US 2.0: Win Hearts, Then Minds

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Imagine you had a dispute with a neighbor. It could be something trivial. Maybe he's playing music too loudly late at night, and your kids can't get to sleep. The way we usually resolve these problems in daily life is to knock on our neighbor's door, explain the problem—

Can you turn it down?

—and try to find an amicable solution. If all goes well, You discover that you have similar tastes in music. You swap playlists while getting him to keep the volume down at night. Maybe you take over soup when he's unwell, and he helps you on a cold morning when your car needs a jump. Now imagine that this dispute takes place on a platform like X, formerly Twitter. Instead of talking to your neighbor, you throw open your window and tell all the people on your side of the street that your neighbor is a jerk. Upset and offended, he throws open his window, which opens onto a different set of neighbors, and tells those people that you're crazy. Soon you're yelling at each other, but really talking to completely different sets of people. Every escalation is met with reprisal. Each of you is certain the other must be dimwitted, Malevolent or unhinged. On social media, especially when it comes to political disagreements, this is often what passes for discourse. Platforms like Twitter have called these shouting matches engagement, but common sense suggests they are really a prescription for disengagement. Today, in the second installment of our series, Us 2.0, we explore why we are often unable to get through to our political opponents and how we can learn to do so. Breaking Through the Echo Chamber, this week on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, This is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

Quick question. Do people come to you for answers at work? Maybe you're managing projects, training new hires, or just the one everyone relies on. That's leadership. Through UVA Darden's Part-Time MBA in Rosslyn, we help professionals like you turn real-world experience into recognized leadership credentials without stepping away from your career. Whether you work in healthcare, education, government, or business, This is how you take the next step. Learn more at darden.virginia.edu/ptmba.

Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. There's a saying that's attributed to the Dalai Lama: In the practice of tolerance, one's enemy is the best teacher. It's a nice idea, but in reality, when people don't share our values, it's hard for us to tolerate theirs. We tell ourselves they must be close-minded, illogical, immoral. They are different from us on a fundamental level. We belong to one group. They belong to another. At Stanford University, Rob Willer studies how most of us go about persuading our opponents and why our favorite technique is strikingly ineffective. Rob Willer, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Rob, you were the prototypical angry young man in your college days. I want you to tell me about a conflict you once had with your roommate, Russ.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can— I actually have a couple of stories along these lines. So in this time in my life, maybe from like 19 to 21, the central axis of conflict for me was around sleep. And I remember one morning, uh, my friend Russ was waking up. He had a job at, you know, a copy center. And he was, you know, just doing what somebody does in the morning, talking to another one of our roommates and hanging out, drinking coffee, getting the day going. It's like 9:30 in the morning or something, but I've been up late working at a restaurant, second shift, and, you know, I'm sleeping in. And I can't sleep, right, because of this noise coming from the living room at this unacceptable time of the morning. And I just Came rushing out of my room, like immediately inflamed, you know, dropping epithets and you know cursing. And I remember like Russ was so caught off guard. He's like the sweetest guy, my roommate, and he just was like you. And I remember I got so mad that I took this whiteboard that we would use to write messages to each other, and I like. Slammed it against a wall.

Wow.

I mean, this is just completely out of control.

Sometime later, Rob had another run-in with a different roommate. This one changed the course of his life.

I was a junior in college. I was sharing a house with my friend Jim, my roommate, and he was up in the morning making eggs for breakfast, as one does. It's like 10 in the morning or something. It's not even that early, but I was a night owl. I would, you know, work late, hang out with people late at night, sleep in in the morning. And, uh, you know, he's making a lot of noise, right, with like the frying pan and so on. My bedroom is just off the kitchen. My first approach to this, to conflict resolution here, or to resolving the situation, was to throw a shoe against the door, which I think is It's considered an international signal of please be quieter, you know. And—

Wait, you were inside your own bedroom and you threw a shoe at your own bedroom door to tell him to pipe down?

