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How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion QUOTES

How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion QUOTES

1 " Brian Greene, a physicist who studies string theory, to tell Wired, “We’ve come to a very strange place in American democracy where there’s an assault on some of the features of reality that one would have thought, just a couple years ago, were beyond debate, discussion, or argument. "

― David McRaney , How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

2 " Once that real, lived memory was out in the open, you could (if done correctly) steer the conversation away from the world of conclusions with their facts googled for support, away from ideological abstractions and into the world of concrete details from that individual’s personal experiences. It was there, and only there, he said, that a single conversation could change someone’s mind. "

― David McRaney , How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

3 " Persuasion is not coercion, and it is also not an attempt to defeat your intellectual opponent with facts or moral superiority, nor is it a debate with a winner or a loser. Persuasion is leading a person along in stages, helping them to better understand their own thinking and how it could align with the message at hand. You can’t persuade another person to change their mind if that person doesn’t want to do so, and as you will see, the techniques that work best focus on a person’s motivations more than their conclusions. "

― David McRaney , How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

4 " The world, as you experience it, is a simulation running inside your skull, a waking dream. We each live in a virtual landscape of perpetual imagination and self-generated illusion, a hallucination informed over our lifetimes by our senses and thoughts about them, updated continuously as we bring in new experiences via those senses and think new thoughts about what we have sensed. "

― David McRaney , How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

5 " What counts as dangerous ignorance or outdated dogma? What qualifies as a malignant tradition, defunct politics, or a misguided practice? What norms are so harmful, what beliefs are so incorrect that, once we know how to change minds, we should take every opportunity to do so? And here’s the kicker: How do we know when we are right and they are wrong? "

― David McRaney , How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

6 " Once people see where their ideas come from, they become aware that they come from somewhere. They can then ask themselves if they’ve learned anything new in the time since they last considered them. Maybe those ideas need updating in some way. "

― David McRaney , How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

7 " That’s when he decided it was time to bring in some scientists. That decision would lead to a torrent of publicity that nearly destroyed everything Fleischer had worked for since the LAB knocked on its first door. "

― David McRaney , How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

8 " For brains, everything is noise at first. Then brains notice the patterns in the static, and they move up a level, noticing patterns in how those patterns interact. Then they move up another level, noticing patterns in how sets of interacting patterns interact with other sets, and on and on it goes. Layers of pattern recognition built on top of simpler layers become a rough understanding of what to expect from the world around us, and their interactions become our sense of cause and effect. "

― David McRaney , How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion

9 " As they had explained in the two hours of training that morning, sometimes the work was like trying to urge people to evacuate before a hurricane: in the time it would take to motivate one obstinate holdout, you could persuade a dozen others to pack up and head north. "

― David McRaney , How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion