The Best Way to Change People's Minds Is to Be a Better Listener

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The best way to convince someone is by not trying to convince them a try to listen, tries to understand whether persons coming from throwing facts at them generally doesn't work. It turns out that if you can be a better listener, instead of hitting them head on and saying, you're wrong, so why do you believe that? Ok, so just walk me through it. If there was a massive conspiracy to steal the election... Who actually did it? And where did they put all the ballots? Can you explain this to me? So once you start doing that and you start seeming receptive and curious, that's a way in, at least, to the right kind of conversation. But remember

Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.

In episode 190, Michael Shermer speaks with Jonathan Rauch as he reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge” — our social system for turning disagreement into truth. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.