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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“What's going on here? And he said, No, no, no, that's not a dog. That's a horse. This requires an accommodation moment because you need to create a category that both horses and dogs can fit within, an overarching category. And we're doing that all the time. Like there are moments where we, I think of things like that have happened politically. I don't know how political you want to get, but think about the insurrection, right?”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They see a horse, they might point at it and go, Big dog. And they're really trying to. An attempt to assimilate like I'm interpreting it. And look, it's got four legs. It walks on four legs. It's non-human. It's not wearing clothes.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Assimilation is when something's ambiguous or uncertain, you interpret it in a way that says basically everything I thought and felt and believed before now, I still think, feel and believe it, it's just a modified a little bit with you assimilate it into your current model of reality. Accommodation, on the other hand, is when there's so many anomalies build up, or this is so counterattitudinal or counterfactual what you currently have in your model of reality, or they'd call it a schema, you must accommodate it. So you can think of it like a child sees a dog for the first time, and they're like, what is that? And you say it's a dog. In their mind, something categorical, something like it's got four legs, it walks on four legs, it's not wearing any clothes, it's furry, has a tail, it's non-human dog. And then if they see like an orange dog or a, you know, a speckled dog, they can just say, they can assimilate that different versions of the thing already understand.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and we're not always, we're totally not aware of it most of the time, but this comes from the work of a lot of psychologists, but I focus in on Piaget because there's two mechanisms, assimilation and accommodation.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, you start really realizing how much of this is abstraction, how much of this has received wisdom, how much of this is political signaling or group identity signaling. And not every time, but many times people will have a personal experience related to the issue and that personal experience related to the issue will create massive amounts of cognitive dissonance on the position I just gave you.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why not a four? The only thing you can really produce for me are reasons why you wouldn't go away from the six, which is also kind of going toward a seven. And in a political discussion, that's how they'll open it up. They'll say, we're talking about transitor bathroom laws, here's the position that I'm talking about is coming up for a vote. I'm wondering where you're at on that, like a scale to a zero to ten. They'll tell them and then they'll say, why that? And then this is a moment. We may stay there for 20 minutes. We go through how you arrived at this number. And then in that, the deep canvas would do something different from the other groups. They ask the person.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You will feel something called reactants, which is that unham me, you fools feeling that I'm telling you what to think. I'm shaming you. And when you push away from it, you'll start creating arguments to keep pursuing the thing. And this was such a debacle that they developed something called motivational interviewing where I would start, I would start trying to evoke from you counter arguments. And I can do that very simply with the scale. Because when I ask you,”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See, so we're getting deeper into the things that you look for in entertainment. But if we was talking about a political issue, this is something that comes out of motivational interviewing, and they weren't even aware of this, the deep canvassing people, therapists who had dealt with people who come in for, say, alcoholism or drug addiction, and they already are at a state of ambivalence. They want to do it, and they don't want to do it. That's why they've come for help. But a psychologist would often engage in something called the writing reflex to say, okay, well, here's what you're doing wrong, here's what you need to do. Here's what you're doing wrong. And they have to fight the fight.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A conversation about a political issue, you might start pulling in things about where this actually is the first time you ever heard about this thing and then you see it's received wisdom or you're being influenced by others. And then all that comes into it's very easy to extract that emotion and tell me what you felt. I liked it, I didn't like it. But when I ask you to rationalize and justify it for me and come up and go through your own personal reasoning process, not my reasoning process, this is a unique experience for a lot of people. And then the other thing I can do is say, you gave it to six. How come not say a four?”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're going to step out of that conversation. We're going to come back to it. But now, this is what I'm doing. I'm listening to you. I'm not judging you. And I'm giving you a chance to actually explore the reasoning and your values are starting to come up and things that are unique to you and things you like about the world. A lot of times this is the first time a person's ever even experienced that. Really? And this is a moment for you to start to understand yourself in a certain way.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Boom. So easy to say, I like it. Okay. Now I ask, on a scale from zero to 10, like if you were a movie reviewer, what would you give it?”