Book Review: How Minds Change

Craig Shearer - 8 January 2024

How Minds Change: The New Science of Belief, Opinion and Persuasion - By David McRaney

I recently read David McRaney’s book (on Kindle, from Amazon) on the recommendation of Melanie Trecek-King - one of our international guests at last year’s conference in Dunedin. I was interested to read the book to gain insights into how to change peoples’ minds about things that they’re wrong about - or perhaps change my own mind about things I’m wrong about!

McRaney is the host of a popular podcast: You Are Not So Smart. I’ve listened to a handful of episodes - it’s yet another podcast of many that I should be listening to, but there’s only so much time in my life.

In the book, McRaney starts out with the story of Charlie Veitch, who used to be a 9/11 Truther - he believed that 9/11 was an inside job, but changed his mind. Veitch is described as a friend of Alex Jones and David Icke, so an out-and-out conspiracy theorist. He’s UK-based, and is a prolific YouTuber. Prior to the book, I wasn’t familiar with Veitch, but I’ve now had a look at his YouTube channel - he’s certainly prolific - though I’ve only had a chance to sample a little of his output..

The first chapter of the book - Post-Truth - describes McRaney meeting Veitch. Veitch has become famous for changing his mind about 9/11 after being part of a BBC documentary series - Conspiracy Road Trip - in which a handful of conspiracy theorists are confronted with evidence from various sources that disputes their beliefs. In the TV series, Veitch meets experts in various disciplines relevant to 9/11 - such as building demolition, skyscraper construction, explosives, and airlines. And he has changed his mind! This was different from the other conspiracy theorists on the programme, the rest of whom stubbornly refused to change their minds.

The chapter details how the conversations went between Veitch and the experts, and it felt to me like how most rational people would approach a conversation with an expert. Veitch had various “how come” questions, which the experts patiently explained and answered. And that caused his mind to change. However, this doesn’t seem to be the usual experience with conspiracy theorists, who typically see any evidence or lack thereof as further proof of their conspiracy beliefs. Somewhat predictably, after recanting his 9/11 “inside job” beliefs, Veitch faced backlash from others in the 9/11 Truther community.

The book threads the mystery of Veitch changing his mind through each of the chapters, trying to figure out what it was that made him different - what it was that caused his mind to change.

The book then covers Deep Canvassing. This was a term that was new to me, but describes a technique that is used in the US by political campaigns to sway people’s opinions about various controversial topics.

In many states in the US, they have issues which people vote on which determine constitutional amendments for the state. A famous one is Prop 8 in which California had a proposition to effectively ban same-sex marriage.

The chapter details how researchers from the Los Angeles LGBT Center ran an operation which had students going door-to-door to engage with voters about LGBT issues. The technique had students having deep conversations with people about the issues. The key point was that in the conversations, people were asked to give reasons for their opinions. In getting people to articulate their reasons, their opinions often softened or changed.

In the context of LGBT issues, researchers found that talking through the issues invoked “perspective taking”:

“Everyone already knows that prejudice is bad. Deep canvassers evoke memories charged with emotion so that people recall what it is like to be ostracized or judged or made to feel lesser than, and it challenges their categorization of otherness.”

I think that this method is fascinating, though requires a large degree of effort to effect change, and it would be interesting to see whether it would work in Aotearoa New Zealand to change political opinions.

The next chapter is Socks and Crocs and covers differing perceptions of reality, including the famous internet dress that was either blue/black or white/gold.

The chapter discusses how differing perceptions of ambiguous reality can be manufactured, and details an experiment done with the Crocs footwear as to how colour is perceived. (Crocs are those foam resin shoes that are either the height of fashion or something to never be seen wearing, but come in a vast array of colours. The idea is that when you think of a pair of Crocs, you don’t have a particular colour in mind.)

While the dress set the internet on fire back in the day, the chapter covers a fairly cohesive theory as to how our perceptions are influenced, and how two different people can see that dress in two different sets of colours. (I’m on team blue/black.)

The chapter Disequilibrium delves in epistemology, how we know what we know. It covers some fascinating concepts from neuroscience about constructed reality and how our brains “know” what they know, and how that can sometimes be wrong. In an amusing example, the book details how people once thought that geese grew on trees:

“Centuries ago, people often found a certain type of barnacle floating on driftwood. It featured a long tube that extended out of a white shell with a smidge of yellow streaked down the side, and for at least seven hundred years, people across medieval Europe thought that this barnacle was some kind of proto-goose, because it looked somewhat like the necks and heads of the familiar geese that lived in the same area where the barnacles regularly appeared. Nature texts going back to the 1100s describe mysterious goose trees with odd fruits from which, they said, birds would form, hatch, dangle, detach, and fly away.”

