The first installment in a two-part book review of David McRaney’s How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion.
May 24, 2023
For the past two weeks, I’ve been saying to the people around me, “You’ve gotta read How Minds Change.” Everyone. I said it to a colleague who wants to bring neuroscience into his English Literature classroom. I said it to my mother, who sighs at every morning’s news of intractable divides in American politics. I said it to my husband after we’d disagreed whether the color in front of us was blue or green. When a friend mentioned an upcoming 10-hour road trip, I told her she should download the book on Audible for the drive.
David McRaney writes and hosts the podcast You Are Not So Smart, which was also the title of his first book; his second book declared, You Are Now Less Dumb. In this third book, McRaney sets out to explain what shapes our beliefs and knowledge. He starts with this fact: in 2012, polls showed legalizing same-sex marriage was opposed by over half the American population. Then, in 2013, polls showed more than half of Americans were in favor of legalization. How does such a sudden, statistically significant shift occur in societal opinion?
The author frames such drastic shifts using the model of punctuated equilibrium, a term he borrows from evolutionary biology. Within this collective model, McRaney also wants to understand the “psychological alchemy of epiphanies” experienced by individuals. The book’s lead-off narrative belongs to Charlie Veitch, a prominent 9/11 truther, who—after a BBC television series flies him to New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania to see evidence, question experts, and meet victims’ families—unexpectedly renounces his views on-air during taping. The three other truthers making the same trip, having the same experiences, stick to their conspiracy theory. What causes some minds to change while others do not? Perhaps I’m experiencing forty-something fatigue, because I have days when transforming a mindset feels not only improbable, but impossible. Not so fast, McRaney would say. Yet before we can fully grasp how minds change, we must understand how the brain knows what it knows, believes, and presumes. This is where much of my favorite material in the book comes in. (“Remember The Dress?” I said to my friend. “He talks about The Dress!”)
Maybe you crossed paths with The Dress on social media in 2015, or maybe not. Here’s the issue: a photograph shows a striped dress that some people perceive to be blue and black, others see as gold and white. Divergences in perception aren’t unusual; you’ve probably seen the drawing that shows a rabbit on one look, a duck on the next. The duck-rabbit is an “intrapersonal” bistable visual illusion (two interpretations available, one interpretation available at a time), whereas The Dress created a whole new category of “interjacent” bistable visual illusions (two interpretations available, only one available to any given individual).
A battery of experiments led by neuroscientist Pascal Wallisch at New York University reveal that The Dress was a rare, in-the-wild example of how disambiguation based on prior probabilities—meaning, your previous visual experience—determines your perception. The issue is not The Dress itself, but the photograph (overexposed, via a cheap phone camera) that provides access to The Dress. If a given individual has spent more time living (e.g., working) in artificial (predominantly yellow) light, the more likely they are to see The Dress in blue and black. If a given individual has spent in more time living (e.g., working) in natural light, they’ll see gold and white. And neither individual registers the possibility of another color scheme.
Instead, each individual adopts a stance of naïve realism—sure that our understanding of the world is an unfiltered one, available to all—that proves particularly resistant to what someone else might share as straightforward (albeit contradictory to our position) facts. Wallisch described this dynamic with an acronym, SURFPAD: Substantial Uncertainty with Ramified or Forked Priors or Assumptions leads to Disagreement. “The first lesson of The Dress is that our disagreements begin at the level of perceptual assumptions, because all reality is virtual,” McRaney writes, “but it doesn’t stop at perceptual disagreement.” The book goes on to explain how our systemic need to disambiguate, in ambiguous circumstances, leads to firm cognitions of how the world “is” that make it difficult to relate to those who disambiguate in a different direction. We’re not just talking about determining the color of dresses (or in another experiment, Crocs). McRaney uses a timely but light touch to discuss how peoples’ initial attitudes toward receiving COVID-19 vaccines in later 2020 were largely shaped by whatever previous experiences they’d had, individually or as part of a larger identity cohort, with institutionalized medicine.
Once upon a time, at the University of Virginia, I wanted to study Cognitive Science. (I chose English instead—blame the Statistics course required of CogSci majors.) I mention this only so that you’ll understand how painful it is for me to skip over McRaney’s discussion of epistemology, Jean Piaget, and the 1949 experiment where Jerome S. Bruner and Leo Postman got participants to accept that a black ace of hearts was a perfectly legitimate playing card. My job isn’t to juice the book for your quick consumption. Go eat the original fruit, rind and all.
Before you do, though, I want to talk about paradigm shifts. As a human, you have a system in place and, as contrary data comes in, you assimilate, assimilate, assimilate, to maintain the integrity of that system. (Nerd alert: as a Star Trek fan, this terminology makes me uneasy.) Only when the anomalies become too numerous, and the cognitive dissonance too great, does a new category needs to be formed to aid comprehension. Instead of assimilating, you accommodate and introduce a new category of understanding, i.e., a “paradigm shift.” Figuratively (and literally, in regard to the brain’s plasticity) you are changing your mind. If you’re a neuroscientist, you might call these comparative responses “conservation” versus “active learning.”
As McRaney writes, “When new evidence calls into questions our expectations and conclusions, to solve the growing number of incongruences that the current model seems unable to address, something must give.”
Can a “something must give” moment lead a sales leader to Maestro’s door? Absolutely. We frequently work with C-suite leaders that have experienced a paradigm shift in understanding how their industry works—and how their company now needs to work, in response.
That said, this book also makes space for more extreme examples of paradigm shift: those shifts introduced by medical crisis, leaving a prohibitive religious sect, or abandoning long-held positions such as a vote against legalizing same-sex marriage. I can’t help but echo a phrase from the flap copy and praise that this is “big-hearted” journalism. Each chapter orchestrates contemporary anecdote, historical research, hard science made accessible, and on-site investigation. As our guide, McRaney does a great job forging audience loyalty by forecasting what to expect. When he omits backstory or abbreviates explanation because he’ll pick up the thread in a later chapter, he lets us know. (In the audiobook, these meta-notes are offered in the soothing baritone of the author’s own voice.) As a writer, I appreciate the author’s craft; as a reader, I can’t remember the last time I finished a book feeling so hopeful for the world. How Minds Change reminds us that arguing serves an evolutionary purpose. Psychological epiphanies and changes of heart aren’t sentimental fictions—they are key to our survival. While it’s true that the only person who can ultimately change your mind is you, it’s also true that some conversational approaches persuade more effectively than others. Next week, we’ll talk about a conversational method that, in case study after case study offered by McRaney, makes the difference in encouraging change.
Ready to change your mind about how you do business? Contact us at mastery@maestrogroup.co.
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