Here’s what I’m doing instead, writes Sarah Stein Lubrano.

In 2019, like so many readers, I went door to door canvassing for the Labour Party. I brought all my friends along. I went weekend after weekend. It was thrilling, addictive, in a way. 

It was also ineffective. By this I don’t just mean that the Party lost, but also that canvassing in general is, as it turns out, ineffective. Studies show that traditional canvassing and other campaign techniques mostly don’t do anything to change voting outcomes. 

And that makes sense to me now, six years later, after I have spent my time looking through a sea of research on the psychology and sociology involved in political persuasion. As I argue in my new book, the best empirical evidence to date suggests that just giving people arguments in general does little to change their minds. Debating with them may even be counterproductive. People instead change their minds about political ideas when they experience changes in their actions and relationships. To change people’s minds, you have to change their lives. 

Yes: our actions and experiences change our beliefs (and not so much the other way around). For example, people who experience intense climate events are more likely to shift their views and believe more in climate change, and people who don’t get to have an abortion they wanted shift their views on abortion (though not necessarily in the direction you might expect!).

We tend to adjust our views to match our reality, due in part to a phenomenon called cognitive dissonance. Dissonance refers to our discomfort when we notice a contradiction in our beliefs and/or actions, and this dissonance is so painful that we often quickly shift our beliefs, often without noticing it, so as to rid ourselves of the discomfort. This means we tend to adjust our views to the lifestyle we are currently engaged in. And this, in turn, might explain why so many voters were totally uninterested in what I had to say about a brighter, collaborative future. Their lives were simply not like that: they had to compete in a rather ruthless marketplace each day, they were isolated, no one was looking after them, and for that matter it wasn’t obvious how they could help others, especially not those outside their family or closest circle. Why would they want to take a bet on a world they weren’t experiencing? To do so would not only potentially be profoundly dissonance-provoking but also deeply naive. 

If I could do it over again, I would instead have tried to build a food coop in my neighbourhood (like I later did with my friends). Or I would have rebuilt a weakened social space, the way the people interviewed in the podcast Now Here did when they turned pie shops, laundromats and mining halls into glorious pieces of community infrastructure. I would try to build a world of solidarity at a small scale, and then through that make the case for a government that operated with the same principles. (And in fact, that’s what I’m doing now!)

Not only do these kinds of actions help other people gain new actions and experiences that shift their views, but they also lead to the formation of new relationships. And that’s the other big factor in our political beliefs: our relationships with those around us, and our friendships especially.

Research shows that our friends don’t brainwash us; they can’t always change our mind radically. But friendship seems to be particularly effective in helping people overcome prejudice and clarify their own thinking. When it comes to democratic life, that prejudice-reducing effect is exceptionally important. The findings of social contact theory suggest that people experience a reduction in prejudice in places that are set up a very specific way: (1) members of the different groups making contact should have equal status in the environment they are in; (2) they should meet in situations where co-operation is regularly required and where they have goals in common; (3) close relationships should be possible; and (4) contact between groups should be legitimized through institutional support. 

In conditions like these, studies show that people tend to become less racist, xenophobic, queerphobic, and more. But of course, our society as a whole is not set up that way (and goodness knows the internet in particular is not–what is the shared goal of two users on X, after all?) 

In fact, much of our current world does exactly the opposite of this. It places minorities in inferior positions, from their workplace titles to their bathroom access. Much of our current world pits people as competitors, not collaborators. Much of our current world makes people too busy, stressed, tired, and fearful to build new close relationships. And few institutions seek to legitimize contact between members of different groups. 

To create a less prejudiced society, we’d have to create places and spaces that allow for these types of better relationships. We’d have to make the worlds we live in – from schools to the workplace to the local government and beyond – work more like this: explicitly equal, collaborative, intimacy-creating and supported. Only then would I talk to people about why it’s worth having diversity or accepting some immigration; because then I would be far more likely to succeed at changing minds, and also at building movements. 

All of what I’ve described above is, of course, harder than what I was doing before. (And canvassing wasn’t easy!) It takes more time, it can’t just be done around election season. But it’s also very fulfilling, because it permanently orients one in a world of meaning, and connects one back to others. I now know all my neighbours in the food coop, even if we spend a lot of time debating the price of yogurt. In my mutual aid group, where we deliver food to elderly impoverished people with disabilities, I feel that I am not just twiddling my thumbs as the world burns. (And sometimes I can ask for help as well–and I can see that there is, in fact, a society). 

Doing more is harder. But it is better, because it gives me purpose and connection. (It’s probably because activism provides purpose and connection that activists are happier than non-activists who share the same beliefs! And yes, this is true despite all the infighting and burnout we’re known for). 

I don’t exactly regret my time canvassing. It gave me a strange high, actually: the high of feeling like I was doing something to create the world I wanted to see. But today, I’ve shifted my energies towards doing what I can to build that world day to day. If one day there are ways to vote for that world too, I’ll have an infrastructure in place to reach people, I’ll have built the right relationships. And then I’ll talk to my neighbours about what that better world looks like and how we can not only vote it in, but build it together. 

Sarah Stein Lubrano is the author of Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds, recently published by Bloomsbury.