Changing Minds When Arguments Fail

How to use storytelling to change minds in the workplace

In Think Again, Adam Grant explores what it takes to change someone’s mind, especially when beliefs run deep.

He turns to one of the most emotionally charged examples: the rivalry between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees.

But this really isn’t about baseball.

Swap in any rivalry and the pattern holds: schools, brands, ideas, political views, even groups inside an organization. The moment a belief becomes part of identity, it becomes harder to question. We stop seeing individuals and start seeing “them.”

Grant describes how deep this rivalry runs. Red Sox fans would boo the Yankees when their scores were announced in games they weren’t even playing. In neuroscience studies, the reward and pleasure centers of fans' brains lit up when their rival failed. Their opponent's loss felt like their own win.

As Grant writes, we don’t just define ourselves by who we are. We define ourselves by who we are not.

How do you create openness and shift perspective when people feel certain?

Grant’s team asked more than a thousand Red Sox and Yankee fans to list negative traits about their rival. The responses were predictable and often funny, including complaints about accents, beards, and their “tendency to smell old corn chips.”

Stereotypes are mental shortcuts. They are assumptions that help us move quickly through the world. But they also narrow what we’re willing to see.

The team tried something different and gave Red Sox fans a story. It was about a child first introduced to baseball by their grandparent. Playing catch with a parent on a summer afternoon. Attending games with family. The beginning of a love for the game. It felt familiar and easy to step into. Only at the very end did they revealed the person was a Yankees fan.

Something shifted. The same fans who listed the negative stereotypes softened. They said things like, “I think this person is very authentic and is a rare Yankee fan,” or “I really liked this until I got the part about them being a Yankees fan. This person is okay.”

The rivalry was still there. But cracks formed, letting light through.

Then came the deeper shift. Participants were asked to imagine being born into a family of the rival team. To consider that under different circumstances, they might have been on the other side.

That’s where perspective changed. Because once people connected with the child in the story, they couldn’t fully unconnect.

Stories don’t tell us what to think. They help us feel what it might be like to think differently.

Why Stories Succeed Where Arguments Fail

Most leaders, when they need to shift someone's thinking, reach for evidence, data, and logic. It rarely works as well as we expect.

When someone encounters an argument that challenges a deeply held belief, the brain treats it as a threat. Identity defense kicks in. The stronger the argument, the more likely someone is to defend their position. We do not update our beliefs under pressure. We dig in.

Story works differently because it does not announce its intention.

The Red Sox fans were not told that Yankees fans are good people. They were not given evidence to reconsider their views. They were given a story and left alone inside it. They drew their own conclusions.

A story does not change a mind. It creates the conditions for a mind to change itself.

That distinction matters enormously for how leaders use stories. Most storytelling advice focuses on the teller: how to structure your story, how to deliver it, how to make it land. This is about designing an experience that allows someone else to arrive somewhere new, on their own terms, without feeling like they were taken there.

What is Actually Happening?

Two things were working simultaneously in that study. First, the story created identity suspension. It didn’t ask readers to change who they were. It invited them into someone else’s beginnings. Identity wasn’t under threat. It was briefly set aside.

Second, it introduced a quiet but powerful idea: the beliefs we feel most certain about are not always the result of careful choice. They are often shaped by where we started: the family we were born into or the first experiences we had. That realization does not erase a belief, but it loosens its grip. And a loosened grip is all you need.

What This Means

This shows up at work more than we realize.

A team resisting a new direction after a merger. A cross-functional group debates the same issue again and again, each side certain they are right. The instinct is to make a stronger case, show more data, and explain why the other view is mistaken. But when people feel certain or don’t care, more information only hardens the line.

If you want to shift perspective, you have to start earlier.

Start before the belief formed.
The baseball story worked because it began before the identity was established: a child, family, or shared experience. The listener enters before they know they might disagree.

Let the reveal do the work.
Don’t lead with your conclusion. Place your idea inside a story the listener already understands, then allow them to arrive at the insight on their own.

Offer the counterfactual.
Help people see how someone else arrived at their view. Invite them to consider how their own perspective might have formed under different conditions. You aren’t asking them to change their mind. You are asking them to hold it a little more loosely.

That is where the openness begins.

The Cracks Are The Point

The Red Sox fans did not become Yankees fans. The rivalry did not disappear. It produced cracks. And cracks are the point. They give space to let oxygen in and breathe life into ideas.

Leaders often go into a communication wanting to move people all the way from where they are to where the leader wants them to be. They measure success by full agreement, full adoption, full alignment. Anything short of that feels like failure.

But real change rarely happens all at once. The goal is not to win. It’s to widen the aperture just enough for a different kind of thinking to become possible. To make certainty slightly more porous, introducing a flicker of recognition where someone sees something they hadn’t seen before.

Stories do not create instant transformation. They create space.

They make the other side human, even briefly. They help people feel what it might be like to think differently.

They help you see things you can’t unsee. That creates the beginnings of understanding.

***

Karen Eber is an author, TED and keynote speaker, and communication strategist who works with frontline leaders, senior executives, and C-suite teams at Fortune 500 companies. She partners with teams across sales, marketing, communications, HR, finance, operations, legal, and IT. She works across industries including healthcare, technology, financial services, manufacturing, energy, consumer goods, retail, professional services, education, and nonprofits — helping leaders turn complex information into clear, compelling stories that drive decisions and action. She is the author of The Perfect Story. Learn more about her keynotes and workshops at kareneber.com/speaking.

‍ ‍