Little Cognitive Revolutions

Yes, people do change their minds

My earlier post looked at how deeply organizational silence is now embedded in our lives. We are too often made passive by our fear of conflict and/or the sense that it’s futile. But why do we believe argument is useless?

It would be wrong to blame the passive sense of futility entirely on Cass Sunstein’s 2009 book Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide but it certainly has something to answer for. Looking at experiments with juries, and with Colorado Democrats and Republicans, it argued that not only did people not change their minds when confronted by divergent views—but they became more extreme. Argument was actually worse than silence! This was a catchy polarizing argument in itself, eagerly amplified by decades of behavioural economics, much of which delighted in revealing that our brains were frequently lazy, biased and wholly inadequate to the problems we thought we could solve. At the time, this gleeful and lucrative denunciation of human thinking bothered me. I felt uncomfortable about the paternalism it spawned and the uncomfortable links between many of its proponents and Big Tech.

But I kept thinking: if Sunstein et al were right—that we don’t ever change our minds—then we’d all still be living in caves. If we're all hopelessly caught in an endless feedback loop of biases and confirmation, and talking just makes us more extreme, then we never change—and history shows that we do. Wasn’t this binary argument more of a problem than a contribution? When, in 2015, I interviewed Sunstein, he casually laughed off his own conclusions as just a few experiments, yes sure, of course but juries aren’t like real life and it was more complicated than that…. But by then the damage was done; the notion of irrevocable polarization has itself become entrenched.

Yet when I turned to neuro-scientist Mariano Sigman, he said that people change their minds frequently—and that even after making a decision, we don’t necessarily stop thinking about it. He used the example of competitive chess players—for whom every second counts. His observation has stuck in my mind ever since.

“They make a decision and they say, well, I'll move my queen. But they don't move it; they write down the move. And the reason they do that is because often in the moment when they write down their move, they understand that there may be something wrong with that particular decision. The brain keeps on computing….”

Noting down their moves is costly for the chess players because it uses up precious time. But they do it (and we do something similar) because we might want to reconsider. We recognize moments when, having taken a decision, a fact or consideration pops into our heads to change or question it. This may be on the drive home (the site of my alltime best tech idea) in the shower or on a walk. The new thought might make a big difference, a slight reconsideration or no difference at all. But we do not stop thinking. This is one reason mobile phone and other costly contracts are frequently required to include a cooling off period, when we are allowed to reflect at our ease, without the pressure of a salesperson. It’s why I recommend that boards or management teams take cooling off periods after a major decision: just like chess players, we may see an error in their judgement before it’s too late.

So we aren’t stuck cleaving to old ideas forever; we are open to alternative or new information. Context—how, where and from where new information arrives—makes a difference. That was the conclusion of a highly original paper in Nature by Danielle Lawson, an environmental educator and researcher based at the State University of North Carolina. She expected environmental curriculum to change students’ views of the climate crisis, but she was amazed by how far that change could travel.

“What we found is that after students participated in an environmental education curriculum on climate change and wildlife, their levels of climate change concern increased. But what was even more exciting is we found that as the children's climate change concern increased, so did their parents’. Even though their parents weren't specifically targeted by this curriculum—they weren't in school with these students learning about climate change—we found that parents who self-identified as politically conservative, it was most effective with them. That's really exciting because typically people who identify as politically conservative, at least in the United States, tend to be the least concerned about climate change. We also found that these children were most effective at communicating this information to their parents if they were talking to their father. And then we also found that they were most effective if the child doing the communicating was a daughter.”

In other words, the girls aged 10 to 14 were getting to the hardest segment of the population to develop climate concern. Lawson’s explanation was optimistic but also, I think, realistic.

“There's that trust, so they can have that conversation. Most parents don't typically look at their child and think that they're a political ideology threat. Their child is less likely in their eyes to be somebody with an agenda. So I think it allows for this really beautiful opportunity to have a conversation with one another. So people we trust can change our minds, even if we start out poles apart.”

Compatible insights emerged from an experiment led by Jochen Wenger at Die Zeit Online in 2018 when he initiated an app dubbed ‘Tinder for Politics’—but instead of bringing together likeminded individuals, this matched people holding diametrically opposed views. Expecting his first test in the experiment to attract 100 to 200 people, Wegner was astonished to recruit 12,000 people wanting to leave their bubble. But it wasn’t just the numbers that surprised him; he experimented on himself too.

