Can We Change Their Minds?

What if the reason that we can't imagine changing our opponents' minds is because we rarely recall changing our own?

Every week it seems like, I hear from someone who's given up on ever changing the mind of anyone on the other side. Their reasoning varies, but usually come down to: the other side is too entrenched, too dogmatic, and is utterly unwilling to listen to reason.

There's a kernel of truth to this complaint. We increasingly get our identity from our politics, and this is true across the political spectrum. When someone gets their identity from their politics, changing their mind is hard because the person perceives our criticism as an attack on their identity (especially when we try to logically dismantle their ideas, rather than appealing to shared values or setting up conditions in which they end up convincing themselves).

But I wonder if something else might be going on too. Maybe part of the reason that we're so skeptical that our opponents' minds can change is that it's hard for us to recall when our own minds were changed. As the late Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and Nobel laureate in economics, wrote in Thinking, Fast and Slow, "A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed." "Once you adopt a new view of the world (or of any part of it)," he warns, "you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed."

Kahneman cites studies of people who have been exposed to new information and then gone on to change their minds. In a typical experiment, the experimenter will carefully measure the subject's attitude on a given policy position (for example, the death penalty). Then the experimenter will give the subject a persuasive message either for or against the death penalty, which generally changes the subject's view at least a little bit. Then, and here's the rub, the experimenter will ask the subjects to report what view they had before the experiment began. As Kahneman puts it, "This task turns out to be surprisingly difficult." Why? "Asked to reconstruct their former beliefs, people retrieve their current ones instead." Even stranger, "many cannot believe that they ever felt differently." When we change our minds, we also seem to edit out the part of our memory that recalls that we ever thought about the issue differently.

This selective forgetfulness makes some sense. It gives us a more coherent view of the world, and a big theme of Kahneman's book is that as humans we want that coherence. When we change from opposing the death penalty to supporting it, we forget all of the complicated reasons that we ever opposed it, which helps us to forget that those reasons even exist, which in turn makes the world a less messy place. Our selective memory makes the case for the death penalty look very cut and dry, and the intuitive and subconscious part of our brain (what Kahneman calls System 1) is drawn to that simplistic view of the world with its easy right and wrong answers.

Our selective forgetfulness also gives us confidence in our decision-making. After all, if we change our minds all the time, then that must mean that we've been wrong about a lot of things. That in turn suggests that we shouldn't trust our own judgment. But in practice this is paralyzing. By contrast, if we never recall changing our minds, then that gives us confidence in our decision-making; and that confidence is essential for developing the courage to act.

But I also worry that our selective forgetfulness might make us more pessimistic about changing other peoples' minds. If we easily recalled all of the times that our own minds changed, then we might see changing our opponents' minds as a less formidable task. When we know that we've done something in the past, we have more faith that other people can do it too.

So here's our action item this week, as a community of practice. Recall a time when you changed your mind. It can be about something big (like switching from being a Democrat to being a Republican) or small (like switching from preferring tea to preferring coffee).

And then tell us about it.

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Bio: Julian Adorney is a volunteer with Braver Angels, a national nonprofit dedicated to reducing toxic polarization. He is the founder of Heal the West, a substack movement.

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