Can I Change Your Mind?
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 4 November 2019
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There’s a widespread belief that there’s no point talking to people you disagree with because they will never change their minds. Everyone is too polarized and attempts to discuss will merely result in greater polarization. But the history of the world is defined by changes of mind –that’s how progress (or even regress) is made: shifts in political, cultural, scientific beliefs and paradigms. So how do we ever change our minds about something? What are the perspectives that foster constructive discussion and what conditions destroy it? Margaret Heffernan talks to international academics at the forefront of research into new forms of democratic discourse, to journalists involved in facilitating national conversations and to members of the public who seized the opportunity to talk to a stranger with opposing political views:
Eileen Carroll, QC Hon, Principal Mediator and Co-founder, Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution Jon Connor-Lyons, participant, Britain Talks James S. Fishkin, Janet M. Peck Professor of International Communication and Director, Centre for Deliberative Democracy, Stanford University Danielle Lawson, Post Doctoral Research Scholar, North Carolina State University Ada Pratt, participant, Britain Talks Mariano Sigman. Associate Professor, Torcuato Di Tella University, Buenos Aires Cass R. Sunstein, Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard Law School Jochen Wegner, Editor, Zeit Online Ros Wynne-Jones, columnist, Daily Mirror
Presenter: Margaret Heffernan Producer: Sheila Cook Editor: Jasper Corbett
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
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| 0:41.0 | Hello, thanks for listening to this edition of Analysis, the podcast that looks at ideas behind the news. |
| 0:47.0 | I'm Margaret Heffernan, the presenter of this edition. |
| 0:50.0 | Over the next half hour, I'm going to be exploring how far any of us is prepared to change our minds. |
| 0:57.0 | People are inclined to think that if they talk with one another they tend to end up thinking a more extreme |
| 1:04.4 | version of what they started out thinking but they'll be more unified, more |
| 1:09.2 | confident and more extreme. It's a great sadness actually that we are not able to disagree well and that we don't have |
| 1:17.5 | intelligent dialogue. |
| 1:19.2 | I think the politicians have got so wrapped up in themselves. |
| 1:22.3 | I don't think they explain to the ordinary population. |
| 1:26.0 | I think they're too busy shouting at one another. |
| 1:30.0 | While my colleagues in political science mostly think that the public is stupid and easily manipulable, |
| 1:38.0 | and it can be manipulable, particularly when it's not paying a lot of attention, |
| 1:42.0 | then it's only listening to its own side of the argument. |
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