How Minds Change with David McRaney.

I have some incredible news. My second book, how to have Difficult Conversations About Race, is now the number one new release in its category on Amazon. I'm so excited, so excited for this because we've put a lot of work into it, and this was risky because as a lawyer who's focusing on negotiation and conflict resolution, talking about race seems for many to be outside of the scope of what I usually do. But again, how are we defining negotiation? We define negotiation as anytime you're having a conversation and somebody in the conversation wants something. And as the podcast is titled Negotiate Anything, we can negotiate anything. And in my years of doing all of this work in the professional world, difficult conversations about race is something that comes up over and over and over again in the workplace. And there isn't really a solid resource out there that blends the fundamentals of negotiation and conflict resolution and effective communication with this particular topic. So it's risky. It is risky, risky to venture in this way. But I'm really excited and encouraged by this early result. So this is not just a win for me, this is a win for you too, because you are part of this tribe. And so a quick note about the book. Who did I write this for? I wrote this for the person who is passionate about changing the world and their organizations for the better, the leader who leads a diverse team, and the professional who wants to learn how to overcome the hidden barriers that make it tough to connect with people with a different background. So whether you consider yourself an ally or just want to avoid making a critical mistake when discussing race, this book is for you and for you as a podcast listener, I'm making a direct request. After six years and over 600 episodes of Negotiate Anything, I'm asking for your support in this endeavor to make the world a better place. Our goal of the American Negotiation Institute is to change the world, and this book plays a critical role in making that happen. And we would love to have your support. We have the links in the description of this episode so you can get your copy of how to have Difficult Conversations About Race. Hello, my friends, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. This show is produced by the American Negotiation Institute and with over 5 million downloads and listeners in over 180 countries, listeners just like you have made this the number one negotiation podcast in the world. Hi, my name is Kwame Christian and I am the founder and CEO of the American Negotiation Institute here at A&I. We believe that the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations, and we are passionate about providing you with the best content that will help you to make your difficult conversations easier, both at work and at home. Lastly, I want to remind you that we offer consulting and conduct trainings both virtually and in person all around the world. Our focus is in three main areas. First, negotiation and conflict resolution. Second, leadership and lastly, diversity, equity and inclusion. Check the link in the description below to learn more about how we could work with you and your team. And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview. David, thanks for joining us today, man.

I'm so happy to be here. This is really cool.

How would you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Sure. I'm a science journalist, author person who makes things that you can consume on the Internet. I mean that category of people have a podcast called you are not so Smart and a couple of previous books, you are not so Smart, you're Not LS Dumb, and this latest book, how Minds Change. So I typically write about psychology, neuroscience, social science, political science, basically brains, minds, culture, that sort of thing. And that's just what I do.

Okay, so I have to ask now, so with the name of your podcast, what inspired the name of the podcast?

I It's a. It was such a securitious byzantine story. I went to school for psychology, I switched to journalism at some point and I had gotten into a place where I was no longer writing the stuff that I got into journalism for. I had moved up in the world and was teaching people how to operate the back end of social media and that sort of thing as a social media guru, person in television news. And I really missed writing for a living. I really missed writing in general. And I'd got into a a number of arguments with friends about different things or just long road trip type things where I would bring stuff out of psychology. The things that I was most interested in. It was always dealing with reasoning, decision making, especially studies like the one where you have somebody on a college campus ask for directions and then the person who's talking to them, somebody steps between and they switch places and usually they're holding up like a big sign or something and that obscures the switch. And then the person just keeps giving directions to this new individual and then on the back end they ask did you notice the change? And about half the time people don't notice. And I just, all of that was very fascinating to me and I thought about it would be neat to start a blog about it. And that was in those days of starting of having blogs being a thing that people would do and start. And I did that. And it was going okay, just a small audience. But then I got into an argument with my friends about which was better, the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 360. And we got to that level of argument where it felt like, maybe we'll never talk to each other ever again. And I was so fascinated by how emotional we got, how angry we got. And I just had access to the university library. I pulled all the research into identity, brand identity, the brand loyalty, and I wrote a post about it. And that was what kicked off my entire career in this world because that went viral and I eventually got a book deal out of it. The idea of the blog, I wanted a title for talking about this type of content. And I attribute 85% of my early success to just having a title that nobody had taken yet. Because you are not so smart that feels like you're being insulted by this inanimate thing. And then you. You get into it. But the writing style was never like that. The writing style is very unity through humility. The you I'm talking about is also me. It's all of us. And the title came from, I think it was John Stewart. It kept doing as a punchline or as a society, be like, not so much. And I just thought you are not so smart would be a good title for something. And it ended up being a great title, and it's carried me all the way through now.

This is great. I love that. I love that for a number of reasons. So, like we mentioned beforehand, and the listeners probably know this by now, because I say it proudly on every episode of this podcast. So people think I get into negotiation because of my time as a mediator, my time practicing law and things like that. But really, it's the. This love of psychology that got. Gets me there. I love this. And when people ask, what, why do you like psychology? I say, humans are fascinating to me because I think we're the only animal that can regularly overestimate how smart we really are. You know?

Yeah, that's.

And the fact that we don't realize just that we are not as smart as we think we are, it makes people ripe for persuasion. And we have to understand that about ourselves and for others, too. Because once you come to that. That humble realization, it's like, oh, you know, my brain has some, like, some faulty parts of it. Like, this is just the one of the beautifully imperfect things about humanity. And that's okay. I can treat myself with a little bit of grace. I can treat others with a little bit of grace. And I don't overestimate what can be achieved in these conversations, you know, and so I really love this because, again, that common understanding, that humility, I think that's really, really powerful.

