YouSaid · the spoken record

David McRaney

lines on the record: 151
first: 2022-09-30
most recent: 2022-09-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“No one's unreachable. No one's unpersuadable. There's no such thing. And I think of it more like if you try to reach the moon with a ladder, you'll fail. And if you assume from that that the moon is unreachable, then you really learn nothing, right? And that's what I actually had thought for a long time. And it turns out the frustration I was feeling toward other people should have been directed to myself for not trying to understand, well, why is this not working the way I thought it should work? The assumption they're stupid or they're misled or they're nefarious in some way. That was a real misconception on my part. The misconception that people are just absolutely unreachable and unpersuadable, I have, through the work of this book, changed my mind.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We now live in an environment we've been living in it for about 20 years now where the people who are going to offer their hand to get you on stage, they care about whether or not you have an audience yet. You can build that audience without anybody's permission right now. And you can do that by making content on TikTok, YouTube, putting it out on medium, wherever you put your stuff. So do those two things back to back. Email the people you want and they make content out of those emails and give it away for free until you have an audience. Develop your voice.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To your field, I'll give you two solid pieces of advice that aren't just high minded, like that sounds nice, and they could put it on a postcard things. This is what you ought to do. Number one, email the people that you admire or the people you'd like to interview. I have about a 70% success rate of when I was starting out of people, they will at least email you back and say, I can't talk. But you'll be surprised how many people are willing to talk to you. Just do that. And then on the back end, make content out of that and give it away for free until you build up an audience.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me say as far as authors. I love John Jeremiah Sullivan, Charlie Leduff, Michael Perry, Larry Brown. These are either people who are in Southern Gothic literature or are the Southern Gothic literature version of journalism. I can't get enough of that stuff.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only for people listening to this, I worked with Joe Hanson and James Burke all over COVID to develop a new connection series. Really?”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gene Edwards, my first, like the first psychology professor that took me aside and said, Let's be friends and really talk about it. I owe a lot to her. You want people who I've met in real life? Who? James Burke is the most influential person in my life.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cool. Very quickly, my favorite podcast has always been or still is Dakota Ring. I recommend it to everybody. I love it. Willa Paskin's amazing Best show I streamed recently is definitely Severance. Everybody should have seen Severance by now. Also, the rehearsal, you can see the kind of stuff that I like.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think of it more like, hmm, I find you a reasonable, rational, interesting human being, and it's odd that I disagree with you on this. I wonder why I disagree with you. Our disagreement is a mystery. What if we teamed up to solve a mystery together of why we disagree? And now we're taking all these things that are adaptive and using them in a way that could actually get us further along and settle in what might actually happen is we both realize we're both wrong. We get to Venn diagram ourselves. So you go from face off to shoulder to shoulder. And this, there are many different ways to go about it. But once you get in that dynamic, you're much more likely to persuade each other of something and move the attitude of the room.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're agreeing to never actually advance this issue and never talk to each other again. Never open up the conversation with anything that could be interpreted as you ought to be ashamed, even if they should be ashamed of what they're feeling and thinking. If you were hoping to persuade them, you have to not do that And then, so be aware that they're a social primate, you're a social primate. Never try to copy and paste your reading of the other person. And the most important part is that you have to get out of debate frame. Don't create a dynamic where I want to win and I want you to lose. I want to show that I'm right and you're wrong. This is the most crucial thing if you take nothing else away from it. Take this.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I talk all about the book. Dueling lasts a long time, was really peculiar, but it was just this system out of control. And if I'm trying to discuss an issue with you and I put you in that state of mind, there's no way what you're going to do is react. You're going to push back against me. Then I'm going to feel that feeling. I'm going to push back against you. And then you push back harder. I push back harder. And we end up in that stupid phrase of, well, let's agree to disagree. We already agreed to disagree. That's how we sat down here, right? We really saying is stop talking to me. That's what that is. It's a nice. We're agreeing.