How to Win Friends That Influence People Part Two

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

David Perry: I really just wanted to understand, how do people change their minds? How do we go from being a nation that was so anti-Samsex marriage to being pro-Samsex. He says the elaboration likelihood model is one of the great things he found. The other ones were street epistemology and smart politics and deep canvassing. And all of these groups are also very similar to motivational interviewing. It's like when you know your room is a mess but your mom says you need to clean up your room and so you don't. Just because your mom told you to.

Read the full transcript here.

What is persuasion, and what is it not? How does persuasion differ from coercion? What is the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) of persuasion? How are the concepts of assimilation and accommodation related to persuasion? Motivated reasoning is usually seen as a cognitive bias or error; but what if all reasoning is motivated? Are we motivated more by physical death or social death? How much evidence would Flat-Earthers need in order to be convinced that Earth is round? What are "deep" canvassing and "street" epistemology? In what contexts are they most effective? Under what conditions is persuasion morally acceptable?

David McRaney is a science journalist fascinated with brains, minds, and culture. He created the podcast You Are Not So Smart based on his 2009 internationally bestselling book of the same name and its followup, You Are Now Less Dumb. Before that, he cut his teeth as a newspaper reporter covering Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast and in the Pine Belt region of the Deep South. Later, he covered things like who tests rockets for NASA, what it is like to run a halfway home for homeless people who are HIV-positive, and how a family sent their kids to college by making and selling knives. Since then, he has been an editor, photographer, voiceover artist, television host, journalism teacher, lecturer, and tornado survivor. Most recently, after finishing his latest book, How Minds Change, he wrote, produced, and recorded a six-hour audio documentary exploring the history of the idea and the word: genius. Learn more about him at davidmcraney.com, or follow him on Twitter at @davidmcraney.

Staff