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Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other Peoples Minds (Leadership for the Common Good) Kindle Edition

by Howard Gardner (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.2 171 ratings

Part of: Leadership for the Common Good (7 books)

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Think about the last time you tried to change someone’s mind about something important: a voter’s political beliefs; a customer’s favorite brand; a spouse’s decorating taste. Chances are you weren’t successful in shifting that person’s beliefs in any way. In his book, Changing Minds, Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner explains what happens during the course of changing a mind and offers ways to influence that process.

Remember that we don’t change our minds overnight, it happens in gradual stages that can be powerfully influenced along the way. This book provides insights that can broaden our horizons and shape our lives.

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Leadership for the Common Good
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262 pages
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English
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Harvard Business Review Press
Publication date

September 1, 2006
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Gardner, a psychologist and professor at Harvard, examines the factors involved in changing minds on significant issues, in politics, science, business and art. He identifies seven key elements, including reason, research and real world events, that are part of the decision-making process. Certain facets are more heavily weighted in some fields than others: "leaders of large groups often rely on the appreciable resources at their disposal but are buoyed or undercut by real world events," says Gardner (Frames of Mind), who believes this explains why a politician or a CEO will disregard advice in the face of larger issues and popular perceptions. To prove his theories, Gardner analyzes the behavior of several individuals including President Bush, Britain's Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, and South Africa's Nelson Mandela. Gardner doesn't limit his examination to politicians because he also believes that artists, writers, musicians and teachers can change people's minds. While the discussions and real-life examples are intriguing and do clarify Gardner's theories, the book doesn't fully deliver on its promise. Although Gardner does offer suggestions on how someone can influence others, he doesn't include a detailed prescriptive strategy for decision makers in the business world. Readers must draw out insights on their own, which, given the complexity of the material, may be difficult.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"This quick, enjoyable read outlines Gardner's research and thinking on how best to convince others (or yourself)." -- CIO Magazine, April 1, 2004

From the Inside Flap

What Does It Take to Change a Mind?

Think about the last time you tried to change someone s mind about something important: a voter s political beliefs; a customer s favorite brand; a spouse s decorating taste; a teenager s attitude toward schoolwork. Chances are you weren t successful in shifting that person s beliefs in a significant way. For an endeavor so commonly mentioned and frequently attempted, why is the phenomenon of changing minds so mysterious? How do people become set on a certain way of thinking? And what, exactly, does it take to change that perspective?

In this groundbreaking book, world-renowned Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner offers surprising insights on this fascinating puzzle insights that could change the way we interact with others at work, at home, and in every aspect of our lives. Gardner, whose work over the last thirty years has revolutionized our thinking about intelligence, creativity, and leadership, now suggests that traditional thinking about mind change as a sudden "epiphany" is entirely wrong. Instead, Gardner shows, we change our minds gradually, in identifiable ways that can be actively and powerfully influenced.

Drawing on decades of cognitive research, Gardner identifies seven levers that aid or thwart the process of mind change, including reason, research, real-world events, and resistances. Changing Minds provides an original framework illustrated with famous and ordinary examples of "change agents" in politics, business, science, the arts, and everyday life that shows how individuals can align these levers to bring about significant changes in perspective and behavior. From Margaret Thatcher s reorientation of Great Britain to Sir John Browne s transformation of BP to Charles Darwin s evolutionary revolution to interactions between spouses or friends to decisions to change one s own mind, Gardner uncovers surprising similarities and instructive differences among the factors that affect mind change in a variety of settings.

Demystifying a phenomenon that permeates human behavior, Changing Minds provides insights that can broaden our horizons and improve our lives.

From the Back Cover

“One of the leading psychologists of our times has taken on the single deepest question in the field: How and when do we change our minds? In this groundbreaking and courageous book Howard Gardner breaks through to the first serious answers.” –Martin Seligman, Author of Authentic Happiness and Learned Optimist

Think about the last time you tried to change someone’s mind about something important: a voter’s political beliefs; a customer’s favorite brand; a spouse’s decorating taste. Chances are you weren’t successful in shifting that person’s beliefs in any way. In his book, Changing Minds, Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner explains what happens during the course of changing a mind – and offers ways to influence that process. Remember that we don’t change our minds overnight, it happens in gradual stages that can be powerfully influenced along the way.