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Change. As we've said all throughout our conversation, we're often very unaware of that. And if someone comes along and gives you an opportunity to self reflect in a way where you will go through your reasoning process, you'll often start to feel moments of dissonance and question yourself. And as long as the other party isn't is allowing you to save face and is just non-judgmentally listening, that's a big component of this. In their technique, they'll open up and say, okay, we're talking about that same-sex marriage or transgender bathroom laws or something. They're very political organizations, so that's sort of the topics they cover. They'll ask a person, this is the biggest part of everything. And I urge everyone to try this out on yourself and other people. You can just do it on a movie, like the last movie that you watched. What's the last movie you watched?”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's probably good to give you a foundation of what motivator reasoning is right here. So when somebody's falling in love with someone and you ask them, why do you like them? Why are you going to date this person? They'll say something like the way they talk, the way they walk, the way they cut their food, the music they're introducing me to. When that same person's breaking up with that same person, you ask why you're breaking up with them. They'll say things like, well, the way they talk, the way they walk, the way they cut their food, the dumb music that made me listen to. So reasons for what become reasons against when the motivation to search for reasons that will rationalize and justify your position”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they had A, B tested their way to a technique that was so powerful that while I went there several times and went door to door with them and everything, but every time I went, there would be scientists there, there'd be activists from around the world there because they were like, what have you done? What have you discovered? And it's very powerful. And over the course of writing the book, the research was done a couple different times on them and they found the numbers you're talking about, 12, 10 to 12 percent success rate. Crazy. The method's very simple. You only really know two of the steps, but it's about 10 steps if you wanted to do it the full thing. The most important aspect of this is non-judgmental listening.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so they wanted to know what did we do there? What happened in that conversation that led to that? So they started reviewing those specific conversations and taking bits and pieces and testing out, was it this, was it that? Was it this? Was it that? And they eventually, when I met them, they had done 17,000 of these conversations recorded on video.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And when they did that, these conversations would go to 20, 30, 40 minutes, and they started thinking, well, we need to record these. And they started recording them. And somewhere along the way, about three or four times, people talked themselves out of their position when you just stood there and listened.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if somebody had voted against it, they asked, Why did you vote against it? And they had these listening brigades, about 50 to 75 people would go out and knock door to door. And to their astonishment, people wanted to talk when they started asking questions.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“USC on the LGBT center of Los Angeles, and they're extremely well funded, millions and millions of dollars. Biggest LGBT organization of its kind in the world, and the leadership lab is their political action wing. And as they were doing this canvassing thing and they lost in Prop 8, he wanted to know how could that be? Because this seems to be an area where we would definitely wouldn't lose this. And so he said, what if we just went and asked people? And so they did the exact same thing again. So this time they knock on doors and say, they went to areas they knew that they had lost in. Help us.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the background you gave is exactly what happened. They wanted to understand how they lost, and they went door to door asking, they came up with this idea, this Day Fleischer, who runs the leadership lab.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two or three summers ago, but I can tell you I know exactly how the response would be like, see, see, someone sabotaged me. They took him out.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, you would believe the number of ways that that has been explained away in flat earth world, there's plenty of explanations for why that's part of a big conspiracy.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perfectly rash. The sun and the moon are celestial objects that are orbs. And when you ask my big question, it was like, okay, well, then this seems manufactured. Who made it? Gods or aliens? And he goes, and I remember him leaning in and saying, does it matter? Isn't it the same thing”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are schisms within the Flat Earth community. There are many different models of flat earth. The one that Mark Sargent is part of, they see the earth as sort of, it's almost like a snow globe.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, going through his whole history, it was really clear how he got motivated into this. But the thing that really kicked in was Flat Earth is a pretty big group of people. They have conventions. They have dating apps. And once he became a spokesperson for it, and he's traveling around the world, he's going to Sweden. He's traveling.