Changing people is similar to physics. We don’t know an absolutely, unified theory of physics for the universe just as we don’t know an absolutely perfect way to make people change. But we’re learning more and more and, what we do know, appears to be helping.

There are two things I think of when it comes to change:
1) We like to think we’re in control of change (that is direction, velocity, impact)
2) It’s likely we have less control than we think

Most of the arguments for 1 are examples of people acting with the intention to change things and then showing the manifestation of that change. The implication being their intent was a causal factor in the change.

This is also an intuitive argument because we know that we do control some things. Physical objects act in predictable ways and we theorize humans would too if we only understood enough. When physical objects do anything other than what we expect, we tend to be amazed. This is what makes magicians fascinating.

But less so with people. With people, even though we believe behavior can be predicted, we’re not surprised when they act counter to expectations because we all recognize there’s a lot more going on there than we understand. Magicians amaze us when they predict our behavior.

So where objects are concerned, 1 is more true. Where people are concerned, 2 is.

These days we’ve got such a handle on our physical universe most of our problems involve people. We attempt to solve the people problem the same way we mastered the physical universe but it doesn’t work because 2.

The argument for 2 is to look at examples of people acting with the intention to change things and then showing the change did not occur. In cases where it did we can also ask, would it have happened anyway even if they’d done nothing?

If we looked at examples of change involving people and made the assumption they would have changed anyway without being acted on by the change agents, we would expect to see a distribution of results which include some instances where someone was attempting to instigate change and other instances where there were not. This is in fact what we do see. So, in my opinion, it muddies the water as to the question of how effective our attempts to change people are.

Complex questions with no easy answers.