What Makes People Change Their Minds?
Courtesy of the political and sociological atmosphere of the last few years, I’ve been contemplating what makes people change their minds – and what doesn’t.
What Can Change Someone’s Opinion?
As a human being, the answer to this matters because, sometimes, we want to change someone’s opinion (Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!). I’m sure you’ve run into this wall in real life, so you probably know that the odds aren’t good. But we still want to know what it might take: either to adjust our strategy or reconcile ourselves with our failure.
As a writer, it matters because, sometimes, you need a character to change his or her opinion as part of the plot. When a character switches sides or reverses opinion, the reasoning has to be believable, or it messes with our suspension of disbelief, disconnecting us from the story.
That said, there are numerous factors involved in changing someone’s mind. I’m going to talk about what tactics work, which ones don’t, and why.
What Can Work
Trusted Resource
If someone whose opinion they trust (especially someone with similar beliefs), disagrees, the person might rethink their stance.
That’s assuming the trusted person broached the topic in a fairly friendly, non-offensive, or not-too-offensive way. Or if the listener values the relationship enough to think about it.
Oh, and remember that I said the person might rethink the opinion. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll come to the conclusion that they were wrong. It’s just the first step to even opening up the possibility.
Betrayal
Just like hearing a trusted source disagree can make someone rethink, so can losing faith in someone who agrees. Feeling angry or distrustful at someone can make a person question anything they felt they had in common with that person before.
But it’s not a guarantee. And, like the last option, it may only open the door to changing a mind. It might not make them go through it.
Personal Experience
I’ve heard this repeatedly with Covid-19. People start out saying that Covid-19 isn’t really that dangerous, and the news is exaggerating. Then, someone they know gets it and/or dies from it, and, suddenly, they’re telling you how dangerous Covid is like you’re the one who didn’t believe before. That’s the power of personal experience.
This is actually the most reliable means of changing someone’s mind relatively quickly, and even it is not 100% effective. People are very good at making excuses for their beliefs, and some people are so close-minded or opposed to change that even their own experience isn’t enough.
That said, for all you writers, I’d say this tactic is the most believable from a reader’s perspective. At least for short-term tactics.
Long-term Exposure to Different Beliefs
This is the other most effective way to change someone’s mind: Living around people with different beliefs, spending time with them, and coming to respect and like them.
To work, both sides have to…
- respect each other’s beliefs,
- spend time in each other’s company, and
- talk about their beliefs enough for the other person to hear/understand.
That doesn’t mean long discussions or arguments. More likely, it would be occasional passing comments or stories. Natural conversations and topics.
Perhaps one reason this is most effective is that it doesn’t involve actively trying to change the person’s beliefs. So there’s less automatic resistance.
Necessity*
In this case, an external pressure forces the person to at least act as if they’ve changed their minds. A comical old example is a Looney Tunes episode where Elmer Fudd was going to inherit millions as long as he never harmed an animal (especially not rabbits).
A more believable example would be a smoker who gets a job somewhere that forbids smoking on the premises. And where the management is so firmly against smoking that being pro-smoking might threaten the person’s job (or the smoker could feasibly believe that).
Is the smoker going to immediately think that smoking is a bad idea? No. He or she might be forced to stop smoking, though. And after a period of time of not smoking, the physical results of not smoking could make it seem less appealing. Eventually, the person might change their mind as well as their habits.
*This one is really more of a behavior-changer. It may not ever change the person’s actual opinion. The Looney Tunes cartoon is actually a decent example of that. Fudd was willing to change his behavior, but once the pros stopped outweighing the cons, he reverted to his true opinion.
What Generally Doesn’t Work
Insults
The only way this tactic will work is if the people in question have an abusive relationship where the person whose opinion is changing generally kowtows to the other person’s opinion. Otherwise, this is going to backfire big-time.
For most people, insulting them in an argument is guaranteeing that they’re going to lose any interest they had in what you had to say. If they’re upset / angry enough, it will make their existing opinion even more solid (even harder or more impossible to change).
They may also write off your opinion related to anything else. So unless you’re trying to alienate someone, avoid insulting them.
Arguing
Yes, discussions count because most people don’t know how to have a discussion about something they feel strongly about without it devolving into an argument.
There are a few reasons arguing doesn’t work:
- The Mentality: As soon as it’s an argument, your goal is to win the argument, not to listen to the other side.
- Bad Listening Skills: People are bad at listening in general. In an argument, most people hear what they expect the other person to say, not necessarily what the person said. Or they’re listening with the sole purpose of developing counter-arguments. Which goes back to the mentality problem.
- Heightened Emotions: When people feel strongly about something, an argument against their belief can feel insulting or morally offensive. That’s not a good framework for open-mindedness or introspection.
The Wild Card: It Could Go Either Way
Logic
Facts and figures might seem like the obvious way to change someone’s opinion (That’s what logical appeals are for, right?). In an actual intellectual discussion (not an argument), it could have some success. Presented to a person outside an argument where they can read the facts and digest them and think about them without prejudice or heightened feelings, the logic of the statistics might change the person’s mind.
Or the person could dismiss the facts and figures as skewed / unreliable. Or not feel that those facts require a change of opinion. Or interpret the facts in a different way. Or ignore that aspect of the discussion entirely.
Truth be told, most people are more heavily influence by emotional appeals than by logical appeals. Mostly, logical appeals are going to work for people who are trained to value them or who are not emotionally attached to the subject.
Influencing Factors
You’ll notice that none of the options above are guaranteed success. That’s because there are so many variables that influence the outcome:
- General Acceptance of Change: Plenty of people oppose change on principle. That makes changing their minds automatically harder.
- Emotional Attachment to the Idea: The stronger you feel about something, the harder it is to change your mind.
- Feelings Toward the Persuading Party: If you don’t respect or like the person, they may as well give up before they start. If you have negative feelings towards the person’s beliefs, even if you like them as a person, they’re not going to do well at influencing your opinion.
- Emotional State at the Time: As my dad would say, “Timing is everything.” Talk to someone in the wrong mood, and the chance of success changes entirely. Lately, people have been stressed out or aggravated enough that there hasn’t been a good time to try to change their minds about anything.
- Past Experiences: Say someone else already tried to change the person’s mind. That makes it harder for the next person. Say that the person had a negative experience that supports their opinion. That makes it harder, too.
TL;DR – people are complicated, and changing their opinions matches that perfectly.
Have You Ever Changed Someone’s Mind?
If you have, did you use one of these methods? What made you successful?
