Persuading Einstein and Members of AARP

I just finished Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Issacson. Excellent book! Issacson also wrote another very interesting biography I read a few years ago, Steve Jobs. His book on Einstein was so well written and portrayed Einstein in such a way that I was sad at the end to read about his death because I felt like I was just getting to know him.

We all have notions of Einstein from school, quotes we’ve read, movies we’ve seen and various other sources. Some of what we learned was true and much was fairy tale or at least exaggeration. What fascinated me about Einstein was how much of a rebel he was in his youth and how much he was willing to change as he got older when the facts warranted change.

As we get older, change gets harder. In some sense we’ve honed what works for us and those patterns or habits – which include speech and thought – are no exception. We think what we think and do what we do because we believe it’s the right way or the best way given the situation. Dale Carnegie understood this and that’s why one of his tips from How to Win Friends and Influence People encourages us to “show respect for the other person’s opinion and never say, ‘You’re wrong.’” Never forget, right or wrong, people have reasons for what they do.

Beyond being stereotyped as “set in their ways” is there any proof that older people are more difficult to persuade? Actually there is. A study mentioned in Robert Cialdini’s Influence Science and Practice noted, “in a follow-up study employing subjects from ages 18 to 80, we found that preference for consistency increased with the years and that, once beyond the age of 50, our subjects displayed the strongest inclination of all to remain consistent with their earlier commitments (Brown, Asher, & Cialdini, 2005).”

So, as we age it’s natural to cling tightly to closely held beliefs, attitudes, values, and ways of doing things. As most of you reading this know, it can be darn hard to change someone’s mind, especially as they grow older.

So, what’s this have to do with our friend Albert Einstein? On one hand he seemed to cling stubbornly to his view of the universe and dismissed some newer science including quantum mechanics. Without going into detail on either issue, suffice it to say that despite lots of data on quantum mechanics, there were a few important questions Einstein could not reconcile in his head. Had someone been able to help him do that he might have changed his mind and abandoned his search for a unified theory.

Being an analytic personality, Einstein would naturally cling to his beliefs because he so thoroughly thought them through. You’d need data to convince him AND you’d need to do so at the points that were of most concern to him. No scientist could convince him that we can never truly tell a particle’s exact position and momentum (a tenant of quantum mechanics). Scientists believe we can only guess at those two things, but Einstein could not reconcile that in his mind, so he held to his earlier beliefs about the universe.

On the flip side there was something very dear to Einstein’s heart that he eventually did change his mind about. He was an ardent pacifist in his younger days and believed if people would refuse military service there would never be a need for military action by nations.His view on this was shaped by the horror of World War I and the unparalleled destruction it brought on the world at that time. Through the early 1930s he held onto this view. However, with the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany he began to re-examine that view. While he never embraced war, he came to believe people should enlist to defend freedom. He was also instrumental in getting President Roosevelt to start exploring nuclear technology and was against unilateral disarmament towards the end of his life because of the imbalance of power it would cause.

Why did he change? He was confronted with facts and the reality was the stakes were too high to be wrong. As you attempt to persuade people you’d do well to consider where they are in their life cycle. Teenagers and younger people have not developed the same groove older people have. It’s easier for them to experiment and quite often there is much less at stake for them in terms of loss should they make a mistake.