❧ On Being a Stranger on the Internet ❧
Drafted January or February 2025, posted September 2025.
It's likely you and I are strangers. The thing about strangers is that, unless we are in actual positions of power, we have no influence over each other's lives. You don't have any influence over what I wear or eat or think, and I don't have any influence over you, either. You may have arrived at this web page from any number of places completely unrelated to me and it's possible that you'll ping away from this site, never to give it a second thought. Or maybe you will be interested in it and become less of a stranger to me.
I don't use a whole lot of labels here because all of us are more nuanced than our labels, but it's possible that something I have said made you label me in your mind. Maybe it even transformed me into the Other, or the Enemy, or one of Those People in your view. That's unfortunate, but I'm not going to argue with you, and here's why.
This year, I read David McRainey's book How Minds Change, which is a journalistic account of recent research on influence, deprogramming, and the neuroscience of perception and belief. If you are despairing that you can ever change someone's mind on a topic of importance to you or bring a loved one back from a cult or a conspiracy theory, I'd recommend this book. And while I gave up on arguing with strangers on the internet a few years ago, this book showed me why that's for the best. I won't get into the science here, but I will tell you my main takeaways:
1. Posting and discussing ideas on the internet among strangers is good for refining in-group thought, but it will never change people's minds. In fact, writing to change the mind of someone on the "other side" of an issue will more deeply entrench their beliefs. Writing on any divisive topic on the internet should only be aimed at a sympathetic audience, or at least an audience sympathetic enough to allow their mind to be changed. But for the big issues, the hot buttons, the ones that make us take sides: arguing becomes worse than useless.
If you've spent a large chunk of your life arguing with people on the internet, this may be difficult to hear. If you have ever hoped to change a stranger's mind by impassioned argument, logical superiority, facts and data, or appeals to ethics, you have not only wasted your time, but accomplished the opposite of what you set out to do. This is because our stance on emotionally-charged topics penetrates much further into our lives than just the intellect.
Our beliefs about divisive, emotionally-charged issues are more closely related to our identities than they are to our values or our understanding of facts. Especially in a polarized society, a person who changes their beliefs about a hot-button issue may have to give up their friend group, become alienated from their family, lose influence with their coworkers, open themselves to harassment, or in some cases lose income streams. If they don't have a community that can actually support them through those changes, they can't risk changing their mind. And since a stranger on the internet cannot replace what they would lose, pelting them with facts or pointing our their fallacies or saying that they're a terrible person will only more deeply entrench them in their beliefs. Human minds have a whole panoply of cognitive biases to ensure that.
And everything I've said here applies to me just as much as it applies to a person whose opinions I oppose.
2. It's also really important to remember that every human being has cognitive biases. They are built into our brains and even being aware of them doesn't save us from them! You and I both absolutely believe things that are untrue and completely irrational. Just because someone else was taken in by some hateful demagogue or conspiracy theory doesn't mean you're superior to them or above the risk of it yourself. Therefore, always have humility when encountering someone whose beliefs you think are wrong. In reading McRainey's book, it really surprised me to learn that certainty is an emotion, not a cognitive state. Even the feeling that we are certain about something is just that--only a feeling! And that's why we can be so certain about things in the face of facts to the contrary.
3. Only try to change someone's mind, whether on the internet or in real life, if you are willing to invest in them as a person. Don't give up on their humanity and don't stop trying to listen to the subtext behind their beliefs and the needs those beliefs are meeting. Can you try to meet those needs? Can you help them get those needs met elsewhere? Because that's what it takes to change someone's mind.
For example, my partner's friend's mother is a [TV Station] casualty. She watches it all day and unfailingly repeats the viewpoints and spin spouted on [TV Station], which sometimes leads her to say horrible, horrible things to her son. Her son also notices that she watches a talk show on this TV station every morning, and she talks about the hosts on this show as if they were her actual friends--like these folks are people in her life. [TV Station] is meeting some sort of social/emotional need of hers that she's not getting elsewhere, and therefore she clings tenaciously to the viewpoints expressed on [TV Station]. In her mind, the people who express those views are her friends. Trying to change her beliefs isn't just a matter of changing her opinions, it's a matter of changing her friend group and identity. If her son wants to get her away from [TV Station]'s spin, he will need to figure out if there's a way that she can get her social/emotional needs met elsewhere, in a less toxic place. Arguing with her viewpoints will only continue to push her toward [TV Station] and away from the real people and support systems in her life.
4. And this is the most fundamental point: not only are our beliefs are shaped by our life experiences, but so are even our most basic sensory perceptions. (Example: The Dress.) We like to think that we came to all of our beliefs rationally. However, that's not true, and a lot of factors outside of our control go into making what we believe. This includes our social position, formative experiences, and where we were born and raised. Most of these things are outside of our control. And it's worth reminding ourselves that other people arrived at their beliefs also largely through factors outside of their control. If someone believes something different from you, it's probably due to reasons having nothing to do with them being stupid, gullible, or hateful. It's because the reality they have inhabited is literally different from yours.
So if I don't have the capacity or desire to change someone's mind, I should just ignore them and move on. And if I want to change someone's mind, I have to make them my neighbor. As I'm writing this, learning to de-polarize and de-escalate ideological conflict is only going to become a more necessary skill. During this time, when increasing polarization (in the US) is leading to increased inequality, violence, and death, how I treat people is far more important than what they believe. "But I can't treat them with respect, their beliefs are killing people!" "How can I be OK with someone who believes that." Those are the kinds of beliefs that push us further to the precipice, as right as they may feel. Either choose to stay a stranger or to become a neighbor; you cannot make change by making enemies.