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You Are Not So Smart
342 - The Conspiracy Theorist Who Changed His Mind
00:47:15
Tim Harford of the podcast Cautionary Tales sits down with David McRaney to hear a story from David's book, How Minds Change, about how (and why) a prominent conspiracy theorist realized he was wrong.
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- [00:01]
David McCraney
Our trip up the coast was perfection. With my Sapphire Preferred card we earned three times the points on gas, online, grocery and dining.
- [00:07]
Disney Cruise Line Advertiser
It was amazing.
- [00:08]
David McCraney
Chase Sapphire preferred the card that's preferred for a reason. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase bank and a member FDIC subject to credit approval terms apply.
- [00:15]
Podcast Host (You Are Not So Smart)
You can go to kittedkitted shop and use the code smart50smart50 at checkout and you will get half off a set of thinking superpowers in a box. If you want to know more about what I'm talking about, check it out. Middle of the Show. Welcome to the you are not so smart podcast, episode 342.
- [01:20]
Tim Harford
I was the guest on the episode that I'm about to play for you. This episode comes from Cautionary Tales, which is a great podcast hosted by Tim Harford. He is a Financial Times columnist, a BBC broadcaster, the author of nine books, including Messi, the Undercover Economist, how to make the World Add up, and others. And Tim is just this great storyteller, great interviewer, and the podcast Cautionary Tales is one of those podcasts that I was already listening to. So I was very excited and honored to get a chance to be on the show and I think you'll enjoy this particular one. Here's my conversation with Tim Harford.
- [02:09]
Narrator
In June 2011, Charlie Veach boarded a British Airways flight at London's Heathrow Airport. He was headed to New York City, in fact, to Ground zero. There, on September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers of the World Trade center collapsed, killing thousands after being struck by two passenger aircraft hijacked by Al Qaeda terrorists. That's the official story anyway. But Charlie didn't believe it. Charlie Veach was a truther, a man who didn't believe that the World Trade center collapsed because of a terrorist attack, who thought instead that it was a controlled demolition, part of a deadly conspiracy. Charlie didn't just believe this, he was evangelical about it. He was a leader in the truther community, making a good living from his YouTube videos in which he explained that jet fuel can't burn hot enough to melt steel beams, or that the neat collapse of the skyscrapers into their own foundations could only have been the result of precision explosives. The 911 conspiracy theory was his faith, his social life, and his job. Charlie flew to Ground Zero as part of a BBC TV series, Conspiracy Road Trip. The premise of the show was that in each episode a different tribe of conspiracy theorists would travel around in a bus, meeting the eyewitnesses and the experts who might challenge their views. And maybe with the cameras rolling when presented with the most authoritative facts in the most riveting circumstances, they'd change their minds. Of course, they never did. Except once. Charlie Veach, after listening to all the experts and all the witnesses, went home to think. And then after a few days, he posted a short video for his fellow truthers. The evidence had convinced him he couldn't hold on to the conspiracy theory any longer. 911 really had simply been a terrorist attack that caught the US unawares. Yes, he said, I have changed my mind. And that, to his fellow truthers, was utterly unforgivable. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. This is another one of our cautionary conversations. As usual, you'll hear a story of something going wrong, a per adventure with a lesson we can all learn. But I'll be joined by an expert to help tell the story and reflect on it. Today I'm joined by David McCraney, the host of the hugely influential podcast yout Are not so Smart and the author of several books, including his new and brilliant How Minds Change, the Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion, which weaves Charlie Veach's story together with many others, along with the latest research and David's own adventures in persuasion and conversation. David McCraney, welcome to Cautionary Tales.
- [05:46]
Interviewer (Cautionary Tales Host)
Wow.
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Tim Harford
Thank you so much. It is a great honor to be here. A big fan of your work, and this is going to be the best. I'm just looking forward to hanging out with you and having a conversation. So thanks for having me.
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Interviewer (Cautionary Tales Host)
It is my pleasure. And I'm a huge fan of youf're not so.
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Narrator
And of the book.
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Interviewer (Cautionary Tales Host)
And you begin quite early on in
- [06:02]
Narrator
the book with the story of Charlie Veach.
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Interviewer (Cautionary Tales Host)
Just tell us a little bit about the things that Charlie believed before he came into contact with this BBC program. And what were the conversations that he had that changed his mind?
