How to Change Minds? A Study Makes the Case for Talking It Out.

Colleagues got stuck on a Zoom call pondering a new strategy for an important project. Roommates at the kitchen table arguing about how to split utility bills fairly. Neighbors discuss paying for road repairs at a town meeting.

We’ve all been there before – in a group, trying our best to get everyone on the same page. It is arguably one of the most important and common endeavors in human societies. But reaching an agreement can be excruciating.

“A lot of our lives seem to be in that kind of Rashomon situation — people see things in different ways and have different accounts of what’s happening,” said Beau Sievers, a social neuroscientist at Dartmouth College.

A few years ago dr. Sievers developed a study to better understand how exactly a group of people come to consensus and how their individual brains change after such discussions. The findings, recently published online but not yet peer-reviewed, showed that robust conversation that leads to consensus synchronizes speakers’ brains — not just when they’re thinking about the topic being explicitly discussed, but about associated situations that were not.

The study also uncovered at least one factor that complicates agreement: a group member whose strident opinions drown out everyone else.

“Conversation is our best tool for aligning thoughts,” said Thalia Wheatley, a social neuroscientist at Dartmouth College who is Dr. Sievers advises. “We don’t think in a vacuum, but with other people.”

dr Sievers designed the experiment around watching movies because he wanted to create a realistic situation in which participants could show rapid and meaningful changes in their minds. But he said it was surprisingly difficult to find films with scenes that could be viewed in different ways. “Movie directors are very good at narrowing down the possible interpretations,” he said.

dr Arguing that super hits didn’t typically offer much ambiguity, Sievers focused on films that critics loved but didn’t reach blockbuster audiences, including The Master, Sexy Beast, and Birth, a 2004 drama starring a mysterious boy Boy shows up at a woman’s engagement party.

None of the study volunteers had seen any of the films before. Lying in a brain scanner, they silently watched scenes from the various films, including one from Birth, in which the boy collapses in a hallway after a tense conversation with the smartly dressed woman and her fiancé.

After watching the clips, the volunteers answered poll questions about what they thought happened in each scene. Then, in groups of three to six people, you sat around a table and discussed their interpretations with the aim of arriving at a consensus statement.

All of the participants were students in the same Master of Business Administration program, and many of them knew each other to varying degrees, leading to lively conversations that reflected real-world social dynamics, the researchers said.

After their discussions, the students went back into the brain scanners and watched the clips again, as well as new scenes featuring some of the same characters. For example, the additional “Birth” scene showed the woman putting the little boy to bed crying.

The study found that group members’ brain activity — including in areas related to vision, hearing, attention, language and memory — was more aligned after their conversation. Fascinatingly, their brains were in sync as they watched both the discussed and the new scenes.

Groups of volunteers developed different interpretations of the same film clip. For example, some groups thought the woman was the boy’s mother and had abandoned him, while others thought they were unrelated. Though I’ve seen the same clips Brain patterns from one group to another were markedly different, but within each group activity was far more synchronized.

The results have been submitted for publication in a scientific journal and are currently being reviewed.

“This is a bold and innovative study,” said Yuan Chang Leong, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Chicago who was not involved in the work.

The results agree with this Previous research shows that people who share beliefs tend to share brain responses. For example, a 2017 study presented volunteers with one of two opposing interpretations of “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes,” a short story by JD Salinger. The participants who received the same interpretation had more aligned brain activity when they heard the story on the brain scanner.

And in 2020, the team led by Dr. Leong that when viewing news footage, conservatives’ brain activity looked more like that of other conservatives than liberals, and vice versa.

The new study “suggests that the degree of similarity in brain responses depends not only on people’s innate dispositions, but also on the commonality created through conversation,” said Dr. Leong.

The experiment also underscored a dynamic familiar to anyone who has been bowled over in a work meeting: an individual’s behavior can drastically influence a group decision. Some of the volunteers tried to persuade their groupmates to make a cinematic interpretation by blustering, barking orders and persuading their classmates. But others—particularly those who were central players in the students’ real-world social networks—acted as intermediaries, reading the space and trying to find common ground.

The groups with blowhards were less neuronally aligned than those with mediators, the study found. Perhaps more surprisingly, the mediators brought about consensus not by forcing their own interpretations, but by encouraging others to come on stage and then adapting their own beliefs—and brain patterns—to the group.

“So being willing to change your own mind seems to be key to getting everyone on the same page,” said Dr. Wheatley.

Because the volunteers were eager to work together, the researchers said the study’s findings were most relevant to situations, such as workplaces or jury rooms, where people are working towards a common goal.

But what about more adversarial scenarios where people have a vested interest in a particular position? The study’s findings may not apply to a person negotiating a pay rise or to politicians arguing about the integrity of our elections. And in some situations, such as creative brainstorming, groupthink may not be an ideal outcome.

“The topic of conversation in this study was probably quite ‘safe’ since no personally or societally relevant beliefs were at stake,” said Suzanne Dikker, a cognitive neuroscientist and linguist at New York University who was not involved in the study.

Future studies could focus on brain activity during consensus-building conversations, she said. This would require a relatively new technique known as hyperscanning, which can measure the brains of multiple people simultaneously. dr Dikker’s work in this area has shown that personality traits and conversational dynamics such as taking turns can affect brain-to-brain synchrony.

dr Wheatley agreed. The neuroscientist said she has long been frustrated with her field’s focus on the isolated brain.

“Our brain has evolved into a social system: we need frequent interaction and conversation to stay sane,” she said. “Yet neuroscience is still tinkering with mapping the single brain, as if doing so would lead to a deep understanding of the human mind. That must and will change.”