Eleanor Gordon Smith

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.