Something You Should Know - Why Nothing Has an Instruction Manual Anymore & How People Really Change Their Mind

Episode Date: December 2, 2019

People seem to get sadder in winter. Is it the weather? Is it just because it’s colder? Or is it the sunlight? This episode begins with the explanation of why more people get into bad moods this time of year. https://www.medicaldaily.com/seasonal-affective-disorder-happiness-actually-linked-sunshine-study-finds-403569 Computers and other electronic devices used to come with huge instruction manuals. Not anymore. We live in an age of “user-friendly” machines that don't need instructions. What’s so interesting is that the whole concept of the “user experience” is really traceable back to a specific point in time and it wasn’t all that long ago. Cliff Kuang is a user experience designer and author of the book User Friendly: How the hidden rules of design are changing the way we live, work, and play (https://amzn.to/37T1Vi0). Listen as he explains the evolution that has gone from teaching people how to use complicated machines to making complicated machines easy for people to use. Everyone loves a log fire on a cold winter’s night. But does it really keep you warm? And what about the pollution it causes? Listen and discover some interesting facts about log fires. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2000-10-06/business/0010060120_1_furnaceor-boiler-chimney-heat We spend a lot of time either trying to change people’s minds or listening to other people trying to change ours. Often it isn’t very successful despite the rational and reasonable arguments we all use. So you have to wonder if there is a better way. And you also have to wonder if it is worth trying to change someone's mind in the first place. Eleanor Gordon Smith has researched this and written a book about it called Stop Being Reasonable: How We Really Change Our Minds (https://amzn.to/2R9OxQQ). She joins me explain the fascinating results of her research on why changing your mind and my mind is so amazingly difficult.  This Week’ Sponsors -Simplisafe. For huge holiday savings and a free HD security camera to www.Simplisafe.com/something -Article Furniture. For $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more go to https://www.article.com/sysk -Capterra. To find the best software for your business for free go to www.Capterra.com/something Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, who doesn't love a log fire on a cold winter night? But does it really heat you up?

Then the fascinating evolution of the user experience and why so many things today are built to be user-friendly. What used to come with instruction manuals doesn't come with them anymore because now we're building up this pattern language of previous reference and this should work like this thing. We're building on that vocabulary without us ever realizing it so that the instruction manual essentially has gone away. Also what really causes people to get sad in winter? And why is it so hard to change someone else's mind?

And is it even worth it? I have close friends who have like weird conspiratoratorial beliefs about the truth of the moon landing. And it's the kind of thing where you can either descend into the quicksand of trying to get them to see reason, or you can think that this is something which is a strange blip in an otherwise coherent person and it will waste both of our time, so try to unpick it. All this today on Something You Should Know. Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool.

And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts.

And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi. Welcome to Something You Should Know. It's been pretty chilly in many parts of the country over the last several days, and in fact in many parts of the world over the last several days. I know here where I am in California it's been chilly, and we just, for the first time, got our fireplace going the other day. And really, who doesn't like a fire in the fireplace on a cold night?

But there are some things about wood fire fireplaces that you may not know. Although fireplaces are often accused of causing pollution, when a wood fire burns hot in the fireplace, it creates very little pollution. A hot fire also adds very little heat to your house. Most of the heat from a hot fire goes right up the chimney and can actually suck more heat out of the heat from a hot fire goes right up the chimney and can actually suck more heat out of the house than it radiates back in. With a slow burning or smoldering fire, less of the combustible gas actually burns. More of it just goes up the chimney as smoke and soot.

So from the point of view of generating heat, wood-burning fireplaces don't really make a whole lot of sense. Hot fires send the heat up the chimney, smoldering fires don't produce much heat, and they cause more pollution. But they still seem like a pretty nice idea on a cold winter night. And that is something you should know. About 80 years ago or so, something changed. And that change has had a fundamental influence on how you live your life. You see, up until then, and this would be around World War II, life was, well, life was simpler.

In particular, the technology was simpler. Machines and the mechanics of life were easier to understand. No one ever talked about the user experience. There was no need for technology to be user-friendly, because up until then, machines and things, mechanical things, were pretty user-friendly. You could figure out how they worked. But then things got complicated, and that is what has led to this whole concept of the user experience.

We need our machines, our computers, our phones to be user-friendly. And now we need our machines to actually anticipate what we want, sometimes before we even know what we want. But then things got complicated. And that is what has led to this whole concept of the user experience. We need our machines, our computers, and our phones to be user-friendly. In fact, we now need some of our machines to actually anticipate our needs before we even ask.

And as this technology keeps advancing, it raises the questions of, where's it going? Is there a downside to all this user-friendliness? Well, here to discuss this is Cliff Kwong. He is a user experience designer, and he's author of the book, User-Friendly, how the hidden rules of design are changing the way we live, work, and play. Hi, Cliff. Welcome. Hi. Thanks for having me.

