You may have once met a person who (although you’ve presented all the evidence to) just won’t change their mind. You might wonder “how so? Why are they being completely illogical?”, well one explanation of that may be the psychology of our brains!

We don’t wanna be alone

In the past not being part of a tribe meant certain doom. You could get attacked by another tribe, and have no one to defend you, or you might not be able to do all the things you needed to survive and thrive, thus our brains act in a way that would make us wanna be part of a tribe and punish us if we weren’t.

This manifests itself in multiple forms, for example this excellent kurzgesagt video explains how loneliness is on such result of that, but what I’m interested in today is how our beliefs and opinions are affected by the same principle.

Being part of a tribe means thinking like them

In the field of advertising, there is a method that a clever advertiser could use to get you to buy his product: convince you that everyone else is buying it. This is called the band wagon effect. We want to do what other do. Going against the norm is punished by our brains, because that might lead to the tribe kicking us out.

I myself have first hand experience with this. in 8th grade I had a biology teacher that everyone hated. Although she had not done anything that justified the feeling i had towards her, i still did not like her. Only after a while when I sat down and evaluated everything did i realise that actually she’s a great teacher, and if i had anything negative to say about her, it was just because everyone else didn’t like her.

We might believe our tribe, even if it doesn’t align with our belief

Expanding on that logic: if someone you already trust shares with you a radical idea, then you are more like to accept it compared to a stranger suggesting it, since he is a part of your tribe.

if the stranger already has opinions opposite to you, there is a higher chance you won’t believe him. To put it another way: if you are a cat person you will easily believe other cat people, maybe believe no pets people, and never believe dog people.

Exploiting all that we’ve discussed

This principles reveals a better way to change people’s minds instead of fighting them with words: by first befriending them and adding them to our tribe, we allow them to change their believes without the risk of being tribe-less. James Clear puts it very nicely:

Facts don’t change our minds. Friendship does

The clearest example of this is the story Daryl Davis and the leader of the Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is an American organization conspiring against black people. They ware robes, have ceremonies ect… Davis is black, and he didn’t understand why he was hated. He managed to meet one of the leaders of the KKK, and then they started to regularly meet each other. They became half-friends, and eventually a former KKK member took of his robe.

conclusion

As important a lesson as it was to learn how to convince people who have opinions opposite to us, what’s definitely more important is us being aware of how this principle can affect us personally. We need to be alert and always examine the facts, not believing what one says because his a friend, or condemning an idea because it was suggested by an enemy.

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