You know what’s a great way to start a blog post? Embed an incredible, nearly two hour long video so that no one reads the rest of the post! So here you go, watch as much or as little as you like, but I’d like to discuss something he brings up about four and a half minutes in. It’s a paper, titled “Effective Messages in Vaccine Promotion: a randomized trial.”

Mr. Harrison Bomberguy’s takeaway is that “no matter what message they tried, people didn’t change their minds.” He quotes the lead on the study saying “It’s depressing, we were definitely depressed” to great comedic effect. I seriously love this video and have watched it multiple times.

He then says the purpose of the video is to answer the question “When someone is wrong about something, how do you change their mind?”

He spends the next 90 minutes crafting a video that is alternately hilarious and heart-breaking, but that never actually addresses the question of how do you change someone’s mind. I mean, other than in the first five minutes when he says “You can’t.” So, uh … asked and answered.

So let’s answer that question.

The issue with the study

The study he cites (linked above) uses the following method:

“A Web-based nationally representative 2-wave survey experiment was conducted with 1759 parents age 18 years and older residing in the United States who have children in their household age 17 years or younger (conducted June-July 2011). Parents were randomly assigned to receive 1 of 4 interventions: (1) information explaining the lack of evidence that MMR causes autism from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; (2) textual information about the dangers of the diseases prevented by MMR from the Vaccine Information Statement; (3) images of children who have diseases prevented by the MMR vaccine; (4) a dramatic narrative about an infant who almost died of measles from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fact sheet; or to a control group.”

To put it plainly, they reached out to nearly two thousand parents with children 17 or younger and then presented them with one of four things:

• Information about the lack of evidence linking the MMR vaccine and autism
• Information about the dangers of the diseases prevented by the MMR vaccine
• Images of children with diseases prevented by the MMR vaccine
• A narrative about an infant who almost died of measles

None of these interventions moved the needle. But you’ll notice that they all have something in common — they are all one-way data sent via the internet.

Think about this for a second. I’m serious — read this paragraph, sit back, and think of an answer. How many times has an ad or article (or fantastic youtube video) changed YOUR opinion? I don’t mean has it modified your opinion, or helped solidify an opinion that you were still deciding on. I mean how many times has it changed a strongly held opinion? You believed one thing. You interacted with something on the internet (ONE THING — not a continuous interaction like a forum). You came to believe the opposite thing. How many times?

Odds are good the answer is zero. The study is correct — none of those interventions would have worked. They could have tried it with a hundred different interventions, trying every possible angle and it wouldn’t have mattered because internet communication is like that — one way information dumps. Even when people are “interacting” they’re often speaking at cross-purposes — dunking on each other not with the intent to change minds, but to raise cheers from those that agree with them.

But what works in real life?

Changing people in the physical world

The gold standard for helping people change (more on that wording in a moment) is a technique called “Motivational Interviewing.”

Motivational Interviewing is not simple, not easy, not short. It’s not “one dumb trick your doctor doesn’t want you to know about.” Motivational Interviewing is a process that takes time.

(everything in this section is taken from the book Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change,” which I highly recommend, although I’m sending you to the fourth edition, which I didn’t know was out, and all my quotes come from the third edition, which is the one I own)

At its most basic MI involves these four processes:

• Engaging — both parties establish a helpful connection and a working relationship
• Focusing — develop and maintain a specific direction in the conversation about change
• Evoking — Eliciting the clients own motivation for change
• Planning — once someone reaches a threshold of readiness to change, you begin discussing how to do so

Motivational Interviewing can be used to help someone who already wants to change (in fact, that’s the primary purpose as that wording — helping people change — implies). It can also help you find common ground with someone who needs change but may be less receptive — an example they site is a doctor who sees a patient for a respiratory illness. They know the patient smokes and that’s ultimately the root of their illness, but if they just tell them “You’ve got to quit smoking” they get nowhere. MI helps the doctor know how to approach the person that, in all honesty, already knows they need to make a change.

What about someone who doesn’t realize they need to change, or doesn’t want to? As Harrison Bomberguy himself asked, “How do you change their mind?”

Motivational Interviewing isn’t for that, but techniques used in MI have proven helpful in the most successful attempts to get over vaccine hesitancy. One study found that vaccine hesitancy reduced 40-97% after medical professionals engaged with vaccine hesitant parents in an MI-style dialog. These dialogs typically go something like this (this is an extremely cut down example, but you’ll get the idea and if you read the linked study you can see the process in depth):

• Get to know the parent — actually show interest in them and hearing their story
• Talk to them about their motivations. Why are they hesitant to give their children vaccines?
• Those motivations typically involve things like love and a protective feeling for their child.
• Acknowledge the validity of those feelings and discuss them
• I’m not going to continue here because I don’t want you to get the wrong idea and, after reading this blog post, run off and try and convince someone to vaccinate their kids. If you really want to be good at this, get the book and read it and also talk to some professionals for advice!

MI works because the side that is pushing for change doesn’t start by pushing for change — they start by listening, connecting, and accepting. And I don’t mean they do that for show — they genuinely care about the people they’re talking to, and treat their fears and feelings with as much respect as if they were their own.

Is the internet a good tool for empathizing?

No! I don’t feel like I need to explain this. You know it. I know it. Moving on.

So were we doomed from the start?

Helping change minds requires conversation. It requires empathy — both things that the internet is not good at because it doesn’t foster one on one, face-to-face, non-performative dialog. It fosters, well, exactly the opposite of that in every respect.

H. Bomberguy’s fantastic video was doomed from the start, not because he isn’t a good researcher, or writer, or performer, or editor, or whatever. It was doomed because the medium he used to transmit it is ill-suited to do exactly the thing he said he was trying to do — change minds.

It’s probably not changing a ton of minds, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful. Tt’s still entertaining, and still enjoyable for people to watch who, you know, already agree with him. And it could still have an effect on those teetering between opinions — which could still be very valuable.

So you can’t change minds ON the internet. You can cheer each other on. You can help the undecided come to a conclusion. And you can use the internet to organize real, in person opportunities to talk to people and maybe those conversations could change minds. I just don’t want you to think that a post on facebook or twitter (or a random blog) is going to change minds. It won’t.