“I met a guy in my Berlin neighbourhood, Mirko, who was in his 20s, a young plant operator and just got his first kid. I found him really a wonderful person, and we had a discussion for, I think, three or four hours about all the topics where we had different opinions. And I realised after our meeting that in his teenage years, he used to be a neo-Nazi in Eastern Germany, so I called him again and asked, "Hey, why..." So he didn't tell me about that. And he said something like, "You know, I want to get over it. I don't want to talk about it anymore. I don’t think like that now, this is why I didn't mention it." And so I was really rethinking my assumptions because assumptions about neo-Nazis in Germany because I didn't think that people could change like Mirko changed. So he was a really nice, sensible person when I met him in Berlin. And this happened a lot. So people met someone else with a totally different background and got an understanding of how these people tick and think.”

Two-thirds of the participants in Wegner’s experiment said they'd learned something and 60% agreed that their viewpoints had converged: one, or both, had changed their minds. Equivalent results emerged from experiments that Wegner repeated all over the world. Critical to agreement was meeting face to face; it’s much easier to stereotype or demonize people when they’re out there, not sitting right next to you. Time between meetings (longer than a chessplayer’s pause) made a difference too. It gave participants time to reflect on new information and to reconcile divergent perspectives. In my experience, nobody changes their mind in front of you immediately on being challenged. They need time to think. The idea that juries need that too might be constructive.

I encountered changing minds firsthand when I interviewed Irish citizens who had taken part in a citizens’ assembly to debate the highly polarizing issue of abortion. This gathering of 99 people, chosen to reflect the population, was immaculately curated. Only verified information from proven experts was presented and jargon was excised to make everything accessible. Participants like John Long, a ventilation engineer, spent 5 weekends with his fellow citizens, in discussion, argument and debate.

“You’d be sitting round the table and someone would say something and: gee, I’d never thought of that! They came at it from a direction I’d never have though of—whether I agreed or not! You come along this big arc—the way and the reasons you’d never think of yourself….Some of the sessions were head-melting, there was so much legal, medical information. But the process—the roundtable discussions, the questions and answers. Q-and-A. At the end you understood.”

Another citizen told me that it was only as he was driving home after one session that it dawned on him: changing the Irish constitution to allow abortion didn’t mean that anyone had to have an abortion, it meant only that it would be legal. Well, he said, who was he to legislate someone else’s decision long after he’d be dead?

The Irish government has used citizens’ assemblies for many thorny topics—gay marriage was the first one, others have addressed drug use, fixed term parliaments, the use of referenda and the challenges of an ageing population. They confirm the findings of American political scientist James Fishkin (which flies in the face of Sunstein’s argument) that shows people are not stupid or intransigent. Having conducted 109 deliberative decision-making projects in 28 countries, he kept finding and recording the evidence that “if you engage them in a thoughtful and balanced way with good information and they think their voice matters, people turn out to be very smart. And this has happened over and over and over again.”

“Eventually we give up on our ideas and move onto new ones,” Mariano Sigman told me. “Those are like little cognitive revolutions where eventually we have so much overwhelming evidence against what we believed. Often, it's just the spike of evidence but it happens in the right time and the right context. So I think it's a question of finding the situation in which the brain actually works better for changing our minds and not just pessimistically arguing that that's something that we will not be able to do. The situations in which we change our minds are all around us.”

So it’s time to reject the rather narcissistic nonsense that other people will never change their minds—and change our own. Yes this makes life more difficult, because it means we need to be more courageous and more skillful. It requires that we listen instead of just talk. But it also means there is reason for hope. The best first step might be to ask the question: what have you changed your mind about?

If You Want to Go Deeper?

Jochen Wegner’s TED talk about his Die Zeit experiment can be found here. And James Fishkin’s work is meticulously recorded and the data tabulated in his book Democracy When People Are Thinking: Revitalizing Our Politics Through Public Deliberation. It should be a clarion call to updating the way we do democracy.

For the Love of It

I only recently discovered the Merlin app from the Cornell Lab for Ornithology. For years I’ve woken early in the summer and stayed in bed to listen to birdsong without the faintest ideas what kinds of birds I was listening to, what they looked like or where they were from. Now I know. Knowing how inspired Messaien had been by birdsong, I wondered what he might have made of it—and my hunch is: more marvellous music.