Last Thursday, I posted one of my periodic “My views on the low carbon news” posts on LinkedIn. As these don’t include any external links, they get favoured by the LinkedIn algorithm and are seen way beyond my usual bubble of connections. This brings them into the feeds of inveterate ‘reply guys’ – people who want to tell you you are wrong without the burden of providing any evidence for their opinions.

Last Thursday’s post produced some corking examples. One said that renewables were not the cheapest form of energy and we should invest in nuclear instead. I replied with a graph of levelled cost of energy (LCOE) showing that wind and solar were now the cheapest form of energy (and nuclear was the most expensive). He responded that this was “the wrong comparison” with no further elucidation. Presumably it was ‘wrong’ because it conflicted with his opinion rather than any methodological shortcoming (LCOE is a pretty standard measure).

One of my big frustrations is that, at a time when we have extraordinary amounts of information at our fingertips, so many people refuse to be budged from their opinion by mere evidence. I have to keep reminding myself that this is just human nature, and reply guys are just fresh case studies each time they click on that button.

I use the elephant model of change to explain this: think of a person riding on an elephant on a path. The rider is our conscious brain – the one that looks at a graph of LCOE and says “oh, that’s interesting!” The elephant is our subconscious – the one that looks at the same graph and gets really uncomfortable if it conflicts with our gut instinct. The path is the external environment we operate in – LinkedIn in this example. Psychologists have found that it is the elephant that usually makes decisions when we like to think it is the rider; but we are fooling ourselves – often the rider tells the elephant what it wants to hear and ignores the rest, aka confirmation bias.

So, while we need to feed the correct information to the rider and shape the path to guide them both in the right direction, fundamentally we need to find a way to connect emotionally with the elephant, otherwise it will go where it wants to go. I always start responding to the reply guys with some further evidence, and if I’m in a mischievous mood I may play with them for a while, but I never expect to change their mind as there is no way to connect emotionally with people via LinkedIn.

Check out the video below for an overview of how I do engage emotionally with key decision makers and employees for my clients.