I recently tried to find some cases of when large groups of people changed their minds. I came across a few interesting articles about how that’s happened in different contexts.

• This article, I Don’t Want to Be Right from the New Yorker in 2014 talks about a study about changing minds about vaccinations - and how a pure fact based approach doesn’t work.

• Vox wrote about a scientific study conducted that shows the impact authentic dialogue plays in changing attitudes.

• Planck’s Principle is the view that scientific change does not occur because individual scientists change their mind, but rather that successive generations of scientists have different views. Essentially, you can’t change minds - you just have to wait for people to die. I’m curious if there’s an equivalent theory regarding social progress.

• A great article from HBR called How Social Movements Change Minds talks about the attributes of successful social movements - how they start by attacking perception, grow through building connections, and connect to the mainstream.

One great quote from the article above:

That’s a lesson we’ve seen over and over in the social movements of the last century—although the outside observer may only notice the movement when the dominoes start falling, the people inside the movement worked tirelessly for months, years, or even decades, to change minds.