Yeah, yeah. If there were like, two principles, if you were not so smart, it's. You're unaware of how unaware you are. Because I love that in those studies, like the person switching study, the people were very adamant, no, that did not happen. Like, if they had never been debriefed, they would have never known, if they rest their lives, that they had taken place. So I love that aspect of it. You're unaware of how unaware you are, which leads to. You are the unreliable narrator in the story of your life. And so those two principles are the twin pistons of my obsession in this space, because I felt like if it was true for that study, it was probably true in so many other domains. And it's the undeserved confidence in our perceptions and our thoughts, feelings, and memories, even in our emotional responses to things, that all became deeply, deeply fascinating. And it also makes me feel more connected to the shared family of humanity in that this is something that we all experience, whether or not you realize it. And I find that really compelling.

Absolutely, absolutely. So. So let's make a tiny shift in the conversation to talk about how minds change. Because when you think about the. Our purpose of the podcast, we define negotiation very broadly. Anytime you're having a conversation and somebody wants something, it's a negotiation. So really, every single human interact. You see how I'm slowly bringing us back to psychology with this. This is. This is our.

Our.

Our motto. This is our approach, would negotiate anything. And so a key part of this process for us to understand in order to. For us to become more effective negotiators, better in our relationships, better communicators in general is understanding how minds change. And you know, as psychology nerds here, I mean, that is almost overwhelming. Like, where do we begin with this?

Yes, it is. Believe me, many times in writing this book, I considered, you know, maybe I'll just go in the woods and make canoes. Maybe, maybe I'll just start a pancake YouTube channel where I tell you about all the pancakes of the world because you very quickly just the phrase how minds change. I thought, you know, I thought this would be a project where I look into the literature, I spice it up, I make it easier for you to understand, get some jokes in there, and then tell you what I read. It's a pop psychology book. It is not that it ended up being almost six years of work. It's almost all on the ground. I visit Westboro Baptist Church. I visit people who've left cults and left conspiratorial communities. I actually spend time with the scientists. I go to activist groups. And the reason it went like that is because I. The very first question I had was just, what does the phrase mean, how minds change? And as soon as you start trying to unravel that, you're like, well, then what is a mind? What does it mean to change your mind? And I'm like, oh, wait, there's 2,000 years of philosophy. And if there are books in philosophy about every word in that sentence, there are 200 books in philosophy about every word in that sentence. So that's already daunting. I was like, well, let me just talk to one scientist. And I talked to Jim Alcock, who studies belief, and he had been studying it for 45 years. And I remember this being the inciting moment of how the book actually turned out, which was. I was like, okay, old journalist trick. What is a belief? Just pretend I'm five years old and explain it to me very simply. And he just leaned back in his chair. Oh, yeah, that's a tough one. And I was. I felt my bones turn to ice because I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't say that stuff. You're the guy who studies belief. And I. I asked him, why was it hard? And he. He said, because I've been studying this for 45 years. I can't give you a single definition of this word believe. And that's when I knew it couldn't be the kind of book I thought it was going to be. And instead, I changed direction and said, okay, I will go spend time with people who have changed their minds in drastic ways and people who've left cults, pseudo cults, religious communities, ideologies, conspiracy communities, and so on. And then I will take what they. Their stories and take what they tell me, and I'll take that back to researchers and say, what do you see here? And that ended up actually opening up all these doors to, oh, I didn't even know the question I was actually asking. Like, I had sold an idea for a book, but I had the actual book that I was going to write was nothing like I had imagined it would be. And so I ended up going into how. How minds change, but also what. Why they resist, and all sorts of things related to group psychology. And eventually, about page 200, we get into straight Hardcore persuasion. Because the most, the most surprising thing in the whole process was I found all these different groups, street epistemology and deep canvassing and smart politics and so on. And then also I found therapeutic communities like motivational interviewing, cognitive behavioral therapy and so on. All of these different groups, most of them were not aware of each other. If they weren't scientists, they weren't even aware of the science underlying what they were under pending what they were doing. Yet they all had the exact same techniques. Basically it was, the techniques even were in the same order if they were listed out in bullet points. I was like, this is something, this is something I did not expect and didn't know about. It felt like if someone was building an airplane for the first time, like the very first airplane, it didn't matter where they were going to build that on earth, it didn't matter who did it, it was going to end up looking like an airplane because you're dealing with the same forces at play, the same physics, the same, you know, all it's, this is what an airplane has looked like on earth for it to fly. And I found that was true of the persuasion techniques as well. These are the persuasion techniques, this is what will work because brains work in a certain way and then I want to understand, well, okay then why is that? So, and I was able to fall into all sorts of neat stuff we could talk about like from the interactions model, the truth wins model to just neurons and so on. So yeah, I come to you with, wow, what a weird project. I didn't expect I was going to get into. And I learned more about like I changed my mind about how minds change in putting this thing together because I do remember like before, before I started this project, I, I, years ago I was, I was at a, doing a lecture and after the lecture someone came up to me and she asked, I have, my father has fallen into a conspiracy theory. How do I get him out of it? And I remember telling her, you can't. And that was my position back at that time. And I deeply regret that. I feel very ashamed of it. I, I, but I knew as the advice was coming out of me that I didn't know enough about this topic to give that kind of advice. And there was a pessimism and cynicism that unnerved me and that was part of what got me interested in this topic because I already had a podcast about it. I could ask some experts and then at the same time the beliefs and norms around same sex marriage in the United States, around the time that she asked that question flipped very dramatically about. And when I looked at the polling at the time, 60% of the United States were, they were against it. And then within three or four years, they were in favor of it. Of course, there's a longer timeline there, especially if you've been involved in the activism. It's much longer. But as far as polling was concerned, it was the fastest flipping public opinion ever recorded at that point. And I was like, clearly there are forces here at play that I'd like to understand. And that's what got me into the entire topic. I don't know if I answered any questions there, but I wanted to sort of lay some of the groundwork for you.

