Convincing Someone to Reconsider is Hard

It’s a hard sell to get people to change their political beliefs.

Presenting someone with a logical argument is like saying, “Let’s sit down together and do some boring math and logic problems. You’ll have to follow along, even though it might get a bit tedious. In addition to being boring, at the end of the exercise it will destroy some of your most cherished beliefs and your sense of identity.”

So much can go wrong here. Even if they do make a good-faith effort to follow along, if you lead them to a conclusion they don’t like, they’ll assume you “tricked” them somehow. After all, you had time to prepare and plan, and they’re seeing your argument for the first time. Keep that in mind when you think you've just presented a killer argument and people don't instantly bow down to your awesomeness. The psychology here is, "That's too easy, so it must be some kind of trap or trick." This puts an upper limit on how convincing any argument can be: the more inherently convincing the argument, the greater the instinctive recoil, and the greater the effort to explain it away. Most people will indulge motivated reasoning, applying a more stringent standard to the quality of your arguments and evidence than they do to their own.

Mostly this takes patience. Someone might balk at an argument the first time they hear it, but slowly come around the second or third or fourth time. They might slowly realize they don’t have a good answer for it. Some hard-headed individuals just don’t wanna'. You have to learn to write off the truly lost causes, and do so without rudely dismissing the ones who will ruminate on your ideas. You have to clarify your thoughts to someone who misunderstands you on the first pass. (“No, I didn’t advocate murdering all children. Let’s try this again…”)

I think every serious adult has gone through this process of slowly changing their mind about something important. If you’ve had that experience, try to remember how hard this was while it was happening. Consider that some people are silently suffering through the same process.

Don't mistake me as saying "Let's all stop fighting and get along" or "We're all right!" or some other middle-ground nonsense. Anyone who reads this blog knows I hold strong opinions, and I'm not shy about sharing them. I think we should all be having those conversations and debates, and rational policy could arise from this process. I think some people are just plain wrong and need to be told so in no uncertain terms (though I am suggesting that this can be done politely). If our government is doing something terrible, if it has implemented a policy with horrendous consequences, we really should demand that it stop doing so immediately. But we should be aware of the limiting factor in this process: human attention. Human patience. Mental bandwidth. We aren't computers that can instantly start running the new software patch, independent of what any other machine is running. Our pathetically slow meat-brains need to process new information, and our social instincts compel us to seek validation of our beliefs and opinions. Minds change slowly.