So what happened? What happened around World War II that brought to light this whole idea of the user experience? Machines in some way had to work differently than they had worked before because of all the different technology that was coming online to help Americans fight in the war. And all that technology coming online with all these new users made people think about technology in a fundamentally different way. So I guess one of the things that people noticed in World War II is that none of the machines were performing nearly as well as people had promised they would, right? So they would come back with numbers saying the bomb should be this accurate and the plane should be flying at this efficiency rate, et cetera, et cetera.

And none of those numbers turned out to be happening. None of those numbers turned out to be true. And so the Army actually, the Air Force, set about figuring out exactly why this was. And it turned out, more often than not, it was that people and machines were not interacting well, right? People did not know how to use the machines in some way. And people didn't have a very good understanding of what was going on. And so this generation of psychologists were

essentially tasked to figure it out. And what they realized was that it wasn't so much that the human beings weren't, quote unquote, trained to use the machines well enough, which is what a lot of people thought was the case. It was the machines in some way were impossible to use. And in one famous instance in World War II, it turned out that there was something almost 500 crashes within a span of 22 months, all caused because the wing flaps and the landing gear in a particular plane, the B-17, were almost identical. So that when people come in to land these planes, they would, for example, hit the wing flaps, meaning to push the landing gear, and end up causing a crash.

And so therefore, in some ways, the machine had to be bent around the man as opposed to people being trained to use more and more complicated machines. And we live with that fundamental shift in thinking to this day. Well, it's pretty interesting when you think about it that more or less the world was simple enough up till then, or sort of up till then, that we didn't really have to discuss this because things were simpler. And then this new technology comes in and then all of a sudden it's like, well, people don't really know how to use this. All of a sudden, the world started to get more complicated. And what was interesting at the time is that, you know, if you were in the Air Force and the Army at the time, you know, this is actually the beginning of IQ tests in the military, which was like they were intensively testing all these different soldiers, hoping that they could fit them into exactly the perfect job. Right. And it turns out that that doesn't work.

It turns out that no matter how well trained somebody is, they're going to make mistakes. And unless you design machines to be simpler to use as opposed to being more complex and therefore requiring more training, you can't solve that problem. And so that shift in thinking, which I call a real paradigm shift that's unappreciated, really set in motion a lot of the ways that we look at technology today. You know, for example, assuming that things shouldn't come with instruction manuals or assuming that things should be able to be used without you ever having to really be told explicitly how to use them.

And yet, when early computers came out, remember, they came with like this huge book that was like the size of a Bible of how this machine works. I traced this change back to the Macintosh computer, right? And so some 35 years after that insight first landed in the cockpits of B-17 bombers and psychologists started figuring out this idea of bending the machine to the man, you actually get the first Macintosh that Apple creates. And in those first ads, they describe it as the computer should be taught how people work as opposed to teaching people how computers work, right? And so that idea is directly descended from that World War II insight. And what it produces is this machine that's actually meant to conform to our expectations about how a machine might work based on our previous assumptions about how the world at large works. So you get things

like the desktop metaphor, which helps us understand what a personal computer should do, right? And so that sets us on that path to essentially eliminating the instruction manual, right? So as you mentioned, there was an era in which computers came with all this instructions and all these kinds of things. But if you notice what Apple has done and then successively with the iPod and the iPhone is that what used to come with instruction manuals doesn't come with them anymore because now we're building up this pattern language of previous reference and, you know, this should work like this thing and this is familiar because you've used this other thing. We're building on that vocabulary

without us ever realizing it so that the instruction manual essentially has gone away. So in a previous era, you might get an instruction manual for something as simple as a VCR, right? But now you don't get an instruction manual for an app that potentially runs your healthcare

and some cases might run an entire fleet of aircraft engines. These things don't come with instruction manuals because of this revolution and thinking about the way technology should behave in our lives. Well, there certainly has been a fundamental change from the days, and it used to be, you know, if you brought some new thing home, the first thing you would do is sit down and read the instructions. Today, nobody wants to read the instructions.

Most things don't even come with instructions. You bring something home, you take it out of the box. Maybe there's a quick start guide. But basically, you want to take your new thing, whatever that is, and start to use it. Yeah, I mean, I would trace this evolution expectation to the smartphone, right? Because, you know, as you know, like there are more smartphones than people in the United States right now. And the fact that virtually every single human being in the United States has a cell phone for them means that we bring these expectations to the most ubiquitous and personal computer of all, which is the smartphone, right? And so this idea that things have to be simple

enough to be worked on this very limited screen in some sense, where you don't have like a full keyboard, you don't have like an entire, you know, you don't have a mouse and all these kinds of things. The idea that you need to be able to manage your life through this one tiny device has really shifted the expectations for everything else. And so in an era in which, you know, you can have some have a company like Amazon or Uber delivered to you service with an ease that's never been seen before. We bring those expectations to all the other things in our lives, because everything should be accessible right through an app or whatever. And so those expectations bleed from one arena to another.