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not even debating you. What I want to do is get shoulder to shoulder with you and say, isn't it interesting that we disagree? I wonder why. You want to partner up with me and try to investigate that mystery together? And in so doing, I open up a space to let him metacognate and run through how did I arrive at this. And that's what I did with him on stage. And we learned all sorts of things. He used to be a ringer for a video game company. So that's where his conspiratorial stuff first came from. Oh,”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you're dealing with the physics that you have to contend with when it comes to the kind of conversation dynamics that actually persuade people or move people Have to work with the way brains make sense of the world and all of the evolutionary past that pressures all of that. And so these independent groups discovered all that independent of each other and of the science that supports them. And Mark Sargent, like when I first met him, I shook his hand and said, look, I'm not going to make fun of you or anything. He goes, oh, that's fine, make fun of me all you want. And he took out his phone and showed me the commercial he had done for Lifelock. Whereas like if I can do it, anybody can do it. And he's totally okay with it. But that's not what I did. When I sat down with him, one of the essence, I know we'll get to it, but it's like, you don't want to face off and I need to win. You need to lose.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it was in steps, the steps would be in the same order. And I started thinking of it like, you know, if you wanted to build an airplane, the first airplane ever built, no matter what it was built or who did it, is going to look kind of like an airplane.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the whole idea. The techniques I learned about in the book, in writing this book, I met many different organizations, Dave Campverser, Street Epistemology, people who work in motivational interviewing and therapeutic practices, professional negotiation and conflict resolution, people working in those spaces. And what really astounded me was when I would bring the stuff that I was witnessing to scientists or experts, there was this underlying literature that made sense, but none of these groups had ever heard of this literature for the most part. And they definitely hadn't heard of each other, but they did a lot of A-B testing, thousands of conversations, throwing away it didn't work, keeping what did. And they would arrive at this is how you ought to do this. And then we also...”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A huge part of it, right? Group identity. After that episode, a group in Sweden knew, they put on something like South by Southwest called the Gather Festival. They asked, hey, we got this crazy idea. What if you go to Sweden and we'll get Mark Sargent, who is sort of the spokesperson for the Flat Earth community, and we'll put you on stage, and I know you're writing a book about how minds change. You can try to try out some of those techniques on them. And I was like, that sounds awesome. I did. I went and I met Mark. And I found a very nice, very lovely man. And I did try some, at the point where I met him, I was about halfway through, and I wasn't great at the techniques. But I did an okay job.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They actually came in a little later in the process. There was a documentary on Netflix. You may have seen it behind the curve. And the producers of that were fans of my podcast and they grabbed a couple of my guests for the show and everything. And I thought it would be, you know, I would love to help promote something. I didn't know this, but someone told me I was in the credits. And I looked in the credits. It was like, you know, David, thanks to David McCraney. I was like, oh, wow. So I emailed them and said, hey, you want to come on my podcast? We'll talk about your documentary because if I had gotten a chance to make a Netflix show, it would have been very similar. Because it seems like it's about flat earth, but it's actually about motivated reasoning. Identity and community and things like that.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's why paintings can look nice because you play with the rules of illusions that to create death, right? And even people who gain vision late in life, the understanding depth and three-dimensionality is something that takes a lot of experience. You have to learn how to do it. And they oftentimes, they'll, in experiments with people who've just gained vision late in life, they'll put a telephone far away from them and they'll try to reach out to it. It's like 30 feet away because you have to learn depth. That's something that we learn over time. We did as children so we don't really”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The retina, I mean, you know, obviously at microscopic levels, it's three dimensional, but for the purposes of vision, it's a two-dimensional sheet. And so we create within consciousness the third dimension, but it's an illusion, just like every color is an illusion”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I just, while I've been visiting New York, I spent time with Pascal, who's in the book, and he's the one who ran me through all this.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is what I think about gun control. And what's invisible in the process or what becomes invisible when we're tasked with explaining ourselves is that all the rationalization and justification, all the interpretation that you've done and all the elaboration, these all these psychological terms, and that this concept of naive realism is that you see reality for what it is and other people are mistaken. When you get into moments of conflict and the thing that Bertrand Russell said is so nice because he is alluding to the fact that all reality is virtual reality, that the subjective experience is very limited. What the German psychologist called an umvelt”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that when I ask your opinion on, say, immigration or gun control, that whatever you tell me came from, you went down to the bowels of your castle, to your scrolls, and pulled out the scrolls by candlelight and read them all. And then one day came up from that and emerged from the staircase and raised your finger and said, ha.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is a way to kind of get into naive realism. Naive realism is the assumption that you're getting a sort of a video camera view of the world through your eyebrows. Right, right. And that you're storing your memories in some sort of database like a hard drive.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is no such thing as certainty. This is, you know, from a scientific or psychological, even philosophical domain, everything is probabilistic. We can hedge our bets, but the...”