Page 62 - The Power to Change Anything

Change the Way You Change Minds 51

all the while constructing counterarguments. Worse still, they
don’t merely believe you’re wrong; they need you to be wrong
in order to protect the status quo. And since the final judge
exists in their own head, you lose every time.
The great persuader is personal experience. With persistent
problems, it’s best to give verbal persuasion a rest and try to help
people experience the world as you experience it. Personal
experience is the mother of all cognitive map changers. For
instance, even after watching others touch the snake, Bandura’s
phobics didn’t completely change their views. After all, the
stranger messing with the snake could easily have been a pro-
fessional snake handler. Only after the subjects had handled
the boa themselves to no ill effect did they change their minds.
Let’s take a moment to consider the most profound and
obvious implications of what we’ve just learned. When trying
to encourage others to change their long-established views, we
should fight our inclination to persuade them through the
clever use of verbal gymnastic and debate tricks. Instead, we
should opt for a field trip—or several of them. Nothing changes
a mind like the cold, hard world hitting it with actual real-life
data.
For example, a large U.S. manufacturing firm the authors
once worked with was struggling to keep up with its Japanese
competitors. The competitors produced more finished product
per employee because their employees often worked faster and
always worked more consistently. As a result, during an eight-
hour shift, the Japanese workers completed around 40 percent
more finished product than the American workers.
When the big bosses gathered the American employees in
a large tent and told them that they had to work harder and
faster if they wanted to keep their jobs, the speech almost
caused a riot. Not only didn’t employees believe the argument,
but they turned on the bosses. “We’re on to your tricks! You
want to work us to death so you can earn your big fat bonuses!”
was the common complaint.