Chapter One
The Contents of the Mind WE TALK ALL THE TIME about changing minds. The meaning of this exceedingly common metaphor seems clear enough: We have a mind set in one direction, some operation is performed, and-lo and behold-the mind is now set in another direction. Yet clear as this figure of speech may seem on superficial consideration, the phenomenon of changing minds is one of the least examined and-I would claim-least understood of familiar human experiences.
What happens when we change our minds? And what exactly does it take for a person to change her mind and begin to act on the basis of this shift? These questions have engaged my own curiosity: I have thought about them as a psychological researcher, while realizing that some aspects of mind changing are likely to remain an art for the foreseeable future. I present my own answers in the pages that follow.
Minds, of course, are hard to change. Yet so many aspects of our lives are oriented toward doing just that-convincing a colleague to approach a task in a new way, trying to eradicate one of our own prejudices. Some of us, even, are involved professionally in the business of changing people's minds: the therapist who affects his patient's self-concept; the teacher who introduces students to new ways of thinking about a familiar topic; the salesperson or advertiser who convinces consumers to switch brands. Leaders almost by definition are people who change minds-be they leaders of a nation, a corporation, or a nonprofit institution. Certainly, then, rather than taking the phenomenon of mind changing for granted, we can benefit from a better understanding of its many fascinating puzzles -of what, exactly, happens when a mind shifts from a seemingly intractable state to a radically different viewpoint.
At the outset let me state what I mean-and do not mean-when I use the expression "changing minds." To begin with, I am speaking about significant changes of mind. In a trivial sense, our minds change every moment that we are awake and, in all probability, while we are dozing or sleeping as well. Even when we grow senile, our minds are changing, though not in ways that are desirable. I shall reserve the phrase "changing minds" for the situation where individuals or groups abandon the way in which they have customarily thought about an issue of importance and henceforth conceive of it in a new way. So if I decide to read the sections of the newspaper in a different order, or to lunch at noon rather than at one o'clock, these do not qualify as significant changes of mind. If, on the other hand, I have always voted the straight Democratic ticket and decide that from now on I will actively campaign for the Libertarian Party; or if I decide to drop out of law school in order to become a pianist at a bar, I would consider these to be significant changes of mind. (Granted, there is always the odd bird for whom switching lunch time represents a bigger shift than changing careers.) The same contrast obtains when someone else is the agent of change-the person who brings about a mental shift. A teacher who decides to give tests on Thursday rather than Friday and who thereby affects my weekly study calendar is bringing about at most a modest change in my mind. But a teacher who turns me on to learning, and thereby stimulates me to continue pursuing a topic even after the course is over, has affected my mind more substantially.
I focus on changes of mind that occur consciously, typically as a result of forces that can be identified (rather than through subtle manipulation). I survey an ensemble of agents who sought to bring about a change of mind and who did so in a straightforward and transparent manner. My examples include political leaders like Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who altered the direction of Great Britain in the 1980s; business leaders like John Browne, now Lord Browne, who changed the operations of the British oil giant BP in the 1990s; the biologist Charles Darwin, who transformed the way in which scientists (and, eventually, laypersons) think about human origins; the spy Whittaker Chambers, whose own tumultuous changes of mind altered the political landscape of the United States in the early 1950s; and less well-known school teachers, family members, professional colleagues, therapists, and lovers who changed the minds of those around them.
My focus falls primarily on agents who succeed in changing minds, but I will also consider failed efforts by political leaders, business leaders, intellectuals, and other aspiring mind-changers. Except incidentally, I am not going to treat changes that occur through compulsion, nor changes that come about as a result of deception or manipulation. I introduce seven factors-ranging from reason to resistance-that operate either individually or jointly to bring about or thwart significant changes of mind; and I show how they work in a variety of specific cases. I am of course aware that changes do not always occur because of the intentions of the change agents or the desires of the person whose mind has been changed; some effects will be indirect or subtle or long-term or unintended or even perverse.
Often artists are the first to scout out terrain that is eventually explored in a more explicit way by scholars. As it happens, the novelist and essayist Nicholson Baker presents a charming example of mind change and-more revealingly-offers a thoughtful intuitive account of how such mind changing may come about. Baker recalls a bus trip that he took from New York City to upstate Rochester. The co-occurrence of two events on that trip stimulated Baker to ruminate about the process of mind changing.
First of all, at a scheduled stop en route, the driver of the bus noticed a stray shoe. He asked whether the shoe belonged to anyone. When no customer responded, the bus driver tossed the shoe into a nearby trash can. At a later point on the trip, a rather pathetic-looking passenger asked the driver whether a shoe had been discovered. The driver informed the passenger that he was too late and that the shoe had already been discarded in the vicinity of Binghamton.
Baker contrasts the decisiveness of the shoe tossing with a much more gradual instance of coming to a decision-in fact, a change of his own mind. While on the same bus trip, the writer began to fantasize about how he might furnish an apartment. In particular, he thought about an imaginative way in which to seat people: he would purchase and install rows of yellow forklifts and orange backhoes in his apartment. Visitors could sit either on slings hanging between the forks of the forklifts or on buckets of the kind used in excavating backhoes. Baker had been in the process of calculating how many forklifts a floor would sustain when the hapless passenger inquired in vain about the whereabouts of his shoe.
Baker reflects on what happened in the five years since he had first envisioned this exotic form of furnishing: "I find that, without my knowledge, I have changed my mind. I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes. Somewhere I jettisoned that interest as irrevocably as the bus driver tossed out the strange sad man's right shoe [Baker's italics]. Yet I did not experience during the intervening time a single uncertainty or pensive moment in regard to a backhoe."
