INTERVIEW: MINDSTUCK with Michael McQueen
Issue 95: Mastering the Art of Changing Minds with branding expert Michael McQueen
This week we are featuring prolific speaker, change strategist, and writer Michael McQueen and his new book, Mindstuck: Mastering the Art of Changing Minds. Michael is a best selling author and has published ten books, with his latest book was released today!
Mindstuck is about how to persuade people in an ideology-driven and polarized age where curiosity and open-mindedness is fading away. Whether you are a businessperson who needs a potential partner to see your value proposition, or a parent who wants to get your teenager away from their screen, this book will show you how to persuade even the most mindstuck people in your world.
In our interview with Michael, he explains how identity tends to trump inquiry in decision-making, and why Socrates and Plato would hardly recognize debate in the 21st-century. Check out the interview below and learn more about Mindstuck and how to purchase it here.
Jay also did a conversation with Michael about how we can have productive conversations across group divides. We discuss how intergroup conflict and polarization impact society all the way from the bills and policies that get passed all the way to our personal and romantic relationships. You can watch the full discussion on YouTube.
What does your book teach us about social identity or group dynamics?
We’ve all encountered the effect of group dynamics – groupthink, tribal politics and the herd instinct that are impossible to escape. Of course, it’s not us that fall prey to the effects of the herd – it’s always the people on the other side that can’t seem to see reason or think for themselves… If only this were true. Despite our assertions that we are individual thinkers and free agents, the truth is that most of our decisions, delusions and judgements are products of groups dynamics.
As advertising strategist Mark Earls writes in his book Herd: How to Change Mass Behavior by Harnessing our True Nature, “We use other people's brains to navigate the world.” This tribal impulse has a powerful impact on how we evaluate information and make judgements. Rather than assess the ideas being offered, we tend to assess the individual offering them – we question whether they are on “our side”, whether or not they are “like us”.
Identity tends to trump inquiry. Decades ago, when the Swiss government started moving to nuclear energy, they began looking for a solution to the waste problem created. After finding two towns that were best-placed to act as waste depositories, the next step was to win over the locals. 50% of them were on board initially – the researchers supposed this was a function of national pride and a commitment to the common good. When they went on to offer 5000 Swiss francs annually as compensation, the amount of the population on board dropped to 24.5%. The money acted as a disincentive!
What this shows us is just how powerful and embedded our sense of social responsibility is, and how it struggles to co-exist with self-interest. Our deep tribal instincts make things like altruism, responsibility and honor powerful motivators for human behavior, and better yet, human change. Where traditional incentives typically appeal to our self-interest, tapping into our desire to do good, be good and be seen as good can be a much more powerful form of motivation.
What is the most important idea readers will learn from your book?
We have been arguing all wrong! In our post-Enlightenment era, conventional wisdom suggests that persuading people is simply a matter of providing more information, better evidence and watertight logic. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Not only is our current persuasive paradigm simply ineffective, but it is often the culprit of the debates and divisions we have seen escalate in our society. The latest brain research has revealed that when we are confronted with information or ideas that threaten our opinions and convictions, our neurological instinct is to batten down the hatches and double down.
The very principles, practices, and purpose of debate have changed so enormously over the centuries that the undisputed original masters of argument—Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato—would hardly recognize what we describe as debating today. Far from an opportunity for winning and and point-scoring, the ancient argument was understood to be in pursuit of truth. “Losing” an argument was associated not with shame or embarrassment but with the feeling of enlightenment and freedom that they referred to as “aporia”. It is this understanding of debate as a collaborative pursuit of truth that we are in most need of reviving, especially given that our modern approach to persuasion is so often shaped by the idea of it being a battle.
Why did you write this book and how did writing it change you?
I initially set out to write Mindstuck due to the question I kept getting asked by clients and audience members about how to get others on board with new programs or initiatives.
Given I’ve spent 20 years helping organizations and leaders gear up for disruption, I often felt I was only doing half the job when I gave clients a strategic game plan for what they needed to do, but didn’t arm them with tools for meaningfully enlisting others (superiors, colleagues or teams) in the process. I honestly assumed the research process would be one of simply gathering together the tools for shifting people’s mindsets and drawing from the worlds such as psychology, sales and negotiation.
However, it soon became clear that a lot of the books written around this topic verged on merely offering tricks to manipulate the choices and emotions of others. In trying to unearth some more research-based and ethical approaches to engaging with obstinate people, I realized that so much of it has to do genuinely understanding the nature of stubbornness and the reasons people don’t change – even when they actually want to.