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In most of history. And I don't care who you are or what kind of profession you're in. You're worried what other people around you in that profession think about you and you're modulating your behavior to go with and you're modulating your beliefs, attitudes, and values. And when it comes down to it, if the situation requires it, you'll put your reputation on the lifeboat and you'll let your body sink to the bottom of the ocean if that's the situation you're put in.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The signaling and the expectations of the people around them. If you say anything to that person that could be interpreted as you ought to be ashamed for what you think, feel and believe, conversations over at that point. No one was willing to be ostracized. The great sociologist Brooke Harrington told me that there was an Eagles MC Square of social science, it would be social death, the fear of social death is greater than the fear of physical death.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's the idea of that's a reasoning, there's a chain of processing involved in reasoning where you are probably unaware that you went through all this and it landed on a particular conclusion because it made sense to you. It matched your values and your attitudes and your beliefs on the matter. And you have to afford the other person the opportunity to go through that same process. You can't meet them at the level of the conclusion because what ends up happening is you just start tossing these facts that support your position at each other instead of having a conversation in which we're looking at the issue together, right? So that's one thing is like you can't copy and paste your reasoning into another person. And when you're trying to argue just based off facts and links and stuff, that's really what you're suggesting they ought to do. So all persuasion is self-persuasion. I have to open up a space for you to explore your own reasoning and I have to open up a space for you to entertain different perspectives and to think about where your stuff comes from, which was what we did earlier in the conversation. Secondly, you have to recognize that we're social creatures. So people are influenced by”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's, you know, we talk a lot about how facts don't seem to work so well. That's only because the, usually when you start arguing with somebody over an issue, you want to present them. You'll say like, hey, read this book. Hey, watch this YouTube video. Hey, go to this website. And you're like, that should do it. But how has that ever happened to you? Like, never has anyone sent me a YouTube video, and I've been like, oh, okay, I never knew it, though. I think I'll totally change my mind about this shit”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In their position. Well, you know, it would be difficult, I think, to pick just three things, but I can think of a couple of things that would fit in here. I think one thing I want people to understand is all persuasion is self-persuasion. Mostly when it comes to changing people's minds, what you're trying to do is alert them to the fact that they could change their mind.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was good faith medicine and elsewhere. That's It's so crucial to creating the rules of the game, and we all play by it. If I meet you on the street or I meet you on the internet, we may not be in a good faith environment. We're going to play by those rules. That's why it was so nice to create these systems of argumentation, like law and medicine and academia. And most of the people that we, I'm very against the great man theory of things that were you imagine single inventors coming up with amazing insights, like no one ever does anything in isolation like that. And a lot of the, even the people we've lauded throughout history, they had either someone that they bounced ideas with across and against, or they collaborated with, or they were absolutely assaulted over and over again by people who disagreed with them and they had to refine their arguments in the presence of all of that. And that's why I talk about culture being 12 egg scale. figures that a way to institutionalize those things, that's when you get those massive leaps, both in the social domain, the political domain, and the scientific and technology.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His plays right off what we were just discussing. Everything we've ever achieved as a species of note has came out of a lot of people disagreeing and then like sorting it out. And there are, we've been great at creating some institutions that do this on purpose. Science when it's done well is a group of people debating and arguing with each other and trying to tear each other's ideas apart.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't mean to be like, you know, I don't mean to poo poo on social media. It's great for what it is. It's just that it is, but it also is.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I feel like I'm doing that. I feel like I'm participating in some sort of marketplace of ideas. It seems like I'm doing that. But the way the platforms are currently set up, for the most part, it's just people yelling, people like riding on a piece of paper what they think, feel, and believe, and dumping it onto a big pile. Right. And then other people running through the pile and going, it's not like 12 angry men. We're not actually sitting in a circle, it's not like a dinner party where we're... I'm sure you've had dinner parties or had guests over who have really wildly different political views than you, and you didn't get into Twitter mind with them. You talked it out in some way that that aspect is something we've yet to tweak the system to allow us in certain contexts.