And so what does this mean to people? Is this all good news? I think that there are pluses and minuses, right? If you ask people today, like, oh, what would life be without your cell phone? People would say, oh man, it'd be so hard. I wouldn't know where to go. I wouldn't be able to keep in touch with my friends. I wouldn't be able to keep in touch with work. And so there is this idea that things are now easier and more accessible to us than they've ever been before. But at the same time, when everything becomes simple to operate, you get into this world in which services like Facebook or, you know, whatever, are trying to anticipate what you want before you even know what you want, before you even decided exactly what it is you're after, right? And so this world in which a lot of those assumptions are being sort of intuited and anticipated by machines is a world in which we don't necessarily have to think as hard about what we want or how we want to act in the world. Instead, these things are in some ways being crafted by the interfaces around

us. And that, I think, is the real challenge point, right? Because you know, a world in which there's no friction is a world in which everything comes to you so easily that you almost don't even have to think about it, right? But friction in some ways is the path to introspection, right? Friction is the way that we decide whether or not something is really worth having or really worth wanting. And so when you take all that friction away, you can ask the question, you know, what decisions aren't we making consciously? What decisions are being made for us? And how might we have made decisions differently if things weren't so easy? There's also the creep factor that because this machine seems to know what I want before I want it, that kind of creeps me out. One example of what you're talking about would be

this really interesting experiment that's happening at Carnival, right? And what they're doing on their cruise ships is supplying all of the passengers with what they call an ocean medallion, which is essentially a Bluetooth near field communication device that allows your profile to sort of travel with you on the ship as you walk around the ship, right? And so your preferences, the things that you've ordered, the things that you want, the things that you've signed up for are now sort of, they're invisibly trailing you as you walk through the ship, right? So that means that the crew members can say like, oh, I see you're headed to this restaurant. Do you want to go there?

But what's also can happen is that the screens around you can basically say, oh, here's some just suggestions for you based on this enormous, quote-unquote, personal genome of your tastes and history that is essentially being tracked and updated in real time, right? And so there is a sense in which, yeah, like, people really seem to respond to that. You know, they like having the things that they want presented to them in the most seamless possible way.

But there's a sense in which, like, you know, if you extrapolate that example out into the real world, you can ask the question, is that something you would want to be happening with your life constantly? And that seems far fetched, right? Until you realize that like, look, because of the way advertising works today, because of the way digital platforms work today, all those things happen to you almost on a minute-by-minute basis. And certainly, they're happening to you constantly through the websites you visit, the apps that you use, and all these kinds of invisible means of putting things in front of you that you may not have explicitly said that you want.

We're talking about the user experience and things being user-friendly. And my guest is Cliff Kwong. He is a user experience designer, and he's author of the book, User-Friendly, How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever

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The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Cliff, what's your sense of how people embrace that kind of technology like you were talking about with Carnival Cruises? Do people like it generally generally or is there resistance to it? Are we in this kind of transition phase where people are resisting it maybe, but pretty soon it just will be part of our lives? I'm not really sure. I don't think anybody is sure exactly how this is going to evolve, right? Because like, I'll just give you an example. You know, the things that we used to find creepy like five or 10 years ago are now just part of everyday life, right?

The fact that you can go to a Maps app and have your location log there and have your favorite spots already marked on the map, for example, or your friends might know exactly where you are down to your GPS location, right? Those things were completely off the table 10 years ago. But what's happened in the

last 10 years is we've recognized the utility. And so we've made this trade-off between privacy and utility. And we're making it constantly, right? And so the question of where we draw the line ultimately is going to be decided not by governments and not by technology companies. It's going to be decided by people deciding whether or not they're getting enough utility in return for the data that they're sharing. Right. And that's a negotiation. I think that it's up to us to be conscious consumers of and be advocating for and being vocal about what we want and where we draw those lines. But, well, Alexa is a good example.

I mean, people always feared that people could listen in what's going on in your house. Then it turns out people were listening in, but nobody really seems to care. Yeah, so that's the funny thing, right? There's a difference between what the media narrative is about, we should be concerned about this. There's a difference between saying like, people saying, I am concerned about this. And there's a difference. And there's a difference between that and people essentially acting upon it, right? What it tells me is that we're just not done with the debate. Part of it is that consumers don't necessarily know what the alternative is.

