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
You know, things like emotional, things like what does this belief mean to you? I think something that I didn't really take into account when I was talking to these cat callers was that I was really asking them to let go of something that was quite foundationally important to the way they saw themselves.
You know, it was really important to them that they were good guys and that they weren't the kind of guys who would do something that was frightening or upsetting to women. And realizing that you've done a bad thing is a very tricky realization. You know, a lot of us are very resistant to revelations that would reveal, you know, that we've been in the wrong.
And I think that I was not sufficiently attentive to the fact that these guys were basically standing in front of a woman in the street who was asking them to give up the idea that they were basically a good person. And that's really hard.
And if I had, you know, if I had the chance to do it again, I might try to be a little more attentive to what this belief in them was doing for the way they saw themselves.
So this is the lesson that I've found after spending so many years interviewing people who have changed their minds, is that the process of changing a mind is two things. One, it's really, really complicated and hard to predict. And what works for one particular person won't work for another. And there's a kind of
tricky sludge that you can get where you try to pick apart what was it that actually did this significant mind change, like what was doing the work. And the same thing, aside from the unpredictability, is just how amazingly personal it is. So I spent weeks at a time interviewing these people about the ways that they had changed their minds.
And quite quickly, I started to feel like what I was doing was really quite an intimate project. I was learning a lot about what they hoped for and who they loved and how they saw themselves and the ways that they saw themselves moving through the world. And a lot of pain went into these moments of mind changing.
And it made me realize that I think too often we talk about changing a mind in a way which suggests that the mind is not tethered to the person. You know, when you hear the story of someone changing their mind, really what you're hearing is a story of someone who changed their life. You're hearing someone who radically altered the way they see themselves and the world.
And that's a very personal thing. So, I mean, I can answer some of your question by saying that over and over again what worked for these people were things that were quite strikingly emotional, things like who you believe and who you trust and who you love and your sense of self.
But I also think it's really important to remember that when we set out trying to change people's minds, you know, both the things I just said, namely, It's astonishingly unpredictable and deeply, profoundly personal.
And if we forget that, then we run the risk of doing what I just did with my catcalls, namely just like spinning our wheels and getting more and more frustrated with the fact that we're not making progress while not in fact changing the strategies that we're using.
Let me illustrate them with some of the stories. So The things that stood out to me in the research were things that were really emotional and really personal. So things like who we believe, as in like the way that we allocate trust in the world, things like how we see ourselves, our own picture of our own identity, the things that we hope for, the things that we wish were true.
These kinds of things went into the ways that people change their minds in really quite surprising ways. One of the ones that stands out to me is the story of Dylan who left what is functionally a cult. It's a very strict religious sect that has very harsh punishments for people who leave or people who dissent in any way or people who speak to people who are outside the sect.
And Dylan had grown up in this sect. He had spent 20-something years only hearing from people who believed what this sect believed. And he ultimately left the sect. He left the sect kind of quite quickly. It was a matter of like three days when he ultimately changed his mind.
And the path to him changing his mind was really striking in the way that it focused on who he believed rather than what he believed. And here's what I mean by that. So Dylan met his wife, his wife now, whose name is Missy. They met when they were both working in a restaurant. And they had this... astonishing chemistry from the moment that they first met.
And Missy knew that she wanted to be with him. She knew that she wanted to marry him. But she also wasn't a member of the sect. And for her, the thought that Dylan was a member of this sect and would continue to be one was a really horrifying thought. So she kind of privately resolved that she was going to try to change his mind.
She spent like close to six years doing this bizarre charade where she would pretend to him that she was a believer, that she was open to the teachings of the sect. And in fact, surreptitiously trying to sow doubt in his mind and to get him to start to question some of the things that he'd taken as orthodoxy since he was a kid.
And ultimately what happened was in fact nothing to do with Missy's own project. What happened was something quite different, which was that one of Dylan's elders came to Dylan and said, you have to choose between your salvation and your wife. Like we have thought about it and we think that your wife is a threat to the congregation and we want her gone.
So you can either stay with her and lose your chance at eternal redemption, or you can stay with us and lose her, but you cannot have both. And Dylan had this moment of thinking, look, anyone who could look at my wife and not see a fundamentally good and loving person who is a wonderful influence on the people around her, must be someone who's capable of making mistakes.
So for him, that moment was the domino that, you know, the first domino to tip and then it made the others cascade on downwards. And from that phone call, it was a matter of like three days before he was out of the sect forever because what had happened for Dylan was nothing to do with an argument or nothing to do with what he believed. It was entirely to do with who he believed.
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