- [06:14]
Tim Harford
Yeah, for him, he had been a curious young man. He had moved around a whole lot. He had Brazilian heritage and his father worked in the oil business. And so they moved around from country to country to country, several countries in the Middle east, and then back and forth. And eventually when they settled in the uk, he had sort of a Brazilian lilt to his accent. And he was, as he told me that he just was made fun of a lot. When he was in the Middle Eastern countries, people there were very prejudiced against him and made fun of him. And then when he came to the uk, people there were prejudice against him and made fun of him. So then he wanted to do something and he wanted to question the world. And so he pursued a philosophy degree and then he eventually ended up in banking. And he said that was something that, that he felt like he had gotten into that sort of hamster wheel loop. He just gets, goes to the cubicle, sits there all day, does something a machine could do, gets back up, comes home. And he just felt very trapped and isolated and not validated. And nothing about this philosophical urge that he had to question the world was being satisfied. And then after 911 he watched a video. I want to say it was loose change, but I think he watched all of them. But I know that one of them in particular he was like, okay, this is clearly a conspiracy. And he had already been playing around in this space. He would take a megaphone and he would run around around in London and other areas and he would just shout at people and tell them they were being controlled, that their lives were part of the military industrial complex. He was very into Anonymous and all these other organizations that felt like there's a, there's sort of a benevolent anarchy that I want to be part of. And he didn't like the idea of being stuck in a loop that removed his humanity. That was something he reiterated over and over again that he felt like he wasn't a real human being. And these were things that helped him feel like he was. So when the 911 video came along he felt like, okay, now this is evidence for what I have been talking about, thinking about feeling for so long. This really justifies my beliefs and attitudes. And that is how he found his way into the truther community, the online community of people who share those anxieties. And together they talk about it all the time and to the point that they became a real community to him.
- [08:27]
Interviewer (Cautionary Tales Host)
So it's really interesting the way that you've set the stage there. So we haven't even yet talked about specifically what he believed, but you phrased it in emotional terms, his emotional journey, the kind of person he was, the kind of longing he had to believe his perspectives on the world, which had not always treated him very well. The idea that there was a community out there of like minded people, this benevolent anarchy. None of this yet is about the specifics of the conspiracy theory. It's all about the emotional resonance of the conspiracy theory, which I think is important in itself.
- [09:00]
Tim Harford
Yeah, I wanted to lay the foundation of his, of how he arrived in that conspiratorial community because it's odd to even say it out loud, even after all this research, that the conspiracy actually is Irrelevant, and the beliefs are irrelevant. But you don't know that when you're in the conspiracy. The anxieties and the values and the emotions that lead a person into a conspiratorial community, that's what's the motivating factor. That's the drive. But in an online ecosystem like we have, an information ecosystem like we have now, you can go online and look for confirmation that your anxiety is reasonable. And you will find it. Yeah, and you'll find it in other people. Sharing their anxieties and at a previous area would be very difficult for that to go any further. You might have some meetups, maybe you might be able to correspond in some way. You might subscribe to people's newsletters or buy their books. But now there's this thing that can happen where people form communities very rapidly, very quickly, and then spend a lot of time exchanging ideas with them. So some of the researchers I spoke to about this, they were like, we find our way into these groups for all sorts of reasons. But once this, Once you're in the group, the anxiety is set aside for the desire to be in this community because it satisfies this other drive you really weren't aware of, maybe that you wanted that validation in community. So that's. That's true for Charlie at the moment that he gets into this. And once you're inside the community, these beliefs that you may never have entertained before, start becoming part of the dynamic. And his. His beliefs, for instance, were that the buildings fell directly into their footprints. He believed that the steel beams of the towers, the jet fuel, couldn't have burned hot enough to melt them, so how could they have fallen? He had other beliefs that were even deeper. Conspiratorial were that the airplanes may have been remote controlled. There may have been dummies on the airplanes. And his fellow conspiracy theorists pretty much shared almost all those beliefs. But they all knew that they shared one thing in common, which was it definitely was a conspiracy. And all those people were then brought over by the BBC and they were given what you always want to give someone who's in a conspiratorial community. The thing we often do online is let me dump as many facts as I can on this person. Let me just show them. Look at this link. Look at this link. Look at this link. Well, they went all the way in a way that we all wish we could do. They took them to Ground Zero. They had them meet the architects who designed the World Trade center, who told them about how it couldn't resist A modern plane. It was designed to resist an impact from an older prop driven plane. They even had them get into a flight simulator, the kind that commercial airline pilots used, and had them learn how. Yeah, it's tough to land one of these, but it's very easy to just point it at something big. They had them talk to demolition experts who talked to them about what kind of explosives be required for this and how difficult it would be to go into the building. And you would have to take these gigantic jackhammer type devices and drill into every one of the columns all the way up, and you would have to put explosives into those holes that you made all the way up. And then they went even further and said, okay, what if we also took these people and had them meet people who were there, meet people who experienced this. So they talked to people who were at the Pentagon when it was attacked, who were there and helped with the cleanup before first responders could get there. People who lost, people they knew, people who, who saw the, the corpses of their own co workers. Then they went to Pennsylvania to the crash site of one of the planes, and they did everything you could imagine to give people a chance to see, okay, clearly, I mean, like, there's facts and then there's this. And the whole premise of the show, because it's like it's a reality show, is that when you do all this, everybody goes, yeah, well, nice job trying to trick me. I still believe it. And that usually is what happens in the show, at least. But Charlie, he said the thing that really cinched it for him was they met the widows and widowers of people who died in the crash. Charlie in particular hugged one of these people when he heard her story. He held her while she sobbed. And when he got back to the hotel room with the other truthers on the trip with him, he was very eager to hear what they thought about all this. They opened the dialogue by saying, wow, those crocodile tears, huh? Yeah, what a great actress they hired to trick us. And he told me that he thought privately, you're a group of disgusting animals to me. And that was overwhelming. He couldn't believe that they had zero empathy for this. And from that point forward, he started seeing himself a little bit separate from the group.