And part of it is there's not necessarily a lot of alternatives in the market out there right now. I think what's interesting is that, like, you're now seeing more and more of this debate being waged out in the public with other companies saying, hey, I do this, but in a privacy centric way, or I do this, but I don't record your calls, or I do this and I don't record your location or your browsing history. And we're seeing whether or not those businesses are going to be successful, right? We're going to see this at scale, whether or not people understand the benefits enough and whether or not the benefits are clear enough that they maybe take a chance on a smaller competitor or a smaller provider. You have in your book a drawing of the Honeywell thermostat from 1953 that everyone has used, everyone has had in their home at some point in their life. It's that round

thermostat that's about the size of your hand and you just turn it to the temperature you want and it goes to that temperature. It is the most simple, intuitive thing on earth in terms of thermostats. And you compare that to say a Nest thermostat, which certainly does a lot more, but it is not as simple and user-friendly as that Honeywell thermostat from 1953 that is still around and still in use in houses today. You're making a really interesting point. And so in the case of the Honeywell round, you know, there's a good reason that that's one of the best-selling designs in the history of American industrial design. And it is that, like, there's a one-to-one correspondence between everything that thermostat does and everything it's showing you an interface right there's kind of honesty there that i think that is becoming more challenging to deliver when these machines have so much capability wrapped into like

let's say a single readout all these algorithms and learning settings and all these kinds of things that are built into these very very um almost oversimplified readouts that sort of hide a lot of the complexity and capability of what these machines do. And that's attention, right? It's like, how much do you reveal to the user so that they can adjust things and have it be understood versus how much do you hide so that they can just get to exactly what the thing needs to be doing? And that is like the real challenge of design in the 21st century. What I find so interesting about this whole idea of user-friendly, which as you point out, really started to take hold in World War II as it related to machines. But today we

kind of want our life to be user-friendly. I want my phone bill to be user-friendly. I want my car insurance policy to be technology is bringing to us, right? We're bringing new expectations. You know, look at what's happened to TV companies and how they're being disintermediated, right? They're essentially being disintermediated because, you know, people like Netflix and Amazon and Apple are coming along with more user-friendly, simpler to access, easier to understand offerings that also provide much more inventory than let's say your TV channels do, right? And so that sort of same sense, the ways in which the cable industry is being rewired by consumer expectation is something that I expect to see. And then in fact, we're already seeing in things like utilities, things like insurance, all these like gnarly complex industries that people have not changed

or seen as being centers of innovation for decade upon decade, right, are now really having to be for, they're waking up and looking in the mirror and saying, like, how do I update my service for the way the generation, the coming generations think about technology and the way those coming generations think about how services should work. Because I don't think it's tenable if you're like a giant insurance company to say like, oh, we're going to make this generation of 15 year olds interact with our insurance company in the same way that their grandparents do. They just won't stand for this assumption that user friendly is the way to go, is that always true, though? I mean, is there value in things perhaps being better because they're more complicated and

because you really need to know how to use it and that making things really user-friendly is, in a way, dumbing down things? This is actually something that comes up in the annals of technology, right? You know, and the example actually comes directly from airplanes once again. And I think that what you're describing is called the automation paradox. And the way this works is the following. So you add automation to the way an airplane works in order to make that airplane easier and safer to fly, right? But in doing so, the pilots now no longer have to work as hard to fly that plane. And so they make errors that they didn't make before. And so to compensate for those errors,

you have to add more automation, right? And so you get into this spiral where the pilots get less and less competent, and the plane gets more and more automated. And therefore, the pilots get less and less capable of flying that plane. And so I think that what you're describing is a world in which we're essentially doing a little bit of that ourselves, right? You can imagine like just to take this forward in a very clear way, like driverless cars, right? What happens when our cars start being able to stop themselves at red lights, start being able to drive themselves along the highway, start being able to take exits off the

highway and take lefts and rights and through the city and all these kinds of things, what kind of drivers will we be then when the machine is doing so much of it, right? And so there's this sense that you actually, you can't automate your way to the future. You actually have to keep humans in the loop, able to be honing their skills, able to be making decisions so that when the time comes and it really matters, they actually have that acumen and the training to do something correctly, right? And so I think that there's a world in which we thought that a lot of these driverless cars and all this kind of stuff would just arrive one day. And it turns out that it's going to be much more messy than that because a lot of what

technology should do is not just take jobs away from us as humans, but actually make us more capable at the jobs that we want to still be doing. And so that tension is one that I think that we're going to be living with more and more as the pace of technological change increases. But then at some point, if we ever get to like the Jetsons where we're all in flying cars, then maybe we do want them all to be driverless so that we're not crashing into each other. Right. I mean, you know, so there's this interesting thing is that like, it's easy when it's all on the human, it's easy when it's all in the machine, where it gets hard is all the places in between all those steps in between where you have to negotiate who's in charge and what do you need? Like what information does the person need? And what happens when one needs to take over with from the other? And so, you know, we've been negotiating that really like that fuzziness for

a long time now. And I think that we're going to be negotiating that fuzziness for a long time still. And when you look at what's happened over the last 80 years or so involving this whole idea of user experience, it makes me wonder, you know, what's going to happen in the next 80 years? What's this going to look like 80 years from now? Cliff Kwong has been my guest. He is a user experience designer, and he is author of the book, User Friendly, How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play. And you'll find the link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Cliff. Thanks, Mike. It was a pleasure and it was really fun talking to you. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan,

the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. I myself have been married for 56 years. Unfortunately to four different women. You can work out a whole lot

