Understanding Why People Believe What They Believe

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Before you can influence anyone, you must grasp a fundamental reality: people hold their views because those views make sense within their personal framework of experience, values, and information. This is not obvious sentiment. This is strategic necessity. The moment you dismiss someone’s position as ignorant, stupid, or malicious, you have eliminated any possibility of changing their mind. They will sense your contempt immediately, and every defence mechanism they possess will activate against you.

Experience Shapes Reality

People’s direct experiences form the bedrock of their political views, and those experiences are undeniable to them. Consider immigration. Someone who grew up in a community that welcomed refugees witnessed specific, concrete outcomes: refugees working in local businesses, children thriving in schools, cultural festivals enriching community life, economic activity increasing. These are not abstractions. These are things they saw with their own eyes, people they know personally, changes they lived through. Their support for immigration is rooted in lived reality.

Another person’s community faced rapid demographic change whilst struggling with inadequate housing, strained public services, and economic decline. They watched their children unable to afford homes in their own neighbourhoods. They saw their local hospital overwhelmed. They experienced their community transformed at a pace that felt destabilising. Their concerns about immigration are equally rooted in lived reality.

These are competing truths, not competing delusions. Both people are reporting accurately what happened in their specific context. Their disagreement stems from having inhabited different realities. You cannot argue someone out of what they have experienced. You can only help them see that their experience, whilst real, may not be universal.