The result of all this research was me having to confront my own stubborn thinking. I started reconsidering my own assumptions about the human mind and the very methods and purpose of engaging with those who we disagree with. I was convinced of the fact that persuasion was simply a matter of using logic to forcefully convince another person to see things my way - an approach that we now know simply doesn’t work. In many ways this is not a new insight given Dale Carnegie famously observed decades ago that “Someone convinced against their will is of the same opinion still.” And yet, I needed to learn this principle afresh and really take it on board as it runs counter to so much of what we’ve been taught to do in post-Enlightenment western culture.
What will readers find provocative or controversial about your book?
Many of us assume that knowledge is the cumulative outcome of considered thought and evaluated experience. Our opinions and views, we presume, are the sum of our experiences and everything they have taught us. The reality is that our sense of certainty, that feeling when we “just know”, is far from a reasoned conclusion.
What has been shown across neuroscience and psychology in recent decades is that when we arrive at this point of just “knowing”, we are much more likely under the influence of identity, ideology and intuition. When we encounter a new idea, these are the lenses we tend to view it through. We analyze it according to its alignment with our self-image or social identity.
While our prior knowledge is often a necessary way of dealing with the mass amounts of information we encounter daily, it can also dangerously blind us to reality. These ideologies often run so deep that even the most irrefutable evidence serves only to solidify our stubbornness.
Put simply, feeling right feels good and, as a result, we are rarely judging the world as it is—but rather the way we expect or want it to be. The final factor that contributes to our false senses of certainty is that of intuition, and it often this one that jars with our rational mind the most. Whether we call it a gut instinct, a hunch or a sixth sense, this intuitive capacity we all seem to have remains difficult to explain and yet is often still the deciding factor of many of opinions and actions.
Stranger still, there have been multiple studies that seem to reveal that it works – despite failing to explain why or how. One of my favorite stories of this comes from the British Journal of Psychology and describes the decision of a Formula One driver who braked sharply coming into a hairpin curve for no particular reason except that it just felt like what he needed to do. Unbeknownst to him, there was a pileup just around the corner and, had he failed to brake, he would have certainly made a bad situation considerably worse. Most neuroscientists put intuition down to a yet-to-be discovered brain mechanism that is responsible for immediate cognition without thought. Either way, as reasoned and rational as we believe we are, we all depend on this intuition along with our social identities and existing ideologies to help us reach the conclusions we are most sure of.
Do you have any practical advice for people who want to apply these ideas (e.g., three tips for the real world)?
One of the simplest strategies I’ve found for persuading stubborn people is highly counter-intuitive and can be deeply uncomfortable for those of us who like winning. Rather than present the most polished argument, some of our most effective persuasion occurs when we put our worst foot forward. This can best be achieved through self-disclosure, self-doubt and self-deprecation – all of which go against all our strongest instincts to double down in debate.
Self-disclosure alludes to the unique power of honestly sharing the weak points of your argument. Proactively highlighting the shortcomings of your perspective and disclosing details that might undermine your position signals to the other person that you are informed, nuanced, and forthright. Not only does this technique enhance your credibility in the debate, but it invariably compels the listener to jump to your defense and even unconsciously start arguing your idea for you.
Similarly, expressing self-doubt and speaking honestly about your own uncertainty is consistently read by others as a sign that the information is trustworthy. Self-deprecation is even more proactive in disarming the other person. Using humor or radical transparency immediately diffuses tension, establishes trust, and breaks down the us vs them mindset that is so often the cause of stubbornness. In his landmark book The Trust Factor, neuroeconomist Paul Zak explored the biological processes involved in establishing affinity in the minds of those we are looking to influence. After years of studying what builds rapport, he uncovered that the most important element of gaining or regaining trust is to dial up our human-ness. Being real, vulnerable, and even fallible results in the release of the hormone oxytocin, which is the chemical responsible for social bonding. When we put our worst foot forward, this exactly the kind of affinity we achieve – and this is where true persuasion begins.
News and Updates
I recently gave a talk at Arizona Statue University on THE POWER OF US for the Cialdini Speaker series. This is him with the legendary psychologist Bob Cialdini. Bob wrote what is probably the best selling—and most useful—book in the history of social psychology: INFLUENCE: The Psychology of Persuasion.
About 15 years ago, Bob was giving a talk at The Ohio State University and he gave Jay some of the best advice of his career. He said that great research involves a test of psychological theory. But it will be far more impactful if you can study that theory in a way that impacts real people. For instance, if you want to study the impact of social norms, you should study how they change something meaningful (eg reducing energy use or increasing recycling).
This will make your research useful and relevant to humans outside of the university and give your work a far broader impact. This was one of those little pieces of advice that was forever burned in Jay’s brain and inspired him to study topics that matter to people outside my field. We thought it might be fun to pass along this story to people in all lines of work—if you want to have influence, think about the audiences outside your own little ingroup!
Catch up on the last one…
Learn the who, what, when, where and whys of misinformation and what can be done to fight it in last week’s issue summarizing recommendations from social science research