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Listen along by searching The Moth wherever you get your podcasts. One of the great frustrations we all experience in life is trying to be reasonable with other people, particularly when it comes to explaining your position or trying to get someone to agree with you. You would think that if you explain things in a calm and rational and reasonable way, everyone should agree with what you said and we can all move forward together. But being reasonable and rational often doesn't work. So why not?

Is there a better way to find common ground so people understand you and you understand them? Or is it in fact a somewhat pointless exercise? Maybe we don't need to try to get people to agree with us because A, it's very difficult to do, and B, what's the point? What's the point? Why is it so important that people agree with us? It's okay to disagree. Eleanor Gordon-Smith, a producer for NPR's This American Life, has researched this and written a book called Stop Being Reasonable, which kind of tells you where she stands on the subject. Hi, Eleanor. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Thank you so much for having me. What a pleasure. Sure. So it certainly seems reasonable that to be reasonable and rational is the way to explain yourself and your position. And if you're really good at it, people should see things your way. And yet it often doesn't work. So the question is, why? Why doesn't it work? I mean, you've put your finger on a large part of the problem just there, which is that we have this kind of self-congratulatory notion that we are reasonable, that the people who we disagree with are the ones who aren't being reasonable, and therefore we're the ones who must be being reasonable. But part of my motivation in calling on us to let go of that thought is that I think

it turns out to be really much more complicated than we might have imagined to work out what it in fact is to be reasonable. So, you know, we have a lot of pretty simple slogan type ideas about what it might be to be reasonable, things that boil off to pretty simple injunctions, like you should doubt more, or you shouldn't believe what you've been told, or you should be thinking with your brain and not with your emotions. And these ideas, I think, if you push on them even a little bit, they turn out to be much more complicated than we might have imagined. And those turn out to not be necessarily the best rules for what it in fact is to think well or to change your mind well. you are, is the story you tell about trying to talk to men who were catcalling you and whistling at you and trying to get them to understand how that made you feel.

And so talk about that experience. For me, the interest in how people change their minds is really quite a personal one. And it started, I guess, about three years ago now when I started working on this catcalling social experiment. And basically, the idea was that I would go out, I'm a radio reporter in a previous life, and the idea was that I would go out and take, you know, a recorder and a microphone and a certain amount of familiar skills as an interviewer, and I would go out and I would try to interview men who catcalled me, and more specifically, I would try to change their minds. I would wait for them to yell something kind of vulgar

or sexual or crass or, you know, just the stupid things that men yell when they're hanging out of the windows of cars or they've had a couple of drinks. And I'd go over and I'd say like, come back, tell me what you just said. Tell me what you were hoping for when you said it. And most importantly, tell me what I would need to say

in order to get you to change your mind about that. And was an idea for the radio program This American Life we thought it would be a kind of fairly simple mission to try to get some good tape of interactions with these men a bit of a disagreement and it turned out to be far more complicated than I thought it would be I have a bit of a background in like high school debate and critical thinking and argument construction and those sorts of like formal tasks where you spend a lot of time doing rigorous argument construction. So I went in honestly pretty cocky. Like I felt like this would be fairly straightforward for someone with my kind of training to be able to pull off. It sounds like the hubris on that, as say it now makes me embarrassed and in fact what happened was I spent close to six weeks walking around talking to cat callers and just having no success whatsoever

just being unable to get them to understand that they were doing something that most women don't enjoy and it really started out for me, this journey into thinking like, when people do change their minds, what is it that manages to get through to them? Because everything I thought could get through to these men turned out not to. And so when you asked these men who were whistling at you and saying vulgar things, when you asked them, what is it you're hoping to get from this? What's the outcome that you desire from this? What did they say? They said this really weird kind of mash of things.