- [13:25]
Interviewer (Cautionary Tales Host)
It's incredible. But that, that I think is this interesting moment. This really sets off the whole exploration in, in the book how minds change. Because they all came in with the same belief, pretty much the same belief. They all saw exactly the same thing. So I want to come back to Charlie's story because I think that this mystery of why he changed his mind and why the others didn't, I think is fascinating. But before we come back to him, I wanted to ask David about your own views. You seem to have gone on a bit of a journey at the beginning of the book. You're pretty much a fatalist, like the BBC TV crew. You're thinking, well, when you show the conspiracy theorists the facts, of course they don't change their mind. Whoever changes their mind about anything. But then you make the point that actually people do change their minds all the time. We managed to do quite a good job of, of ignoring it when it happens.
- [14:14]
Tim Harford
Yeah, I, I mean, I had this podcast, you're not so Smart. I have the book, you're not so smart in a follow up. And I. This become my beat as a journalist, was talking to people about motivated reasoning, which is just all the psychological mechanisms and neurological mechanisms that influences us. We're very motivated to justify and rationalize and explain ourselves in a way that always seems to suggest we were right all along. And, yeah, I was very cynical. I was, I. I had this pessimism and I was not giving prescriptive advice. I was just describing, here's a thing in the world and, you know, best not to engage in it. And then around the same time period, the norms and attitudes and then the law about same sex marriage in the United States and LGBTQ issues in general had changed so rapidly. And I had this thought experiment pop in my mind. I was like, what if you took all those people and you put them in a time machine and sent them back 10 years? Would they argue with themselves? Would they look at each other and find it impossible to convince each other of something that in the future that same person will then absolutely accept? I wanted to understand what must have happened in those people's brains. And I felt like to understand it from, like, the bird's eye view, I could go all the way down into neurons and work my, my way up. And I became obsessed. It felt like it was an opportunity to give myself some comeuppance, and I was eager to do so because I didn't want to hold the cynical attitude. So I had motivated reasoning. I was motivated by something that I didn't even quite understand. And that's what set me off on this super obsessive journey and all over the world trying to meet experts and people who change minds, people who've had their minds changed in drastic ways and so on.
- [15:49]
Interviewer (Cautionary Tales Host)
I mean, not everyone is as knowledgeable about the subject as you are. David, and not everyone is. Is as obsessed with the problem of changing minds as you are. But a lot of people are kind of. We all like to think of ourselves as people who should be able to change other people's minds. I was quite interested. I published my own book, the Data Detective, last year. And that's a book about how to think clearly about the world and about how numbers might help you think clearly about the world. And I was quite interested by the response because lots of people came to me and said, well, yeah, I enjoyed the book. I've got this friend and he. Or she, well, he's this dumb thing and could you tell me how to use numbers to set them straight about this stupid thing that they believe? And my book had never. The way I thought about it is, if you can set your own thinking straight, isn't that enough? So do we think too much about trying to help other people see clearly, about trying to change other people's views, and not enough about seeing clearly ourselves?
- [16:47]
Tim Harford
It's so nuanced, I think, that it reminds me of something Tom Stafford told me, the great cognitive psychologist. He. He said germs were always a problem for human beings. And then when we built cities, they became this existential crisis because, well, put a lot of people together in a big group. Germs become a major problem. You have plagues, outbreaks and so on. So we developed sanitation at the level of the community and then we developed best practices for individuals, which would be washing your hands and stuff, boiling your water. He said, for misinformation and the inability to. To develop. Where's the good? Sourcing the information. All these problems with information have always been the problem for human beings. But then you get the Internet, which is the informational equivalent of gigantic cities, and now it's an existential crisis. And so we'll have to develop the generational equivalent of both sanitation at the context level, at the platform level. And we have to develop best practices as individuals. We have to develop the generational equivalent of washing your hands. When it comes to misinformation, this is what Tom Stafford told me. So the answer to your question is it's both things have to happen simultaneously because we all do need to become better critical thinkers. That's true. We all do need to become more amenable to changing our own minds, more amenable to being wrong, more likely to consider things a hypothesis and not a conclusion and all the things that go into that. But the context in which we discuss these issues are going to also have to change. Because if we're good critical thinkers, we're going to come across things that other people aren't. We're going to have experiences they're not going to have. We're going to have expertise they don't have. We're just going to be in worlds that they don't live in. If we're all great critical thinkers, we're going to discover things that, oh, this might not be true. We're going to see that certain attitudes might be harmful. We're going to see that maybe certain value structures need to be rearranged. Each person who's doing their due diligence is going to become aware of things that might help everybody else to understand better. And if you don't have a way to actually do that, if you don't have a way to do that that doesn't create massive resistance and pushback, then it will remain one sided. The current thinking is that natural selection did a great job of creating psychological mechanisms within us that are set up to have that kind of discussion. You ever go to a movie with someone and you love it and you can't wait to tell them about it and then when you get out of the movie, they say, boy, I hated that. Yeah, but you don't say, I can never talk to you again. I reject you forever. I don't trust you. Like, no, you, you have, you talk about it and you have a great conversation.
