroom rights.

You would ask, like, what was the first time you heard about that?

And like, it's astonishing to see people go.

And just that moment before the eyes go up and the breath stops for a second, like.

And they will often realize, oh, this is completely received wisdom.

But you don't say that.

They feel that.

They think that on their own.

And you can also ask – in deep canvassing.

They ask them about times in their lives where they've experienced things that would run counter to it.

So they start to reveal the person's values to themselves and the person starts to feel cognitive dissonance, that their values actually are – uh, not aligned with the position that they're presenting to you.

So it goes deeper.

There are many more steps to it, but i feel like those first two really open up a conversation space that most of us never offer each other Exactly.

And that's what I'm saying, because once you understand the rich psychology that substantiates these strategies, it helps you to execute the strategies at a much higher level.

I know for me, I study this.

I wrote a book on this recently, too.

And just hearing your, your approach and the the psychology and the studies that you reference, compared in my mind to the ones that I referenced, it's deep in my knowledge.

You know, and I study this all the time.

Right.

So I think that's that's why it's so powerful and important to talk about the psychology, because it helps us in that way.

But then again it shows why people still need to take that next step and get your book, because there's so much more to this.

And that's what's so exciting.

So again, i gotta have a copy of your book.

Help me, help me get a copy of the book.

We will listen.

Let's do a double book promotion here.

That's what we should do.

So we have um, how minds change, and then we have how to have difficult conversations about race and uh.

So yeah listeners i, i i'm pumped to read to, to get through your book too, because i'm i'm already thinking about the second edition of my book after hearing.

What do you have to say here?

So this, This is really, really great.

So can you tell the listeners about the book, where they can get it and how they can get in touch with you?

Sure, sure, sure.

I have two things out there in the world.

One is my podcast.

You are not so smart comes out every two weeks.

You can find it very easily.

You are not so smart dot com.

And then everything else goes under David McCraney dot com.

And the book is How Minds Change.

And there's a page there with all sorts of stuff.

I keep adding to it.

I've got a nice three hour almost three hour round table video with me and some persuasion experts from the book and um conversation guides and all sorts of things like that.

Um, so yeah, and also photos of like, the dress and the other thing i got to hold the dress.

By the way, the actual dress uh, i it was black and blue in person, but i've held it thinking maybe not, i don't know.

The scientists have showed it to me.

It's like yeah, now you, now you're enlightened, Let's see.

David McCraney dot com.

And you are not so smart to come.

The easiest way to find me on Twitter is David McCraney.

Perfect, David.

I appreciate you.

And listeners will have links to the book David's website, and we'll throw in a link to the dress so you can take a peek and see what it looks like to you.

So, David, really appreciate it, my friend.

Thanks so much.

It's been a pleasure.

[Masterclass: The Science of Persuasion and Changing Minds]-[How People REALLY Change Their Minds? (Backed up by Science)]

📋 Summary

Navigating the Science of Persuasion: A Masterclass in Changing Minds

The Psychology of Strong Attitudes

Speaking the 'Moral Dialect'

Change Management and the Myth of Difficulty

The Mechanics of Mind Change

Conclusion: The Path Forward

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Masterclass: The Science of Persuasion and Changing Minds]-[How People REALLY Change Their Minds? (Backed up by Science)]

📋 Summary

Navigating the Science of Persuasion: A Masterclass in Changing Minds

The Psychology of Strong Attitudes

Speaking the 'Moral Dialect'

Change Management and the Myth of Difficulty

The Mechanics of Mind Change

Conclusion: The Path Forward

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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