The chapter then covers cognitive dissonance, and how our brains handle it. How much cognitive dissonance is enough to make us reconsider our opinions, and re-evaluate evidence.

The Westboro church is covered, particularly those who have left the church and changed their minds. The Westboro Baptist Church is famous for its hatred of gays, and of protesting soldiers’ funerals. The chapter details the experiences of some of the children of Fred Phelps - such as Megan Phelps-Roper and later has siblings Zach and Grace. Reportedly, four of the Phelps children have now left the church, along with 20 grandchildren. It seems that exposure to other ideas and contact with people outside the church led to its members changing their minds.

Another major chapter in the book is about Street Epistemology. This is a technique pioneered by Anthony Magnabosco at the University of San Antonio in Texas, and we’ve covered it before in our newsletter.

Street Epistemology, which has a good website detailing how it works and how to use it, is positively covered in the book. Street Epistemology seeks to have deep conversations with people about something they believe in and then talk about how firmly they believe that thing on a numerical scale, and explore the reasons why they believe to that level of certainty. An integral part of the technique is to establish rapport with the person - emphasising that you’re not out to shame them and asking for consent to explore their reasoning.

I think that Street Epistemology has roots in the Socratic Method - a technique that uses questions to explore beliefs as a means to bring people closer to truth.

Interestingly, in a previous newsletter in which Street Epistemology was discussed, I’d made a comment about Peter Boghossian, who at one time was an associate of Magnabosco’s in promoting Street Epistemology, and that he was now attempting to use it to provoke reactions from people about perceived “woke” topics. I got some pushback for mentioning that, but I was heartened to read the following in the book:

“After six years and hundreds of conversations, Anthony said his anger had subsided. Like many militant atheists who met online in the 2000s, he and others in the street epistemology community had distanced themselves from controversial figures like Richard Dawkins and even Peter Boghossian, who had taken to social media to complain about “social justice warriors.” Anthony and others like him are part of a humanist schism, enthusiastic about trans rights and racial justice, down to drop acid and eat pot brownies and talk about the mysteries of the universe as long as others are willing to fall back on street epistemology to dig as deep as one can go discussing quantum mechanics or ancient beings seeding the Earth with mushrooms to accelerate our evolution. Nothing is taboo, and people who believe strange things aren’t seen as rubes or maniacs anymore.”

I think Street Epistemology is a good technique that can be used to explore people’s beliefs and ultimately bring people closer to evidence-based beliefs, though I’m unsure how it can be easily casually deployed versus setting up a stand in a public place with a lot of preparation. But I think that elements of these techniques could be deployed causally. In the end, I think it’s all about having respectful conversions, and establishing a connection with somebody, and importantly, not treating them like an “other” or a “them”.

This quote from Anthony Magnabosco which appears in the book is, I think, a good summary of what we should be trying to do as skeptics:

“I want to live in a world where people believe true things. But I’ve realized that ridicule, being angry and telling people that they’re mistaken, is not going to help them. We’re all sort of in the same boat. We’re just grasping for reasons to justify the views that we’ve already built. Once you know that, you begin to feel empathy, you really do. You begin to have epistemic humility about what you yourself believe.”

I mentioned earlier that McRaney tries to apply what he’s learnt to Charlie Veitch. I’m not sure that Veitch is all that relevant. Having reviewed some of Veitch’s YouTube videos, it seems that he’s an angry man shouting at convenient populist targets in an effort to gain engagement. His YouTube channel currently has 343K subscribers, and he’s putting out regular content, sometimes multiple videos in one day, so he’s undoubtedly making his living off being a content creator. I guess I feel a little cynical about him and his motives, and perhaps suspect that his conspiracy theory beliefs around 9/11 were perhaps not well rooted, but done because that’s how he could make money. Maybe Veitch is just a bit of a grifter, latching on to whatever will make him money in the moment.

Anyway, in conclusion, I think How Minds Change is a very relevant book for skeptics to read. As Melanie Trecek-King taught us, we’re better to concentrate on teaching skills, not facts. The book provides some fascinating examples that I’d not encountered before, and overall, gives a good primer on how to practise mind-changing.

Highly recommended!