Is It Really Possible to Change Someone's Beliefs? | Barbara Oakley | Big Think скачать в хорошем качестве

Is It Really Possible to Change Someone's Beliefs? | Barbara Oakley | Big Think

Is It Really Possible to Change Someone's Beliefs? Watch the newest video from Big Think: https://bigth.ink/NewVideo Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos: https://bigth.ink/Edge ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ideology doesn’t bend to reason, says Professor Barbara Oakley. Here's why we can't really change what other people believe, and why that brand of "helping" others can backfire.The two things you simply cannot do are probably the two things you most want to: change someone, and help them. Barbara Oakley, an engineering professor who teaches the world's largest online open class, knows this intimately: when she was teaching in China, "working with the communists" as she says, people had tried to warn others about the dangers of communist totalitarianism before the Great Leap Forward. Nobody listened. Ultimately discussion isn't enough to sway people's beliefs — for any slim shot at that, says Oakley, you have to give people new experiences, not just facts. But should you always be trying to change others, anyway? "Your own good intentions can also lead you astray," says Oakley, whose research involves pathologies of altruism. Could altruism be a behavioral disorder? A study from Boston in the 1930s that was followed up in the 1970s imparts an important lesson on why thinking you know best for others can be anything but a help, and that if a good deed feels good, it might be a red flag that you're only helping yourself. Barbara Oakley's most recent book is Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential, and you can find the Mindshift course here. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BARBARA OAKLEY : Barbara Oakley, PhD, is a professor of engineering at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, and Ramón y Cajal Distinguished Scholar of Global Digital Learning at McMaster University. Her research involves bioengineering with an emphasis on neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Alongside legendary neuroscientist Terrence Sejnowski, Dr. Oakley teaches two massive open online courses (MOOCs), 'Learning How to Learn,' the world's most popular course, and 'Mindshift,' the companion course to her most recent book of the same title. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TRANSCRIPT: Barbara Oakley: It’s hard to know how you can change a person’s mind or opinion. And the reality is you can’t. I mean, a change has to come from within that person. And sometimes that change only comes when you have the experience or that person has the experiences themselves. So again harking back to my old days of working with the communists. In Communist China there was some really, there were some horrific things taking place with Mao during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. But before that time even there were a lot of atrocities that didn’t get heard because if you talked about them they’d kill you. So in more open and western approaches to government, there was a lot of criticism of the bad things going on. And in communist systems there was none. And so it was easy to imagine that they were great systems. So people who had come from the communist side in China and they were trying to convince others that wait a minute, no. You don’t want this type of totalitarian system in your life. You don’t want to bring it there. They would talk and talk and talk and it made no difference at all because the people couldn’t imagine what kind of experiences there were. It’s the same for the Jews during the Holocaust. I mean people just didn’t believe what was going on. So sometimes it’s just, it’s hard to imagine how you can change a person because you really can’t unless they’re experiencing the kinds of things that you’ve seen and you’ve encountered. But at the same time it’s important to be aware that your own good intentions can also lead you astray. So what do I mean by that? There was a wonderful study done and published in the 1970s by Joan McCord. And what she did was she went back and looked at an old study in the 1930s of Boston school boys, 500 of them. They split them into two groups. One was the control group, they did nothing to them. The other group was given every possible advantage. They had counseling, summer camps, they got extra tutoring. Just medical assistance, even assistance for the family. It was really about the best you could imagine. Thirty years later Joan McCord followed up on those two groups. One group had significantly higher rates of suicide, alcoholism, drug use. They were in jail more. They ended up in lower class jobs. I mean it was just sort of every sort of bad thing you could imagine. For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/barbara-o...