Does your company invest in professional development training? If you believe that your team would benefit from a negotiation workshop, all you need to do is go to our website, fill out the workshop request form, and then we'll set up a time to chat. These workshops are completely customizable and we've done them all around the country. Negotiation and conflict resolution skills are beneficial across all professions, but they're especially useful in procurement, purchasing, sales, sourcing, and contract management. Our calendar is filling up quickly and we even have some workshops scheduled for next year if you think you might want one. I'd suggest reaching out soon so you don't miss out. Check out the link in the description to learn more. And we will be right back after this. Oh, this is fascinating. It's so fascinating. A number of things kind of stand out in your response. You talked about pancakes and you talked about cults. Two things I'm fascinated with.

And there's got to be a, there's got to be a pancake cult out there.

Listen, let's start it if there isn't one. So, yeah, this is, it's funny, I haven't told anybody this, but a couple of Saturdays ago when I was, I was making pancakes for my family Saturday morning and I wanted something to entertain myself and, you know, being who I am, I said, I wonder about the psychology of cults. And I was just looking into it because I think about the, like, the ultimate persuasion that that's got to be it. Persuading somebody to join a cult and then persuading somebody to get out. So I wanted to get into that. And so it's really interesting that this is, that's something that you focused on too. And I, in my, my book that's coming out, I quote Neil DeGrasse Tyson where he says, I'm going to butcher the quote. But he says, you know, whenever you add humans to the equation, things go non linear. And that's why physics is easy and sociology is hard, because when you put people in there, everybody's unique. And then it's hard to understand what, why communicating and trying to persuade somebody in this way for this person works, but for this person it doesn't work. But what I find that's so cool about what you've discovered after this year, these years of research, is that you found communities that didn't know of each other, that have found a sequence to persuasion and influence and changing minds that matches each other even if, though, even though they are, are different in terms of objective, in terms of ideology and location, but there's still that commonality. And I just want to really impress upon the listeners how important and how remarkable that is, because whenever we start with the psychology and we can identify essentially the psychological blueprint that's at play in these interactions, then we could reverse engineer negotiation and communication strategies to solve the problems that we're facing. So starting off with the psychology is so critical and then moving to how to change minds. I think this is, this is great. So I guess to make it really practical for the listeners when we, when we talk about this sequence to persuasion. What are some of those commonalities that you found?

Sure, let me set it up by a couple of psychological principles that I think are important. One is the how do minds change in general? The, the framework I prefer is something out of the old research of Jean Piaget. It's called assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is whenever we encounter novel, ambiguous, uncertain information, we will try to fit that model into, fit that information into an existing model to make sense of it, to give it context. And that's assimilation. Whereas accommodation is acknowledging that the novelty and the ambiguity can't be resolved perfectly, which suggests there's something incomplete or incorrect in the models we've been using to make sense of things. And it needs to expand to accommodate. A good way to see, to make sense of this with something that's not so full of psychological terminology is when a child sees a dog for the first time, you, you know, it asks what is that? Or you're having a conversation like you would have with a child, you say, yeah, dog, dog, dog, dog. And then something happens in their mind that's very categorical. Non human, furry, walks on four legs, tail. These are all things that seem to say, these are, these are perceptual groundwork for this is the category that I'm trying to make for this, this thing I'M experiencing. Later on, though, they might see a horse. And they would. And I've had a lot of. When children do stuff like this, they'll point out and go, dog. But if they're very advanced, they might be like big dog. So what's happening there is an attempted assimilation. This seems to fit the category I already have. Non human walks on four legs, furry tail, seems like dog. And if you say, no, no, no, no, that's a horse, the child must create a new category in which both the dog and the horse can fit. And there's going to be something. Even if they haven't quite articulated it, it'll be something along the lines of creature or animal. So they literally must expand their mind to accommodate. Okay, we need a new category to fit these multidimensional things of experience. So you and I are doing this in this conversation. Everyone's doing this at all times. Every time we encounter anything new, we assimilate and accommodate. Back and forth, back and forth. And that's the engine of how minds change. After a certain point, though, after doing this for a while, we would much rather assimilate than accommodate if we can get away with it. Because our models become so complex, it's easy to find a way to interpret just about anything as another example of what I already understand. And you'd have to be something really outlandish for you to feel like, oh, I have to accommodate here. You open the door to your, to your house and there's just a bunch of snakes playing in a marching band and going around in your living room. You could be like, okay, I don't. I clearly understand the world like I thought I understood it. But you would, of course, attempt to assimilate. At first you'd be like, okay, somebody's playing a trick on me. This might be a hologram. Maybe I took. Maybe I'm having a hallucination. There's all these things that fit into your previous understanding of the world. But if you're denied that over and over again, you eventually have to accommodate. So this means that when we already have a built in level of resistance when it comes to if there's someone out there who's. It's not coming in through our perception, but it's another human being who is suggesting, okay, here's how things actually work. Your model is incomplete or incorrect. We have a built in level of resistance to that because we're going to try to assimilate what they're telling us. We're going to try to fit it into our Existing understanding and that resistance gets stronger and stronger and more and more intense the more motivations we carry with us to not update our understanding. And the strongest motivation you're going to have is to not be ostracized or shamed by your most trusted peers. Because we're social primates. And as the great Brooke Harrington, a sociologist, told me in when I was researching the book, she said, if there was an equals MC square of social science, it would be the fear of social death is greater than the fear of physical death. So when we feel like our reputation is on the line, our status is on the line, our image is a trustworthy individual among peers, when that's on the line, it's the strongest motivation we'll have is to maintain that. And in the end, we'd rather be a good member of our group than would be correct, quote unquote on anything. So you're dealing with many levels of resistance and there's a baseline resistance in there. And when these persuasion models that we were talking about come into play, this is something they all acknowledge up front. And that's why the step one of every single one of them is establish rapport. And it's a really easy catch all phrase. It's a very suitcase term where you open it up and the clothes explode everywhere, because there's a lot in that. But the idea here is you need to assure the other person that you are not out to shame them. Even if you privately and correctly feel like you should be ashamed, you are wrong factually, morally, politically, and this even if you feel those things, and that's totally okay. There are many things that we would like to change people's minds about where yeah, you are, you're putting harm in the world. But if you communicate to that person that they should be ashamed for what they think and feel, it's over the commute. The persuasion attempt will fail because they will respond with something I'm sure your audience is familiar with, with reactants. And there's a huge body of research into reactants. It's a, one of the most fundamental things you learn when you're training to be a therapist. The you put you, you push, they push back, you push back harder, they push back harder. Feedback loop it's over. And you, we, I'm sure we've all experienced that if you've ever been a teenager or talk to a teenager, you know what reactance is, which is, hey, you should do this because I want you to do this is the way is the other part of the phrase that you may not say, but that's what they hear. You should. And that's true when you're trying to change someone's mind. You should think this because I want you to think this is what's on the other side of that. You should change your mind. Because I want you to change your mind. You should believe this fact. Because I want you to believe this fact. It comes into the negotiation frame because you're suggesting that you want something and you're not asking them what they want. And reactance emerges from that. Because we are very, as social primates, we're very concerned with agency, we're very concerned with being, being put into a corner where we're not able to pick and choose and think and feel as we, as we would with our own volition. And it's very easy to generate that. And on top of it is this feeling of I better not say think or feel something that's going to ostracize me. It's going to get me kicked out of my group. And so the establishing rapport phase is very important. Stage one is establish rapport. And I think if you wanted to get out of all that psychological terminology and say, okay, but what, how could I think about how that would work in a way that makes sense to me in a one to one interactions and so on. Like you're watching a movie, you're like, this is pretty good. Like it's like Top, you're watching Top Gun, Maverick and you can't wait to get out and talk to the other person. And when you get out of the movie theater, you're like, what do you think? And they're like, oh, that was a piece of shit. And you're like, oh no. And you have that a feeling. I was totally sure that I saw this the way I saw it was the way to see it. Now I have another person who sees it a different way. And when you have rapport established with someone, they, you don't feel the reactance feeling of okay, I need to demolish my friend, I need to destroy them in every way and show them that they're wrong. And they don't feel that way about you either. What you instead feel is like, oh, what, why did you think that? What do you feel about it? And then they'll ask you the same thing and you start to merge a little bit and Venn diagram a little bit. Because your inclination when you're, when you have a rapport established with someone is, I don't want to face off with you. I Want to go shoulder to shoulder with you and look at it together. And that's what you're trying to encourage in that first step is, hey, I respect you. I think you're a smart, capable human being. We may disagree on this, but I'm interested in why we disagree. I'm not actually interested in changing you or myself in any way pointedly. What I'm curious about is how can we both be smart people who care about this issue, but we don't see it this anymore and wonder if you'd be interested in exploring that with me. That's the first step, and that's the most important step.

