David McRaney on How Minds Change

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2022

⏱️ 88 minutes

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Summary

To the Founding Fathers it was free libraries. To the 19th century rationalist philosophers it was a system of public schools. Today it's access to the internet. Since its beginnings, Americans have believed that if facts and information were available to all, a democratic utopia would prevail. But missing from these well-intentioned efforts, says author and journalist David McRaney, is the awareness that people's opinions are unrelated to their knowledge and intelligence. In fact, he explains, the better educated we become, the better we are at rationalizing what we already believe. Listen as the author of How Minds Change speaks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about why it's so hard to change someone's mind, the best way to make it happen (if you absolutely must), and why teens are hard-wired not to take good advice from older people even if they are actually wiser.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.8	I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover
0:12.7	Institution.
0:13.7	Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode and find links down
0:18.6	the information related to today's conversation.
0:21.4	You'll also find our archives, but every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.8	Our email address is mail at econtalk.org.
0:30.3	We'd love to hear from you.
0:37.8	Today is August 17th, 2022.
0:39.8	My guest is journalist and author, David McGraney.
0:42.8	He hosts the podcast.
0:44.0	You are not so smart.
0:45.1	His latest book and topic for today's conversation is how minds change the surprising science
0:51.4	of belief, opinion and persuasion.
0:54.4	David, welcome to econ talk.
0:56.6	Thank you so much for having me.
0:58.8	Underlying this book is the simple but often unappreciated idea that we are not fully aware
1:03.4	of what we know, what we don't know and what motivates us about what we think we know.
1:09.0	How did you get interested in these ideas?
1:13.1	The entry point of this, I think there's a lot of things.
1:15.1	One was growing up in the deep south, but being part of a generation that had so much
1:20.5	media coming at you that you started to feel like there's another world out there.
	...

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