How do I/we change somebody else’s mind without becoming ignored by them?
I mean, when I try to change somebody’s mind, and tell them an “ugly truth” that they don’t want to hear, they usually end up ignoring me.
How do I change their mind without falling into that trap?
Some people are very willing to become patient, listen, and argue. Most people are not; most people are impatient.
I want to convince the impatient ones without having them close their minds too fast. How do I gain their trust?
First, it helps to be right. You definitely have a better chance of convincing somebody of something that’s true than something that’s untrue.
Second, don’t be an ass hole to them. People are going to resent you, and by extension any idea you represent, if you’re an ass hole.
Third, before trying to convince them, make sure you can convince yourself. Play the devil’s advocate for a bit and figure out the best way to approach the issue.
There’s probably other important steps to take. Those ones were the ones I could think of off the top of my head.
So I need to espouse an absolute, morally dogmatic position of God given Truth? That makes sense.
I need absolute conviction.
So be “nice” to other people, like laugh at their stupid jokes and smile when they say stupid things?
Like if I despise my boss at work, think he is ugly, then I should never tell him upfront or I will get fired right??
I need to lie.
This seems like an extension of lying. I need to be able to discern my own lies.
Thanks, you are a real help.
Basically, your point is, that I need to lie my ass off. I think you are onto something here.
The “truth” is not going to help me change people’s beliefs. Frankly, it does not matter what I am saying is true or not, only that a person can become convinced of my own conviction. I understand this better now. More help is appreciated though.
You cannot. That is the “ugly truth” 
There’s no separating the self from what is listened to or looked at. Preconceptions and expectations are all built into what is being thought, listened to or looked at. This is particularly true when listening to what is being said. What is normally heard in talks is only those things which are interesting, give hope, give something which can be turned into a recipe for living, something which will give happiness or enlightenment. The mere fact that the one being listened to is worthy of being listened to reveals that there is some kind of transformation which is hoped to be received by using what is said.
There is nothing that can be done to change the present condition because whatever is there now, the confusions, problems, conflicts, violence, are all products of thought and self-consciousness. Any attempt to change the given is born out of thought, and whatever thought does only perpetuates and strengthens itself and the knowledge it has, but does not result in freedom from them.
Is it better that a speaker have a beautiful or ugly face when convincing others of things?
I mean, if I wanted to convince somebody about one of my points, wouldn’t it hinder me if I were wearing a clown suit with a red ball nose?
It’s not so hard on online debate forums. Just keep following the person around and continually point out their contradictions or illogical stance. Offline, though, it’s much harder because you can easily walk away from someone who annoys you. Can’t help there.
I’ve been on online debate forums nearly 15 years, and I’ve never seen someone change their mind because of stalking and harassment. The “best” you’ll do is drive someone away.
This thread is an interesting insight into one of the drives of philosophy - that urge to prove that you’re right, that other people have to listen to you, otherwise they’re fools.
How do you force somebody to stay and listen, rather than retreat? You need to hold somebody’s interest first.
So presume you have their interest. How do you keep it, force them to change their mind, their beliefs, without them becoming suspicious of your or distrustful toward you?
First you must live well holding the beliefs and convictions you do. Be your own poster-boy. Then people will come to you, to listen, then the convincing will become easy, for in coming to you, they have already half-convinced themselves.
Nothing convince with greater success, than success itself.
That would work. But let’s presume the situation is dire, an emergency.
I need to convert a Muslim into a Christian, in 2 days. Maybe I made a bet that I could do it for a million dollars. Maybe I am a fundamentalist with a death wish before I die of terminal cancer. Whatever the reason, I need to convert a devout dogmatist to their exact opposite belief system within as little time as possible.
Let’s think about that. How do I change a deeply held belief in a short period of time? Is it possible?
Let’s talk about converting Christians to Atheism and back again, within the same session of dialogue. I really want to cut through all the defenses.
How do you attack somebody’s deepest held beliefs, about their own identity perhaps, about their gender, about what they find beautiful or ugly?
I was just thinking and I got an answer: family intervention!
For example, when a miscreant is hooked on drugs like pot or something, the family members come together to confront the drug abuser. They prevent him from “running away” from his problem of drug abuse and such.
This maybe very helpful in converting somebody and changing beliefs, if you get their family members and other trusted authorities together to confront the person along with the point you are trying to make.
I dunno if it is that simple, something as profound as a deep religious conviction is not something that would have been built up over night, nor is it something so easily compartmentalised as a stand-alone-complex. Religion overlaps many things - a renouncement of the religion of your country, is to some degree a slight against that country - invoking nationalist feeling within the subject. A renouncement of the religion of your forefathers is also a slight againt those forefathers and your imediate family, should they share the same beliefs.
Some people live their lives completely cocooned socially within the religious sphere - their friends are those they meet through their religion, their wives, their children may have been put through religious strictures, anything from circumcision, and enforced training in the dogma and ritual - or the deprivation of certain kinds of entertainment, or compulsary dress-codes. All things done - in a religious based context - for ‘their own good’. Thus the collapse of that belief set as false would entail an acceptance of guilt - for putting a loved one through such hardship, and social alienation.
And as such these belief sets, encompassing as they do, the greater part of the subjects social persona, become to big to fail. For should the belief fail, so too would the subjects life and livelihood.