Yeah, I agree 100%. And it's so funny because we. When you think about the, The. The psychological language and the research that we're talking about and everything, it's so fascinating that it all comes down to build rapport, which seems so simple or simplistic in terms of understanding the, like, what the first step is. But then when you get an opportunity to listen to an expert like you explain the psychology behind what makes this such an integral part of every persuasion endeavor, it makes so much more sense and changes the way that we do it. Because I think a lot of times people say, all right, I read a million books. They said I should build rapport. Okay, I'll build rapport. I'm going to check my box. It's essentially perfunctory. But now we're saying, no, I need to do this with intentionality. I need to do this with the goal of the person seeing me walking side by side along this learning journey with me so we can learn about each other. We can. We can empathize, and that empathy is reciprocated. And I want them to feel as though we're connected and on the same team. And understanding the psychology that substantiates the value of rapport changes the way that you go about building rapport.

Absolutely. And I totally understand for certain issues, this is. This seems like, oh, yeah, cool. I want to be a good, empathetic, non judgmental listener. That's great. We all. I can. I know for some issues it's so easy, but for the. From the people that I learned this from initially, deep canvassing, these were people in the LGBTQ community who were going door to door talking to people who hated them, who wanted to take away their rights to prevent them from having rights. And they had to accept something which was difficult for them to accept. And I see this as being very difficult for almost everyone who first approaches these techniques for a Lot of the things we care about in this world, things that matter to us, the people whose minds we want to change are people who we don't want to afford that empathy. And it's very difficult. I totally understand, like, there are people who I can't imagine extending a hand to and saying, I see you as a fellow human being, even though we disagree, when the issue we disagree about is my own humanity, or the issue we disagree about is the harm that you're causing me and my family. But if your intention is to change their mind, the jagged pill here is you must establish a rapport where you don't generate reactants and push them away, or you won't get the opportunity to do step two, three, four, five, six. And that was something that was very difficult for them to do as well. And they developed their technique through going door to door and asking people, why did you vote against this issue? Why did you vote for this issue? And what they were surprised to learn was even when the person on the other side knew that the person they were speaking with was somebody who was in the LGBTQ community, they were very eager to talk about the topic. And in talking about the topic, often just listening to them, they would shift their attitude just a little bit in the conversation. They would change their own mind because you were holding space for them to think about it in a way they'd never thought about it before. So it's odd that you could reduce some of these steps, some of these techniques, down to just two steps, the first one being build rapport, and the second one being hold space for the person to work it out. But the. The building rapport stage, I just want to acknowledge a huge caveat. I understand anyone who listens is like, I don't want to talk to somebody in QAnon and give them, you know, I don't want to. I don't want to go to the Reptilians. I don't want to talk to somebody who's in a racist or a anti LGBT community and give them space. I don't want to talk to a white nationalist who was like, man, I wish I'd been there on January 20th. I could really cause a ruckus. I don't want to give that person space to work things out. I totally understand that. I just wanted to acknowledge that these techniques do work, and they work because that is so difficult to do. In one way, that person is expecting you to come in hot, and they're ready for it, and they're like, I can't wait they're like that person who walks around behind in the bar, around the pool tables. They can't wait for you to bump up. That's what they're looking for. And when you don't and you start opening space for them, it's incredible that that person starts to shift their own attitudes even if you don't do much work. So I just wanted to put that out there as a caveat. I totally understand when people want to push back against the idea of offering building rapport. Those with which we don't just disagree, but the disagreement is over us. You know, that's a really important part of it.

