How I’ve Changed My Mind

Here’s an expanded version of a talk I gave to our small group. It’s a meandering chat, I haven’t put much order into it, and it’s a summary of just one of six pages of notes…
People – including Yours Truly – do not change their minds simply because a Compelling New Idea comes floating by. To summarise four years of a Masters’ degree in social psychology: given that the new idea has to make sense, it also has to win in the ‘reward/punishment’ stakes. Punishment? Yes, if the group to which you belong and/or whose approval you need despises or even expels you for espousing the new idea, you’ll think twice about embracing it.
Also, one asks the ‘source credibility’ question: can I trust the purveyor of the new idea. Are they ‘opinion leaders’ in this field?
Then there’s the ‘cognitive dissonance’ issue: can the new idea fit into the schema of ideas already registered in my brain? And the ‘personality/ persuasibility’ question: some of us are suckers for any novelty at all, including new ideas.
Many people belong to groups which not only abhor new ideas, they ensure that their members don’t connect with any (‘monopoly propaganda’). And finally, the incorporation of a new idea is reinforced if the welcomer-of-the-idea has to role-play with it in front of others (which is why cults/sects and many other groups get their devotees to give ‘testimonies’).
OK, so much for psychology. As I’m mainly talking about Christian ideas, there’s the question of authority, and Christians have four broad approaches: the Bible, the Church and its tradition/s, reason (together with contemporary secular disciplines), and experience – past and present, one’s own and others’.
People embrace new ideas in different ways. Will Rogers said there are three kinds of men (ie. males): those who learn by reading; the few who learn by observation; and the rest who have to pee on the electric fence and find out for themselves… Most of my mind-shifts have resulted from reading.
I grew up in the ‘Open [Plymouth] Brethren’, and they would have approved of this quote: ‘[I hope] they would not find me changed from him they knew/ Only more sure of what he thought was true’. I’m now a bit wary of such a maxim. One of my greatest fears is to come across a new idea and reject it, through stubbornness and/or fear. Or, OTOH, how pathetic to go to your grave believing something that is not true, or resisting a good idea which might be inconvenient. However I am a ‘work in progress’. I’m only 70 years young, and have many ideas to reject/modify/embrace before I die. And I have a way to go yet on the road to wholeness/holiness.

Rowland Croucher