Change Your Mind

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Most of us, when confronted with a we'll talk a little bit about how we process new information and sometimes change our mind. We either put it down, that new piece of information, just push it back, ignore it, don't want to think about it. And lifeit really depends on the motivation. You feel strongly motivated. I need to resolve this. And for other things, you can let it gou like oftentimes,. oo, that that phrase, change your mind is so fascinating to me, hat in that oftentimes something does change.

To the Founding Fathers it was free libraries. To the 19th century rationalist philosophers it was a system of public schools. Today it's access to the internet. Since its beginnings, Americans have believed that if facts and information were available to all, a democratic utopia would prevail. But missing from these well-intentioned efforts, says author and journalist David McRaney, is the awareness that people's opinions are unrelated to their knowledge and intelligence. In fact, he explains, the better educated we become, the better we are at rationalizing what we already believe. Listen as the author of How Minds Change speaks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about why it's so hard to change someone's mind, the best way to make it happen (if you absolutely must), and why teens are hard-wired not to take good advice from older people even if they are actually wiser.