- [19:19]
Interviewer (Cautionary Tales Host)
Those that I mean, conversations about movies, whether they suck or not, are the best kinds of conversations because they're so interesting. But the stakes are low. It's a friendly chat.
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Tim Harford
So why is it so hard to do? Well, there's real, there are real reasons why this is hard to do. One reason is that we're not very good at it. And another reason is that there is a massive amount of identity defense going on. There's a massive amount of reputation management. And in a case like talking about a movie, that's probably not going to be that way, but let's pretend you're two movie critics to go see a movie that work for two different organizations. And let's say you're the director of the movie and somebody is just watched it with you, is just some random fan. And then they come out and you're like, what do you think? And they're like, I think it's the worst movie I've ever seen. Different conversation, most likely, right? Yeah, there's a reason for all those things. And oddly enough, it can seem like everything is just as neutral as everything else, but clearly not clearly there are other factors that motivate us when we get into these dynamics.
- [20:15]
Narrator
So the celebrated 911 conspiracy theorist Charlie Veach had indeed changed his mind and no longer thought that the destruction of the World Trade center was an inside job. The evidence of witnesses, experts and most importantly, widows had convinced him it had been a personal journey of discovery. But for the 911 truther community, it was a betrayal and one that demanded punishment. Cautionary Tales will be back in a moment.
- [20:50]
Tim Harford
Hey, this is David McRaney.
- [20:51]
Podcast Host (You Are Not So Smart)
This show has a Patreon page and if you go there and contribute to the Patreon for this show, it will support the show and keep the show going and I'll give you stuff you can't get otherwhere otherwhere elsewhere. But otherwhere is a cool word. Search for my name, David McRaney, or click the link in the show notes, which is otherwhere I like it.
- [21:21]
Narrator
Please welcome aboard the Johnson family.
- [21:24]
Disney Cruise Line Advertiser
The whole fame's here for the Disney Cruise. So you, you know we came to play and listen. The adults are gonna have a ball. First we're chilling in the infinity pool, onto massages at Sense's spa, then gliding into Star Wars Hyperspace Lounge for a toast. We're even gonna kick back with Mickey on Disney's private island. That's how we get down. Cause Disney Cruise Line is where we came to play.
- [21:52]
David McCraney
Our trip up the coast was perfection. With my Sapphire Preferred card, we earned three times the points on gas, online, grocery and dining.
- [21:58]
Disney Cruise Line Advertiser
It was amaz amazing.
- [22:00]
David McCraney
Chase Sapphire preferred the card that's preferred for a reason. Cards issued by JP Morgan, Chase bank and a member FDIC subject to credit approval terms apply.
- [22:08]
Podcast Host (You Are Not So Smart)
The School of Thought I love this place. I've been a fan of the School of Thought for years. It's a nonprofit organization. They provide free Creative Commons critical thinking resources to more than 30 million people worldwide. And their mission is to help popularize critical thinking, reason, media literacy, scientific literacy, and a desire to understand things deeply via intellectual humility. So you can see why I would totally be into something like this. The founders of the School of Thought have just launched something new called Kitted Thinking Tools. K I T T E D Thinking Tools. And the way this works is you go to the website, you pick out the kit that you want, there's tons of them. And the School of Thought will send you a kit of very nice, beautifully designed, well curated, high quality. Each one about double the size of a playing card. Matte Cello 400 GSM stock prompt cards and a nice magnetically latching box that you can use to facilitate workshops, level up brainstorming and creative thinking sessions, optimize user and customer experience and design, elevate strategic planning and decision making, mitigate risks and liabilities, and much, much more. Each kit can, if you want to use it this way, interact with this crazy cool app. Each card has a corresponding digital version with examples and templates and videos and step by step instructions and more. You even get PowerPoint and Keynote templates. There are so many ways you could use this. Here's some ideas. If you're a venture capital investor, you could get the Investors Critical Thinking Kit and use it to stress test and evaluate different startups for Series A funding. If you're a user experience designer, you can get the User Design Kit to put together a workshop with internal stockholders for a software product. Or if you're an HR professional, you could mix and match these kits to create a complete professional development learning program tailored specifically for your team over the course of the next two years. So if you're the kind of person who is fascinated with critical thinking and motivated reasoning and intellectual humility and biases, fallacies and heuristics, you know, the sort of person who listens to podcasts like you are not so smart. But you're probably the kind of person who would love these decks. If you're curious, you can get a special 50% off offer. That's right, half off offer right here. You can get half off of one of these kits by heading to Kitted Shop K I T T E D Shop and using the code smart50 at checkout. That's smart50 at checkout, 5% of the profits will go back to the school of thought. So you're supporting a good cause that distributes free critical thinking tools all over the world, on top of receiving a set of thinking superpowers in a box. Check all of this out at Kitted Shop or just click the link in the show notes and now we return to our program.
