Andy Luttrell: How to Change Minds Through Negotiation

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Andy, thanks for joining us today.

Hi. Yeah, happy to be here.

So how about you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Sure. So, I'm Andy Luttrell. I'm a professor of psychological science at Ball State University. I study persuasion, influence, and public opinion. And I also host the podcast Opinion Science, which features interviews with folks and explorations of ideas all around the idea of public opinion and how our opinions can change and how we communicate them.

This is great. So essentially, everybody, Andy is the man I wanted to be when I was in undergrad because my undergrad is in psych. And I remember, actually, you'd probably find this interesting. The first podcast I ever started listening to was the Psych Files. Really? I love that show. And so I said, one of these days, I'm going to have a podcast on psychology. And so now, listeners, you understand why I talk about psychology so much and also make sure to check out Andy's podcast. It's really, really great. And I want to be clear about my bias. One of the reasons I think it's great is because I was on the show. So we'll put a link to both the show and my episode on the show in the description below and to the courses that Andy does as well. Andy is a friend who is very modest. So, Andy, please tell us about the courses you have, too. Sure.

So the newest one is an audio course called the Science of Persuasion, which you can get online and listen to. And it's sort of a nice entry point into the psychology of persuasion from all the research that's been done from the very beginnings of this work around World War II, where really, scientists started to ask the question, how do persuasive messages work, how can they work better? All the way up to all the kinds of experiments that we're doing today to understand how people can be persuaded and how you could use that information to craft your own messages.

This is great. Yes. So links in the description below for that, too. So we are having Andy on the show today to talk about the science of persuasion as it relates to deeply held beliefs and strongly held opinions. When we think about this, I think really as psychology nerds, it makes sense for us to start off with operational definitions here. And so when we think about these deeply held beliefs or strongly held beliefs, what does that mean to you?

Sure. So I will. I will say that I may slip into psychology speak by talking about these as attitudes. That's sort of the word that we use in psychology, but that doesn't always translate as well. So when I say attitude, I mean basically opinion. Right. It's just an evaluation you have. So I have a positive attitude toward my favorite TV show. It just means I really like that TV show. Right. I have a negative attitude toward other things, and those are things I dislike. Right. Those are my least favorite TV shows. And it goes beyond TV shows. And so strong attitudes or strong opinions, the way that we define them in social psychology is really two things. One is that that attitude tends to be durable, meaning if I tried to change it, it would resist being changed. And if I just kind of waited a while and checked back in, it would be unlikely to have changed. Right. So that attitude was durable, it was strong, it lasted a long time. And the other component is influence, meaning that your attitude influences the way you see the world and the actions that you take. Right. So if I have a strong attitude toward a politician, I'm especially likely to vote for that person. Right. My behavior follows from my support for that person. But if I have a weak attitude toward that person, I may, you know, I would say on a survey that I like this person, but I may not actually do anything about it. Right. So a strong attitude is one that is both durable and influential for the choices that we make.

This is great. And I think it's so important for us to start here because I think oftentimes we can be distracted by the perceived strength of the emotion behind the attitude. And so if we think about somebody having a strong opinion about something, we just assume by the amount of emotionality behind what they're saying that it means that it is durable and influential. But it sounds like, and you correct me if I'm wrong here, Andy? It sounds like they can be very. They can sound very emotional and passionate about something, and it might be durable. They might maintain that same feeling one year, two years down the line. But it still might not be influential in that it doesn't change the way that they navigate the world in that they don't really do anything about it.

Yeah, it could be. So I'll reframe that a little bit, which is to say that there's a little bit of a difference between what a strong attitude is and the things that we look for to try and suss out which attitudes are strong or not. Right. So the metaphor I like to use in talking about this is the Three Little Pigs story, right? So the big bad wolf wanted to, I don't know, break into these pigs houses. I don't actually know the backstory, right? So one of the pigs houses was made out of hay. One of them was made out of sticks. One of them was made out of brick. Right? And so ordinarily, we would look at that and we would go, okay, based on the building material, I'm going to make a guess that the brick one is the strong one and the hay one is the weak one. Right? But we don't actually know which house is strong until we try to blow it down. Right. Once the big bad wolf comes around and tries to knock those houses down and discovers that one house stays standing while the other one knocks down, only then do we know that one of them was strong and the other was weak. Right? We use the building material to make a guess about which one was going to be strong. But until we actually look at what happens, that's when we can say that it's strong. So I say that to say that things like emotionality can be a pretty good indicator of which attitudes are strong. So we had a paper come out this year where we found that, in fact, when people hold an opinion for highly emotional reasons, that opinion is way less likely to change. When you check back in later, we did some cool stuff where we looked at Yelp reviews, and you can update your Yelp review, you know, a year later, months later, if you go back to the restaurant. And so we looked at the language people were using when they wrote their first review, and then we saw. Did their summary rating of that place change even a year later? And we found that the more emotional people's first review was, the less likely their review was to change later. Right? And we have this in surveys as well. So emotionality, in this example, it's kind of like the building material of the house. Right. I can look at how emotional you are and make a fairly good guess that your opinion is going to be strong. But it's not until I check back in a year later or try deliberately to change that opinion that I'll actually know if it's strong. Right. So it's one of those things that sounds like a very fine distinction, but theoretically it does mean something. Right. Because those indicators of strength don't always perfectly predict strength.