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And over time, that's developed these two mechanisms. We have this, that's why as individuals, one of the biggest problems with the internet is that we do a lot of our deliberating these days in context that incentivize the production of arguments, but don't really give us much opportunity to go through that evaluation together.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So it seems to be the function here, why this is so adaptive, is that under a lot of pressure, or it doesn't even need to be a group selection process, it's just simply how the math works out. If you have a lot of different people with a lot of different experiences and they have a lot of different value sets and they have a lot of different skill sets and you're facing a problem, you're trying to come up with a solution to it or you have a goal you want to reach, you will be much more effective as a group if everybody presents their biased individual perspective and they don't put a lot of cognitive effort into the production of it make it easy, cheap, and biased. Then you offload the cognitive labor to that evaluation process. That 12 angry men experience where everyone looks at each other's arguments and goes, okay, this, that, this, that, this, that.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rationalizing and justifying it to yourself. And when you want a piece of cake, you will come up with a justification for getting the cake, right? Like I didn't eat anything today or exercise yesterday or whatever it is you need to do. You want to do it, but you need a justification for it. There's a humongous body of evidence that we don't even make the decisions that are best. We only make the decision that's easiest to justify. And Mercia Spur have done all these great experiments where they have people. And one of them they had people They solve these word problems and then they would mix the answers up and have people evaluate other people who've been looking at the word problem. But of course the trick is and one of the answers is their own and they would find that when people were thinking that they were evaluating other people's arguments, they'd find the holes in their own thinking and their own reasoning. But if they thought they were looking at their own arguments, they'd usually miss it.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And why do we do this? Well, the interactionist model is because we're always imagining the audience that's going to be receiving the information. That's why you in your shower, you're thinking of how you're going to really stick it to that person on Reddit that you've been arguing with all day, right? Because that's how we produce reasons. But we also do it alone. Like if I'm imagining I want to buy something on Amazon or I want to take a trip somewhere, you'll start”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They had to get that evaluation phase. So we have two cognitive mechanisms to really simplify this. One for the production of arguments of justifications and rationalizations. Reasons why we are doing something. It's important that in psychology, reason is not the big R reason of philosophy with propositional logic and all that. It's just coming up for reasons for what you think it's rationalization. Totally. Rationalization and justification, and in some cases, just explanation.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's some really cool research recently where they have people put on VR headsets and they walk into a room in virtual reality and I see Freud sitting there. And Freud says, tell me about your problems. And they sit down and they explain the problem they're having. And then they run it the second time, but the second time you are Freud and you see yourself walk in. It's all been recorded. They even have an avatar with your face. And you hear the audio of yourself telling you as Freud what your problems are. And they have around a 68% success rate of the person having a breakthrough. Oh, I see what I ought to do now that they couldn't do on their own. They need to get into this dynamic that we're talking about.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love this so much. It reminds me of something in psychology called the Solomon paradox. I think it's in business too. We're really good at giving out advice that it's very hard for us to actually employ in our own lives. When somebody has a problem, they tell you and you're like, here's what you ought to do. But then when you have that exact same problem, you don't do that thing.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On, or they could be purposely misleading me because they want to get an advantage over me. So they use the phrase we have a built-in epistemic vigilance for when people might be misleading us. And that serves us well too. The only problem is that can lead to something they call a trust bottleneck. And a trust bottleneck is when someone does actually in our group come up with a very innovative idea. Maybe it's some sort of invention they've created, some sort of new way of doing something. They have an idea about going to a new territory where there's good things for us to go do there. But there's risk and reward in it. But this person really is right. If we get into an argumentation process that's too epistemically vigilant, then we will end up not doing the thing that could benefit the group. And so we have this trust bottleneck that could prevent the calls groups to stagnate. So we developed another evolutionary mechanism to get past trust bottlenecks, and that is arguing itself. The argumentation process is how we get through the trust bottleneck created by epistemic vigilance.