- [25:16]
Narrator
Influential YouTuber Charlie Veach had changed his mind about 9 11. The Twin Towers hadn't been toppled by demolition charges planted by the government after all. Keen to share his new views, Charlie uploaded a video for his fellow conspiracy theorists. If you're presented with new evidence, he told them, take it on. But as my guest David McCraney explains, the reaction of the 911 truthers was far from measured.
- [25:45]
Tim Harford
As I say in the book, it was swift and it was brutal. At first there were a lot of these just comments and Quickly put together videos, wondering what happened, who got to him. That was the initial response. Like, there was this sense that maybe somebody put a gun to his head or that somebody was threatening him. And then that started to transition into.
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Interviewer (Cautionary Tales Host)
But that he couldn't possibly have just looked at the evidence and changed his mind. Like, that is inconceivable.
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Tim Harford
Couldn't possibly do it. There were comments that were like, that's like exchanging the belief in gravity for something, you know, else. There were. There were comments that were like, someone must be coercing him. Someone must be threatening him. Then it went to, oh, wait, maybe he was a double agent all this time. And then you would think, okay, maybe some of this seems like what I would expect. But it goes further and further. They start trying to reach out to his family. They start. They. They go so far as they find his sister's Facebook page. She didn't have a. She had just not made it private. They found pictures of his niece and nephew. They took those pictures of his niece and nephew. They photoshopped their faces onto child pornography, and then they sent that to his mother. And his mother, not being very Internet savvy, was devastated. And he had to explain what was going on, which was difficult to do. They found out who his partner was. They started just sending her all these death threats and messages saying that their children were going to be the spawn of demon spawn. She started becoming scared. It was this incredible, awful campaign to destroy his life. Just for saying out loud in a YouTube video, I've changed my mind.
- [27:21]
Interviewer (Cautionary Tales Host)
Is this the tribal reasoning that you talk about in the course of the book? Or is this just. Is this a particularly extreme version of it? And actually, the tribal reasoning is something much broader and much more common.
- [27:34]
Tim Harford
It's hard to say if this is just an extreme version of it, because I've seen people react this way to just about anything, if not in this very coordinated, sort of awful way, at least on the other side of the spectrum, where people go to great lengths to demonstrate that they're good members of their groups and will put everything in their lives aside for whatever they're doing. We saw it very clearly with COVID where people would refuse to wear a mask, refuse to get vaccinated on their deathbed, say that I'm totally okay with the fact that I'm dying from this, even though it's pretty clear that they're being motivated by a political ideology that they're trying to signal to their most trusted peers they're a good member of their group by not Getting vaccinated. I think it's extreme in all sorts of different ways. This particular thing seems bonkers and heinous and so weird. But the reason it has that patina to it is that this was just a very coordinated group of people already. They already had this network where they could very quickly coordinate and make do actions. And I think that there are a lot of other situations where people had that ability to coordinate. It would look just as extreme when someone did something that felt like it was absolutely worth their excommunication. You have to see Charlie as more someone who is an elite within the group. It would be like the head of a political party walking out on stage and saying that my political party is the worst political party. I have been convinced of it, and I will never, ever support anything they ever do ever again. And I don't think you should ever vote for people in this particular political party. Like, imagine the head of a political party saying that it seems strange in a belief structure, like a conspiracy theory. Only if you look at it as a belief structure, it's a community first. And I argue in the book that that's true for a lot of the things that we think of as just something that we like, we love, we believe in. And we also have met some other people who feel the same way. At a certain point, that crosses a line into being a social identity, a group identity. The great sociologist Brooke Harrington told me that the equals mc square of social science is that the fear of social death is greater than the fear of physical death. And so if the ship is going down, you'll put your reputation on the lifeboat and you'll go down with the ship. It seems like that might be some sort of motivating, illusory thing. But in the case of Charlie, he demonstrates, when he did change his mind, that fear that we think, oh, something bad might happen to us. It happened to him. They almost ruined his entire life. He left his job, he had to change his name, he had to move.
- [29:58]
Interviewer (Cautionary Tales Host)
Now, listening to this, I think people will be plunging into the despair and fatalism that you describe yourself as holding before you started writing the book. Of like. Of course, no one listens to the facts. No one ever changes their mind about anything.