So I actually wound up getting quite different answers to this from different guys. Some of them said that they were looking for a relationship, like they genuinely wanted to meet their girlfriend by yelling something at her in the street. Others of them were a little more like playful about it. They would say things like, oh, it's just, you know, like I'm doing it for my mates or I'm doing it to get a reaction or it's just like me being silly. Others of them said it was while they granted, you know, not something that was likely to get them a girlfriend, at least it was attention and there was some sort of camaraderie that they could get going between them and a woman that maybe then from there they could say something a little more likely to instigate a relationship. So I got this weird, inconsistent mash of motivations from them. But one thing they

all had in common, which is when I said to them, do you think that women like this? Like, is part of your motivation the sense that women too are enjoying what you're doing? To a man, they all said, oh yeah, yeah, oh yeah yeah absolutely i'm totally confident that women are enjoying this and i wouldn't dream of doing it if they didn't it's so that she can have fun and enjoy the night which made it all the more peculiar that when i said hey buddy i don't think that they are enjoying it that they weren't receptive to that you know i mean if you have a stated motivation which is to give a certain kind of person a good time and then you find out they're not having a good time well by your by your lights, you should care about that. But

they didn't. Well, why do you think that they would say that? Why do you think that men, what would be their reason? What would be their evidence for saying, oh, yeah, women like this, they really get a kick out of this? Yeah, I mean, I was baffled by it as well. And so that's kind of the next question that I pursued was to say, like, well, what evidence do you have for why you think women enjoy this? And it was really striking to me that the thing they all said was this kind of conclusive proof was the fact that the women that they did this to smiled and laughed. And that's striking.

And it really resonated with me because I know that I smile and laugh when men do this to me. And I kind of, I don't like that about myself. It makes me feel quite embarrassed and like I'm capitulating to something that I shouldn't be capitulating to. But it's true that one reaction that women can have to feeling frightened or put on the spot is that in order to kind of deescalate the situation, you do laugh and you smile and you just do what's necessary to kind of get out of there in a relatively frictionless way. So I would try to explain this to these guys. I would say like, yeah, you're right.

You are seeing some smiles and some laughs. But let me authoritatively tell you as someone who also does these smiles and laughs that they're in fact precisely evidence of discomfort rather than evidence of the fact that she's really having fun. And they just didn't believe me. I would say this over and over to different men and they would all come back with some variation on the theme that I was particularly sensitive and that I couldn't speak for all women, which was funny because it implied that they could. But yeah, but you were being reasonable and rational in explaining that. And guess what? It doesn't work. It didn't work. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, I still, so since then, I embarked on this project, which the book is the kind of final culmination of, which was, I went out and I spoke to people who really did change their minds. You know, I went to try to find stories where persuasion works and where we are able to get people back to the truth and to, you know, better sets of beliefs, I guess. And I still have a lot of faith in the idea that we can reach each other with rational debate or with something like what I was trying to do in those conversations with catcallers. I just also think that there are a large number of missing ingredients that we can

do ourselves a certain disservice by forgetting to include when we set out on these kinds of persuasive missions. You know, things like emotional, things like, what does this belief mean to you? I think something that I didn't really take into account when I was talking to these cat callers was that I was really asking them to let go of something that was quite foundationally important to the way they saw themselves. You know, it was really important to them that they were good guys and that they weren't the kind of guys who would do something that was frightening or upsetting to women. And realizing that you've done a bad thing is a very tricky realization. A lot of us are very resistant to revel fact that these guys were basically standing in front of a woman in the street who was asking them to give up the idea that they were basically a good

person. And that's really hard. And if I had, you know, if I had the chance to do it again, I might try to be a little more attentive to what this belief in them was doing for the way they saw themselves. So what does this experience all tell you about what does work in terms of changing people's minds or getting them to see things your way? So this is the lesson that I've found after spending so many years interviewing people who have changed their minds, is that the process of changing a mind is two things. One, it's really really really complicated and hard to predict and what works for one particular person won't work for another and there's a kind of tricky like sludge that you can get where you try to pick apart what was it that actually did this significant mind change

like what was doing the work and the same, aside from the unpredictability, is just how amazingly personal it is. So I spent, you know, weeks at a time interviewing these people about the ways that they had changed their minds. And quite quickly, I started to feel like what I was doing was really quite an intimate project. I was learning a lot about what they hoped for and who they loved and how they saw themselves and the ways that they saw themselves moving through the world. And a lot of pain went into these moments of mind changing. And it made me realize that I think too often we talk about changing a mind in a way which suggests that the mind is not tethered to the person.