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're all looking in different directions. None of us can see what the other two can see. So you would benefit from some sort of worldview that is the combination of all three perspectives. So if I do trust these people, I know them pretty well. And we're talking about going to a certain place in the forest together or something. One person's for it, one person's against it. I'll know that the person who's for it is young. This is the first time out. They don't know much about the world. They're eager to show what they can do. That's why they like that. The person who's hesitant, they were in a bear attack two years ago. And they're, I don't know if they really are, maybe they're a little overscared. I have a pretty good idea of how to modulate my trust about when it comes into the deliberation process. The more people involved in that process, the more complex it gets, the more I have to worry about people could be misleading me. They could be wrong by no fault of their”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is one of my favorite things that changed the way I see the world in researching the book. A lot of this also goes back to the interactions model that Mercy Ann Sperber helped put together. Why would we argue? Well, human beings have this nice complex and dense communication system that eventually became language. And we depend very much on the signals from other units in our social network to help us understand what's going on, to make plans, to settle on goals, shared goals, to decide to just do stuff. And so we do a lot of deliberating and arguing in that space. The problem is, imagine it like there are three people, three proto-”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's been a big part of all of my work. All of these things are adaptive. That's the phrase you want to use. All things being equal, this is probably the best thing to do. But we get into certain situations where they're very unique to modern life, and it turns out that it can get us in trouble. So that's the baggage you're talking about is one of those things where most of the time it serves us well, but in very specific situations, it goes the other way.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's what we're aiming for. And so there are ways to catalyze the cascade effects, but you have to think of it in terms of the diffusion model in this regard is not that old fashioned early adopter holdout model. It's waves of conformity via the thresholds conformity where you want to build up by saying this group influences this group. Together they become a new unit and so on and so on and so on.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you eventually wave your way through the cascade so that when you get to that middle hump that's very hard to get over, you have so many people vaccinated around you, it seems kind of weird that you wouldn't be. And it's okay. Some of the holdouts may take forever. The last people to buy the fax machine or whatever, but they're in a world”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understand very well to take a needle and put something they didn't understand very well on their bodies. So organizations got together with mosques and said, here's the sites where we'll have the vaccinations. And they got the elites within that religious community to be the first to vaccinate. And so what you end up with is you have this wave effect of the least hesitant among the most hesitant. So these are people with the thresholds of conformity where they will go, well, all I need is one person I trust to do this. They get vaccinated. Well, that's a new wave of people who are vaccinated. So, that next level of hesitancy says, well, this number of people that I trust have been vaccinated, I'll get vaccinated. So now you have that next level of hesitancy that they've been satisfied.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the idea. And you have to let luck be a big part of it because you're trying to find the percolating local cluster that will create the cascade that will cascade all along the network because your different thresholds of conformity are moving in and out of the networks that you're affecting. If you look through any of the history of people who affected great social change, especially history of the United States, they had figured out some system by which to get a lot of people together to strike at the system relentlessly and they were indefatigable. And that was the most important aspect of the whole thing. And there are all sorts of other ways to nudge and move around, but that seems to be the essence of it. And that example from COVID-19, that's what the fastest social change now ever recorded. They use this. What they did is they, it was people who were very hesitant to get vaccinated because it was in the UK. People in certain religious communities were very hesitant because of their past with the government of the UK. And they didn't want to necessarily allow these government entities.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something happened in that system As far as the vulnerability, that's exactly how the phrase they use. The vulnerability of that particular aspect of the network at that particular moment was quite vulnerable to any nudge, any impact, any strike. And the thing that really struck me about his example was it could have been a cigarette he tossed out. It could have been a lightning bolt. It could have been a nuclear bomb. It didn't matter how powerful it was. It didn't matter how connected the person was, you won't think of it in the connection in the science of that connectivity and everything. It doesn't matter that the cluster was vulnerable at that point. And any complex system is going to be like the surface of the ocean. It's constantly moving around. So if you think of that molecule model of human connectivity, it's constantly morphing and changing as people, their relationships change and they move from one group to another. So the point that's vulnerable is always moving. So how do you affect great change like same-sex marriage or any other social issue that we've seen in the past? You have to strike at the system relentlessly.