5 Ways to Change a Mind… According to Reddit

“People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions and help them throw rocks at their enemies.”

While there is a lot of truth and insight in this sentence, it could be easy to read it and still be no clearer how to affect change in the vexing situations and relationships you find yourself in right now. And you wouldn’t be alone.

The art and science of persuasion can seem evasive and opaque.

What the research shows

Others have adopted a more rigorous approach to unearthing the secrets of influencing others to change, such as a famous 2016 study by a team at Cornell University.

In outlining his rationale and vision, Cornell’s lead researcher Chenhao Tan acknowledged that “changing someone’s opinion is arguably one of the most important challenges of social interaction. The underlying process proves difficult to study: it is hard to know how someone’s opinions are formed and whether and how someone’s views shift.”^[1]

To get a unique insight into exactly how the process of opinion change occurs, Tan and his team used a Reddit community called ChangeMyView.

This online commuity is designed as a place where “users present their own opinions and reasoning, invite others to contest them, and acknowledge when the ensuing discussions change their original views”.

“Changing someone’s opinion is arguably one of the most important challenges of social interaction.” ~ Chenhao Tan

While it must be said that the sort of people attracted to a Reddit community like ChangeMyView are, perhaps, more intellectually engaged and flexible that the average person, the insights gained by observing persuasion (as it occurred in real time) were invaluable.

ChangeMyView allowed the process of interpersonal persuasion to be monitored at massive scale. At the time of Tan’s research, the community had just over 200,000 active members. This addressed one of the key limitations in similar studies – the sample sizes was too small to be meaningful.

In addition to scale, the beauty of ChangeMyView  – as opposed to Twitter or Facebook – is it requires users to outline the reasoning for a particular view when they post it.

Also, all users make a commitment to being open-minded when they sign up. This means the quality, veracity and “adultness” of the conversations tends to be quite high.

Lessons from the ChangeMyView Reddit

In case you haven’t checked out the ChangeMyView community (or thread), here’s how it works.

A user posts an opinion or idea in 500 words. If others post comments or counterviews which successfully change or alter the views of an Original Poster (OP), they reply to the comment with a delta (∆) character.

They also articulate why the comment/perspective shifted their view.

In examining the instances where an OP’s view was changed, the Cornell team found that there were common features of successful persuasive efforts:

1. Volume – If a lot of people argued against an original poster’s view, they were more likely to consider changing it. This is not merely a case of peer pressure but the fact that more responses means more diverse views and, therefore, an increased likelihood that one of those counterviews will hit the spot. Interestingly though, while some back-and-forth engagement between the original posters and a commenter proved to be helpful, there was little evidence that conversion of belief was a function of extended conversations.

2. Vocabulary – When comparing similar comments or arguments that had varying degrees of persuasive effectiveness, it became clear that stylistic influences play a big role in persuasiveness. The commenters were more likely to be persuasive if they used “sentiment words”, calm language and a larger number of words. Short, sharp responses were the least successful in changing views.

Mirroring or using similar language to the original post was highly effective.

First-person singular pronouns such as “me” and “I” were far more persuasive than second-person pronouns such as “you.”

Interestingly, one of the key indicators that an opinion was entrenched and unlikely to change was when the OP used first-person plural pronouns like “us”. As the researchers concluded, “first person plurals can indicate a diluted sense of group responsibility for the view”.

“First-person singular pronouns such as ‘me’ and ‘I’ were far more persuasive than second-person pronouns such as “you.”

The posture of the language made a big difference too. When the commenter engaged in “hedging” where they indicated uncertainty, they softened their tone and made their arguments less intense and easier to accept.

A common hedging technique used in counterpoints was the phrase “it could be the case that… ”

3. Evidence – If a poster replied with numerous hyperlinks as evidence, it was deemed to be more thorough and impactful.

Interestingly, .com links were deemed more impactful because they were easiest to recall and .edu and PDF links were also highly effective.

Social proof factors and deferral to authority figures were also powerful forms of persuasive evidence.

4. Examples – The more examples which illustrated the counterpoint, the more serious the view was taken.

Successful persuasion comments invariably included the key words and phrases “for example… ” and “for instance… ”

5. Positive and negative words – Using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count text analysis tool, the researchers measured whether the words used in successfully persuasive comments tended to be positive or negative.

As above, sentiment-laden messages were more persuasive on the whole but, interestingly, it was negative sentiments which appeared more frequently in persuasive counter arguments.

Naturally, there were some Original Poster views which were stubbornly resistant to change.

However, the frequency with which people did change their opinions and the reasons this occurred offer some incredibly important insights.

Changing minds will always be an unpredictable art. People are on many levels tribal, irrational and inconsistent. However, these ChangeMyView insights reveal that there are some fundamentals which tend to apply more often than not.

Using techniques such as these might give us the best chances of changing stubborn minds.

[1] Tan, C, Niculae, V, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, C & Lee, L 2016, ‘Winning Arguments: Interaction Dynamics and Persuasion Strategies in Good-faith Online Discussions’, IW3C2.