After I finish a lecture there is usually a line, and most of the people standing in it want a book signed. But someone always waits until the line is gone. They stand off to the side while the room empties out, and then they ask me the question I have now been asked in something like a dozen countries.

It is never “why do people believe this stuff.”

It is almost always “my brother.” Or “my mother.” Or “my closest friend since we were nine.” And then, more quietly: what do I do.

They are not asking for an explanation. They want instructions for what they could do next with people that they love.

What I say about this in Misbelief?

Misbelief is not stupidity. That is the first thing to say and the hardest thing for people to accept. Stupidity is a very comfortable explanation that allows us to ignore the person and the problem. It is also very incorrect. What I found instead was a funnel that takes people and changes them over time. It starts with stress that pushes people to look for anything that would explain to them what is going on. It is not any kind of stress that pushes us to find an answer, it is, especially the unpredictable kind of stress. The kind of stress that makes us wonder about what is really going on. After stress, our cognitive gets to work and after that personality joins in. Finally, the social forces of acceptance and belonging, echoing beliefs and becoming more extreme, cement the misbelief, and it makes leaving the group of misbelievers very expensive

I did not choose this subject. It chose me in 2020, when I started appearing in other people’s videos as an Illuminati henchman, complete with a speech I never gave.

The chapter I could not write

When I started working on Misbelief, I assumed I knew how the book would end. There would be a final chapter, and that chapter would tell you how to get your brother back.

I planned for it. I read for it. I spent two years interviewing for it.

I did not find it.

The trouble is that once people enter the funnel the forces to maintain them there are just too powerful. It also became clear that the standard responses of simply giving people more information or giving them some facts is not going to do much to change anyone’s opinion.

So, instead of one solutions chapter, the book grew small boxes scattered through it,wherever the research actually supported doing something. I called them “Hopefully Helpful.”

That name is not modesty. It is an accurate description of my confidence. Some of them will help some people some of the time, and I cannot tell you in advance which ones. There are 25, spread across chapters 3 through 11.

One is called “How to Have a Nondebate,” which is about removing the scoreboard from a conversation so that neither of you is playing to win. Another is “The Three Razors,” which hands you Occam’s razor, Hitchens’ razor, and a gentler version of Hanlon’s, offered as hygiene for your own thinking rather than as weapons for somebody else’s.

All 25, in one place

Enough people wrote asking me for specific pieces of advice that I finally pulled all 25 out of the book and put them into a single document. It is here for you to read.

https://misbeliefbook.com/pdfs/Hopefully-Helpful-Boxes.pdf

I also realized that 25 pieces of advice might be too much to go through. Maybe it is Thursday. You are about to have a conversation on Sunday. You are already upset, and you are not going to read a booklet and work out which four paragraphs apply to you.

So the boxes became a tool. It asks up to three questions about the conversation you are actually about to have, and then hands you three of the 25. Not all of them. Three.

https://decisionaids.danariely.com/conversations/

I did not stop there and I created a second tool. This is not a tool to plan a conversation, it is a tool that was created to try and fix something about a conversation that maybe did not go the way you planned for it to go. It is a post-mortem you run the same evening, while it is still fresh. Thirteen questions, about three minutes.

The design of this tool, and what I think makes it worth while is that it asks what you did, not what you meant. From the inside, those two feel like the same thing. They are not, and the distance between them is where most of these conversations quietly go wrong.

https://decisionaids.danariely.com/went-badly/

What I had to give up

Writing this book cost me a belief of my own. It was the belief that there is an answer that could make a person take a U-turn and come back. There isn’t such simple answer. What is left is smaller, and it is about aiming for small steps over time.

And here again are all the links. Hopefully, you will make good use of them.

The 25 boxes, free: https://misbeliefbook.com/pdfs/Hopefully-Helpful-Boxes.pdf

Before the conversation: https://decisionaids.danariely.com/conversations/

After the conversation: https://decisionaids.danariely.com/went-badly/