Absolutely. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think it's really important essentially what it is. Again, thinking like a scientist, we are generating a hypothesis based on what we observe. Okay. I see a high level of emotionality. I'm pretty sure that this is a durable, strong attitude. But until I test it, I can't be actually sure. And so it's the big bad wolf trying to blow down the house. Okay. This opinion didn't change. This is a durable opinion. This is a strong opinion.

And I'll give another example too from other work that my lab has done, which is probably the indicator of a strong opinion that people look to the most is confidence. So when people say, I'm sure this is the best movie I've ever seen, that sure seems like a strong opinion. Strong meaning that's probably going to be hard to change in that person and that person's probably going to go back to the theater and see it again. The behavior follows from it because they say, I'm sure, I'm confident, I'm certain. We have some studies where we, we look at this and even though in general when people say that they're sure of an opinion and we check back in weeks, months, years later, that opinion is less likely to change. The ones that they were sure about are the ones that changed the least. Unless you look under the hood a little bit to what that attitude was made of. Was it one sided or was it a two sided opinion? Right. In other words, you can be ambivalent about something. Right. So when you're not ambivalent, it means that I only see this as good. There's nothing about this that's negative. But I could be ambivalent. Right. Meaning overall, I like this, but I'll be honest, there's some stuff that's not so great. And so what we find is that certainty was only a good clue to how strong people's opinion was going to be so long as they were not also ambivalent about it. Right. If they were, certainty suddenly sometimes predicted more change. Right. It's the confident attitudes that were the weakest if they were confident in an ambivalent attitude. Right. So again, this is a little technical, but it just makes the point that you'd think certainty is a shoo in. Right? You'd go, that's the thing that's going to tell me how strong this opinion is. And yet, just like a brick facade could deceive you. And that actually is a weak Building a confident attitude might actually be weak under some circumstances.

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Master the art with the American Negotiation Institute. Click the link in the description to find out more. Elevate, negotiate and succeed. This is fascinating, especially when you think about changing beliefs and behavior, because everybody listening to the podcast negotiate anything. We're talking about how to change hearts and minds, how to change behavior, attitudes, beliefs, those type of things. I want to persuade you, and a lot of times what ends up happening is we see a level of confidence in somebody else and that in turn has an impact on us. And so we say they seem incredibly confident in the way that they are approaching this. And they might be, I might say they are so confident, in fact, that I'm not going to try or I'm not going to try my hardest. So we're not as persistent in trying to change that attitude or belief when in fact that confidence is not the only indicator of how difficult it will be to change that attitude or belief.

Yeah, yeah. People's perceptions of persuadability can be misaligned to someone's actual persuadability. Now granted, confidence is a pretty good if you were going to place bets, yeah, the confidence stuff is less likely to change, but it's imperfect. Right. And so in some ways that's a meta point about psychology. Right. We make these bold claims about stuff, but they're all relative and trends Right there. There's hard to find a hard and fast rule of always, always, always X is true because there's almost always going to be a case where X is not perfectly true.

Exactly. No, that makes sense. Now let's say we find ourselves in a situation where we want to change somebody's attitude on something, but it is a strongly held belief. So let's say this is a situation where they are. We're talking about politics, religion, race, concepts of fairness and justice, those type of things. Those are tied closely to morality. And so oftentimes those beliefs or attitudes are a lot stronger. And so how do you change somebody's attitude on something if it is very strong, very durable, very influential for them?

