Alan Levinovitz

Yep, that's absolutely right.

The thing I found that is most powerful, this is going to be, it has nothing to do with research at all, which is kind of interesting, is betrayal.

So in these spaces, I've found, so if someone's really into holistic medicine, for example, and they work for a clinic that claims to cure cancer with wheatgrass shots, no amount of research is going to disconfirm that person's beliefs, especially if their job and their identity is bound up in it.

But if someone in that clinic betrays them, if they discover that someone was lying to them, if they discover that someone was cheating on their taxes, even, I mean, something like that,

That, in my experience, is the most effective way to start the chain reaction of changing your mind.

Because at the end of the day, their beliefs are not just about whether they make sense or what the evidence is.

It's about something much bigger.

So that's the first thing I would say.

If, though, you're trying to...

convince someone of something or you're wondering, you know, I mean, it depends at what level of a culture and who the person is.

So individuals, gosh, like what would change their mind?

I mean, for example, a woman I feature in my Wired piece, Georgia Lupe, she'd heard about these techniques for helping people recover from long COVID, but she'd always heard about them from people who seem to have a financial interest or a professional interest in promoting them.

Eventually, a friend of hers reached out.

I want to get this exactly right.

I believe it was a friend of hers, someone she knew on Instagram who she'd known for a long time and had absolutely no connection to these people.

That was really helpful to her.

She was like, oh, wait, okay, so this is a friend of mine.

This isn't just someone trying to promote something.

They have no connection to it.

I trust this person.