Also too, from a conditioning POV - their beliefs may be represented as a prolonged period of time, and the accumulated experience involved. Let’s give the creation of a deep religious conviction an arbitrary value - 10 - representing the time and experiential intensity involved. To break that conviction, and rebuild another would take 20 - 10 to destroy, 10 to rebuild a set of equal strength in its place.
To compress that value of 20 into a period of 48 hours would require experiences of extraordinary intensity. Let’s not fool ourselves - we’re talking 48 hours of psychologic and physical torture to the absolute limit of death, interspersed with short periods of free heroin and blow-jobs supplied by the entire contestant list of last year’s Miss World competition.
Toughie.
I understand that most people cannot be talked into good thinking or changing their minds, but they can be listened into it. (I’m not talking about abuse or brainwashing here, which is a different dynamic.) Very likely it has to come from expressing themselves and being able to see their views and ideas outside of their own minds. I’ve been able to work through some very heavy stuff that way and change my thinking, but it’s a process and it usually takes a while. This is also not something that will just work through writing on a mb, either. You have to express yourself verbally and emotionally with someone else listening and paying you aware attention.
This may sound corny, especially coming from a staff member, but: In my experience with trying to convince people of things, treating people with respect is a huge first step. You’re unlikely to convince someone by telling them they’re too stupid to understand what you’re saying. The best approach requires empathy, really understanding where the person is coming from and making your case with specific attention to the reasons they disagree with you.
In response to a similar recommendation by Humpty, you say that this is basically lying, but I don’t think that’s so, or rather it shouldn’t be. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re a great liar, you can assume the words, gestures, and expressions that mimic the real sentiment. But given that you’re already trying to convince someone of something they think to be untrue, if you’re anything less than a great liar, chances are that they will come to believe that you are lying, and the associated loss of credibility will make convincing them much harder (and will probably make their belief even stronger).
So, rather than lie about, actually do it. If you want to convince a person, you clearly care what that person believes. Communicate that you care what they believe, give their beliefs the benefit of the doubt. Put your beliefs into play and ask them to do the same. Be willing to be convinced yourself, and your audience will be more receptive.
I get the feeling you’re looking for a Derren Brown/NLP-esque tactic that will flawlessly convince anyone of anything. But DB’s tricks don’t really work for foundational beliefs like religion. Like Tab said, it’s much easier to convince someone they want a bike for their birthday than it is to convince someone that the lens through which they understand reality has been wrong all along. Think of a belief as a circuit in a neural network (which it is): the longer one has held a belief, and the more other beliefs that are dependent upon it, the stronger the connections that form the circuit will be, and so the more (or more intense) experience will be required to reshape the network to exclude the belief.
Okay, so there are 2 things to consider here.
The first is the context. If you want to change somebody’s beliefs then you should first rig the context. If the person is a small child, all the parents & friends are around, and you have an heir of authority, then it presumably would be much easier for you to convince whoever you are convincing about whatever you want.
The second is the argument. Even if you have everything in order to your advantage or disadvantage, then you still have to do the actual convincing.
Presume that in one case, you have everything in order. You are dealing with a 5 year old girl who automatically believes everything you say. Maybe you are her father or something. In this case, there really is no difficulty. Everything you say comes with presumed, absolute authority. She would drink and bathe in your words.
Presume in the second case, everything as bad as possible. You are very ugly, unintelligent, never serious, a minority, etc. attempting to convince somebody who is very beautiful, smarter than you, always serious, a majority, an esteemed member of a community, in fact the president of the United States.
In the second case, it clearly will be much, much more difficult to become believed, let alone listened to. It should not take more than a glimpse from the president of the United States that you are a person “not to be listened to”. So let’s start there, from this second case. Assume that everything is going against you from the beginning. The first thing you would need to do is get somebody’s attention.
There is a difference between indoctrination of children, brainwashing, and actually trying to convince someone to change their mind.
As I said before, very few people can be talked into making such changes; but nearly anyone can be listened into good thinking and new ideas. You’d be amazed at what can happen when you give a person good attention.
Do tell about this supposed difference between indoctrination, brain washing, and convincing.
I really want to hear about this difference.
Why is it any different for me to convince a small child that God exists compared to the president of the USA, or a devout Muslim?
The main difference is the former seems ready to accept anything I say whereas the latter are not willing to hear me speak in the first place.
It’s all about dogma.
To be honest, in that equation, should you find yourself embodied as the former, rather than the latter, maybe you should go back to your basement, and give some serious consideration to the idea you might actually be totally wrong anyway.
A person who believes anything you say, no matter what it is, isn’t being convinced of it. They’re taking your word for it; they believe you. Convincing doesn’t seem to require belief. A convincing argument relies on premises that a person already accepts, and demonstrates from them that xyz is the case.
For instance, suppose someone doesn’t buy quantum physics. If they were a small child and we could easily brainwash them, we could simply say “light is a particle and a wave, and takes all paths from point A to point B, etc.,” and they would believe this to be true. To convince someone of quantum physics, on the other hand, we would need to say something like “You accept that this laser emits light, you accept that there are two slits in this material that the laser is pointing at, and you acknowledge that there is a diffraction pattern on the wall opposite the material with the slits (etc. etc.); quantum physics accounts for all this, and has made numerous testable predictions which have all born it out (etc. etc.).”
In the latter case, your providing reasons that connect things that the person already believes. In the former, you’re creating a new belief out of thin air, based solely on the person’s trust in you.
Second. If a person is excelling by acting on beliefs that you hold to be false, you need to account for that. If you can’t, you need to consider the fact that your beliefs are as subject to error as are anyone else’s.