How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

Here’s the biggest thing I learned from this book: facts do not convince anyone of anything. And you cannot change someone’s mind. They can only change it themselves.

Someone once told me the secret to sales: “You have to put an idea in someone’s head and make them think they thought of it first.”

That’s basically the message of the book. You change someone’s mind by asking them questions and getting them to formulate their own argument against themselves.

That’s why the book is called “How Minds Change,” not “How to Change Someone’s Mind.”

The book is at its best when it’s talking about actual attempts to change minds. It talks about “deep canvassing,” which was an effort to talk to people on their front porches about social issues. And there are other examples.

The book gets a little tedious when it digs deeply into the science of how we decide things and how our minds handle change from a biological perspective. I checked out in some of those places.

Also, if you’re a social conservative, the book will annoy you. Almost all the examples are of changing minds to the Left – getting people to accept same-sex marriage, abortion, etc. There’s not a single example of the opposite, and all these examples are presented as progress; the changing of minds in the “correct” direction.

So, this one is uneven. It’s a mix of practical examples, and then deep science. The former was interesting and helpful. The latter didn’t do much for me.

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