This book provides insights that can broaden our horizons and shape our lives.

About the Author

Howard Gardner is the Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00THMKOPS
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harvard Business Review Press; First Trade Paper edition (September 1, 2006)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 1, 2006
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 694 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 262 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #822,308 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #133 in Business Conflict Resolution & Mediation (Kindle Store)
- #736 in Business Negotiating (Books)
- #2,722 in Business Leadership

Customer Reviews:
4.2 171 ratings

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Howard Gardner

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Howard Gardner is the Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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171 global ratings

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Good Model for Changing Minds

Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2004

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Howard Gardner is an education thought-leader who has changed minds at many levels - among his students, with educators and society at large. In "Changing Minds", Howard Gardner re-examines concepts presented in his earlier works - i.e. multiple intelligences, the "disciplined" mind, the importance of integrating ethics with instruction/leadership, etc. He then presents seven "levers" for changing minds and discusses their application at various levels of mind change (from societal to intimate relationships). As usual, Gardner has produced an important, well organized book supported with excellent real-world examples. Unfortunately, the book stops short of providing specific tools and techniques for applying his model for changing minds. Perhaps in a sequel, Gardner will share more specific tools and techniques that may be used to "map the mental terrain", compile and present convincing research, build resonance and breakdown resistance. (Those looking for more detail may want to dig deeper into the tools/techniques used in organizational development, team-building, leadership development and self-awareness.) Nevertheless, a book worth reading for the model presented and reminder that one must keep both the mind and ears open to effectively change others.

114 people found this helpful

Laurence J. Stybel

excellent perspective

Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2022

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Howard Gardner is a psychologist and has studied mind changing at the individual group and nation level. He has a framework that is both practical and logical.

Heavy on opinion, light on facts

Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2024

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I was very interested in learning more about changing minds, and how they change. Reading a book on the topic by a Harvard Professor, I expected robust research and informed theories. What I got instead was one long, EXTREMELY self-interested diatribe about the things the author thought.
He couldnt help but insert four or five unnecessarily complex words into nearly every sentence, and found myriad ways to insert himself into topics and stories which did not need him in them.
He had a rather strange obsession with words starting with "re" and chose to wrench the phrase "say the same thing in different ways" into the hilariously unnatural phrase "representational redescription."
I gave 3 stars because I found a few useful new nuggets and perspectives, but far too often the author would make a claim, tell a story, and without explaining or connecting the dots, simply conclude the chapter.
One of the harder books to get through, and nowhere near as enjoyable, or as well-supported by research as David McRaney's book "How Minds Change." Buy that instead.

Arthur R. Silen

Changing minds is difficult, but it works only when a mind is open to change

Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2019

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I found Howard Gardner's "Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds" a useful and informative book that would be immensely useful in addressing people whose minds are open to changing their views or opinions on particular subjects. Written by a Harvard University Professor of Education, it implicitly assumes goodwill on the part of the advocate and audience. I would find Professor Gardner's approach immensely useful in crafting arguments in a variety of situations, where the targeted audience might be persuaded based upon the type of proof that is offered, and the quality of the evidence presented to effectuate a change of mind. It assumes an honest discourse, focusing on a diversity of opinions, honestly held. Professor Gardner assumes that facts matter, and that self-respecting people holding divergent opinions may be willing to change their stance when presented with additional facts that challenge their existing worldview.

Regrettably, that is not the situation we face today. Were Professor Gardner writing his book today, or updating it from its 2006 original publication date, he undoubtedly would be taking a more nuanced view of the value of open debate, based upon agreed-upon facts. Professor Gardner wrote his book in the era before the predominance of social media; before the days of 'alternative facts', and foreign-sponsored larding of our social media with state-sponsored foreign intelligence postings that emphasize false narratives, which in turn were set loose to spread like wildfire among people whose sources of information tended to be hyper-partisan propaganda mills.

