Can we change others’ minds?
As peacebuilders try to move from anti-war to pro-peace, here are some thoughts on how, if at all, we can change other people's minds.
From Paul Bonham (bonhamline@FTC-I.NET)
During one of our very difficult Liberal vs Conservative discussions in our session (board of elders), one of the elders opined that no one's stance ever seems to change through debate, argument or persuasion. He said that we just seem to be hard wired the way we are.
I have come back to that thought many, many times and am becoming increasingly persuaded that he may be right: we may be hard wired, by either nature or nurture--- hard wired so that by the time we are more or less adult it is virtually impossible, barring some cataclysmic event, to change our general perception of most of the fundamental issues of life. Liberals are liberal, conservatives are conservative and never the 'twain shall meet.
But how did we get that way???
A long time acquaintance told me years ago that I was one of the very fewpeople she had ever know who really changed. And she was right on: I am one of the very few people I know who has really changed. I had a dramatic change in viewpoint from conservative to liberal over the entire broad range of life issues and situations. Looking back on it I think it gradually took place over a number of years but the genesis of it was I think, one or more near death experiences which opened my eyes to see in a new way. And seeing in a new way I made a conscious decision and effort to embrace change. As the Buddhists say, I changed my mind. I changed my mind at a very deep and profound level.
Wouldn't this make an interesting and enlightening discussion for any peace discussion group? How did each of us come to believe the way we believe? Have you ever been successful in persuading someone to change her general life perspective? Has anyone ever been successful in changing yours? If you have changed, what was the mechanism?
From Susan Livingston (susan@propeace.net)
I don't agree with the notion that we become somehow stuck or hard-wired in a particular way, but I do agree that you can't talk a person out of his/her ideas with information. I don't agree with the notion that we change our mind. I think we change our hearts, and it's our hearts that change our minds. Then we say that we've had a life-changing experience. It can be a near-death experience, it can be falling in love, it can be a paranormal phenomenon....
I believe in the wizard's third rule: Passion rules reason. Of course, the heart is just a metaphor for the complex of systems - brain stem, endocrine, etc. - that create our emotions. And the brain is not the mind; the brain is really several separate organs that happen to share living space in the skull, of which only the cerebral cortex processes abstract ideas like liberal versus conservative.
The moral of the story is that if you want someone to "change their mind," no amount of logic or reason will do the job - you have to "move" them, or they have to have a life-changing experience. That's why NVC stresses the primacy of empathy and connection over information and strategy.
The exception to this rule is when the person who is trying to change someone's heart/mind is perceived by the other as having much greater power. That's why parents have such a strong influence on kids, or mentors on their protégés, or shamans on their tribes (whether pagan or modern). That's why brainwashing and propaganda work.
I like to "make up my own mind." That's why I avoid joining groups or parties or religions. I'm more likely to "join" a virtual group because of the lack of emotional appeal. I take in information, process it, and then listen to my emotions to see how I "feel" about it. Then I adopt a position. If I'm confused, I seek advice from other individuals who have earned my respect on an emotional and intellectual level, like a "best friend" or my therapist or my brother, and I'll tend to mimic their position - although positions adopted in this way are much more susceptible to change.
Response from Paul Bonham
We all get stuck on our own pet words, fight to defend them and by doing so cease communicating. When the Buddhists say "to change your mind" they mean the entire self which includes what Susan is arguing so aggressively. As she says, "just a metaphor." But it takes openness, confidence and integrity to accept others' metaphors.
From Grace Gifford (BRFHerb@aol.com.)
Here's a story that illustrates for me how God changes peoples' minds and we are just the helpers: (From Eight of a Kind by Betty M. Hockett, Traveling for the Lord)
Stephen Grellet was born in France and became a convinced Friend (Quaker) after having moving personal experiences and reading the work of William Penn. He survived yellow fever after tending to the sick in Philadelphia and became a U.S. citizen in 1803.
He traveled widely and preached to theives, pick pockets, prostitutes and Emperor Alexander of Russia. Once he felt called to preach in an abandoned lumber camp that he came upon in his travels. Years later on his third trip to England he was stopped by a man while crossing London Bridge. The stranger told him that, back in America he was one of the woodsmen from the camp that had relocated. He had come back for a tool and heard a voice preaching. He thanked Stephen Grellet for helping him change his life and those of many others as a result of his calling to preach to an empty log building in the woods.
Sometimes we might feel like we are out there in the woods preaching to an abandoned camp. We can remember the hopeful story of Stephen Grellet and just get louder.
A Note on Research from Paul Bonham
Don't Confuse Me With the Facts
I remember on numerous occasions I would try to convince my Less-Than-Sainted Dad about a particular subject. He would simply answer, "Don't confuse me with the facts. My mind is already made up."
