On Changing Someone's Mind (and Conspiracy Theorists)

Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS 156 - David McRaney on “Why it’s so hard to change someone’s mind”

"It's very rarely do people have this epiphany, completely changing everything in one second. It would be catastrophic to the organism. It would be catastrophic to any human mind to do something like that.

In fact, the people that I've interviewed, I've interviewed some people who are former members of the Westboro Baptist Church. I've interviewed former cult members. I've interviewed a variety of people who have experienced that 100%, press the reset button, delete everything and start over and it was completely catastrophic...

[On trying to convince 911 truthers] The straw that broke the camel's back was that when they met the mother of a person who actually died in this tragedy and they had listened to the audio already of his last words to his mother, they all believed that it was faked in some way, either they did it with a computer and tricked her or that she, herself, was an actress or something.

They spoke to an expert who said, "Yeah, maybe you could do this, but it would take a lot of work to make a computer version of this person's voice and maybe, I don't know, possibly." They go to her and she is absolutely a real, honest, true human being living on a farm and she's horribly distraught and when she's telling the story of losing her son and hearing his last words right before he dies and living through the fame of that moment and the ...

It's not just losing your child, but you're reliving that entire experience every anniversary of this event with the rest of the nation.

She's crying and Charlie's crying, but he looks at the other people who are with him and they seem to be like huh, whatever. They're eye rolling about it.

He said to me, he's like, "I just thought they were animals. And I realized that I was in a cult. I was in a cult that -- for you to deny it at this point seems cult-like."

Not only was he swayed by the evidence, but he had the benefit that many of us don't have when we're isolated at our computers, of actually being right next to people who are not being swayed by the evidence that you are being swayed by.

The finale of his story is that he went on YouTube before he was even finished filming that show and said, "You know what? I think I've changed my mind."

The response was people all throughout the internet are still trying to ruin his life. They went so far as to find his sister's Facebook page, find pictures of his nieces and nephews. Someone, some people Photoshopped their actual real faces onto child pornography and then sent that to his mother by email...

If you want for the facts to work on people, just the plain facts, that's how far you would have to go. You would have to actually take them and put them on an airplane and take them to a ...

An internet link to a thing that you found on Google, it’s not -- it has to be so powerful. The person must come in contact directly with the evidence if they're a strong naysayer. That's how far you had to go...

Out of 5 people that went, he was the only one that it worked on. Of course, the truther community thinks that he was a secret agent the whole time now or that he was an infiltrator or that he was put in room 101 and they electrocuted his genitals and made him change his mind or some weird stuff like that"