- [30:14]
Narrator
But you do have stories, really, really
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Interviewer (Cautionary Tales Host)
striking and persuasive stories of people changing their minds and of conversational methods that help to make that possible. So could you. Could you tell us a bit about deep canvassing? There's a little vignette about the Mustang man, and I found it very moving. So Just tell me about him and the context in which he was talking to a campaigner.
- [30:39]
Tim Harford
Sure. So around the time that we were discussing same sex marriage in the United States, I had heard about this group of people in California who were changing people's minds by going door to door and just talking to them. I was very curious about it. I wanted to see what was going on. And so I read some of the reports about them and then I've emailed, can I come out there? Can I just do this with you? And they said, yeah, of course. So I flew out to Los Angeles and I went to the LGBT center of Los Angeles, they have several buildings in la. And I went to the one where Dave Fleischer works. And Dave Fleischer had developed this thing called deep canvassing. After they lost on Prop 8, there was this legal thing that went through in California where they said, no, same sex marriage will not be legal here. And they were stunned that they had been defeated. And so he just wanted to understand how that happened. And he had this radical idea of why don't we just go door to door and ask people? And many of the conversations, people would change their minds. And they were recording the conversations and they did this a B testing thing, this sort of playback to see what happened there. And over the course of more than 17,000 conversations, almost all of them recorded on video, a B testing it, throwing away what doesn't work, keeping what does work. They developed this method for you knock on a person's door, you talk to them in a particular way, you ask questions in a particular order, you non judgmentally listen to what they have to say about the issue, and then you help them introspect in a way they've never introspected before by giving them a number scale. And all of the persuasion techniques I talk about in the book have this number scale where you just say, how strongly do you feel about X? Or how much do you believe this is true? How much confidence do you have in X? And so on. And then when a person gives you the number from say 0 to 10 or 1 to 100, you then say, why does that number feel right to you? And the conversation leaves immediately the binary debate space becomes this unspooling of what are my reasons for thinking this way? What motivated all this? And you allow the person to do that on exploration. You're just there to kind of help and move it forward. And over time this became so successful as a technique that they were actually getting a lot of people to change their minds to the point that the scientists started studying them and today it's being used in phone banks for all, for all sorts of different topics. They had this huge archive and one of the times I visited, I said, can I just go to the archives? They said, sure. And it really felt like something out of like a FBI thriller or something. They had this room all to itself that has several ways to, to read and watch and view all their stuff. And they have this amazing archive, very well organized, going all the way back to the beginning. And I watched 80 of these. I spent days in there. It was, it was incredible. And there was one in particular that just stuck out, which was the Mustang man. They call him the Mustang Man. And one of the canvassers approaches this man, he is in the garage with him and you know, they ask him how he voted on same sex marriage. He voted against it. And he's in his 70s, he's wearing shorts, he's got a dress shirt, he's smoking a cigarette, he's got the Zippo lighter that he's toying with. And he tells them, you know, I'm not against gay stuff necessarily. I just wish they wouldn't cause such a ruckus is the way he put it. He said, the country has enough problems as it is. I don't know why they have to keep causing all these problems. And so the canvasser doesn't respond like, how dare you, doesn't say you should be ashamed for saying such a thing. They just start asking questions. Oh, that's, huh. I'm wondering why you feel that way and where you at on the number scale. And it's just opening up space for this person to explore how they feel about it. And in one of the questions, he asks if he had ever been married before. And the Mustang man says, yeah, for 43 years. And she passed away. She passed away about 11 years ago. And I'm never going to get over it because I was supposed to die first. And then he says, let me show you something. And he takes him out and he uncovers this tarp over his wife's vintage Mustang. And he still maintains it. It's like his central hobby. He works on it all the time, keeps it in perfect pristine condition. And he's smoking a cigarette. He says, you know, she never smoked a day. She didn't even drink. She wouldn't let me smoke in the car. And he explains that one day she found a black spot on her gums. It was cancer spread to her throat. She couldn't speak. They had to talk to each other across a notepad, and she died. And just out of nowhere, he wasn't prompted. He said, don't pursue money or other riches. Just find happiness with somebody, because material things are loaned. Happiness is not loaned. It's yours. I feel I'm getting tearing up thinking about this again. And then the canvasser responded by just listening, by just hoping, this holding the space, and says, you know, it seems like 11 years is a long time to be alone. And he says, it gives you a lot of time to think. And he. And he said this statement where he stopped and let there be silence, where he said that sometimes he hears songs that they loved and he cries, and sometimes he remembers jokes that they laughed about. He laughs. And he said, he's never gotten over her, and that's okay by him. I don't want to get over her. And so without any prompting, he then says, while looking in the distance, I would want these gay people to be happy, too. And he convinces himself that he was wrong. And he says, you know what? I'd vote for it this time. And it was incredible to watch this conversation unfold because he clearly was against it. And until he had this conversation with the deep canvasser, he didn't know that he could feel otherwise. It required someone opening a space and going through what they would consider in psychology, guided metacognition, something that takes place in a lot of therapeutic models, where you give a person an opportunity to discover where their current attitude comes from and an opportunity to discover that perhaps they could see it otherwise, which was already available to them. And that's why I say in the book that persuasion, the kind that I advocate and the kind that really works, is more about giving a person an opportunity to understand that they can change their mind, that it's possible, than anything else. Because all mind change takes place on the other side. People change their own minds, and you're encouraging them to engage in some sort of metacognitive process that'll get them there. It's incredible to see it when it unfolds and works in that way.
