Think Again.

What should we think about those who change their minds?

We all have narratives we’re suckers for. Me, I’m a sucker for stories about people who change their minds.

I find these stories fascinating in part because they’re rare. Most of us land on our core beliefs early in life and stay there. Hopefully, we add layers of nuance over time. Sometimes, we become more doctrinaire. But mostly it’s a matter of small adjustments. We tilt toward rigidity in some domains and flexibility in others, migrate a little to the left or to the right, shade slightly toward cynicism or idealism. We change, but not drastically. That’s not surprising. What we believe feels indistinguishable from who we are.

Yet so much of what we believe is based on factors outside our volition: where we live, who we know, the kind of education we received. I often wonder what would have happened had I been raised by a fundamentalist family in a conservative region of the country. I’d like to think that I would still believe the things I do now, but I have no evidence to support that idea. Like most people, I share the same basic values and worldview as my parents, the people I went to school with, and the majority of people in the region where I live. Would that remain true if I’d been raised differently? I value my own intellectual rigor and my willingness to investigate the origins of my thinking, yet neither one has led me to abandon my most dearly held beliefs. Sure, I’ve changed my mind about plenty of small-scale stuff—which policies are effective, which approaches are just, and so on. But the core remains the same.

It’s for this reason, perhaps, that I find mind-changing narratives so fascinating. I love reading about the way Darwin’s explorations led him away from his belief in a creationist God and the anguish this caused him ("It is as if one were confessing to a murder," he told a colleague). I love the many narratives about white nationalists who abandoned those views, particularly Rising Out of Hatred, a riveting account of how Derek Black, the son of a prominent white nationalist, came to repudiate the views of his father (and of his godfather, Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke). I was captivated by the This American Life episode about the preacher who stopped believing in hell. I want to understand how it happens. How do people release their hold on their previous beliefs, particularly when doing so means severing important relationships with friends and family?