Wednesday, August 16, 2023

Podcast for Inquiry S02E17: How Minds Change with David McRaney

On this week's Podcast for Inquiry, I speak with David McRaney (@davidmcraney) about his book, “How Minds Change”. We explore how social context is critical when people form their opinions. People don’t change their minds in a vacuum, and David describes how network effects lead to social cascades, such as how widespread resistance to equal marriage flipped to widespread acceptance in an astonishingly short period. David quizzes me about the most recent movie I watched as a demonstration of how to get people to think differently. We discuss the role of truth in persuasion, and the utter failure of the “information deficit hypothesis”. You can learn more from David via his podcast You Are Not So Smart and on his website at davidmcraney.com

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1 comment:

  1. Macking it Raney!

    I wonder if he's familiar with Sociophysics, specifically the work of Serge Galam? Ironically, the last l heard, the latter was still a climate change skeptic!

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_physics

    https://books.google.ca/books/about/Sociophysics.html?id=edKEjA5wFjQC&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y

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