It seems that researchers at Emory University did a study and found that Democrats and Republicans are also adept at ignoring facts. I know that will shock some of you. But the interesting part to me is that we actually enjoy ignoring facts. Our pleasure centers in our brain get positive feedback when we ignore certain facts that might contradict cherished beliefs. (The following story is from www.livescience.com, a rather cool web site on science news. The actual story is at http://www.livescience.com/othernews/060124_political_decisions.html)
"Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects' brains were monitored while they pondered.
"'We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,' said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. 'What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.'
"Test subjects on both sides reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted... 'None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged,' Westen said.
And here is the rather amazing part. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."
We get a positive vibe from ignoring negative information damaging to our strong biases. "Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning."
"The tests involved pairs of statements by the candidates, President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, that clearly contradicted each other. The test subjects were asked to consider and rate the discrepancy. Then they were presented with another statement that might explain away the contradiction. The scenario was repeated several times for each candidate.
"The brain imaging revealed a consistent pattern. Both Republicans and Democrats consistently denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate but detected contradictions in the opposing candidate. 'The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data,' Westen said.
In East Texas, back when I was growing up, we had what were called Yellow Dog Democrats. They would only vote for a democrat, even if they put a yellow dog on the ballot. Which shows that things can change over time, as now they are electing republicans even in yellow dog counties. But it was a long time for that change to come. Now, we see some of the opposite patterns. But it is that way all over the world.
That is why you can reliably predict what a "core" vote will be. It is what makes gerrymandering so effective and easy. It is the small group of voters in the middle, whose minds do not get a stimulus from ignoring data where the real political contest is waged. But that study does more than show us about our political problems. It is the human condition. Religion, family, our kids, our favorite weight loss program - we too often come to the table with our biases.
It is only when we are in a crisis of some kind that we seem to look for answers outside our biases.
From Mike Carter (mikesmail@mac.com)
In Zen there is this: "Nothing needed, nothing missing." Certainly, the presence of so much suffering, so much violence, starvation in a world that has the resources to feed its every inhabitant, such disenfranchisement and much more - causes me more than pause. It tempts me to look around for cause or, perhaps, even blame. Almost always I think about what is needed and what is missing; how I and even more so others need to change.
Yet, I wonder if this is skillful thinking for as a number of people have already pointed out, we often have little luck in changing anyone's opinion. The brain, as has been noted, "enjoys" its cherished beliefs. This, by the way, is not a surprise as the neural pathways in the brain are established based on our activities (how we spend our time, assign our passions) with the brain laying more and more neural infrastructure down as we assign more and more time and energy to something (golf, guitar or the GOP). The brain is amoral in fulfilling its evolutionary function in this regard. It assumes that this thing we give so much time and emotion to is a matter of our survival and thus it supports our commitments.
People on both sides of a debate generally do not like to be confused by the facts and in a quantum world the facts are incredibly subjective in their individual analysis. We have all marveled at the experience of talking with someone who uses facts that we accept to
"prove" a position 180 degrees from ours. Quantum physics has dashed for now the separation between subject and object. There is no objective reality (or political position including mine). There is only that reality that emerges when we (subject) consider the context (object) and mistake the resulting intersection as more "factual" than someone else's who is apply their most cherished beliefs in their attempt to understand events.
I have found that when I desire to change someone for whatever reason that I am not being honest about why. Pausing to honestly confront this desire and the attachments it generates, I have found behind it my own fear, my ego tendency toward the need to be right and my ownresistance to allowing my brain to do what it will do until the day I
die if I let it (grow through the introduction of change). I have found that my desires and attachments relative to what the world should be - of what another should believe or do - form an illusion about who I am and why I am here.
All that is needed is inside of me (and those I would desire to change). Nothing is missing from me or you or the "them" I so often identify as the cause of the problem.
Jack Kornfield has a book entitled, "After Enlightenment, Laundry". It doesn't mean that until we find our true self, we do not do the laundry (for surely this would result in a number of environmental issues at the personal level). I respectfully suggest that what Kornfield does mean is that after enlightenment - after we go in search of this self where nothing is missing - the laundry is a different matter; strangely a much more powerful matter. (How can laundry be powerful? The impact of washing and cleaning our cloth is one of the key areas for understanding how our daily actions impact the environment. I can change my laundry habits and have as profound an impact on supporting the environment as I might doing nearly anything else on a grander scale.)
We do politics while we struggle with attachments and desires. We create a new world every moment when we set aside illusion in favor of an honest look at ourselves. Then we do some more politics but in a much more powerful and effective fashion that does not exclude
electoral votes or civil disobedience or service to our country but makes each of them and scores of seemingly insignificant acts we do each day much, much more powerful.
One additional comment regarding how change seems to come only when we are faced with something very disruptive, this is not change so much as reaction (i.e., yang swings to yin or vice versa and overtime becomes an excess in its own right).