Yeah. 100. And I was smiling smugly throughout what you were saying because you know this, you know, I, I, I'm, I'm upset that we did not cross paths or the earlier because you have given were like voice to some of the things that I felt like I had to create from scratch for my book. And I was like, man, David said it more eloquent than me. So I'm a bit annoyed on that part. But you're absolutely right, because when it comes down to what it takes to build rapport, like the skill set behind it, everybody has what it takes to effectively build rapport. It's not hard for us to build rapport with people that we agree with, people that we like. We do that naturally. But the thing is, when you're having one of these really tough conversations and you're trying to change somebody's mind on something that is very, very important. You talked about the social issues. My upcoming book is how to have Difficult Conversations About Race. Could be a difficult. Just any type of negotiation we're having where it's a big deal for me, there's a lot on the line. A big deal for you, there's a lot on the line. And it feels like our, our goals are antithetical to each other. But the reality is that the major barrier that we will face as individuals really comes down to the fact that in the moment we will not feel like doing what we need to do in order to establish rapport. It's not that we don't know how to do it. It's that we will have some emotional resistance to doing it in the moment because we don't feel like they deserve it, whatever the fact might be. So in order for us to be able to actually execute on this, we have to get in the right mindset. And so based on your research, how can somebody get to that point where they're willing to make that Emotional sacrifice to hold space and build rapport with somebody who has beliefs that you might find immoral or improper.

I feel you completely on this. It's a very difficult question and I have to always lean on the expertise of those who've gone before in this world and the. The incredible people at the Los Angeles LGBT center, the Leadership Lab, Dave Fleischer and his team who developed deep canvassing over time. They, because they. Once they had developed deep canvassing to discuss same sex marriage was the original topic, then they moved on to talking about transgender rights and then race and then so on, and then moved into. In the last presidential election, they had to acknowledge they had to have something that called cognitive empathy, which is a little different than regular empathy in that. And I talked about this at length in the book by using the dress as the example to get you there, which is a long topic. The dress that some people saw as black and blue and some people saw as white and gold, the short version of that dress story is the reason people see that differently is because they've been. They've either spent a whole lot of time in their lives around things that have been overexposed in sunlight, or they spent a whole lot of their time in their life around things that have been overexposed in artificial light. And sunlight is mostly in the blue spectrum, the sky blue spectrum, and then artificial lights, mostly incandescents, mostly in the yellow side of the spectrum. So that photograph is completely ambiguous how it's lit. It's. But it is overexposed. And the brain will go, okay, I know it's overexposed. I want to reduce the overexposure so you can see it better. I'm going to assume it's overexposed in sunlight. If I've had more experiences in my life around sunlight, I'm going to assume it's overexposed in artificial light. If I have more experiences in my life around artificial light. It does all of that without your knowledge. All you get is the outcome of all these processes. That's what arrives in consciousness. And if it wasn't for the fact that social media is social, people who saw the dress differently might not know they saw the dress differently. That's why it became so, like, viral, because people like, what do you mean it's black and blue? You nuts? I'm looking at it. I am looking at it. I have no choice but to see it the way I see it. And then other people and people who saw it the other way were like, what do you mean it's white and gold. I have no choice but to see it the way I see it. You're asking me to deny the truth of my eyes. What they were unaware of were that, you know, there are these pros. There's all these things that take place in the domain of visual priors that lead us to disambiguate the ambiguous in a way that makes sense to us. But you're never aware you're disambiguating the ambiguous because it never seemed ambiguous to you in the first place, because you only get the result of the process. There was a model for this in neuroscience called Surf Pad. And the surf pad model is substantial uncertainty in the presence of ramified or forked prior assumptions will lead to substantial disagreement. It's a very fancy way of saying when you don't know what you don't know, you see what you expect to see. When you. When you. When you encounter something ambiguous, you will disambiguate it based off of all of your previous experiences. And I'm talking everything. The way you've. Visually, mentally, emotionally, the way your culture has shaped you, the lack of experiences that you could have had. All those things when you're in a moment of uncertainty or ambiguity will cause you to resolve it by leaning on those priors. And the person on the other side who's doing that may be doing it with a completely different set of those things. And you both arrive at what feels like the truth. But you don't realize there could be a different version of the truth until you meet someone like that. So all of a sudden this person isn't actually a great. Is a grand opportunity for you. Notice this. Like, you could step off of that and go, I wonder why we see it differently. Because you can imagine an argument with the dress. If two people are like, I have to convince you that there's only one way to look at this. What you're actually doing is denying yourself the opportunity to understand why you disagree. You're denying yourself the opportunity to see why you even see it the way you see it the first place. The only thing, if you enter into a debate frame over something like that, the person who wins the debate is the person who learns nothing. And if you want to win that argument, all you're going to win is assurance that the way you see it is flawless in some way. So I say all that as to answer your question, that at nyu, where they developed this certpad model, they discussed this concept of cognitive empathy, which is different from the empathy in the sense that this exactly what Dave Fleischer and his team at the LGBT center of Los Angeles were trying to get across to me is that they had developed that as well, independently, that they started to recognize that these sexist, racist, homophobic people were experiencing what felt like the truth to them without their knowledge, that they were disambiguating it in any way, and that they had been influenced in any way, that they had any kind of received wisdom. It did feel to them in the moment. That was just the outcome of the processes in their brain. And they looked at it more as an opportunity, like, I can step in and give them the chance to see for this, for the first time and generate an opinion on this matter. That is, it's okay if at the end of this conversation they disagree, they have an opinion that isn't mine, or we disagree. But I want to give them a chance to actually form their first true opinion on the matter. And so that's how they developed their deep canvassing technique is I'm going to give this person a chance to see that it could be seen. Not only can this be seen differently, but the way you see it is influenced in a certain way and is motivated by certain things. And I'm going to do that in a way that doesn't generate any kind of resistance and reactance. And you'll get a chance to evaluate, how do you feel about this? How do you see this? Does this align with your values like they give people. They're actually giving people a service in a way. And that's how they reframed it. That's how they were able to say, I can be empathetic. I can be cognitively empathetic with this person without being okay with how they think or feel about this issue. And in so doing, I can offer them a space to, okay, I'm giving you a chance to form your first true opinion about this. And if at the end of that process, your. Your true opinion is, oh, I still hate you, then all right, fine, we. I walk away, and you, that's how you are. But I gave you the opportunity to feel differently. And they have an enormous rate of success with this. People almost never do that. They, they. I've watched so many other videos where you could. If you, if it's like, if you, you probably experienced this, where you ask somebody, hey, what'd you think of the. I use the movie example again. Like, hey, what do you think of the movie? It was great. Like, what did you like about it? Like this. This. I mean, it wasn't so much. And you can hear somebody like working it out. And you could, at the end of it, they're like, well, I guess it wasn't that great. If you had like a little YouTube slider for your friend, it'd be like, it was great. Well, I guess it wasn't that great. It was great. I guess it wasn't that great. Like, giving people space to introspect in that way often gives them a chance to form an actual true opinion. The knee jerk response is rarely the actual thing that they would feel if they took a chance to look at it. And a lot of these persuasion techniques, that's almost all there is to it. You're giving a person the opportunity to truly introspect, metacognate and evaluate in a way that gives them a chance to go, okay, well, this is how I do feel about this issue. It turns out I was parroting someone. I was, I was, I was repeating received wisdom. I was trying to fall in line with a, with a social group that I was worried about becoming ostracized from. It's really astonishing that if you see it in that way, it starts to become a lot easier to approach the people who truly wish to do you harm or hate you or look down upon you or hold some sort of opinion about something that's poisonous to the world that could cause from climate change to flat earth. It gives you a chance to say, okay, what I'm offering this person is not the kind of empathy that goes along with, we're going to be chummy, chummy friends, friends after this. It's a chance for you to actually reevaluate how you see this for the first time. And I can do that by holding space for you.

