The real reason it’s so hard to change anyone’s mind
HOW MINDS CHANGE
by David McRaney (Oneworld £18.99, 352 pp)
If you have ever had an argument with someone about one of the live issues of the day — and you surely have — you will know how difficult it is to change anyone’s mind.
Brexiteers and Remainers, Trump supporters and Trump loathers, Corbynistas and normal people . . . the arguments roll on, but no compromise is ever reached.
‘We shall have to agree to disagree,’ are words that we all find ourselves saying, usually when attempting to debate something with some pig-headed dimwit of the other side.
But David McRaney might differ. This self- styled ‘ self- delusion expert and psychology nerd’ from Mississippi once wrote a book called you Are Not So Smart, which was all about the ways in which we delude ourselves, and here he sets out to discover not just what it takes to influence others, but why we believe things in the first place.
Along the way he meets Charlie Veitch, a 9-11 ‘truther’ who believed that it was all a put-up job planned and executed by villainous Americans. until one day he simply changed his mind, and was immediately excommunicated by all his fellow conspiracy theorists, who would not listen to anything he said and simply assumed he had been ‘got at’ by the malefactors.
Veitch had been a rising star in the conspiracy world, who had become friend and collaborator with the American basket- case Alex Jones and our own David Icke, who still believes the world is being run by interdimensional lizard humanoids (the Duke of Edinburgh having been one of them). He was recruited onto a BBC reality series, Conspiracy Road Trip, in which the comedian Andrew Maxwell would load several extremists onto a bus, take them to people who know better and try to persuade them that they were wrong.
At the end of each show Maxwell would sit down with his road-trippers and see if the facts presented had changed their minds in any way. But they never budged. Nothing could persuade them that what they had already decided, however ridiculous, wasn’t true.
for the 9-11 episode of the show, a group of ‘truthers’ walked the crash sites, met experts in demolition, explosives, air travel and construction, met family members of the victims, met the person who was national operations manager of the federal Aviation Administration at the time of the attacks and even took flying lessons over New york City.
They weren’t having any of it. They assumed the people they met were paid actors, that experts were mistaken and
that facts weren’t facts but suppositions or just lies.
But for Veitch, the flight school, the architecture firm, the demolition experts had all chipped away at his certainty and exposed the possibility that he might be wrong. And it was the grieving family members who confirmed it.
Back at the hotel he found out that he was the only person who felt this way. He eventually put up a video on YouTube telling people of his epiphany.
The backlash was swift and brutal. Within days one conspiracy theorist was saying a producer friend had told him Veitch had been manipulated by a psychologist who had worked closely with mentalist Derren Brown.
Rumours spread he was an agent sent by the FBI or the CIA to infiltrate the truther movement and discredit them. (Something you might have thought they were doing an excellent job of themselves.) Someone found his mother’s email address and sent her images of child pornography with the heads of Veitch’s children superimposed on them.
Alex Jones made a video in which he said that he had known Veitch was a double agent all along. That was it for Veitch. He changed his identity and now makes a good living selling property around the world.
You can’t change anyone’s mind. You can only change your own, and that’s pretty hard. McRaney talks to several people who changed theirs and suffered exclusion from tight-knit little groups of maniacs and loons.
It’s a dense book but, at times, a fascinating one. Much recommended to conspiracy theorists, flat- Earthers, climate change deniers and Trump supporters, none of whom will read it.