- [36:44]
Interviewer (Cautionary Tales Host)
You've got to open that space up for people to change their own minds. But I wanted to come back to Charlie Veech because he, apparently, he had the same space, he had the same context as all of these other truthers, and none of them considered changing their minds for a second. And he wasn't subjected to any clever deep canvassing or street epistemology. There was something in him that was different. So what was different about Charlie? What was different about his life? When he went into that process with the BBC, that led him coming out on a different path from the others.
- [37:18]
Podcast Host (You Are Not So Smart)
Sure.
- [37:19]
Tim Harford
And I can say also to preface this, every person that I met who had left either a conspiratorial community or a cult or a pseudo cult or something along those lines, there was something else at play. And it was this. In Charlie's case, all those things I talked about when we first started talking about him, all those things that led him into the conspiracy, that led him to even search for something, to be amenable to it, to be open to it, they were being satisfied in the Truther community in a way that he enjoyed. Plus, he had some fame there that felt really good as a person who had been considered lesser than he. Also, he was interested in all sorts of anarchy themed communities, and he had found another one called Truth Jews. They're a group that was more open your third eye, let's play around with psychedelics, let's discuss the simulation, theory of the universe, stuff like that. And in that community, he was finding that all those same things that motivated him to go into the Truth community were being more nurtured there. And he was slowly moving up there, too. He's very charismatic. He's a great public speaker. So he was doing a great job of doing these kind of things that made him move up in the Truth world, inside the Truth Juice world. None of the other Truthers had anything like that. They didn't have a foot in two social worlds the way he did. In other words, they didn't have a social safety net. Even though the evidence was persuasive to them, the costs of accepting it were something they could not absorb, whereas he could. They had to think of the same things. I'm going to be shamed. I'm going to be ostracized. And none of this is articulated. None of this is salient. This is the things that are motivating their behavior without their knowledge, for the most part. But he feels safe to change his mind. He feels safe so he could change his mind. So he did.
- [38:59]
Interviewer (Cautionary Tales Host)
Yeah. This thing that everybody said, the other Truthers said, like, who got to him? The answer is, well, this slightly wacky pyramids and crystals, energy circles, Truth juice movement got to him not in the way that they put a gun to his head or paid him off, but just that they were offering him an alternative, slightly wacky, but much more benevolent community that he knew he could flourish in.
- [39:25]
Tim Harford
And it's not totally unlike what happens in deep canvassing, because in deep canvassing, One sort of representative of another community comes along and says, I will listen to you in a non judgmental, empathetic way and I will hear you out and I won't push back against it and I won't shame you for what you're saying. In many cases it's the first time that person's ever experienced that. But someone who they thought would immediately jump into a debate and argue with them and get angry and possibly go to fisticos and with the people I met who left Westboro Baptist Church, particularly Megan, felt Roper very similar to what happened with Charlie in the.
- [40:01]
Interviewer (Cautionary Tales Host)
We should say Westboro is this church that's famous for just being incredibly inflammatory, showing up at the funerals of veterans who've died in Afghanistan and saying thank God for dead soldiers and just deliberately getting in people's faces. And it's kind of this strange cult like organization. But you talk to several people, them who had left about that journey.
- [40:22]
Tim Harford
Yeah, they're. They're one of the most prominent hate groups in the United States. They're very anti Semitic. And when I say very, that's. They're about the most anti Semitic that a group could be. Megan Phelps, who was, she was a younger member of the group who was active on social media. They loved this about the fact that she was good at getting on social media and she pretty much spent all day arguing with people and somebody who was prominent in the Jewish community, they reached out to her over Twitter and they extended a hand. They said, I'd like to spend time with you. I want to talk to you about this and hear you out. I want to understand your position. I want to hear more about what you think, feel and believe. I'm curious in you in a compassionate, transparent, non judgmental way. They opened up a space just to talk. And then as they started building a bit of rapport with each other, he started making fun of her, making little jokes, the kind of stuff that you would do with your friend when you leave a movie theater. He started just trolling her. And they developed a friendly rapport even though they both knew they were on two different sides ideologically. And over time it had an effect to the point that she, she was at some sort of public event where people kind of circled her because a lot of people hate Westborough's church. And he was there in person and he defended her. And when some things happened in the Westboro that she didn't like, which is similar to what happened with Charlie, that he had that experience where he's like, oh, that was gross. I don't like this. And she started having the foot in both worlds. And when it came time to leave, that was the off ramp that got her out of that world. What I find compelling about all these stories is that I always thought people changed their beliefs, then they left the groups. But most often what happens is they leave the groups and then they change their beliefs. And there's something else that is involved for making them feel like I don't think this community is the right community for me. And it should offer you some cognitive empathy for the people on the other side of issues where if you can recognize they may be trapped by those same tribal tendencies, they may actually be imprisoned by this thing, then you can approach them with this sort of non judgmental, compassionate listening frame in a way that addresses that part of the motivation that is keeping them away from accepting the evidence that you think should just speak for itself.
