The Simple Trick to Change Other People’s Minds

“The growth of knowledge depends entirely upon disagreement,” claimed the philosopher Karl Popper. He was writing about the dangers of dogma in science – but his words could equally apply to anyone’s worldview. And if you want a disagreement to end by changing someone’s mind, you have to do it in the right way.

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Research by Jeremy Frimer at the University of Winnipeg and Linda Skitka at the University of Illinois at Chicago has shown that rude behaviour is far more likely to alienate the person you wish to persuade than change their opinion, and it may even disaffect people who were already coming around to your point of view. They describe this as the Montagu Principle, named after the 18th-Century English aristocrat Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who declared that “civility costs nothing and buys everything”.

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