How to Change Minds

The idea is that our strongly held beliefs form a network of consistent concepts. For example, I might believe that multitasking is a good thing. I support that belief with aspects of my own experience: Maybe I remember having especially productive days while multitasking. I also know of other colleagues who multitask, which strengthens my belief that it works.

Those of us who have encountered the, “We’ve always done it this way” argument recognizes the power of this web of belief. Any defense of the status quo based on anecdotes of success, rather than objective data comparing method A to B, is an example of this web. And confirmation bias is just a case of believing the web we are caught in is the whole world, because we can’t escape the web to see otherwise.

The article suggests that we cause “incoherence” in order to free people from the web and begin changing minds. That’s a rather broad prescription, as just about anything that is absurd or illogical or rambling or off-the-wall can be incoherent. The idea is to weaken or remove coherence, or loosen the mental bonds that keep the central idea from being replaced with the new idea. It is not unlike performing a root cause analysis for a practical problem, drawing fishbone diagrams and asking the 5 whys, to identify the contributing factors to a problem. How do we change minds? We investigate what’s preventing the change, or keeping the belief coherent, and act on those causes.

Whenever we hear, “Well, I still think I’m right,” after we have made our point, presented a winning argument, or given enough evidence to change a reasonable person’s mind, we should recall that reasonable people are also emotional people. It is useful to borrow Aristotle’s modes of persuasion in changing minds: ethos, pathos and logos. Logos is logic, showing the benefits of the new way or proposed change through facts, data and studies. While necessary, we tend to rely too much on logos. Pathos helps us break the strands in our web of beliefs, making an emotional adjustment to the new condition. This can be by feeling bad about supporting an false believe in a way that is obviously damaging, or feeling good about a change that will bring benefit. We recognize this in the “Oh, crap!” or “A-ha!” moments that bring a physical and emotional reaction, and can help us change or cause us to get further caught in our own web. Ethos, is persuasion by a person who is respected, trusted and credible, making acceptance of new facts and a different emotional response to these facts more likely.

The effective continuous improvement leader persuades through a balance of the three modes. The changing of minds involves a chipping away at, or de-cohering, the webs of old beliefs. It involves stronger coherence by building personal trust, factual underpinning and emotional acceptance. That, at least, is the logos of it.