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You look at this from sort of a great man theory of history, or you're looking for people who are innovators, if you look at that whole old tipping point models and things like that, you're looking for the Mavens and the connectors and everything. Well, it turns out the science doesn't really support that very well. It has nothing to do with any individual being more connected or more powerful or more savvy than anybody else. What it has to do with is the susceptibility of the system to anybody throwing out a cigarette”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He gave this example to me, and I thank him forever for it. You can imagine a road that people are driving down in the middle of a forest. There's someone who smokes a cigarette on the way to wherever they're going and they throw a cigarette out pretty much every time at a certain spot in the forest. And they've been doing this for years and nothing ever happens. And then one day they toss that cigarette out and it causes a seven county fire.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their expression of conformity just got me out they're like, I should probably go. And then now you have the people who really were going to stay all night. And like, I guess I'm the last person here. And they spend the night on your couch or they leave. And you're like, oh my God, what happened to my party? This is Cascades. It's a very fascinating part of human psychology because we're talking about massive groups of people. And you have a nation of people, you'll have massive clusters of people that will have different thresholds. And we often will have one in that group, many of them called a percolating local cluster. Anyone listening who's in this world, I hope you're happy that I found your stuff because this stuff was totally unfamiliar to me. This stuff goes into like diffusion science and people studying how rocks sink and float. Percolating.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Each person is a node, and each node has a different threshold of conformity. And that threshold of conformity is influenced by how many people they know. And you end up with clumps and clusters of people who have different thresholds as a cluster. Let's say you're at a party and they want to go because they're tired of being there. They have work in the morning or whatever, but there are other people in the group who are like, I would like to go, but like, I can't just be the first person that leaves. So the person who has a reason to leave or they just don't care what other people think, they leave the party. That encourages the next group of people who needed one more person to back them up to leave. Now there are people who actually did, they wanted to stay at the party.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Information out of the system. The door opens up, and like the professor is like, Why are you waiting? Or somebody looks at their watch and is like, I figured we should have been in here by now, or you could have a real rabble rouser. You could have a subversive element, somebody who's a punk, they have a low threshold for conformity, you know, there. They're like, I don't care what people think of me. I'm going to open the door. And that person will lead everybody in. So what you end up here with are thresholds of conformity. Some people need only a few people around them to do something before they do it. Some people need a lot. And any population is going to have a large mix of people who have different thresholds of conformity. If you think of it like an old chemistry molecule with like balls and sticks connect to it.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know what was in there. These are examples of Cascades and down Cascades. So in a school setting or a restaurant setting, you're waiting in line. The first person that shows up, they have an internal signal because they have no information. The door's closed. So maybe in the past, they tried to go to a classroom and they opened the door and everybody turned and looked at them and they felt real weird about it. Maybe they just have a certain kind of social anxiety. There are all sorts of nature nurture things to give them an internal signal that says, I should wait and see what's going on. So they take out their phone, they're playing with it. The second person that shows up, they don't just have an internal signal. They have one human being who seems to be waiting, but maybe they know something I don't. So whatever internal signal they have is magnified by that, they start to wait. Once you show up at a door and there are two people waiting and you don't, you're pretty sure you're going to wait too. Once there are three people waiting at a door, it's almost inevitable you're going to get a line of people waiting because they assume they're part of something and everybody knows something they don't. And with a cascade, the only thing they'll break the cascade is new.