Oh, there's so much good here. And so I'll give some, I'll start off with some quotes for, for ani that jives completely with what you're saying. So our motto is, we believe the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. Goes in line with what you're saying.

This is a pin that I'm writing that down with.

I'm glad you like it. I'm glad you like, because again, we're seeing that there's something bigger that we're moving toward. It's not just the conversation, there's, there's something more. And I love the fact that we talked about the mindset because that changes the whole way you approach it. Because if you say this is a fight between good and evil, then amongst other things, it makes it much Difficult, more difficult. It makes it impossible to, to establish rapport. You can't establish rapport with somebody who you think is an enemy, who's evil. That mean that's, that's hard to do. Right. And then when you think about the mindset too, just saying, hey, this is a service. Okay, cool. So if I don't see you as an enemy, that helps me to, to maintain my emotional stability throughout the interaction. And I'm not running so hot. So I can actually stay in the conversation a little bit longer because at least in my experience, if I'm very, very emotional, then my patience goes down. The, like the amount of time I can allocate high level focus and stay in the flow state is very low in that. So it's, it helps me to be in a better mindset. And then also saying, if I'm here for you, a service for you, essentially almost like therapy light to a certain extent, allowing you to wrestle with these. Yeah. So I'm giving you space to wrestle with this again. It changes the way that I show up in this conversation because I'm working with you. And you talked about introspection and giving them the ability to metacognate. And so metacognition is thinking about things, thinking. And so you're. The person is not going to feel comfortable doing, with doing that with you unless they feel safe again, they need to be vulnerable with you in that moment. And if they think, okay, during this process, I'm going to contradict myself a number of times. And that's one of the things that's really interesting about human cognition. We're just filled with contradictions. And so in that process, I think of myself in these difficult conversations as I'm. I'm not Kwame, I'm not your friend. I'm not your enemy. I'm your, I am your internal voice. And I'm helping you think through this in a way that you haven't thought through. So those quiet conversations you should be having with yourself late at night as you wrestle with these existential questions of humanity that you haven't done, I'm here with you. I'm going to help you think through that. I'm going to be your internal voice, you know, and, and it helps them to wrestle through that. And a mistake that people often make at this stage early because again, what we're doing is we're just building rapport and giving space and allowing them to come to the conclusion themselves. People like to jump in, jump and jump in on those contradictions, tell people where they're wrong, those type of things.

You.

In giving them space, you're. You're letting them say what they need to say and then giving them space to explore that themselves. And likely, if you ask the right questions in the right way, give enough time, then they come to a different conclusion themselves. And it goes back to, I think it was the book by Lax and Sabinius, negotiating in 3D. They described negotiation as the art of letting them have your way. So you sit back and you let them turn. Turn the tables on themselves. And they say, you know what? David didn't change my mind. But after talking to David, I started to see the world a little bit differently.

