The central premise: Instead of trying to force other people to change, you’re better off helping them find their own intrinsic motivation to change. Several decades ago, when treating substance abuse problems, psychologists developed a technique called motivational interviewing. If I wanted him to rethink his blanket resistance to vaccines, I had to rethink my approach. Refuting a point of view produces antibodies against future attempts at influence, making people more certain of their own opinions and more ready to rebut alternatives. Much as a vaccine inoculates the physical immune system against a virus, the act of resistance fortifies the psychological immune system. Yet experiments show that preaching and prosecuting typically backfire - and what doesn’t sway people may strengthen their beliefs. When we try to change a person’s mind, our first impulse is to preach about why we’re right and prosecute them for being wrong. Zeynep Tufekci writes that many preconceptions about unvaccinated people may be wrong, and that could be a good thing.
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