That's the question, isn't it? How do you do that? You know, in some ways, a criticism of the research on psychology is that it's focused on when people's attitudes are not super strong. I'm trying to create an attitude, right? The polar opposite of this is you've never heard of my product before. I got a blank slate to come in and try and get you on board, right? There's nothing in there for you to resist because I'm coming in totally clean. There's lots of studies on that. How do you persuade when there's no pre existing attitude, then there's plenty of studies to show that some attitudes are just more open to change. Those for which people are a little more doubtful, those that are not super important to people, those that a person hasn't really ever thought about before. And so the lessons there are, you know, most kinds of messages do a pretty good job of getting through to someone who doesn't already have a hard stake in it. Your question is the big tough one, which is, okay, you already have a view on this issue and that view is strong, right? I can. I know it's strong. I know it's probably strong because you say you're sure, because you have a lot of emotion behind it, because you say that it's moral to you. So I'll talk about that moral version because that's the work that we've done. And indeed, just like emotional opinions tend to be harder to change, there's evidence that moral opinions are hard to change, right? These are opinions that people outwardly say, I think this because of my moral compass, my moral convictions lead me to oppose this policy. And sure enough, when people say that, they change much less when confronted with new information. But we started to think, well, you know, how much of that is just because the messages that we're giving in those circumstances are just missing the point that this person cares about, right? This person cares about the morality of the issue. And so, you know, one of the studies that I had done looks at recycling, right? So it seems weird that we tried to persuade people that recycling wasn't great, but it was a very logistically useful thing for us because most people think recycling is wonderful. Some people think recycling is wonderful on moral grounds. And so we created a handful of arguments that said, you know, recycling is not that great. It's really expensive. That means there's a lot more cars on the road trying to go pick up the belongings. It's really inefficient because you have to fish through what is and isn't recyclable, and it ends up taking more time. So arguments why recycling isn't perfect. When people had moral reasons to love recycling, they just didn't care. They went, yeah, I hear what you're saying. It doesn't change my mind, right? I am morally committed to thinking recycling is great. The people who liked recycling for different reasons that had nothing to do with morality, they heard those arguments and they went, oh, okay, well, interesting. Yeah, I like recycling a little bit less, right? I see some of the flaws in it. And we thought, well, you know, is the problem necessarily that moral convictions led people to resist any and all persuasion, Right? They went, no, I will never change my mind. Or did our persuasive approach miss what that audience cares about? That audience cares about the morality of recycling. And here we did, coming along saying, it's expensive and it's inefficient and it takes too much time. And they go, okay, but I just don't care. That's not why I support recycling. We had shown that in one couple of studies, and then a few years later, we ran the test to really push this to go, okay, what if our message directly grappled with the morality of recycling? What if we made the case that recycling is not great and it's not great for morally relevant reasons? Would that do anything to get through to that kind of audience? And sure enough, that's what we find. So if we use those practical arguments, just like before, we show that people who are morally committed to recycling, we're not convinced by pragmatic arguments, but give them moral arguments, reasons to think that recycling could cause harm, it could actually do harm to the environment, it could do harm to wildlife. It has these negative moral implications. Now, all of a sudden, the people who were morally committed to recycling were no longer as resistant as they were before, right? And so this is a case where speaking directly to the basis for what made the attitude strong to begin with can be a way to move forward by acknowledging the actual underlying reason why those attitudes are strong could be a viable road forward for coming to terms with Attitudes that normally are resistant to communication.

That's fascinating. And it seems as though if we think about this in a literal sense of different languages, it's almost like this is what's happening. And so we were speaking the language of pragmatism to somebody who is speaking the language of morality. It doesn't, I cannot understand that because it's a different language. And here we say, all right, I'm going to speak the language of morality. More specifically, I'm going to speak your specific moral dialect. And so some people have different moral convictions on the same issue. But this person, for example, is saying, I'm in favor of recycling because I have a moral conviction to do what I feel is best for the planet. And so you say, all right, my moral language now becomes what is best for the planet. And so now you're creating language, an argument that speaks that specific language, and. And now they're more open to it. Is that a fair synopsis?

Totally. Yeah. And it's one sliver of a huge swath of research and persuasion on the value of speaking the audience's language. Getting to the heart of why the audience cared about this issue to begin with. Because again, you could talk and talk and talk, and we're so good at saying why we thought this thing was good that we don't always go like, wait, why do you think it's good? Or why do you think it's bad? Oh, oh, oh, okay, well, my reason to like it won't. You won't care. I need to figure out why you resist it to begin with. Then we can start to make some inroads. Right? And so in the political realm, as we've talked before, right, these different moral dialects, some folks care a lot about moral issues of harm, right? Who's being harmed? Who can I care for? How can I protect, you know, the well being of people other people care more about? You know, just doing as you're told, right? Fitting in, abiding by the rules of your society. That is what is moral. And so those two perspectives can be at odds with each other until you take a second to go, oh, wait a minute, yeah, your moral compass can be different from mine and will never get anywhere until I acknowledge that.