You know, when you hear the story of someone changing their mind, really what you're hearing is a story of someone who changed their life. You're hearing someone who radically altered the way they see themselves in the world. And that's a very personal thing. So, I mean, I can answer some of your question by saying that over and over again, what worked for these people were things that were quite strikingly emotional, things like who you believe and who you trust and who you love and your sense of self. But I also think it's really important to remember that when we set out trying to change people's

minds, you know, both the things I just said, namely, it's astonishingly unpredictable and deeply, profoundly personal. And if we forget that, then we run the risk of doing what I just did with my catcalls, namely just like spinning our wheels and getting more and more frustrated with the fact that we're not making progress while not in fact changing the strategies that we're using. If the strategies to use to change people's minds are so idiosyncratic and so individual, well, how would you ever know which one to use? How would you know how to do it? Let me illustrate them with some of the stories. So the things that stood out to me in the research were things that were really emotional and really personal. So things like who we believe, as in like the way that we allocate trust in the world, things like how we see ourselves, our own picture of our own identity,

the things that we hope for, the things that we wish were true. These kinds of things went into the ways that people change their minds in really quite surprising ways. One of the ones that stands out to me is the story of Dylan, who left what is functionally a cult. I mean, it's a very strict religious sect that has very harsh punishments for people who leave or people who dissent in any way or people who speak to people who are outside the sect. And Dylan had grown up in this sect. He had spent 20-something years only hearing from people who believed what this sect believed. And he ultimately left the sect. He left the sect kind of quite quickly. It was a matter of like three days when he ultimately changed his mind. And the path to him changing his mind was really striking in the way that it focused on who he believed rather than what he believed. And here's what I mean by that. So Dylan met his wife, his wife now,

whose name is Missy. They met when they were both working in a restaurant. And they had this astonishing chemistry from the moment that they first met. And Missy knew that she wanted to be with him. She knew that she wanted to marry him. But she also wasn't a member of the sect. And for her, the thought that Dylan was a member of the sect. And for her, the thought that Dylan was a member of this sect and would continue to be one was a really horrifying thought. So she kind of privately resolved that she was going to try to change his mind. She spent like close to six years doing this bizarre charade where she would pretend to him that she was a believer, that she was open to the teachings of the sect. And in fact,

surreptitiously trying to sow doubt in his mind and to get him to start to question some of the things that he'd taken as orthodoxy since he was a kid. And ultimately what happened was in fact nothing to do with Missy's own project. What happened was something quite different, which was that one of Dylan's elders came to Dylan and said, you have to choose between your salvation and your wife. Like, we have thought about it, and we think that your wife is a threat to the congregation, and we want her gone. So you can either stay with her and lose your chance at eternal redemption, or you can stay with us and lose her but you cannot have both and Dylan had this moment of thinking look anyone who could look at my wife and not see a fundamentally good and loving person who is a wonderful influence on the people around her must be someone who's capable of making mistakes so for him that moment was the domino that you know the first domino to tip and then it made

the others cascade on downwards. And from that phone call, it was a matter of like three days before he was out of the sect forever. Because what had happened for Dylan was nothing to do with an argument or nothing to do with what he believed. It was entirely to do with who he believed. And it was the situation where his trust in his wife was so great that it meant that he could realize that people who didn't like her must be capable of making mistakes.

And so ultimately what he lost was trust in his elders. And it's so interesting to me and so, I think, like personal and kind of beautiful. Like it's a weird love story, but I think in many ways it's a love story, that the thing that saved him, the thing that made him see the truth, had so much more to do with who he believed than what he believed. And that really stands out to me as a lesson about how we can set out changing people's minds, is that if we find ourselves trying to change someone's mind like Dylan's, you know, often our best bet is to disrupt the trust allocations that people have, rather than to try to present them with an argument. So what I get from what you're saying is that the idea of changing someone's mind or changing our own mind about something is to change, at least in part, who we are or part of who we are.

And to change part of who someone is, whether it's us or someone else, that's a pretty daunting task. It is a really, it's a really daunting task. When people change their minds and have to forfeit the part of themselves that was connected to the old belief, there's a kind of period, it's almost like a period of grieving. It's a kind of loss. You know, they realize that they have to let go of the way that they've been seeing themselves. And a whole bunch of other things can tumble down with that. Things like the friends that you're keeping company or, you know, the ways that you structure your time. A lot of that changes when you forfeit a belief, particularly a belief of the kind that you just mentioned, something as foundational to your identity as like your politics or your religion.

You sort of almost have to help someone find their way to what life will look like after they've changed their mind. And that can be really hard because like, you don't want to help everyone to a new particular sense of self. You don't want to be the one to smooth the transition for every particular person. But I think it's often pragmatically the case that if people have other sources of self to draw on, then they don't need to rely so heavily on this particular belief. So another question that pops into my mind as you talk about, you know, trying to change people's minds is that perhaps it isn't worth it. I mean, trying to change catcallers' behavior,

it's going to be difficult to do, as you found out. And to what end, other than, I mean, what does it do for you? Because even if you get those guys to stop, the guys down at the next bar are going to do it anyway. For me anyway, once I'd done all this research and spoken to all these people who changed their minds and realized just how astonishingly complicated and personal and long the process of changing a mind really is,