Yeah, that's right. So that didn't work because it couldn't be decoded as I intended it. So then I came out of the bedroom, you know, just immediately angry, already turned all the way up to 11. I'm like, you know, you need to not make all this noise so early in the morning, you know, and, you know, probably cursing and whatnot. And he's totally taken aback and himself upset about this. And now we're in this heated argument and I slam the door behind me, can't go back to sleep because I'm all worked up now. And the whole exercise is self-defeating at every level.

Rob thought back to this altercation with Jim when one of his social science professors gave him an interesting assignment. It was to mark a turning point in his life.

Yeah, yeah. So it was this great assignment. And my professor, Professor Michael LaValia at University of Iowa, he had us first write an essay, a short essay about a recent conflict we'd been in, and to just go off on the person we were in a conflict with, you know, just render our perspective as vividly as possible. So I did that, you know, defending all of my choices in this situation as one does. And then the catch was, after we turned this in, he said, okay, this second short essay assignment is for you to now write the exact same essay, the same, about the same conflict. However, you're supposed to write it from the perspective of the person who you were in the conflict with.

Hmm.

And that the best version of this, you would actually simulate as accurately as you can what they would've written if they had gotten this assignment.

Hmm.

So you're totally in their first-person perspective. And so I did that, and for me, honestly, it was a pretty revelatory Experience. So I sit down to write this essay, and now I'm writing an essay from my roommate's perspective, and it's coming out, of course, completely differently. So now I'm talking about how I woke up one morning, I be— I was hungry for breakfast, and so I went and started to make some eggs on my Stove, and halfway through making them, there's a loud noise on the wall from apparently inside my roommate Rob's bedroom. I don't know what this is. I ignore it and continue, and I'm about done making my tasty, healthy breakfast when all of a sudden this mad person, you know, comes storming out of Rob's bedroom, you know, ranting at me about how I'm being too loud when I'm—

Making breakfast.

I'm really just making eggs and maybe whistling or something. And I start engaging back. You know, I'm— next thing I know, I'm in an argument out of nowhere with little to no provocation on my end. And so that's the essay I wrote, the second essay, the one from my roommate Jim's perspective. And this might seem silly for people who take the perspective of other people more readily or have in their lives.

Mm-hmm.

But for me, this was like a pretty revelatory experience because I, for perhaps the very first time in my entire life, had really, really deeply and authentically taken the perspective of somebody else when it was hard. You know, when I was sure I was right, when I had a bunch of emotion and righteousness invested in my side, and I had gotten over that for the purposes of getting an A on this assignment in college and embraced the other person's perspective. And then I saw that they were right, you know, and I was wrong, or at least it was at least 80/20 that they were right.

Hmm.

That was a first. I was a kind of angry young man type around that time, as you can guess from the story. And that was a needed and revelatory lesson for me.

There's an emotional power to this exercise, which I'm not sure people might anticipate experiencing. But when you do this, it's not just that you start to see things from another person's point of view, but the story itself feels like an entirely different story.

That's exactly right, yeah. It's not just that you're getting out of your head into somebody else's, but you're accessing entirely different information, maybe. So as I'm simulating what it must be like to make breakfast, I'm in a completely different world now. I'm, you know, guessing at the experience that Jim's having, but I'm now seeing and hearing and thinking things that I couldn't have known, you know, when I was locked in my own perspective.

When someone believes the world revolves around them, we think they are selfish, unkind, or oblivious. Yet all of us are born with a subjective view of the world. It's only natural to see things from our own perspective. When we come back, the effects this has on our political conversations. And how understanding what happens inside our own minds is the first step to changing someone else's mind. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Quick question. Do people come to you for answers at work? Maybe you're managing projects, training new hires, or just the one everyone relies on. That's leadership. Through UVA Darden's Part-Time MBA in Rosslyn, we help professionals like you turn real-world experience into recognized leadership credentials without stepping away from your career. Whether you work in healthcare, education, government, or business, this is how you take the next step. Learn more at darden.virginia.edu/ptmba.

Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Think back to the last disagreement you had with someone. Maybe it was a fight with your partner or a coworker over the thermostat setting, or a more serious argument with a relative over politics. Did the disagreement go well, or did it end with both sides feeling frustrated and misunderstood? Chances are it's the latter. Rob Willer used to have many experiences like this. When he was a kid, his family moved from Kansas to South Carolina. It was something of a culture shock, and Rob was pretty sure that everyone around him had the world completely wrong.

I had grown up in, in Lawrence, Kansas, and my parents were super progressive secular folks, and I was living in this very progressive college town in Kansas, and then got splashed down in South Carolina in 1988, in Columbia, South Carolina. It was, it was a real shock to be suddenly, you know, in a middle school that had only been integrated less than 20 years earlier, uh, and in a place where the, you know, the scars of the Civil War, um, they're right on the surface. They're not far away.

Did you find yourself getting into arguments and conversations with people around you?

Yeah, for sure, for sure, uh, including with history teachers, with peers. I mean, to me, it was totally shocking to be taught a history of the Civil War that was just strikingly at odds with the one I was, you know, raised to understand.

In high school, you had a friend named Andy, and you would often get into arguments with him about the Confederate flag. How did these go? What did you try and do in these discussions with Andy?

Yeah, so the meaning of the Confederate flag was a topic of some debate in Columbia, South Carolina at this time because the Confederate flag was flying above our state capitol in Columbia. People would debate a lot. What did this mean? Was this okay? And I was inclined to debate just about anyone on this topic, and wound up debating with my friend Andy, who we were actually in on the debate team together. And I would, you know, advocate for how that flag needed to come down, that regardless of what people might associate with it, that it was, you know, a symbol of racism, of racial domination, and if it ever had a time, that time was certainly gone. on. And Andy would, you know, say the opposite. He'd say, that's not what it means to me, you know, and that's not what it means to the people I know and people in my family. It's a symbol of our history. And, you know, we lost the Civil War, and it's this, uh, this kind of sad thing deep in our history, and this is a way for us to maintain some, some pride around that. And then I would come back and say, well, but the flag went up there during racial integration battles in the 1960s. It didn't go up in the 18th, in the 19th century. And we would go back and forth in this way. And the thing is that I never convinced Andy even a little bit, or probably anyone else I ever debated on this subject.

I mean, it's almost like you were imagining that this was an actual debate where there was a judge, a neutral judge who would listen to both arguments and then decide which, which person had the better argument.

Exactly. A godlike figure that simply wasn't there. And I Got this idea in part because I was on the debate team and was, you know, every other weekend I was engaging in, you know, many, many debate rounds with people from all across the state. And so it wasn't ridiculous for me to think that a way to debate effectively would be to, to win on, on the facts, on the logic of your argument, and to destroy the other person's argument. Because in the culture and structure of high school debate, that was pretty much rewarded.

The other thing that I think is worth pointing out is that in a debate, you could get points for how passionate you are. So in other words, the more fervently you argue your point of view, that could tell a neutral judge, this person really cares about the argument, put in a lot of time and heart into the argument. I'm going to give a few more points for the passion that this person is demonstrating. Of course, this passion doesn't go very far when it comes to convincing our opponents as opposed to some neutral judge.

Yeah. And in a way, I think that while I really, really value the experience I had in debate of having to think really, really hard about holes in my opponent's argument, and then passionately and as logically as I could expose those holes and make stronger— make a stronger argument in response, I also was just like, weekend after weekend, year after year, getting my reps in on my perspective, you know, and, and how to prosecute it passionately and intensely. And I wasn't getting really any reps in on understanding someone else's perspective. So I was, you know, coming out of high school, I was, I was still on the ground floor on that journey.

