Sarah Harte: Changing minds first begins with empathetic listening and sharing

A timely book seems to provide pointers as to how collective minds could be changed on climate change, Brexit, and many other issues

Tory leadership rivals Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak may have substantial differences but both have doubled down on their support for Brexit.

THE decision over who becomes the next UK prime minister is now down to Tory party members. Ballots posted to conservative party members arrive this week. It’s crunch time for Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss.

In the ring are two candidates who despite other differences have doubled down on Brexit. The Labour party’s mantra has also become “make Brexit work”.

The fantasy was that a clean Brexit would result in Britain leaving the EU, erecting trade barriers against its neighbours while experiencing frictionless trade thereby increasing its annual income by billions.

The reality according to the UK Office for Budget Responsibility is that Brexit has resulted in an annual loss of £80bn and that little over half the damage to the economy has been done yet.

The recent chaos at the docks of the Channel ports where British holidaymakers and lorry drivers waited for up to 18 hours to reach the Eurotunnel to cross to France is the result of significant checks and controls at the formerly frictionless border.

Yet, while one YouGov poll in Britain last month showed that only 16% of Britons think that Brexit is going well, other polls indicated that if asked to vote again on Brexit, Britons remain split down the middle as they were in 2016.

Why would people polled say they would vote for Brexit again while the evidence of Brexit-induced economic self-harm mounts? Or to put it another way, why do otherwise sane people disregard factually based evidence to cling to what Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s right-hand woman, once infamously termed “alternative facts”?

Understanding the psychology of misinformation is complex where emotion may play an unknown role in our beliefs and where there may be psychological drivers to false beliefs.

Science journalist David McRaney says that reasoning isn’t the same thing as logic because “we naturally prefer to search for evidence that confirms our assumptions”. And we tend to put on our confirmation “goggles” when we feel highly motivated by fear, anxiety, and anger.

So, what if anything can we do to dislodge false narratives and change peoples’ minds?

In his stimulating new book How Minds Change: The New Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion McRaney, suggests that giving a fact-based correction that directly addresses inaccuracies in misinformation by providing accurate information may fail.

In fact, (pun intended) bombarding people with facts may have the opposite effect of cementing them in their views.

Witnessing “the sudden shift in opinion about same-sex marriage across the United States” made him wonder what changes minds.

McRaney talks to Charlie Veitch, a 9/11 conspiracy theorist and “darling of the conspiracy community” who was brutally ostracised by his online community after deciding that 9/11 was not a hoax.

He demonstrates how truth is tribal, “humans value being good members of their groups much more than they value being right, so much so that as long as the group satisfies those needs, we will choose to be wrong if it keeps us in good standing with our peers”.

Certainty itself is an emotion, so the feeling of “knowing we are right” even when faced with the fact we might be wrong “encourages us to argue with our own past selves as if trapped in a neurological prison of our own convictions”.

This might partially explain the reluctance of some Britons to abandon the magical thinking that leads them to think that Brexit will work out okay.

Members of the extremist Westboro Baptist Church who McRaney talked with left the Church because their core needs weren’t being met (one left because of a bad back). It was only after they left that their views on things like homosexuality changed. He writes that even the most resistant of us change our minds in certain transformative circumstances.

So, presumably, if you spent enough time trapped in your car at a port, couldn’t afford to feed your family, couldn’t get the operation you needed because there was no NHS staff, you might reach what is described as “the affective tipping point, the moment after which a brain can no longer assimilate anomalies and becomes motivated to accommodate instead”. 

There comes a moment “when we realise that refusing to change is riskier than admitting we are probably wrong”. In any group, there will be “early adopters” and others will be “stubborn holdouts, and many will be in between”. But a society can change its mind in a sudden cascade a bit like how a party can empty out without any group coordination. One bored/tired person leaves, then another, and the dominos fall until the stubborn holdouts are forced to get their jackets and the party is over.

A former Tory defence minister, Tobias Ellwood, suggested that Britain should rejoin the EU single market to soften the cost-of-living crisis, saying that “this is not the Brexit most people imagined”. This book would suggest that early adopter Ellwood should engage in “deep canvassing” which is “incredibly effective” at shifting attitudes on a wide variety of socially contentious issues including immigration which was a key driver of Brexit. 

It involves going door to door, conversing with a person for around 20 minutes using a technique that was developed by LGBT campaigners in California who shared this method with other campaigners around the world as “a new way to reach out to people, to cut through polarisation and change minds”. It was discovered by a man called Dave Fleisher, a professional mind-changer from a small town in Ohio who graduated from Harvard law school.

The long-term goal was to change attitudes without waiting for “generational churn”. The immediate goal was to get people thinking about their own thinking by listening to them in a non-judgmental way, by building rapport, not rubbishing them, not bombarding them with facts, and by sharing a story about somebody affected by the issue.

“When you become so fully immersed in a story that you forget yourself for a moment” you begin “to humanise and empathize and demystify one another”, McRaney writes.

A key tactic of the Yes Equality campaign in Ireland was to make the case for marriage equality through the telling of personal stories. This approach also worked during the abortion referendum.

Ultimately, McRaney argues that change occurs when people have their position and feelings acknowledged. Listening before persuading is your best shot at changing hearts and minds.

He cautions that it may be a bad idea to always want to win an argument, that it’s necessary to ask yourself why you want to change somebody’s views, whether you’re willing to change yours, and if you do want to change beliefs you must persist “because the people who change the world are the people who persist”. We live in an era where the world feels increasingly polarised but the good news from this optimistic book is that there is a value to ‘arguing’ because if there wasn’t, “argumentation would have long ago been tossed into the evolutionary dustbin”.

Where climate change is concerned the stakes could not be higher and as the editorial in this paper made clear last week all production sectors including farmers must change their practices which necessitates a shift in thinking.

This clever, compassionate, and timely book seems to provide pointers as to how collective minds could be changed on climate change, Brexit, and many other issues.