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly where I'm headed up. Thanks for kicking me over to it. The culture is being influenced by the social change. And then the social change in reflection influences the culture. And this back and forth is what creates a staggered acceleration of the social change, right? What's deep within that is understood in network science as cascades. And the best way I could quickly explain what a cascade is is, have you ever been to a party and everything seems to be going okay? And then all of a sudden everybody leaves and you're like, what happened? Especially if you're the host. Or have you ever waited to get into a restaurant or if you remember back in a university setting, you're waiting to get into a classroom. And there's just a big line of people and then the door opens up and you could have gone in at any time. Empty.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other LGBTQ issues coming out was a very huge part of that. Any movement that urged people to reveal their identities and to live openly allow people the opportunity to go, well, oh my God, I have a family member like this. I have a person who I care about who's being affected by this issue. I have people who, my plumber, my hairdresser, my...”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People argued about this as vehemently as they argue about immigration and gun control and everything else that's a wedge issue today. And there were articles that would come out that were like, this is something we'll never get over. You shouldn't talk about this at Thanksgiving kind of things, right? And then over the course of about 12 years, but very rapidly over the course of three or four years, we went from more than 60% of the country opposed to 60% of the country in favor around 2012-ish. It seemed like how could this possibly have happened? Where did it come from? And I wanted to understand that too, because I thought if I could take most of the country and put them in a time machine and send them back a decade, would they argue with themselves? And what happened in between these two moments? And if they were going to change their mind about this, what was preventing them from changing their mind the whole time? One of the answers to that is that a lot of things that have changed when it comes to like social issues, people were separate from one another in social context. Whereas with same-sex marriage,”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or any political issue that anything becomes charged politically. And I use Flat Earthers so much because they're pretty much neutral and people can feel like they have some distance from it. And the mechanism, you can see those mechanisms at play. And then I can say, and that's also in this, and you can see how it works. With same-sex marriage, it is almost impossible to believe this as a person talking to a microphone right now in this modern moment. It wasn't very long ago.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reason I like to talk about flat earth so much is because the same psychological mechanisms are at play in everything else that we like to talk about.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Surface the norm as they put it when I was asking political scientists about the shift in attitudes about same-sex marriage, they kept telling me this was the fastest recorded shift in public opinion since we've been recording this since the 20s. And since then though, there was an attitude shift on COVID-19, which I put in the book that was a little bit faster. In this case,”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was actually the first question I had. That's what the book was going to be about. There's a dozen different answers to that question that was sort of a confluence of psychological mechanisms. The most influential part of it is contact, right? There's an idea in psychology called pluralistic ignorance where you ask a lot of people will have a certain feeling inside of them, an attitude or a value, and they'll feel like they're the only person within their community who has that feeling. And unless you surface the norm in some way, they won't be aware that there are so many other people who feel the same way they feel.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That there's a there was a long stretch, and there always is where you're being pulled in every direction, and I don't want to make a blanket statement. Most people are pretty rational about what happened there, but there's a certain portion of the population that went very conspiratorial with it. And there was a deep crisis of how to make sense of the world and where should I put my allegiances and where are my values expressed. And what we would rather do is assimilate if we can get away with it because that allows us to maintain our current model and move forward. And if we can find an elite who says, no, it's okay to think what you think. In fact, I agree with you. If I can find peers who will support me in that, if I can find groups having conversations on the internet who let me do this, I'll assimilate and I'll stay within it. And as they say in psychology, my social network will reassert its influence.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of people, I have positive attitudes toward a certain political persuasion and people within that positive attitude space did something I don't like. So I have these two feelings. I feel negatively and I feel positively about what has happened. You could accommodate and say, well, it looks like people who share my political views sometimes do bad things and I need to like have a more complex view of things. you could assimilate, which is often how we get into conspiratorial thinking and say, When I'm looking at this, what if they didn't do that at all? What if those were actors? What if those were people who are pretending to be people that agree with me?”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source