That's right. You're nailing it all the way. Because this is one of the most important principles of therapy. Like, I was astonished at how many of these persuasion techniques were very similar to motivational interviewing, which is one of the most robust therapeutic models. In motivational interviewing, a person comes in. It was studied first. It was for alcoholism, was mostly directed at alcoholism, but it's used for a variety of things today. But the person usually comes in, they have a change they want to make, but they keep returning to the behavior they would like to extinguish. And therapists were noticing that they were. They kept somehow in the conversation, the person would leave, more likely to do the thing they came to therapy to stop. And they started studying, well, what am I doing that's causing that to take place? And they started calling it the writing reflex, which is what you were just talking about. The person comes in and says, I want to stop this behavior, but I keep wanting to do this behavior. And then the therapist will say, you know, your problem is you needed a blah, blah, blah, blah. And the person's like. They turn and go straight to the teenager mode. It's reactants, you know, they're like, oh, now you're telling me how to live my life? There's a, you know, expletive exploit. So even though they came there for somebody to tell them how to live their life, they couldn't get over the fact that it's a. It's like being burnt by a stove. This is something that the body responds to physiologically. It's in our makeup. We are. We evolved to push away from stuff like that, reasonably so, because we're just like, oh, this is the unhand me, you fools feeling, you know, because what's the next thing? What's the next thing that I asked me to do? Then eventually, you know, I'm, you know, in Their basement, I don't. And like they're feeding me oatmeal. I don't want this. This is. So it's good to stop here. You know, this is stage one of that. This is how we react to it. But the, the, what they started doing instead was something that's in all the persuasion techniques that I, that I researched. Most of them have a couple steps. A lot of them have steps before this, but they get here very early. The street epistemology is mainly about questioning people's fact based beliefs. It's very subtle. Something like, you know, is the earth flat? Is karma real? Things like that. Whereas deep canvassing is much more attitude based, like how do you feel about same sex marriage? How do you feel about critical race theory, that sort of thing. And smart politics is almost always about things that have already become super, super polarized. Topics that have become so politically charged that people feel an inclination to react to it a certain way just hearing about it for a second. But they all usually arrive in street epistemology. They ask for a very specific claim to get it to the next step. And then in deep canvassing though, they typically jump right in. And this is, I'm saying all this to get to the step that if I were going to reduce these to two steps, there's build rapport. But then the next step is this beautiful framing. And I've used this so many times and I love it. You. If it's a very broad topic, you can talk about a person's intent. So if it's like say it's who they're gonna. Let me, let me rephrase that. If you can think about the person's intent. So if it was like vaccination, you say how likely are you to vaccinate the futures? That's a good way to do it. If it's a very broad topic, if it's something more specific, like is the earth flat? You can just say like what is your specific claim when it comes to that? And you can get something, kind of carve something out of it, like the idea, the belief that the earth is flat is actually can be divided into a thousand smaller beliefs that are foundational to that belief. Either way, you want to get to this step of. And we can use my movie example again, which is, okay, so Top Gun Maverick, you know, if you were to like give that a number, like, like I think you were a movie critic, like 0 to 10, what would you give it? Most people can very quickly land on a number. They'll say something like, you know, I'd give it like an eight, maybe seven or eight. I'm like, okay, let's say eight. Why does that number feel right to you? Now, all these persuasion techniques have some version of that where they ask people to quantify it in some way, which gets you out of the yes, no, for, against is good, is bad, binary dynamic. And it makes it very difficult for you to go into the debate frame because now we're in some other frame. This is a frame where I'm asking you, how do you feel about this? And I'm not even suggesting that you're right, wrong. I'm not suggesting I'm going to even counter you. I'm like, yeah, why would you give it an 8? What do you think about, like, what does that feel right to you? And you can feel a person will start to. And you can do this to yourself, like, well, and then they'll start producing reasons. And this is one of the most important things I have in the book, which is there's several chapters before this where we talk about the psychology of reasoning, which is my deepest obsession. It's important to note that in psychology, reasoning is not the same as in philosophy or in logic or the Big R reason, where we're talking about propositions and something along the lines of something you might learn about in a philosophy class or a debate class. In psychology, reasoning is coming up with reasons for what you think, feel and believe. And usually they're in the form of justifications and explanations. That's all based on something called the interactionist model, which I go into really deeply in the book. This evidence suggests we evolved to produce arguments using one set of cognitive mechanisms and evaluate arguments using a different set of cognitive mechanisms. And we tend to produce the most lazy and biased argument we can up front. And then we depend on the conversation or the interaction with other people to offload the cognitive labor to sorting out what's the best argument in the pool. You can imagine it's like three different people on a hill. Imagine three proto humans on a hill looking in different directions, and they're trying to make sense of should we go down and should we go hunt somewhere? And each person has a different view of the world, and so they already have a different perspective they can offer to the other two. And they also have different experiences going into the situation where one person's like, I don't think we should go hunting down there because there might be bears down there, but that's because they were attacked by a bear when they were four years old. And there's another person like, oh, I usually. I would love to go down there. I would love to go hunting in that region. But this person's 18, and they'd never have a lot of experience, right? But they've. They know. They. They say they've never been attacked by a bear. And then you're in. You're in the third person. You're like, okay, well, this person's all the way this way, and this person's all the way this way. But they are offering good advice, which gives me an opportunity for me to make an even better decision. I would on my own. And I can offer something to pool. So there's a lot of evidence that goes into this. This is. There's a great literature into this. There's a book I recommend everyone get called the Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, which goes deep into the interactionist model. And the research is really clear on this. People will. If you give a person a chance to answer a very difficult question and you show their answers to them and you trick them into thinking that their answers are somebody else's answers, when it's their answer, they'll defend it to the death. But when they think that it's somebody else's answer, they'll see all the flaws in it. And some of the most recent research is they have people put on VR headsets, and they walk into a room and there's Freud is sitting there in VR, and they sit down in front of Freud and Freud's like, tell me what your problem is. And they tell Freud all their problems, and then it reboots and you are Freud. And you see yourself walk into the room and sit down in front of yourself, and you hear yourself tell yourself all of your problems. And they have a more than 70% success rate of people having breakthroughs with just this one experience of going, I actually hear my problem for the first time. It all goes back to the production of arguments is different from the evaluation of arguments. And part of that is when we are producing our reasons for. We think, feel, and believe we're producing them for an assumed audience of evaluators. And those evaluators that we presume are going to be people who are in our trusted peer group. And we don't want to look like an unreasonable person to them. And so we try to come up with the most just. We try to justify and rationalize everything in a way that that presumed peer group will go, okay, that seems like a reasonable way to look at It. But the only problem with that is that we're very motivated reasoners. And my favorite example of motivated reasoning is, you know when someone's falling in love with someone and you ask them, why do you, why do you like them? And they'll say, well, the way they talk, the way they walk, the way they cut their food, this, this crazy music they listen to and what they do for a living, all this stuff. And then if that person's breaking up with that exact same person, you ask, hey, why are you breaking up with that person? Like the way they talk, the way they walk, the way they cut their food, this music they listen to, the job they do. Same, same information, same facts. But they become reasons for or reasons against based off the motivation of the person in the situation. That's motivated reasoning in a nutshell. So you take all that together and when what you do is you can take this after you've established rapport and the person feels comfortable with you and they feel like it's okay that we're going to investigate this together, you ask basically this particular issue we're talking about, it could be something like a movie is a good neutral example. But I could talk about, you know, is the earth flat? On the scale 0 to 10, how certain are you? The person says, well, I'm pretty much like a 9 on this one. I'm like, well, how come 9 feels like a right number to you? This switches gears for them to, they are now in justification, explanation, reason mode. And they're going to start producing those reasons. And this gives you a chance. This is why motivational interviewing is so incredible. Once that person's laid that out, you can then ask, this is the powerful question of motivational interviewing. Say you're, you want to, you are looking to help that person change their behavior. You know which way to ask this. But if you're talking about it in a mind change situation with a flat earth, they said they were like a nine. You're looking for them to go down there into the one zone. Like you could ask, how come you didn't answer 10. And the person must, to answer your question, produce reasons in the direction of the counter argument. And this will push them closer to the ambivalence, the middle ground, which means you probably got to have multiple conversations to continue moving them in that direction. But if they already answer in the level of like a 5 or a 6 or something like that, this could be an opportunity for them to go across that line. And that's the power of motivational interviewing is they learned that to avoid reactants in the writing reflex, they could ask questions in a way that would get a person to produce their own counter arguments. And that's exactly what you were talking about earlier when you said, let them make your argument for you in a way like it's theirs. You didn't copy and paste anything into their brain. They wrote those sentences themselves. They're their own voice. They produce those counter arguments, and all you had to do was hold space for them to do so. And it doesn't feel like there's any manipulation at play, because there isn't. You only offered a space for a person to produce a counter argument they would have produced if they had had that opportunity before you had walked along. You gave them a chance to produce the counter argument. And in motivational interviewing, often what happens is they produce enough counter arguments from the position they already hold that it changes the balance. And then they notice that within themselves and they can proceed forward to change their behavior. But it also works in these negotiation persuasion frames as well. And that's why that, that number exercise is so powerful.