Absolutely. No, I think that's really, really helpful. It's really helpful and it makes it a lot easier for people to understand. And one of the things that we have to recognize is that people might listen to you, Andy, and they say, okay, I need to speak their moral dialect. I get that some of the things that that makes persuasion so difficult is the fact that we don't want to do that even if we know it works, because we almost feel as though it's a moral concession on our part to speak a different moral dialect.

Yeah, either. Either people don't understand that there are other moral dialects out there. Or as you say, you go, no, I'm not that. I can't live with myself if that's the argument that I make. And, you know, I mean, as hard as it was to try to convince people that recycling was bad, it's another thing even to do that with arguments that you go, like, that doesn't even make any sense to me, but it's going to make sense to someone else. Right. And, you know, I've talked with students about this too before, which is like, especially when you. When you think about diversity and inclusion type things and like, how do we get people to get on board with programs that are going to even the playing field, acknowledge historical disparities? You go, I don't want to make concessions. I don't want to pat some groups on the back and go, it's okay, you'll be fine. You'll be fine. Because some of that resistance to these programs is like, well, wait a minute, my group is going to get left out now. And it's like, oh, no, no, no, everyone's going to get included. And I've had students be like, I don't. That doesn't seem right. Do we really have to reassure people that they're going to still be included in the conversation? And my pragmatic take is, whatever it takes to accomplish the goal is the communication strategy that is important. It's a means, justify the ends sort of thing. When it comes to persuasion, I may not love that this is the way I have to pitch this, but if it's going to be the thing that gets people on board with this program or idea, that to me, as a totally subjective perception, strikes me as just the pragmatic choice.

Absolutely. And I know it makes a lot of sense. And again, it comes down to pragmatism. It comes down to what your major goal is. Is your major goal to feel good about yourself, or is your major goal to actually get something done? And sometimes you have to do something that you don't want to do in order to get the outcome that you want. As a married man, I know that sometimes I have to do things I don't want to do. Take out the trash, you know, all these little things. But I understand that's what is necessary to be part of a healthy, functioning family and have a great working relationship with Whitney, you know, and so I think that's the question that we have to ask ourselves. What's most important to us? And it's tough to be able to step outside yourself in that moment. But if we think about it, again, trying to think about it pragmatically, the emotional discomfort, we could maybe even describe it as dissonance that we experience when we use a different moral dialect is limited to ourselves. Because when you think about it, all right, if the outcome exists outside of ourselves, but the discomfort exists within ourselves. And I feel as though in the situations where I've had to speak a different moral dialect, things started to feel a lot better when I started to see the outcomes that I wanted to have. And so I want you to speak to the idea of dissonance. And whether you, whether or not you think that's an appropriate term to describe it. What do you, what do you think? Because I have never once thought of it that way. And we are beta testing this as we.

Sure, yeah. There's a. There's a version of it that I could see being dissonance, and I also haven't thought of it quite that way. That the method I'm using, not the point I'm making, but the method I'm using could result in dissonance. It's a testable question. I don't know if we know that. I mean, we have. I've got some evidence from some studies that we're still working on, which I think are interesting and potentially relevant, which are when? So just to backtrack, there's a long history of research showing that we like people more if they like the same things that we like, right? So if we share our opinions, we'll get along fabulously. If we have the same taste in movies, we get along really well. If we both agree politically, we're more likely to get along than if we disagree politically. Even if we both agree on coffee versus tea, we get along a little bit better. But I had always wondered, like, how far does that really go? Like, what if? And so the background for this is, as a longtime vegetarian, I always think about this where you could be vegetarian for many reasons, right? You could do it for your health, you could do it for the environment, you could do it for animal rights related reasons. Some of those are more morally relevant than others. So if I'm a, like, moral vegetarian, right? I've made this choice because it aligns with my moral values and I Meet someone who also is a vegetarian. I should go, we're best friends immediately, you know, because we agree on this thing. But if I'm a morally driven vegetarian and someone else is a vegetarian for health related reasons, we find in circumstances like that that, that punch of agreement doesn't go so far.

Right?

We go, I know we agree, but we agree for different reasons. And so it's almost like, do we even agree at all? Right. On the surface you'd go, these two people would get along. But you go, but actually under the surface it's a conflict, right? Which is sort of like what you're saying of there's a, there's this, I'm attentive to the reasons why we do things in addition to what it is that we're doing. Right. And so potentially there is, there, there could be some dissonance where I go, it doesn't feel right to be best friends with this person even though they look the same as me on paper. I know under the surface that our reasons for being this way are different.

That makes a lot of sense. I, I think about it as, I don't want you to just do the dishes, I want you to want to do the dishes.

Right.

