Jürgen Habermas, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, passed away recently at the age of 96. In academic circles, this was major news.
Habermas spent his career developing the concept of the public sphere: the idea that healthy societies depend on genuine spaces where people can reason together, challenge each other’s ideas, and arrive at something closer to the truth through conversation. And back in the 1970s, before anyone had heard of an algorithm or a filter bubble, he predicted its collapse.
He was spot on.
What he identified wasn’t just a problem with the media or the platforms but a problem with how we approach conversation itself. We’ve forgotten what conversation is actually for.
I’ve been lucky enough to talk to Tamsen Webster several times now, and every single conversation eclipses the one before it. Tamsen is a design expert in persuasion, a doctoral student, and someone who has spent 25 years inside the question that most people haven’t even thought to ask:
Is there a way to genuinely change someone’s mind without coercing them?
The reason we’re so bad at changing minds has very little to do with intelligence and almost everything to do with how we’re showing up to the conversation in the first place. We think we’re having a dialogue. We’re usually having a debate. And we don’t know the difference.
More importantly, the moment someone senses you’re trying to persuade them, the conversation is already over. Let’s get into it.
The smartest thing you can do to change someone’s mind is stop trying
Tamsen pointed me to a distinction I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since, drawn from Dr. Julia Sloan’s book Learning to Think Strategically. Sloan goes back to the etymological roots of three words we use as though they’re interchangeable: debate, discussion, and dialogue.
Debate, it turns out, comes from a word meaning to beat. Its purpose is defeat. One person wins. One person loses.
Discussion, at its root, is about coming to a decision together as reasonable people.
Dialogue is oriented toward mutual understanding. If minds happen to change, that’s a bonus. The goal is comprehension.
Three completely different functions. Three completely different sets of rules, and we rarely announce which one we’re playing.
So two people sit down to have what they each call a conversation, one playing by the rules of debate (I need to win this), the other playing by the rules of dialogue (I want to understand where you’re coming from), and things break down almost immediately.
Habermas spent decades worrying about the disappearance of genuine dialogue from public life. What he saw in the seventies was the early signs of what we now swim in: social media that looks like a public square but operates like a colosseum. Algorithms designed to deepen the perspectives you already have. Filter bubbles that give you the comfortable sensation of being in conversation while ensuring you’re only really talking to yourself.
Before any important conversation, name what you’re actually trying to do. Are you trying to win? Decide together? Understand? The label you give the conversation shapes everything that follows, including your emotional state going in and theirs.
The paradox that changes everything
Tamsen has been sitting with a question for most of her career that sounds almost paradoxical:
Can you have a persuasive effect without a persuasive intent?
Her current view: absolutely yes. In fact, the persuasive intent might be the very thing getting in the way.
The moment someone senses that your goal is to change their mind, a psychological mechanism kicks in that researchers call reactance. It’s the brain’s automatic response to perceived threat against its freedom, a kind of cognitive immune system. Rational processing gets suppressed. Automatic processing takes over. The person stops listening to what you’re actually saying and starts constructing a defense.
We’ve all been on both sides of this. Someone starts making their case, and before they’re three sentences in, you’ve already stopped hearing them. You’re building your counter-argument. You’re looking for the flaw. You’re not listening but waiting for your chance to speak.
The deep canvassers figured this out through experimentation. Deep canvassing, developed in the noughties and studied extensively through a landmark 2016 study, involves going to someone’s door, raising a difficult social issue, and then doing something that goes against every instinct: asking questions, listening without judgment, not challenging, not arguing, not debating. Demonstrating genuine respect. Then, only then, sharing your own perspective.
The results were striking. Durable, genuine shifts in attitude, of the kind that most persuasion techniques can’t produce, came from making someone feel genuinely heard first.
But if you go in with zero persuasive intent, how do you know you want things to change? How do you measure success? What Tamsen landed on was the more precise framing: go in with a persuasive aspiration, a hope rather than a goal. The hope is that they’ll see it differently. The commitment is to understand them first.
When that happens, they’re no longer in fight mode. The automatic brain stands down. The analytic brain comes back online. And suddenly, an idea that might have bounced off them two minutes ago has a chance of actually landing.
Going into the next difficult conversation, try replacing the goal of convincing with the goal of understanding. Ask yourself: Could I accurately describe their position in a way they’d recognize as fair? If not, you haven’t understood them yet. If you haven’t understood them yet, you haven’t earned the right to be heard.
The tools that actually work
Tamsen had a handful of specific, practical techniques that I thought were worth lifting out of the conversation directly.
The first came from her doctoral work and from years of watching what actually creates durable change in people. It’s two words: “I believe.”
Put “I believe” in front of everything you say. Not out loud, necessarily. In your own mind. “I believe the economy is heading for a correction.” “I believe this approach won’t work.” The habit functions as a constant reminder that even when you’re stating something with total confidence, you’re stating a belief, not a fact. A belief that hasn’t yet been functionally disconfirmed, as Tamsen put it, is still a belief.
The second application of those same two words is to put them in front of what the other person is saying. Not out loud. You don’t say “you believe that” to someone if you want to keep the conversation alive. You say it to yourself. It creates just enough distance between their words and your reaction that you can hear what they’re actually saying rather than what it triggers in you.
This connects to something I mentioned in the conversation: E-Prime, David Bourland’s 1950s linguistic experiment drawing on Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity. The idea was to remove the verb “to be” from English entirely. Instead of “this is the truth,” you’re forced to say “this seems true to me” or “I experience this as true.” It sounds small, but it changes everything. It turns every declaration into an acknowledgment of subjectivity.