It makes so much sense. David, this is, this is fascinating. And I love, again, that this is, it's so practical. This is something that anybody can say, all right, this is a two step play with motivational interviewing. Okay, so how do you feel about this on a scale of 1 to 10? Great. All right. Why wasn't it 10? Right? And then that you just sit back and listen and that's really it. Right. But it sounds simple. You could tell somebody how to do this. We could have had a 30 second podcast.

The real techniques are like 10 steps, you know, but those two are a good way to get started. You know, it goes farther, much farther than that. I mean, there are 20 steps when it comes to building rapport and all. But like in, in street epistemology, the next thing is like, to help them evaluate what, what methods are you using to evaluate those reasons and consider them, you know, good reasons. There's also, you can go deeper and deeper and deeper with it, and in deep canvassing after that, they ask people, when was the first time you heard about the issue? The person's like, oh. And people often are very surprised when you ask that question. Like, it's, it feels like transgender bathroom rides. You would ask, like, when was the first time you heard about that? And like, it's astonishing to see people go. And just that moment where the eyes go up and the, the, the breath stops for a second. Like, and they will often realize, oh, this is completely received wisdom. But you don't say, you don't say that they feel that, they think that on their own. And you can also ask, you know, in deep canvassing, they ask them about times in their lives where they've experienced things that would run counter to it. So they start to reveal the person's values to themselves and they start to, the person starts to feel cognitive dissonance that their values actually are not aligned with the position that they're presenting to you. So it goes deeper. There are many more steps to it. But I feel like those first two really open up a conversation space that most of us never offer each other.

Exactly. And that's what I'm saying. Because once you understand the rich psychology that substantiates these strategies, it helps you to execute the strategies at a much higher level. I know for me, I studied this, I wrote a book on this recently too. And just hearing your approach and the psychology and the studies that you reference, compared in my mind to the ones that I referenced, it's deep in my knowledge. And, you know, and I study this all the time. Right. So I think that's, that's why it's so powerful and important to talk about the psychology because it helps us in that way. But then again, it shows why people still need to take that next step and get your book because there's so much more to this and that and that's what's so exciting. So again, I got to have a.

Copy of your book. Help me, help me get a copy of your book. We will.

Let's, let's do a double book promotion here.

That's what we should, we have.

So we have how minds change and then we have how to have difficult conversations about race. And so yeah, listeners, I, I'm pumped to read to get through your book too, because I'm, I'm already thinking about the second edition of my book after hearing what you have to say here. So this, this is really, really great. So can you tell the listeners about the book, where they can get it and how they can get in touch with you?

Sure, sure, sure. I have two things out there in the world. One is my podcast, you are not so Smart comes out every two weeks. You can find it very easily. You are not so smart.com and then everything else goes under. Davidmcraney.com and the book is how minds Change. And there's a page there with all sorts of stuff I keep adding to it. Like I've got a nice three hour, almost three hour roundtable video with me and some persuasion experts that from the book. Book and conversation guides and all sorts of things like that. So, yeah. And also photos of, like, the dress and the other thing. I got to hold the dress, by the way, the actual dress, it was black and blue in person, but I held it thinking maybe not, I don't know, the scientist who showed it to me, it's like, yeah, now you, now you're enlightened. So, yeah. Davidmcranty.com and you are not so smart to come. The easiest way to find me, and I'm on Twitter, is David McCray.

Perfect, David, I appreciate you. And listeners will have links to the book, David's website, and we'll throw in a link to the dress so you can take a peek and see what it looks like to you. So, David, really appreciate it, my friend.

Thanks so much. It's been a pleasure.

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