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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 out of 5 stars 170
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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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  1. Part of series
    Leadership for the Common Good
  2. Print length
    262 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  5. Publisher
    Harvard Business Review Press
  6. Publication date
    September 1, 2006
  7. File size
    694 KB
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  9. Word Wise
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  10. Enhanced typesetting
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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

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
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 out of 5 stars 170

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Howard Gardner

Howard Gardner

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

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
170 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Brian Petula
5.0 out of 5 stars 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.
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Laurence J. Stybel
5.0 out of 5 stars 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.
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Kevin Currie-Knight
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but not terribly revealing!
Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2004
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For well over 10 years, Howard Gardner has been writing books exploring many aspects of the mind - from how the mind creates, to traits leaders have. Following this path, he has now written a book exploring the phenomenon of mind changing. How do we do it? What plays a factor in it? Why is it so dang hard to convincce people to give up well cherished (wrong) beliefs for new (right) ones?

The problem is that we get only the vaguest of answers to these questions. As I like to say, the best psychology tells us most of the things we already knew (but may not have known we knew). This book follows suit. It might explain which of the seven "factors" (listed by the reviewer below) plays a part in different mind changing situations, but hardly eluminates beyond that.

For instance, in a chapter devoted to how politicians try and change our minds, we hear about Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (both iconoclasts who were successful in the end at mind changing). The explanation to their success in mind changin is that they were able to tell their story, their nation's story, and a vision for the country's future, in different conceptual language than their opponents (and convine us that their own story was better. That answer seems quite right, but I was hoping it would be followed by examples of how they did this - how they told stories different from their opponents, while gradually winning acceptance for them. Gardner hardly gives any.

Much of the book is like this. After he explains the general principles utilized in one situation, he doesn't bolster it with detail and example, but simply moves on to the next situation.

What it all makes for is a somewhat (somewhat!) interesting, but hardly revealing, book.
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Arthur R. Silen
4.0 out of 5 stars 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.
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Andrew
5.0 out of 5 stars 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.
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Tambra
5.0 out of 5 stars Great Read.
Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2021
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Awesome approach to the historical conquests of change.
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Top reviews from other countries

Rodney Denno
5.0 out of 5 stars 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.
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Sujoy
3.0 out of 5 stars 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.
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Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars 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.
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m. rankin
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 8, 2014
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AM PLEASED WITH THE BOOK WOULD RECOMENDIT
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zeki
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 21, 2016
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I liked the book and I want to send you my thanks for good servant.
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