The closest that Professor Gardner comes to addressing this now world-wide battle over the value of truth and verifiable facts is his discussion of the case of Whittaker Chambers. Mr. Chambers, born in 1901, became enamored with communism during the 1920s, and infatuation that lasted until 1937. In 1952, Chambers wrote an expose that chronicled his changing views of communism as practiced by Stalin, Chambers' early disillusionment, beginning with the Moscow Show Trials; his grudging acknowledgment of Soviet tyranny and duplicity; and his soul-wrenching decision to expose that tyranny for what it was, and to not sit idly by as the Soviet Union expanded its territorial control and political domination in the years between the end of World War II and 1950. Chambers was also mindful of the fact that he would be giving up a lucrative and influential career with one of the major news media publications of that era, Time Magazine, itself a bastion of conservative political thinking during those years. But he did so, and his memoir, Witness, was a bestseller.

In the course of Chambers writing this autobiographical confessional, he identified certain people will be new to be engaged in pro-Soviet espionage. Professor Gardner notes that several times during the years leading up to the publication of his book, Chambers had notified federal law enforcement authorities of Russian espionage activities within the United States, but that those disclosures had not been taken seriously.

All that changed in 1948 when Chambers publicly accused Alger Hiss, a highly regarded, well-connected State Department official of spying for the Soviets. It did not help that Alger Hiss with the product of a wealthy, influential family, and that Hiss had played an especially prominent role in the development of the postwar international settlement, with the creation of the United Nations and associated international organizations that were tasked with planning and programming how the postwar world would unfold.

Professor Gardner does not go into detail; and indeed, he might not have felt the need to discuss the class differences between Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, wealth, prestige, influence, and public service, versus someone who is widely seen as having been disreputable, and who had long espoused political views that the then-arbiters of public opinion had long found to be abhorrent. Chambers provided sufficient evidence to provoke the United States Government to indict Hiss; and although the Government could not prove Hiss' involvement in actual espionage, he was convicted of lying under oath. That perjury conviction ended Hiss' career as a public personality as well as any further career opportunity that he might have had, either in government or in a private, non-governmental advisory capacity.

The point of the story, from Professor Gardner's view, was that Left-leaning intellectuals of the day were scandalized by the Chamber's accusations; and for years they were loath to admit that any portion of his story could be true. Parenthetically, that same intellectual disdain for the espionage charges that were laid against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and the Atomic Spy Ring that they were associated with, was starkly apparent, especially where those espionage allegations led to their trial, conviction, and eventual death sentences. All of that occurred simultaneously with the sudden public prominence of a United States Senator, Joseph McCarthy, from Wisconsin, whose modus operandi centered on making a barrage of sensational, inconsistent, and easily disprovable claims of communist infiltration the State Department, and latterly, the United States Army.

Joseph McCarthy's reign of terror as the Chairman of a United States Senate subcommittee investigating communist subversion within the United States Government's Executive Branch, as well as outside influences on American governmental policy, did not end with the end of the Truman Administration and the accession of the new Republican Administration under President Dwight D Eisenhower. A mere eight years earlier, Dwight Eisenhower had been the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe who oversaw the D-Day invasion and the subsequent conquest of Germany. With the House of Representatives than under Republican control, a series of investigations occurred targeting communism in the Arts, and in the motion picture industry. All of this occurred against the backdrop of another shooting war in which the United States was reluctantly involved, this time in Korea, against a coalition of Communist-led governments, this time in mainland China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union. The war dragged on until 1953, when in July of that year, a truce and ceasefire were negotiated. Ultimately, as so often happens with political persecutions, the investigators' efforts foundered on their own excesses, and the procedural unfairness to which their victims had been subjected. Senator McCarthy's downfall came soon after the senator's subcommittee began an investigation into a United States Army's training facility on trumped up allegations of supposed communist influence. This time, senior army officers stood their ground, and in the end humiliated the senator to the extent that within the next two years the Senate itself formally censured the Wisconsin senator.

