How Minds Change

Anna, who later ran the second laundry, once wanted a new washing machine. The Don was against it. For twenty years he’d been saying the new machines chewed up the linen, and the whole neighbourhood knew it. Arguing with him was pointless. I’d tried.

Anna didn’t argue. She said, “I believe you. Just explain how exactly it chews. I’ll have to teach the girls afterwards.” The Don began to explain. The drum, the spin speed, the fabric. Three minutes in he fell silent and stared out of the window for a long time. Then he said, “Take one. If it chews up so much as one tablecloth, it comes out of your share.” It didn’t. Two years later we had four of those machines.

Scientists have tested what Anna did. In 2013 Philip Fernbach and his colleagues found Americans with hard-line political views. They were asked to explain, step by step, how a policy they passionately supported or attacked actually worked. As they explained, people noticed they knew less than they’d thought, and their views softened. Those who were simply asked to list their reasons didn’t soften at all.

Notice how Anna asked. “I believe you”: she wasn’t attacking. A man under attack defends himself. A man asked to teach starts to think. And she asked in private, and left the decision to the Don. The same “how” question can be put in front of witnesses, so that a man gets tangled up and gives way out of shame. If someone asks you like that, answer the next day, with no audience.

Let Him Say It Himself

The American psychologist William Miller worked with heavy drinkers. He noticed a simple thing. Start persuading a man, and he argues back and defends the bottle. Let him say for himself why he should change, and he starts to move. A whole method grew out of that.

One of the Don’s drivers took to drink. The Don didn’t lecture him. He only asked, “What would you say to your son if he got behind the wheel like that?” The driver talked for half an hour. The Don said nothing. The man didn’t stop drinking. And one conversation wasn’t enough: six months later he did get behind the wheel drunk and scraped the lorry along the gates. The Don called him in again, asked the same question and again said nothing. After the second time, as far as I know, he never drove drunk again.

Sometimes it isn’t the other man who asks the question, but life. Peppino Impastato grew up in Cinisi, in a Mafia family. He was fifteen when his uncle by marriage, the husband of his father’s sister and the boss of Cinisi, was blown to pieces by a car bomb. Peppino asked another uncle what the man had felt. The answer, Dickie writes, was that it had all happened in the blink of an eye, and it did nothing to comfort the boy. In 1966 Peppino called the Mafia a mountain of dung in the headline of an article, only in cruder words, and he was thrown out of the house.

Nobody talked him round. His world simply couldn’t answer a simple question. So don’t stop up an honest question with a lie. That’s the surest way to keep a belief that should have been changed long ago.

Correcting Is Worth It

You may have been told that correcting people is useless: contradiction only makes them more stubborn. This “backfire effect” made a big noise in 2010. Then Thomas Wood and Ethan Porter repeated the experiments on more than ten thousand people and barely found it. More often than not, a correction nudges a man a little towards the truth. Not much and not at once, but it nudges him.

There’s a way round, too. The Israeli psychologist Boaz Hameiri and his colleagues showed Israelis with hard-line views on the conflict with the Palestinians short films that didn’t argue with them but pushed their own position to the point of absurdity: we need the conflict to stay united and morally upright. Afterwards some of the viewers softened and were readier to accept a compromise. Only the distorting mirror works when the man is laughing with you. If he feels he’s being laughed at, he’ll dig in deeper.

Changing Sides, Not Faith

There’s a kind of change that only looks like change. Dickie cites Tommaso Buscetta, who insisted that he hadn’t left Cosa Nostra, Cosa Nostra had abandoned him. After Capaci other turncoats justified themselves with the same argument: it was the killers who had betrayed the “traditional values”. Dickie has his doubts, since in the Mafia, as he points out, treachery and cruelty had always sat perfectly well with the code of honour.

The man changed sides. But the belief in “honour” stayed: it was the organisation he declared the traitor. In an office, people often leave a boss this way. Not because they’ve understood something about themselves. But because the boss has “betrayed his ideals”. A year later they’ll say the same about the new one. So when a man announces that he’s changed, ask yourself one question: did he change his faith, or only his side?

Taking the Word Away

Father Peppe Diana, a priest from Casal di Principe, handed out leaflets at Christmas that read “For the love of my people I will not keep silent.” The Camorra called itself a “family”. He split the two meanings of the word. The family of the clan, where the law is “absolute loyalty”. And the Christian family, where the law is love. He demanded that men who did not live clean lives should not stand as godfathers in church.

Saviano writes, as a matter of fact, that Father Peppe talked Mario De Falco, the boss’s brother, out of a career in the System. Saviano doesn’t say how this is known. But he does write who made use of it: the boss himself, Nunzio De Falco. He was suspected of ordering the priest’s murder, and he held up this story as his alibi. Saviano puts it plainly: “This achievement of the priest, one of the most important of his career, De Falco used as his alibi.” In 2003 De Falco got life for organising the murder.

The priest took the word away from the clan. And the clan took the priest’s finest victory away from him and wore it.