Tamsen’s classmate contributed a third phrase worth adding to the toolkit: “my current view is.” It does the same work as “I believe,” but with an added layer. It signals that the view is yours, that you own it, and that it’s current, meaning it’s subject to revision. It’s a tiny invitation for the conversation to actually go somewhere.
The deeper principle underneath all of these is what Tamsen identified as the most dangerous belief too many people hold: Naïve realism. The conviction that you see things as they are, that your perception is objective, that anyone who disagrees is either stupid, uninformed, or acting in bad faith.
She made a point at the Aspen Institute’s Socrates Seminar that I thought was quietly devastating: people on the liberal left, she included herself explicitly, often aren’t as effective as they could be at changing minds precisely because they’re so certain they’re right. The certainty becomes the obstacle. You can’t reach someone you’ve already dismissed.
It’s not possible, mathematically, for everyone to be more rational than the person next to them. But everyone believes they are. That belief, held simultaneously by all parties, is a large part of why so many conversations go nowhere.
Pick up “I believe” and “my current view is” and use them this week in a conversation that matters to you. Notice what changes. Then try the harder version: when someone says something you strongly disagree with, mentally prefix it with “they believe.” See if it gives you even a moment of distance before the defense mechanism kicks in.
What lies beneath what people say
Toward the end of our conversation, Tamsen introduced a concept that I’d not come across before: semantic dark matter, an idea she’d picked up from the head of the Santa Fe Institute.
The words we use in any given moment are shaped by everything else going on in our lives. Our current emotional state, our history, our assumptions, our unexamined beliefs. Two people can read the same sentence and walk away with entirely different understandings, because the dark matter surrounding each of them is different.
Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels are set in Boston in the 1970s and 80s, and Spenser lives on the first block of Marlborough Street. In those decades, that was a rundown area. If you read the books today knowing that Marlborough Street is now among the most expensive real estate in Boston, you construct a completely different picture of the character’s life and circumstances. Same words. Different semantic dark matter. Entirely different story.
This is what’s happening in most of our disagreements. Underneath every position someone holds is what Robert Kegan calls a hidden commitment, what Aaron Beck and David Burns would call a silent assumption, what argumentation theorists call a warrant: a deeper, often unexamined principle that justifies the position. These are usually not stated. Often, they’re not even consciously known. But they’re doing most of the work.
This is where the most interesting practical question lives, and it’s the one Tamsen has built her doctoral research around: what does a novel idea require for a genuine aha moment to be possible?
Her answer, in plain language: before you can offer an idea that lands, you need to understand what’s underneath the position you’re trying to shift. Ask not just what they think, but why it makes sense to them. What would have to be true for a reasonable person to hold that view? Then check those assumptions. Excavate through questions.
Tamsen also introduced me to the term parrhesia, an ancient Greek practice of speaking one’s truth. The act of plainly stating why you believe what you believe, attached to genuine risk, because it was often about speaking truth to power. It’s what got Socrates killed. Michel Foucault wrote about it extensively. According to Tamsen’s research, it largely disappeared as a formal practice sometime after the ancient Greeks, swallowed up by rhetoric and persuasion frameworks that turned conversation from a shared search for truth into a competition with winners and losers.
The if-then framework she described is one of the clearest practical tools for bringing something close to parrhesia back into everyday conversation. There are two kinds of ideas, she argued. Premises, which are definitional, and ideas for doing something, which are what actually move people. The second type needs both parts of the conditional to work: if you want X, then do Y. Not just “do Y.” Not just “X matters.” Both together.
This works because of something Bayesian probability theory eventually confirmed: if the “if” isn’t relevant to the person you’re talking to, the entire statement becomes void to them. They don’t disagree with it. They simply stop processing it. The relevance has to come first.
The next time you want to explain an idea, make the if explicit before you get to the then. Who is this for? What do they want? Start there. If they don’t care about the outcome you’re promising, they won’t listen to the path you’re proposing, no matter how logical that path actually is.
Habermas predicted the collapse of the public sphere fifty years before most people noticed it happening. What he couldn’t quite have anticipated was that the collapse wouldn’t be visible. It would look like a conversation. It would have all the surface features of dialogue: people talking, sharing, responding, and engaging. But underneath, everyone would be debating. Everyone convinced they were right. Everyone using the rules of battle while calling it a discussion.
Tamsen has spent 25 years trying to find a way out of that. Her doctoral research is a serious attempt to answer the question: what actually has to happen for a genuine aha moment to be possible? For a mind to change of its own accord, not through coercion, not through compliance, not through exhaustion, but through actual understanding.
The answer, as best as both of us could piece it together, starts with this: stop treating the other person’s position as an obstacle to overcome and start treating it as a territory to understand. As she mentioned, you can’t be furious and curious at the same time.
Check out Tamsen on LinkedIn for some of the best thinking on persuasion anywhere on the platform. Her books, Find Your Red Thread and Say What They Can’t Unhear, are well worth your time. And find her at tamsenwebster.com.
You can watch our interview on this week’s Inner Propaganda Podcast episode.
Belief Leader of the Week
Tamsen Webster
Tamsen Webster has built a quiet reputation as one of the sharpest message strategists working today, and her book Find Your Red Thread is one of those rare works I recommend to anyone who communicates ideas for a living, which is everyone. Her most important insight is this: people don’t resist your idea because they don’t understand it; they resist it because it conflicts with something they already believe, and your job is to find the argument they are already making to themselves and build your idea inside it. This felt right to anyone who had watched a brilliant idea die in a room full of smart people. It fits in with everything we know about how belief actually changes. And it made sense — meet people inside their story, not outside it.