But that doesn't make sense.

Well, and so, you know, this is, this has implications again for, you know, I have another foot in the diversity and inclusion world and psychology of prejudice, which is we want organizations to adopt policies that further the diversity of their, their company. Right. Should we care that they do that for profit motivated reasons? Right. You'd go, I'm an activist, I want to make change. And you go, as long as they say we're going to adopt this policy and implement it, I should be ecstatic. I shouldn't care why you're doing it. And yet I get the feeling that in cases like that, people go, you're not doing it for the right reason. Right. You're doing it for the wrong reason. So can I really celebrate it if it's for a reason that I'm not super on board with? And I would go, if it makes the change you're looking for, then that's great. But, but we, sometimes we feel like, no, no, no, I don't only want this, I want it for these reasons.

Exactly. And I think that's one of the things that, that we have to recognize in a lot of these serious moral dilemmas that we find ourselves in as a society. A lot of times the, the policy, a policy change or a pragmatic shift precedes the subsequent moral Shift. So, for example, when you think about Loving versus Virginia, the interracial marriage case out of Virginia, where at the time there were strong attitudes against interracial marriage. But since that Supreme Court decision, those attitudes on a societal level have changed significantly. And it's a lot of, it's a, it's an example of policy changing and then beliefs, behaviors and attitudes changing as a result. Down the road with integration in 1954, with Brown versus Board of Education, same thing. A lot of people were against integration. And then the attitudes have shifted as time has gone on. And so a lot of times we might have that. There might be somebody who says, no, I don't like the reason why you're making the right decision. They might feel that way. But I think there's a little bit of consolation that says sometimes the mind has to lead the heart in these situations.

Yeah. A couple other good examples. One that I love is some work that Eric Heyman and others have done. Eric Heyman was on my podcast, so you can look at episode something something. Geography of bias is what we called it. And they had the school paper like a year or two ago where they were following legal decisions related to same sex marriage in different states. Right. So this is at a time pre Supreme Court ruling where states were kind of adopting different same sex marriage laws independent of one another. And they sort of rolled out over time and they had access to this like huge amount of data on people's implicit biases related to sexual orientation all over the country. And they were able to show that if you look state by state at the moment, that a state legalized same sex marriage, you started to see a decrease in implicit biases against gay and lesbian people in that place. Right. So this is another case where the law, the change, the societal change, had to implement a policy. And then hearts and minds followed. Another favorite example of mine comes from Sweden. There's like this paper that nobody's ever cited, the 70s in Sweden. And they were looking at seatbelts legislation, right. So there was like a time, it boggles my mind, a time when seatbelts were not, were not required by law in cars. And it was a, it was a policy that people thought was stupid. They were like, I don't want to wear a seatbelt. That sounds crazy. It's not going to do anything. It seems uncomfortable. And then the government said, well, we're doing it now. Seatbelts are the law. And then when you look at the public opinion polling, just a couple years later, all of a sudden people are going to, oh, yeah, seatbelts. They help promote our safety, and they're not that uncomfortable. And all it took was going, we're just going to do this thing, guys. We're just going to implement this. And all of a sudden, right? People go, well, I might as well be okay with this because I have to do it anyway, or I see the norms around me, and that is going to push me to think about this somewhat differently than I had before.

This is great. This is great. Andy, I feel like I could talk to you forever on this topic, which means you are certainly going to come back on the show, my friend. I really appreciate this. But before you go, can you remind the listeners about your podcasts and your courses as well and how they can get in touch with you?

Totally, yeah. So the podcast is called Opinion Science. Esteemed guests, including Kwame, have been on and, yeah, so most of those episodes that I've done so far are interviews with prominent social scientists, political scientists, social psychologists, communication scholars, and communicators whose professional lives involve shaping opinion or just communicating opinion. We had a film reviewer on in the early days, right. Someone whose whole job is expressing their opinion about something. And so it's really just an excuse to talk to both people that I know and don't know and learn about a bunch of cool work on the psychology of how we see the worlds and how that changes and how we talk to other people about it. And so occasionally we do special episodes, like we did a big dissonance episode. So we talked about dissonance. Episode 20 is a cognitive dissonance episode. We trace the history of it. We talk about what dissonance actually is, what it does, talking to the movers and shakers in that theory. And other episodes like that are on the way. So you can find that@opinionsciencepodcast.com follow us on Twitter, Facebook, @opinionscipod, and on all the major podcast platforms. And the course is the. The online courses. You can find information about that@opinionsciencepodcast.com as well.

Fantastic, Andy. Thank you so much, my friend. Really appreciate it.

Sure. Yeah. Super fun.

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