None of the foregoing events salvaged the reputations of those Left-wing intellectuals who had so noisily endorsed the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin. Public support for Left-wing causes was already in precipitous decline for reasons entirely apart what was going on in the United States at that time. Specifically, Stalin's reputation worldwide was demolished by a secret speech that then Communist Party Chairman Nikita Khrushchev gave at the Twentieth Party Congress in February, 1956, in which he accused Stalin of monstrous crimes against Communist Party members and Soviet citizens. In June 1957, riots broke out in Poznan, Poland, against the Soviet-installed Polish puppet government; four months later, Hungarians in Budapest rose up against their Soviet-installed puppet regime. Except for isolated pockets of resistance, chiefly in France, popular and intellectual sentiment turned decidedly against Soviet communism, at which point American and European intellectuals were struggling, not to justify their former political and moral allegiances to Russian-style socialism; rather instead, they fought to be seen at the forefront of intellectual efforts to promote open societies and open economies in America, Europe, and elsewhere.

It took a while, but at least within the United States, Left-leaning intellectuals, brought up from childhood to admire socialism as put into practice by the Soviet Union, came to realize that the ideals to which they had devoted their intellectual lives, and for which many had sacrificed much, were nowhere in evidence, and to the Soviet Union was as bad or worse than European fascism. Neither did it help that those making the accusations against the Soviet Union and Stalin's overseas apologists and collaborators were themselves typically political conservatives whose political philosophies strongly opposed the egalitarian ethos of New Deal under the former Roosevelt and Truman administrations. What a starkly evident was that suddenly, those Left-wing intellectuals, many of them in the Arts, writers, and filmmakers, not only lost the political argument, but so that their ideals and their worldview completely shattered.

We see the same phenomenon occurring today, with the impending impeachment of President Donald Trump. The immediate, and visceral response, of the president's supporters is complete and utter denial. How Professor Gardner would approach that problem of dealing with a blinkered, bunker mentality, that is seemingly impermeable to reason or argument, is something that he might consider worthy of exploring, possibly in an updated version of his book. I would urge him to do so, and as soon as possible.

12 people found this helpful

the book conveyed the topic to a laymen in simple and easy to understand terms

Reviewed in the United States on January 4, 2017

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This was an incredible book. The seven intelligences that Howard describes are well thought out and researched. Not having a formal Psychology background, the book conveyed the topic to a laymen in simple and easy to understand terms. I learned a lot and would consider reading more books by this author.

2 people found this helpful

Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2021

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Awesome approach to the historical conquests of change.

Amazon Customer

Don't waste your money or time

Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2007

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I see other comments that are similar to my opinion. I thought this book was a total waste of time. Self-indulgent, rambling ideas that seemed there only to demonstrate how much the author believes he is brilliant. I can't believe he has so many books and university endorsements. It is rare for me to dislike a book, but this one made me angry. I read the entire thing, so I gave it a fair chance. As a busy consultant, I don't have time to lose on things like this.

10 people found this helpful

... for a course it turned out to be an easy read! Great examples and graphics making it easier ...

Reviewed in the United States on August 23, 2015

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Brought the book for a course it turned out to be an easy read! Great examples and graphics making it easier to follow. I later learned the book is also available on CD's.

Top reviews from other countries

Rodney Denno

Changing Minds opened my mind to the pervasiveness of persuasion in our lives

Reviewed in Canada on August 25, 2021

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Wow! I thought I knew a lot about the art and science of persuasion. So glad I read this book. It opened up a universe of mind changing thoughts and ideas to explore, ponder and share.

Sujoy

Are you buying it?

Reviewed in India on November 4, 2019

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Was recommended by E&Y expert but came short to meet my expectation.

Kindle Customer

Brilliant read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 3, 2013

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excellent read and got it in time too for my holiday. Really straighforward and meatilicious. I thought being a book on psychology, it was going to be a hard read but no. Realy loved the split into various areas of application.

m. rankin

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 8, 2014

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AM PLEASED WITH THE BOOK WOULD RECOMENDIT

Pèche

Three Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 27, 2015

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COOL

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