{"id":1185,"date":"2019-03-12T13:44:55","date_gmt":"2019-03-12T13:44:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/?p=1185"},"modified":"2019-03-12T13:44:55","modified_gmt":"2019-03-12T13:44:55","slug":"how-do-you-change-someones-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/2019\/03\/12\/how-do-you-change-someones-mind\/","title":{"rendered":"How Do You Change Someone's Mind?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Darlington<\/a> is\u00a0Campaign Director in London and Head of Strategic Communication at Well Told Story and Well Made Strategy, in Nairobi, Kenya. He is also one of the founders and Editorial Board Member of WonkComms.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cOh yeah, what you\u2019re talking about is \u2018pluralistic ignorance\u2019.\u201d That\u2019s the first thing I\u2019m told by the first academic I meet. It\u2019s nine AM, I\u2019m sat in a professor\u2019s office in the Department of Psychology at the University of Bath and I\u2019m about to have my mind blown.<\/p>\n

Eight hours later, I\u2019m filling out a feedback form, resting on a 400 page text book about attitude change that the Head of Department has gifted me as take-away homework. My head is fizzing with ideas. I\u2019m rethinking assumptions I\u2019ve made in my day job and I\u2019m reconsidering professional habits I\u2019ve picked up over years.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s all thanks to the\u00a0Institute for Policy Research<\/a>\u00a0(IPR). But I\u2019ll be honest, when it was first suggested to me that I\u2019d travel down to Bath and undertake the\u00a0Policy Fellowship Programme<\/a>, I was a bit sceptical. It\u2019s kind of a long way to go, right? But I guess there are some benefits of putting the \u2018out of office\u2019 on and getting out of town. So what\u2019s it for? You get to meet with, and speak to, academics in a variety of fields, doing research on the kind of policy areas or political challenges that you\u2019re working on. But do they really understand what I do at work?<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s the brilliant part. There is, in the words of the Director of the IPR, Professor Nick Pearce, a \u201cserendipity\u201d in meeting people you wouldn\u2019t normally meet and having conversations you wouldn\u2019t normally have. It works both ways. It\u2019s good for these academics to have people working in public policy come through their office and challenge how they think about their research. As one Senior Lecturer put it to me after I explained what I\u2019m trying to do in my day job, \u201cthat raises some fascinating research questions.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You don\u2019t just meet anyone. IPR asks you about what you do and what you\u2019re interested in learning more about. Then they matchmake you with their extensive list of faculty and their published and current research interests. It\u2019s like a geeky online dating service. Followed by a day of speed dating. Although, this being academic, the dates last an hour each.<\/p>\n

And, like online dating, it\u2019s a bit hit and miss. While perfectly pleasant people, two of three of the half a dozen I met, didn\u2019t really leave an impression on me and I\u2019ll probably be instantly forgettable to them too. But three of those one hour one-to-one tutorials (yes, I did have a little bit of post-grad flashback) stopped the earth on its axis.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Like a lot of WonkComms types, I do a lot with digital and social media but I\u2019ve always been very sceptical of \u2018bots\u2019 having any value to my work. But then I met a Prize Fellow with a PhD in political science who is working with IBM to develop algorithms to measure topic-specific ideological positions. Seriously. She\u2019s made me think again.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Equally, I assumed that if you want to change the mind of someone who disagrees with you, you should try to pull them towards your argument. Then I met an academic who told me about a clinical psychology technique called \u2018motivational interviewing\u2019, were you invite people to challenge their own thinking by exaggerating their views back to them. He told me that campaigners for peace in the Middle East have operationalised this through a technique called \u2018paradoxical thinking\u2019: taking an idea and extending it to an even further extreme, in order to encourage a reconsideration and ultimately promoting a more moderate point of view.<\/p>\n

Finally, I met an academic working on a major\u00a0research project\u00a0<\/a>on the affect of\u00a0child salience<\/a>\u00a0on pro-social behaviour. We all know that kids work in all types of communications campaigns but they are measuring exactly when, where and how they work best. The way that the image of the \u2018boy on the beach<\/a>\u2019 captured public attention and changed the migration debate is an example of how things can change for campaigners but also how progress can stall.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Lots to think about. And at the every least, the next time I find my talking talking to someone who personally rejects something but is going along with it because they incorrectly assume that most of the other people in their group do too, I\u2019ll know that what I\u2019m up against. Because that\u2019s \u2018pluralistic ignorance\u2019.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This blog was originally published via WonkComms<\/a> on 11 March 2019.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard Darlington is\u00a0Campaign Director in London and Head of Strategic Communication at Well Told Story and Well Made Strategy, in Nairobi, Kenya. He is also one of the founders and Editorial Board Member of WonkComms. \u201cOh yeah, what you\u2019re talking...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1186,"featured_media":1008,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[108,109,116,126],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture-and-policy","category-data-politics-and-policy","category-evidence-and-policymaking","category-science-and-research-policy"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/115\/2018\/04\/mentalhealth-e1552398082850.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1186"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}