Professional Documents
Culture Documents
How To Change Your Mind (Ep PDF
How To Change Your Mind (Ep PDF
freakonomics.com
1 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
* * *
* * *
2 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
Francis FUKUYAMA: This model where people just take facts and
draw conclusions is completely wrong.
* * *
3 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
way through Music Man or — actually, that’s not true, I still loathe
Music Man. But I actually have come to like musicals a whole lot.
She and I have done 19 of them now together, she’s directed I’ve
been sort of the rehearsal pianist.
DUBNER: Oh boy, you really went — you crossed the border then,
fully.
Who is this guy, and why should we care that he’s changed his
mind?
4 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
SAPOLSKY: In my thirties.
DUBNER: So had you come home and gone to Yom Kippur with
him and faked it, or how did that work?
SAPOLSKY: Yeah. Yeah. And not just for the High Holy Days. I’m
home for three days visiting and he’s not going to change, he
doesn’t need this sort of headache or heartache at this point, so
whatever. It just would have been very hurtful to someone of
enormous importance to me.
5 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
percent chance you’re never going to. By age 35, if you’re not
eating sushi, 95 percent chance you never will. In other words,
these windows of openness to novelty close. But then as a
biologist, the thing that floored me is, you take a lab rat and you
look at when in its life it’s willing to try a novel type of food — and
it’s the exact same curve! The equivalent of 10-year-old lab rats
hate broccoli as much as 10-year-old humans do. And late
adolescence, early adulthood, there’s this sudden craving for
novelty. And that’s when primates pick up and leave their home
troops and transfer into new ones. And then by the time you’re a
middle-aged adult rat, you’re never going to try anything new for
the rest of your life. It’s the exact same curve, which fascinated me.
6 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
VOICEOVER: If you thought you could trust him, you might want to
change your mind too.
7 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
In other words: democracy had essentially won. Not just the Cold
War, but the future. And yet: a lot of the recent political momentum
is going in the other direction: toward populism and
authoritarianism, with a backlash against globalism.
So Fukuyama has not changed his mind about his most famous
assertion — although he is open to it.
But he did change his mind on something else. It goes back to that
8 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
FUKUYAMA: That’s happened in the past and it’s had good effects.
9 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
10 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
11 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
And in the case of someone deriving pleasure from an idea that you
disagree with:
And she’s found this effect not just in models or lab studies but out
in the real world, where people are constantly making decisions
about their work, their families, their lives.
12 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
13 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
And these were people who had detailed feedback about their
performance every quarter. Which is a lot more than most
employees get.
So maybe it’s not so much that people refuse to change their minds
— or refuse to “update their priors,” as economists like to say.
Maybe they just have self-enhancing selective memories.
14 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
FUKUYAMA: And in May of 1989, after there had been this turmoil
in Hungary and Poland, I drafted a memo to my boss, Dennis Ross,
who was the director of the office that sent it on to Jim Baker, who
was the Secretary of State, saying we ought to start thinking about
German unification, because it didn’t make sense to me that you
could have all this turmoil right around East Germany and East
Germany not being affected. The German experts in the State
Department went ballistic at this. You know, they said, “This is
never going to happen. And this was said at the end of October.
The Berlin wall fell on November 11th. And so I think that the
people that were the closest to this situation — so I was not a
German expert at all but it just seemed to me logical. But I think it’s
true that if you are an expert, you really do have a big investment in
seeing the world in a certain way, whereas if you’re an amateur like
me you can say whatever you think.
As you can see, there are a lot of reasons why a given person
might be reluctant to change their mind about a given thing. Ego,
selective memory, overconfidence, the cost of losing family or
friends. But let’s say you remain committed to changing minds —
your own or someone else’s. How do you get that done? The secret
may lie not in a grand theoretical framework, but in small, mundane
objects:
* * *
15 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
SLOMAN: Well, first of all, there’s no silver bullet. It’s really hard.
But if you’re going to try, the first thing you should do is try to get
them to change their own minds. And you do that by simply asking
them to assume your perspective and explain why you might be
right. If you can get people to step outside themselves and think
about the issue — not even necessarily from your perspective, but
from an objective perspective, from one that is detached from their
own interests — people learn a lot. So, given how hard it is for
people to assume other people’s perspectives, you can see why I
started my answer by saying it’s very hard.
16 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
That’s true not only for big, thorny issues like climate change or
income inequality, but even for things like:
17 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
And you know the plumber; or, even if you don’t know the plumber,
you know how to find a plumber.
You can see how the illusion of explanatory depth could be helpful
in some scenarios — you don’t need to know everything for
yourself, as long as you know someone who knows someone who
knows something. But you could also imagine scenarios in which
the illusion could be problematic.
Now, was this a case of simply slowing down and thinking the issue
through? Could it be that we’re often inflexible in our thinking simply
because we come to conclusions too quickly? Apparently not.
18 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
DUBNER: The ability to change your mind — would you say that’s
really important as a human?
SLOMAN: The former is more often true. That is, we believe what
we do because the people around us believe what they do. This is
the way humanity evolved. We depend on other people. And it’s not
simply a matter of getting us to think more independently. I actually
think that this is one of the major problems with the kinds of
solutions people are talking about today for our current political
problems. I don’t think the solution is give people the information
they need.
19 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
JACKSON: One thing I used to think was that people, if you gave
them the same kinds of information, they would make decisions the
same way. They might have different experiences in their past,
different influences. But somehow the fundamental ways in which
they think about things and process things is the same.
JACKSON: The more you look at data, and in particular, the more
you look at experiments where people are faced with facts or
information, you realize that some people are very single-minded.
20 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
21 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
22 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
you do? Do they love their kids? Look at a picture of them singing
lullabies to their children. Look at a picture of them enjoying the
same food that you do. Contact — and this has been floating
around for decades as a theory — give people, thems, enough
contact with each other and they turn into us-es and it turns out
contact works under very specialized circumstances. You’ve got to
spend a bunch of time with thems. And us-es and thems need to be
in equal numbers and in a neutral setting and you’ve got to have a
shared sort of goal. I mean, all of these work to at least some
degree. The peoples we hated in the past are allies now. There are
outgroups that spent centuries being persecuted where we don’t
even know what the word refers to anymore. And in all those
cases, there’s something resembling biological pathways that help
thems stop being so objectionable.
SAPOLSKY: Well, the really irritating thing I would say is that the
two are one and the same. We are nothing more or less than the
sum of our biology. Every time you learn something, from
something profound to something idiotic, something changes in
your brain. Every time you have a sensory experience, your brain is
constantly rewiring in major ways.
23 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
24 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
SAPOLSKY: I would say the biggest thing that came out of that is I
am in every fiber of my soul a profound pessimist, and sitting and
obsessing for three, four years on what we know about the
biological roots of humans being rotten to each other and humans
being kind to each other, there’s actually a fair amount of room for
optimism.
SAPOLSKY: It’s — well, we’re pretty lousy to each other. But the
basic paradox of humans is simultaneously we are the most
miserably violent species on this planet, and we are the most
cooperative. We do stuff which from the standards of evolution and
cooperation, game theory, all of that, would make stickleback fish
just flabbergasted at how cooperative, how altruistic we are, how
often we can do that for strangers. Each one of us, depending on
the context can be awful, can be wonderful, or ambiguously
somewhere in between.
* * *
25 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16
How to Change Your Mind (Ep. 379 Rebroadcast) - Freakonomics about:reader?url=http://freakonomics.com/podcast/change-your-mind-re...
Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this
episode:
SOURCES
RESOURCES
EXTRA
26 of 26 01/12/2019 18:16