Baker proceeds to reflect on the peculiar nature of these gradual changes of mind-such changes as the drifting apart of two friends, a shift in artistic taste, an alteration of political consciousness or persuasion. As he sees it, a mind change most often results from a slow, almost unidentifiable shift of viewpoint rather than by virtue of any single argument or sudden epiphany. Moreover, such so-called jolting insights are usually things we point to only after the fact, becoming stories that we eventually tell ourselves and others to explain our change of mind. He concludes his meditation with a characterization that encompasses just the kinds of mind changes that I am trying to understand: "I don't want the story of the feared-but-loved teacher, the book that hit like a thunderclap, the years of severe study followed by a visionary breakdown, the clench of repentance: I want each sequential change of mind in its true, knotted, clotted, viny multifariousness, with all of the colorful streams of intelligence still taped on and flapping in the wind."
From a phenomenological point of view, Baker has captured well the experience that all of us have had with respect to two varieties of mind changing: on the one hand, an apparently abrupt decision, like the tossing of a shoe out the window; on the other hand, a decision we come to gradually, perhaps even imperceptibly, over a longer period of time, like a shift in one's taste. I believe that Baker is correct in asserting that even those changes that erupt dramatically in consciousness often mask subtler processes that have jelled over a lengthy period of time. Still, such cases of personal mind-changing are but a subclass: In many cases, other agents-leaders, teachers, media personalities-play a decisive role in helping to bring about a change of mind, be it sudden or emergent.
All these forms of mind changing call for an explanation. What is enigmatic to the novelist or provocative for the essayist can and should be explicated by the social scientist. In this book, I identify (1) the various agents and agencies of mind change, (2) the tools that they have at their disposal, and (3) the seven factors that help to determine whether they succeed in changing minds. And I seek to show the power of my cognitively based account, as compared to rival rationales: for example, one based on biological factors or one that focuses on cultural or historical factors.
Before we launch into the specific agents and tools that can create a change of mind, let me define what I am talking about when I speak of what happens in the "mind." Though both Nicholson Baker and I speak about changing minds, it is clear that what I am writing about (and perhaps what he is writing about as well) ultimately involves changes of behavior. Changes that occur "within the mind" may be of academic interest, but if they do not result in present or future changes of behavior, then they are not of interest here.
Why, then, not simply speak of behavior? Why bring the mind into the discussion at all? Because a key to changing a mind is to produce a shift in the individual's "mental representations"-the particular way in which a person perceives, codes, retains, and accesses information. Here we run smack into the history of psychology-and a way of thinking about the human mind that will allow us to answer the question: What does it take to change a mind?
A PSYCHOLOGY OPEN TO "MIND" TALK
A century ago, in the earliest days of scientific psychology, researchers relied heavily on self-reports (introspection) and displayed no hesitation in speaking about ideas, thoughts, images, states of consciousness, even the Mind. Unfortunately, human beings are not necessarily accurate observers of their own mental life, and introspective accounts of experience did not satisfy strict scientific standards. As a reaction against this overreliance on personal, Nicholson Baker-style reports, a generation of psychologists decided to eliminate from their fledgling discipline all personal testimony-all reference to mental phenomena. They called instead for an exclusive emphasis on observable behaviors-acts that can be objectively seen, recorded, and quantified. Their approach-which held sway in the United States and some other countries for half a century-was called behaviorism. The tenets (and limits) of behaviorism are well conveyed in an old joke: Two behaviorists make love. The first then says to the second, "Well, it was great for you. But tell me, how was it for me?"
Whatever its virtues, behaviorism died during the second half of the twentieth century. There were various accessories to the fact but the principal executioner was the computer. By the 1950s and 1960s, it had become clear that computers were capable of problem solving of a sophisticated sort. To effect such problem solving, the computers required information-data-on which various operations were then performed in sequence. Often the computers went about computations in ways that appeared similar to those employed by human beings. As evidence accrued that manmade objects could think, it seemed absurd to deny mental activity to those entities-human beings-who built the hardware, created the software, and modeled the processes by which computers operated.
Thus was launched the cognitive revolution. This intellectual current swept through a number of disciplines fifty years ago and gave rise to an interdisciplinary field called cognitive science. Rejecting the strictures of behaviorism, cognitive scientists revisit the questions and concepts that were considered fair game during the first years of psychology (and, indeed, in the great philosophies of the past). Cognitivists have no hesitation in speaking about images, ideas, mental operations, and the Mind. In doing so, they rely heavily on the analogy and terminology of the computer age. And so, like mechanical or electrical computing devices, individuals are said to take in information, process it in various ways, and create diverse mental representations. It is possible to describe these mental representations in plain English (or French or Swahili)-as I will often do. But ultimately it is preferable if these mental representations can be described as precisely as the objects and operations of a programming language. Indeed, a new field called cognitive neuroscience posits that one day these mental representations will be explicable in purely physiological terms. We may be able to point to the set of neural connections or networks that represent a particular image, idea, or concept and observe changes thereto directly. And if the future techniques of brain transplants or genetic engineering achieve their potential, we might even be able to change minds by operating directly on the neurons or nucleotides (more on this in the closing chapter of the book).
To pursue the present inquiry I appropriate the language of cognitive science and speak about the ways in which mental representations change, or are changed. Of course, in a modest way our mental representations change all the time. Indeed, you could not have gotten this far in the first chapter if you had not undergone voluntary changes in representation -perhaps changes in the ways in which you understand the history of psychology or think about the common phrase "changing my mind."
Continues...
Excerpted from CHANGING MINDS by Howard Gardner Copyright © 2004 by Howard Gardner. Excerpted by permission.
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