Eleanor Gordon Smith
speaker
300 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 24 May
Eleanor Gordon Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
For me, the interest in how people change their minds is really quite a personal one. And it started, I guess, about three years ago now when I started working on this catcalling social experiment. And basically, the idea was that I would go out. I'm a radio reporter in a previous life. And the idea was that I would go out and take a recorder and a microphone and a certain amount of
familiar skills as an interviewer and I would go out and I would try to interview men who cackled me and more specifically I would try to change their minds.
I would wait for them to yell something kind of vulgar or sexual or crass or you know just the stupid things that men yell when they're hanging out of the windows of cars or they've had a couple drinks and I'd go over and I'd say like come back, tell me what you just said, tell me what you were hoping for when you said it and most importantly tell me what I would need to say in order to get you to change your mind about that.
And this was an idea for the radio program This American Life. We thought it would be a kind of fairly simple mission to try to get some good tape of interactions with these men, a bit of a disagreement. And it turned out to be far more complicated than I thought it would be.
I have a bit of a background in high school debate and critical thinking and argument construction and those sorts of formal tasks where you spend a lot of time doing rigorous argument construction. So I went in honestly pretty cocky. I felt like this would be...
fairly straightforward for someone with my kind of training to be able to pull off it sounds like the hubris on that as I say it now makes me embarrassed and in fact what happened was I spent close to six weeks walking around talking to cat callers and just having no success whatsoever just being unable to get them to understand that they were doing something that most women don't enjoy.
And it really started out for me, this journey into thinking like, when people do change their minds, what is it that manages to get through to them? Because everything I thought could get through to these men turned out not to.
They said this really weird kind of mash of things. So I actually wound up getting quite different answers to this from different guys. Some of them said that they were looking for a relationship, like they genuinely wanted to meet their girlfriend by yelling something at her in the street. Others of them were a little more like playful about it.
They would say things like, oh, it's just, you know, like I'm doing it for my mates or I'm doing it to get a reaction or it's just like me being silly. Others of them said it was...
While they granted, you know, not something that was likely to get them a girlfriend, at least it was attention and there was some sort of camaraderie that they could get going between them and a woman that maybe then from there they could say something a little more likely to instigate a relationship. So I got this weird, inconsistent mash of motivations from them.
But one thing they all had in common, which is when I said to them, do you think that women like this? Like, is part of your motivation the sense that women, too, are enjoying what you're doing? To a man, they all said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm totally confident that women are enjoying this, and I wouldn't dream of doing it if they didn't.
It's so that she can have fun and enjoy the night, which made it all the more peculiar that when I said, hey, buddy, I don't think that they are enjoying it, that they weren't receptive to that.
You know, I mean, if you have a stated motivation, which is to give a certain kind of person a good time, and then you find out they're not having a good time, well, by your lads, you should care about that. But they didn't.
Yeah, I mean, I was baffled by it as well. And so that's kind of the next question that I pursued was to say, like, well, what evidence do you have for why you think women enjoy this? And it was really striking to me that the thing they all said was this kind of conclusive proof was the fact that the women that they did this to smiled and laughed.
And that's striking and it really resonated with me because I know that I smile and laugh when men do this to me. And I kind of, I don't like that about myself. It makes me feel quite embarrassed and like I'm capitulating to something that I shouldn't be capitulating to.
But it's true that one reaction that women can have to feeling frightened or put on the spot is that in order to kind of de-escalate the situation, you do laugh and you smile and you just do what's necessary to kind of get out of there in a relatively frictionless way. So I would try to explain this to these guys. You know, I would say like, Yeah, you're right.
You are seeing some smiles and some laughs. But let me authoritatively tell you, as someone who also does these smiles and laughs, that they're in fact precisely evidence of discomfort rather than evidence of the fact that she's really having fun. And they just didn't.
believe me, you know, I would say this over and over to different men and they would all come back with some variation on the theme that I was particularly sensitive and that I couldn't speak for all women, which was funny because it implied that they could.
It didn't work. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I still, so since then, I embarked on this project, which the book is the kind of final combination of, which was I went out and I spoke to people who really did change their minds. I went to try to find stories where persuasion works and where we are able to get people back to the truth and to better sets of beliefs, I guess.
And I still have a lot of faith in the idea that we can reach each other with rational debate or with something like what I was trying to do in those conversations with catcallers. I just also think that there are a large number of missing ingredients that we can do ourselves a certain disservice by saying, forgetting to include when we set out on these kinds of persuasive missions.
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