it generates exactly this question. And I'm like, well, can I be bothered to do that for every person who has a bad belief? And the answer is obviously no. I mean, like, we just don't have the time, never mind be bothered to do that for every person who has a bad belief and the answer is obviously no i mean like we just don't have the time never mind the patience to do that i do think though that that's kind of a useful thing to realize in itself you know i mean we have this climate of public debate at the moment which tells us over and over again that if we only speak to each other more we'll be able to change people's minds. And we see this played out over and over again in the political arena where we put people on stage, you know, one against the other and think that in a certain amount of allotted time,

we're going to be able to change the audience members' minds in anything like a productive way. I think it's really valuable for us to reflect on just how difficult it is to really change a mind. And there may be cases where that's worth our patience and there may be cases where that's worth our time. But I hope that one thing that the final chapter of the book does is to make us consider that there may be cases where it's not worth our time and where our energy would be better spent, you know,

dealing with the behavioral problems that result from beliefs rather than trying to deal with the beliefs themselves. And so the big takeaway from this is that it's probably a lot harder than you think it is, and it's a lot more complicated than you think it is. It isn't just a matter of, well, here are the facts. If you would just agree with these facts, then you'll change your mind. I think that is the takeaway. And I think what's weird about that is that's something kind of, we all already know that deep down, you know, we all already are well aware of

just how peculiar it is to change a person's mind. I mean, we know it from when we've changed our own minds. Well, why do I need to change your mind? Why do people think that it's so important because someone disagrees with you to change their mind? Why can't we just live and agree to disagree? And we don't have to try to change each other's minds can't we just live and agree to disagree? And we don't have to try to change each other's minds, A, because it's probably not going to happen, B, it's really going to be hard to do, and C, to what end? Yeah, I mean, I think this comes back to the thing that we started talking about like way, way back at the beginning, which is that we are so convinced that we are the ones who are being

reasonable. And when you think that, then every divergent belief strikes you as an affront. You know, everyone who believes something that you don't seems to you to be making a mistake. And it's very difficult to have the patience to just watch someone make a mistake and think that that's fine. But as you say, you know, very often these things can be nothing more than futile exercises in mutual frustration. And if that's the case, well, then like maybe we should give up and watch TV together instead. Yeah, well, I mean, I have, and I know other people have, you know, friends who we just agree that, you know, politics is off the table, because there's no point to it. It's just going to, you know, potentially put the friendship at risk,

because we disagree. And rather than try to change each other's minds, we'll just agree to disagree. And that works just fine. You know, I have close friends who have weird conspiratorial beliefs, and otherwise they're completely rational and ordinary people, and yet they have these very strange beliefs about the truth of the moon landing. And it's the kind of thing where you can either descend into the quicksand of trying to get them to see reason, or you can think that this is something which is a strange blip

in an otherwise coherent person, and it will waste both of our time. So try to unpick it. I like that. I like that approach a lot. That's going to save you years of your life. Exactly. Age so much slower and you'll sleep better at night. Exactly.

Right. And go have fun and just stop because, yeah, you're not going to change anybody's mind about the moon landing. And again, even if you did, so what? I mean, it's a battle not worth the victory. It isn't. I think it's really hard for us to see this because we live in this climate which encourages us so often to be pursuing debate and to be thinking that debate will be effective, i.e., that every time we try to debate someone and we fail, it's our fault. And it means that if only we did something slightly differently, we would have been able to get through them. And that means you can kind of spend your life

sinking effort after effort trying to persuade someone. And we live in like a very combative time where so much of our political media is structured around argument as entertainment. And I think it's really easy to forget in that climate that argument is not entertaining. It's catastrophically boring and it's very often a waste of time. Well, this is really good news in a way because it takes the pressure off. I mean, clearly trying to change someone's mind is probably a lot harder than you think it is. So you've got to pick those battles pretty carefully. And even if you do change somebody's mind, you have to ask yourself, well, is it really worth that victory?

Eleanor Gordon-Smith has been my guest and the name of her book is Stop Being Reasonable. You'll find the link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Eleanor. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Days are shorter in the winter and that does have an effect on all of us. A study from Brigham Young University revealed that the amount of time between sunrise and sunset influences everyone's mood,

even more than factors like temperature, pollution, and rain. It's a common belief that rainy days make people sad, but that's not what the researchers found. They looked at something called solar irradiance, or the amount of sunlight that actually hits the ground. They tried to factor things in like temperature and rain, and those things didn't seem to matter. The one thing that was really significant was the amount of time between sunrise and sunset. And that is something you should know. It only takes a moment to subscribe to this podcast, and it is totally free to do so. We've got some really good episodes coming up, and when you subscribe,

then those episodes get sent right to your phone or tablet so you don't miss a single one. Just hit the subscribe button on the player you're listening to right now. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager,

but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot,

and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes.

And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible.

The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now.