Go ahead—prod people into accepting your point of view…bury them with evidence that supports your position…and carefully recount why a rethink is in their own best interest. Despite your best efforts, much of the time you’ll accomplish nothing. 

Whether you’re trying to convince your spouse to change his/her eating habits or convince consumers to buy a new product, the tactics traditionally employed to change minds usually are ineffective. In fact, sometimes these ­efforts accidentally push people to dig in their heels even further. Consider all the times you’ve felt insulted by a manipulative advertisement…or rolled your eyes at political views voiced by someone on the other side of the aisle. 

The secret of successfully changing minds often lies not in making a persuasive case but rather in removing the hidden barriers that prevent people from modifying their views. Three of the biggest barriers and how to overcome them…

When Pushed, People Push Back

When you try to persuade people of something, their natural reaction is to push back in an attempt to reassure themselves that they remain in control of their own opinions. These people might focus on perceived shortcomings in your argument or voice skepticism about the veracity of your facts, but this may have little to do with the merits of your case and everything to do with the threat that your attempt to convince them poses to their sense of freedom and self-control. 

What to do: Rather than try to convince people of what you believe, use strategies that encourage them to convince themselves—people are far more likely to accept ideas that seem to spring from their own minds. Among the ways to do this…

Provide a carefully selected range of choices. Offer several options that are all acceptable to you, then let the person you are trying to win over make the final selection from among these. Example: A wife is bored with the Italian restaurant her husband chooses almost every time the couple eats out. Before their next date night, she asks if he would rather try a Mexican restaurant or a Thai restaurant or a different Italian restaurant. The husband retains control over the final decision, so there’s a good chance he won’t rebel against his wife’s attempt to steer him away from his actual preference. 

Warn the person that someone is trying to manipulate him/her. This turns people’s natural push-back tendencies to your advantage. Example: A Florida antismoking campaign found success by warning teens that the tobacco industry was trying to manipulate them with its ads. Rather than push back against the antismoking campaign, as teens tend to do, they pushed back against the tobacco companies and the state’s smoking rates among teens declined. 

Ask questions rather than make challenging statements. If you suspect that the person already knows he/she is in the wrong, don’t tell him this—ask a question that encourages him to say or think it. Example: The owner of a test-prep company who saw that many would-be business school ­students weren’t putting sufficient hours into studying for the GMATs asked her class, “Why are you here? What’s your goal?” The answer, of course, was to get into a top business school. She told the students that 250,000 people take the GMATs ­every year, and the top 20 MBA programs accept around 10,000 total—only 4% make the cut. She then asked how many hours they thought they needed to study not just to do well but to land safely in that top 4%. 

Call attention to a gap between what someone is saying and what the person is doing. Quote this person’s own words back to him—people tend to agree with what they themselves have said. ­Example: Your spouse dislikes a local company but does business with it anyway because of its low prices. Rather than say you don’t want to work with the company, you could say, “You know, I think you were right when you said, ‘These people don’t respect their customers.’”

People Stick to Status Quo

One big reason that it’s hard to get people to change their minds is that people don’t like to change. Most people will go on buying the same brands, voting for the same political party and driving the same route to work rather than investigate other options unless it becomes painfully obvious that their initial selection is lacking. Economists estimate that the potential upside of taking action must be around 2.5 times the potential downside before the average person will make a move. 

What to do: Try one of these approaches to stress the benefits of making a change… 

Expose the hidden costs of not changing. The costs of change often are more obvious than the costs of keeping things as they are—when we try something new, we often have to learn something new or buy something new, for example. But that doesn’t mean the current state of affairs actually has lower costs. Perhaps people have grown so used to the way things are that they no longer notice its costs…or perhaps these costs are hidden because they’re not coming out of people’s pockets. Example: Your spouse resists learning how to use a new piece of time-saving consumer technology because he believes his current way of doing things works just fine. Work out how much time he would save whenever he uses the technology, and multiply that by the number of times he would use it each year. If it saves just one minute every day, that’s more than six hours a year. Tell him that if saving six hours of effort isn’t important to him, then he shouldn’t mind spending six hours that weekend doing chores that would normally fall to you. 

Reframe a change as a return to the way things used to be. This can overcome people’s aversion to doing things that seem new and different. Example: A husband doesn’t want to downsize from a house to an apartment in retirement. His wife could frame the move as a ­return to the way things were before their first child was born, when they shared a small apartment in the city. 

Preserve treasured memories. Sometimes people resist change even when they know that the way things are is less than ideal because it reminds them of earlier, better times. Search for a way to preserve these positive memories yet still change. Example: A mother doesn’t want to transform a child’s room into a home gym even though the child is grown and living elsewhere. She could take photos of the child’s room, and hang these on the walls of the new exercise room. The ­photos can preserve the memories, especially since the room will be visited much more often now that it has a new purpose. 

People Balk At Extreme Change

A common lament in our politically ­divided society is that we would have an easier time coming together as a country if everyone would take the time to listen to the opinions of their political ­opponents, rather than exclusively to media outlets and social media slanted toward the positions they already hold. A 2018 study by a Duke University ­sociology professor put that theory to the test. For one month, more than 1,500 politically partisan Twitter users read messages expressing views from people on the other side of the aisle. Results: Republican participants became more conservative, and Democrats became more liberal. Not only had exposure to the other side’s opinions not won them over, it had pushed them further away. 

The problem isn’t that people won’t consider ideas different from their own—it’s that they won’t consider ideas vastly different from their own, at least not with their firmly held beliefs. 

What to do: Seek modest progress, not massive shifts, when trying to change minds. Had that Duke study asked partisans to follow moderate Twitter messages, rather than ­messages from the other side of the aisle, it might have succeeded in bringing its participants a little closer. View modest change as the first stepping stone on a path to greater change. Example: An employee is tasked with cutting costs on office supplies, but his boss is reluctant to drop the office’s very reliable long-term supplier. The employee convinces the boss to try a new supplier for one small order of supplies. Once the order has arrived quickly and at a lower cost, the employee suggests more and bigger orders from the new supplier. 

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