- [42:29]
Interviewer (Cautionary Tales Host)
There's more than one story towards the end of your book in which it seems that you are setting up to use your clever psychological hacks and conversational strategies to change somebody's mind. And in both cases, actually you don't, and that's okay. Do you think sometimes we're just too desperate to change other people?
- [42:53]
Tim Harford
I do. In the introduction, I try to make it very clear that you really need to ask yourself why you want to do this. Because I had had several experiences after getting what I felt was like, wow, I have this incredible superpower. Now I can just change minds. I spent time with a flat Earther, the great Mark Sargent, and we had. We were having a good time in Sweden. We both got one of those invites that just comes out of nowhere. Come to Sweden, come on stage and talk about this. Because they had heard me talk about it. Slaters on the podcast, and he's a prominent Flat Earther. But we had such a good time hanging out and he was such a fun person. It was such a. It was interesting. I took the technique up to the point where he said he was totally open to changing his mind, maybe. And then I could tell that if I pushed more than that that it would ruin everything, that we'd never be able to talk for the rest of the time. And it felt. It felt, what's the good in that? I would rather have a good time in Sweden and then go get some food. It's very easy to assume that the facts are on your side. It's very easy to assume that you're the hero in the story. And I was so excited about deep canvassing When I. When I left, the first time that I went there, that I sat down with my friend Misha Globerman, who is a conflict resolution actual professional negotiator, I told them they're trying. There's one of the great statements they make is, I'm just trying to solve a mystery together with you. And I was telling him, you know, the mystery is like, why do we disagree? He's like, the mystery for the deep canvassers is, why are you wrong? And I'm right. I was like, no, no, that's. That's not where they're coming from. And he's like, david, they're biased. I mean, I agree with them. You agree with them. We share their values, and we think that what they're doing is good because we feel that. That we want the LGBTQ people to have more freedoms in this world. We want the laws to change. We want that. But don't kid yourself that it isn't persuasion. But at that point in the journey, I had thought to myself, no, they were just putting people on the correct path. But I had to admit, yeah, it is persuasion, and they were biased. So be honest with yourself, at least, that you are biased, and be sure that you're biased in the direction of what you're trying to do is reduce harm in this world. And be aware of the fact that it's possible you could be misleading yourself into thinking you're reducing harm when you're not. I think that the LGBT center of Los Angeles is absolutely reducing harm in this world, but I can imagine other people who would try to employ such techniques who would be convinced of such a thing, and I would not agree with them.
- [45:18]
Interviewer (Cautionary Tales Host)
David McCraney is the host of the you are not so Smart podcast you should all be subscribing, and he is the author of the wonderful new book how minds Change. David, thank you so much for joining Cautionary Tales.
- [45:31]
Tim Harford
Thank you so much for having me. It's been such a pleasure.
- [45:56]
Podcast Host (You Are Not So Smart)
Foreign. That is it for this episode of the you are not so Smart podcast. For links to everything we talked about, head to you are not sosmart.com or check the show notes right there in your podcast player.
- [46:17]
Tim Harford
My name is David McCraney.
- [46:18]
Podcast Host (You Are Not So Smart)
I have been your host. You can find my book how minds Change, wherever they put books on shelves and ship them in trucks. Details davidmcraney.com and I'll have all of that in the show notes on my homepage davidmcraney.com you can find a roundtable video with a group of persuasion experts featured in the book talking all about it. You can read a sample chapter, download a discussion guide, sign up for the newsletter, read reviews, all sorts of things for all the past episodes of this podcast. You are not so smart dot com. You can follow me on threads and Instagram and Blue sky and everything else that's like that avidmcraney symbol. Davidmcraney Follow the showtsmartblog. We're also on Facebook. You are not so smart. And if you'd like to support this one person operation, no editors, no staff, just me. Go to patreon.com you are not so smart. Pitching in at any amount gets you the show ad free. But the higher amounts, that'll get you posters and t shirts and signed books and other stuff. The opening music that is Clash by Caravan Palace. And if you really, really, really want to support this show, the best way to do that just tell people about it. Either rate and comment on it on all these platforms or just tell somebody directly. Hey, you should check out this show. Point them to an episode that really meant something that really connected with you. And check back in in about two weeks for a fresh new episode.
- [48:17]
Narrator
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- [48:19]
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