A good friend recently told me that his mother fears that a minority religion in India has been spreading only to displace the majority (hers.) Any facts on them being poorer or most of them trying to lead a dignified life couldn’t convince her otherwise.
Similarly, you wouldn’t believe the number of times I’ve tried to reason with my deeply religious aunt as to why most of her teacher’s claims were scientifically false.
Haven’t we all been there? Giving up after multiple rounds of arguments when the opposition, even dear friends and family, can’t look at the facts, and would rather just stick to their ‘opinions.’
Are they irrational?
Almost every football fan tells us that their club is going to win this season by signing just a new player, and almost every political party worker tells us that they’re the best even if they’ve fulfilled just one of the hundred electoral promises.
Where do they get these irrational ideas from?
Being social animals, seems like some of our identities & hence ideas are tied to our respective tribes.
Psychological research on changing people’s minds draws an interesting comparison:
It turns out that holding onto an irrational idea that is the basis for membership in a group functions much in the same way as an addictive drug.
So the “irrational” idea that your opponent is holding onto is a form of emotional response.
Stopping a substance not only denies the user the profound reward of increased dopamine release but it also results in stimulation of other brain areas that are associated with dysphoric emotions and painful autonomic nervous system activation; they are the basis for habit and emotion, not reason.
Opposing facts
Shouldn’t our opposing facts help them understand and see the whole picture?
A Neuroscience research found concerning evidence when they used MRI scans to study brain functions for a simple experiment. They wanted to see how paired ‘partners’ bid for properties depending on each other’s response to list prices.
As we could guess, people stuck to their guns even when their partners disagreed
Yet when the partnered participants disagreed about the property value, their opinions would fail to influence each other’s final decision as to how much they would be willing to invest in that house.
Only when they looked deeper could they understand why no amount of the opposing partner’s conviction mattered
The team saw that brain activity in the posterior medial prefrontal cortex fluctuated, depending on the strength of a partner’s conviction, as suggested by the value of the investment they were willing to make.
However, this was only the case when paired participants agreed about the value of the house. When they were in disagreement, there was no change in brain activity in the posterior medial prefrontal cortex.
I don’t think anybody could’ve summarised the findings better than Senior author. Prof. Tali Sharot
We found that when people disagree, their brains fail to encode the quality of the other person’s opinion, giving them less reason to change their mind.
What do we do?
Identity based ideas seem to be emotional responses that people hold very dear, and as we know these don’t change easily.
For now, looks like we need to make sure we don’t come across as adversarial if we are truly looking to get people to our side.
Cheers,
Kalaikovan
So, what is the best way to disagree or influence? And what's the science behind it?