How to Change Someone’s Mind
Long story shortest. Presenting someone with alternative facts rarely changes minds, but stories are powerful shifters in perspective.
A few weeks ago, I saw this maskless guy standing in downtown San Jose holding a sign that read “COVID VACCINE IS THE TRUE ENEMY”. I parked my car and approached him slowly, lowering my mask briefly to smile and show that I meant no harm. I calmly explained to him all the reasons why he was wrong. I told him all the actual facts about the vaccines, how they were saving lives, and how what he believed was simply wrong. He seemed to be listening, so I encouraged him to put down the sign and stop misinforming the public. To my delight, he did. He bent his sign in half, threw it away, took the extra mask I handed him, and thanked me for changing his mind. As I walked away, he said, “Dude, you may have saved my life.”
A shocking story isn’t it? There’s a reason for that: none of it’s true. And that’s the point—stories like this just don’t happen. No one changes their mind because someone showed up and said, “I know better than you. Allow me to educate you.” And yet, this is how most of us insist on trying to persuade others, isn’t it?
Here’s the thing—when we believe something, we don’t think of it as a belief. We think of it as a fact. An indisputable, you’re-dumb-if-you-don’t-believe-this kind of fact. My late granddad used to say, “You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.” A true statement, for sure, but it also assumes that we know, or more importantly, feel the difference.
Once a belief has taken hold, we defend it tooth and nail. We look for facts that validate what we believe (i.e., confirmation bias), and we fight any fact that contradicts our understanding of the world. And there’s an evolutionary reason for this: social survival.
Social Survival
About 100,000 years ago, the human brain did its last major burst of growth. The reason for this was to accommodate all that we needed to know in order to live well together with other people. Humans learned we could survive longer if we stuck together. So being part of a tribe was a matter of life or death. And having good social standing was crucial to survival. Getting on the bad side of the people you lived with could mean exile. And exile would almost certainly get you eaten.
Even though most of our societies look very different, our brains are still wired this way. We are social creatures, and we want to belong. So, when someone presents facts that contradict what we and our chosen tribe believe, we pull up the drawbridge and get our archers ready. Because contradictory facts suggest we are wrong, and if we are wrong, our social standing may be in jeopardy. Even though we may consciously know that being wrong does not mean ostracism or death, our brains react as if we are in actual danger. In fact, the brain interprets psychological or emotional pain in the same way it interprets physical pain. So an attack on our belief system feels the same as an attack on our body. As story coach Lisa Cron writes in her brilliant book Story or Die (p. 43), “We don’t decide to get mad. We don’t decide to fight. Our brain, fearing for our survival, takes the decision out of our hands.” It just happens.
“Contradictory facts suggest we are wrong, and if we are wrong, our social standing may be in jeopardy.”
So, long story short, arguing with facts only makes us feel threatened and therefore throw up the shields and grab the spears. A well-told story, though, has a different effect.
Stories are Stealthy
My colleague David Hutchens refers to storytelling as “stealth technology.” When we tell a story effectively, without preaching or hitting our audience with “and here’s why this should matter to you,” the impact of the story kind of sneaks in. It flies well below the radars searching for threats. We get hooked on a story, curious to see what’s going to happen next. And then, if the storyteller does their job well, we might begin to think, “Wow. If that happened to me, I would probably think/feel/do…” The neural coupling has activated, and we are seeing ourselves inside the story. So whatever learning happened to the protagonist is now happening to us as well.
How We Make Decisions
The truth is, we don’t actually make most of our decisions based on facts and figures, even though we think we do. We make decisions based on what we feel and what we believe. This is the language of stories. Stories have the power to shift us in ways facts rarely do. Because while we are loathed to have someone tell us what to think, we don’t mind at all coming to new conclusions on our own. (Watch the movie Inception and you’ll go on a super heady journey with this idea.) A story lets us do that. Lisa Cron writes:
We learn from the experience of others not when they tell us what they learned, but when they allow us to learn it along with them—through an emotionally significant story.
So, if I want you to think differently, my best bet is to tell you a story of a time when I myself learned the lesson I’m hoping you’ll learn. I’ll talk about the belief I had before, how I saw the world, and what I thought was true. Then I’ll tell you what happened that changed my mind. I won’t talk about you, what you think or should think, or how this story can help you. I’ll just tell you my experience.
And even if this doesn’t change your mind, we will certainly have a far more interesting conversation.
UP NEXT: HOW TO TELL A STORY
*This post was informed heavily by Lisa Cron’s book Story or Die. Check it out if you want to learn more from her brilliance.
