How to Change People’s Minds
You can’t reason people out of something they weren’t reasoned into.
Why do people believe what they do?
People believe the things that make them feel good.
People don’t change their minds by hearing a bunch of facts and then carefully analyzing them until they arrive at the truth. That’s not how our brains work.
Our brains are not truth machines. They are there to keep us alive by pulling the levers of our emotions. To understand this, it helps to peel back the layers of modern society and imagine how the human brain worked for hunter-gatherers.
Spot a predator? You feel fear which tells you to hide or run away. Spot some bright colored berries? Your brain gives you a rush of dopamine to motivate you to go get those berries and eat them.
One way our brains keep us safe is by constantly scanning people to categorize them as either in-group or out-group. It makes us feel good to agree with our in-group. This is why echo chambers work the way they do. This is also why people tend to believe what those close to them believe, even if they haven’t personally analyzed all the relevant data first.
Milton Friedman once said:
People have a great misconception in this way, they think the way you solve things is by electing the right people. It’s nice to elect the right people, but that isn’t the way you solve things. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things.¹
In the same vein, one way to change people’s minds is not by giving them a rational argument, but by making it socially profitable to believe X and not Y.
When it comes down to it, people will change their minds once they believe having a different opinion would make them feel better.
Take the political arena for example. Why do fourteen-year-olds hold the political beliefs that they do? For most young people who hold political beliefs, they didn’t read a bunch of books, listen to all kinds of different arguments, think about it for hours and hours, and then come to a rational conclusion based on all the data.
They watched some videos of a conservative making fun of liberals and now they’re a conservative. This is not because they’ve been deeply convinced of conservative principles, but because it’s fun to be part of the conservative in-group since they get to dunk on the libs.
Why are so many young people communists? Did they read all three volumes of Das Kapital and get convinced by logical arguments? No, they watched some videos of a communist making fun of capitalists and now they’re a communist. It’s fun to be part of the in-group and laugh at the out-group², that’s why they believe the things they do.
If you liked this post, check out my substack for more.
