Can facts change someone’s mind? Most times, this approach is a dead end, especially when we try to convince those with top-notch analytical skills. In fact, neuroscience shows that analytical people will tend to use data to find fault with facts they don’t like.

If we want to bring someone closer to our way of thinking, Tali Sharot suggests another way in her book, The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals about our Power to Change Others. Tali is founder and director of the Affective Brain Lab at University College London and an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and the BBC. Tali is also author of the book, The Optimism Bias.

In this interview we discuss:

Why we tend to seek out information that confirms what we already believe

Our attraction to information associated with people who think like us

How bias compounds as we filter for information that aligns with, and people who agree with, our beliefs

How we will avoid getting advice from experts - on something completely unrelated to politics - if they are not aligned with our political beliefs

Why people with strong math and analytical skills can become even more entrenched in their beliefs on a topic

How our brains tend to encode information from people who agree with us and how that impacts the decisions we make

Why starting a conversation by focusing on an area of agreement can help us view one another as more similar than originally thought and help us listen more fully to a different perspective

How our brains can synchronize when we listen to an emotional, compelling speech and how that helps us predict what the speaker may say

How feelings of happiness, sadness, stress, and so on, can be emotionally contagious for others in a family, group or organization

How social media serves as the amygdala of the internet, rousing us emotionally in ways associated with how the amygdala works

How immediate, positive feedback, associated with progress and situated in a social setting, can improve performance

The fact that our phobias arise from areas of our life we cannot control

How our brains view choice as a reward

Episode Links

Tali Sharot

@affectivebrain

Affective Brain Lab

Dan Kahan

Mentalization

How Emotions are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Susan Cain

Uri Hasson

Weizmann Institute of Science

Hospital Hand Hygiene Project

Discovery health insurance

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!