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that feeling that you're getting it, there's something generating that 100% certainty feeling, right? So the feeling of knowing is something that's separate from knowing. But as far as subjectively, it's the exact same thing. We only get to see this objectively in some way, especially in those like open up the middle envelope. Let's see what you actually said kind of thing.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, thank you. Because the idea is like facts, not feelings, or let's not get emotional. Let's not make emotional appeals. There's no dividing emotion from cognition. Emotion is cognition. And certainty is one of those things that lets you bridge the two because certainty is the emergent property of networks waiting something in one direction or another. And you feel like if you want to do percentage-wise, you can feel it if I ask you percentage-wise. If I ask you, did you have eggs last week on Tuesday? And you're like, I think I did. And like, well, like on a scale from like one to 10, like percentage-wise.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like I know. Here's what's important to know about this certainty is an emotion. This is something that gets me in trouble, I think, in rationalist circles. Won't catch you?”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it's. There are ways to have cathodic experiences, but the ones where you reward yourself for being angry tend to keep you angry.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The evidence suggests that what this does is reward you for the behavior, and you maintain that level of anger and anxiety and frustration.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things problematic. Yeah, it's related to the extinction birth. There's a For a while there. This is especially in like 1950s psychology the idea that just get it out. If you're angry, go beat up a punching bag or yell a piece.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they call this an extinction burst. It's that moment of like, if you're watching it on a slope, it's sloping down, down, down, down, and there's a huge spike. And that could either be the moment you go back to smoking.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was wrong with catharsis. Extinction burst is a real thing that I love. I see that everywhere. I see that all in society right now in many different ways. Extinction burst is when you have a behavior that has been enforced many, many times and your body even expects that you're going to perform this behavior and you start doing something like, say, dieting or you're trying to quit smoking or you're trying to do, you're trying just to extinguish the behavior. Right at the moment before it fully extinguishes, you will have a little hissy fit. You'll have a, as they say, back home. You'll have a toddler outburst sort of thing where all of your systems, cognitive systems are saying, why don't we really, really try to do that thing again? Because we're about to lose it.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the guy gave him the book as a favor, and he was like very honored that Ben Raffranco asked for it. I like to think that Benjamin Franklin just put it on a shelf and then waited a month and then took it back to him. But he said, Thank you. I'm forever in your debt. You're the best. And from that point forward, that guy never said another negative thing about Benjamin Franklin. So what that comes down to is I just observed my own behavior. I did something that produced cognitive dissonance. I have a negative attitude toward Benjamin Franklin, but I did something that a person with a positive attitude would do. So, I must either think a strange thing about who I am and what I'm doing, or I could just take the easy route out and go, I like Benjamin Franklin. And they call that the Benjamin Franklin effect.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's my favorite Benjamin Franklin effect goes back to you know a lot of my new book is in this domain of justification and rationalization Benjamin Franklin had someone who was opposing him at every turn. I call him a hater in the previous book back when that was a term. Yeah. He just had this political opponent that he knew was going to cause him real problems for the next thing he was going up for. And he also knew that this guy had a really nice book collection. And everybody also knew that Benjamin Franklin had a nice book collection. And so he sent them a letter that said, there's a book that I've always wanted to read, but I can never find. I hear you've got a copy of it. No. Who knows? It seems from reading the literature that Benjamin Franklin totally had this book.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is not well understood. A lot of the like, here's why this is happening have failed to replicate. So we have this phenomenon, but we still don't quite understand what is the mechanism underlying it.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man, ego depletion is one of those things that boy, it goes back and forth. The original scientists are still hardcore into it. I love it. Whether or not ego depletion is properly defined or categorized, the phenomenon does exist. The actual mechanisms of it aren't well understood. When you have been faced with a lot of cognitive tasks, You start to have a hard time completing more cognitive tasks in general”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you don't go looking for your keys on Mars. You go looking for them in your kitchen, right? It's the faster solution. And most of our, most of these biases go back to the adaptive thing is the thing that costs the least calories and gets you to the solution as quickly as possible so you can go back to trying to find food and not getting eaten. And in this case, most of the time, most of the time, confirmation bias serves as well. It's in those instances where it really doesn't serve as well that we end up with things like climate change.”
2022-09-30 · Masters in Business · David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source