When you get to Cornell University and you're in graduate school, you decide to try and organize students into a union, graduate students into a union, and you start to recruit people to the cause. I'm wondering if you can tell me how you went about doing this and whether you learned something different than your exploits as a high school debater.

Yeah, so this was a fascinating experience at a number of levels. So I was working as a union organizer, trying to organize graduate students on campus into a union for teaching assistants and research assistants. My position involved striking up conversations with graduate students and trying to get them involved and interested in the union. And sometimes I'd be going to the English department, sometimes I'd be going to the math department. So I remember on one occasion, I, you know, I go to the English department and I strike up a conversation with a woman who was a PhD student in English, and she was a Marxist theorist.

Rob quickly assumed that he would have no trouble persuading the young woman to join the union. She was a Marxist, and Karl Marx was surely the patron saint of the working class. But to his surprise, the conversation wasn't going well.

I'm explaining what we're trying to do, the benefits that it could offer graduate students in my view, and the evidence for unionization. I'm just making my case, but I can tell it's not connecting. She seems sort of distant, maybe about halfway through this kind of boilerplate spiel. And I was like, what do you think? You know, what do you think about all this? And she was like, well, I'm trying to think of this from a Marxist perspective. I'm kind of curious how Marx would think about this. And I was like, okay, that was not the conversation I thought I'd be in. but I can do this. Okay, so there's different Marxist views on union organizing. One is that it is just a band-aid you slap onto the status quo that only makes things look superficially better, but, you know, pushes off the inevitable communist revolution that's going to bring a utopian workers' collective to, you know, to power. There's another version of Marxian thinking that says, no, this is consistent with reforming capitalism and addressing the the harms of unregulated market economies and unions are actually really helpful, you know, and consistent with the Marxist critiques of the status quo. And I was like, I'm a little more of the latter persuasion, but I can understand either perspective. What do you think? And now we're talking about whether one should take a more extreme or more moderate version of a Marxist perspective on the union. And we get there, you know, she winds up being a supporter of the union, but For me, it was, you know, one of these initial experiences of figuring out, like, you're going to have to get into potentially a very different headspace, you know, in each conversation that might be an entirely different headspace in order to have productive conversations.

Rob managed to win over the Marxist, but it was an early signal to him that ultimately she didn't join the union Rob joined the union for his reasons. She joined the union for her reasons. Sometime later, Rob met another graduate student, this time in the math department.

We were losing math, you know, like we were doing badly in math and it was becoming a pretty anti-union department. And I was even hesitant to go back there just because I'd had bad experiences. And this Really nice advanced graduate student was like, hey, you want to go for a walk and we can talk about this? And I was like, yes, I would love to get out of this space and into another one. That'd be great. Because it was sort of intimidating because I had this sense that people maybe didn't want me there. So we go for a walk and we just very, very carefully go through all of the different reasons for and against unionization, the main ones. And one thing he's emphasizing is uncertainty and how whenever he's seen uncertainty left over, that he kind of has a conservative response. of not changing things too much 'cause things aren't going that badly for him. And so, you know, where he's not sure what would happen from unionization, that's kind of points on the board for the status quo.

But when he initially said that the status quo might be better, didn't you feel inclined to argue with him to sort of say, no, no, no, no, of course not, you're wrong?

Oh, definitely. So I would come back and say, yes, but there's pretty consistent empirical evidence that you're gonna get gains in wages and benefits here. You know, look at campuses X, Y, and Z. And he would come back like, Okay, but we also got a 3% raise last year. You know, we just got health insurance a couple years ago. So I kind of feel like in this case, the status quo is giving me what I need, and I don't know where all this extra money's gonna come from on campus. And at the end of the conversation, we basically agreed that we did disagree, but that we disagreed less than when we started, that he was a little more positive towards unionization, and that I was more respectful and understanding of why somebody wouldn't support it. In particular, based on this sort of risk calculation. We came to see each other's perspectives, and a key part of it was that I changed my mind a little bit in the conversation.

As a union organizer, Rob learned his goal wasn't to win a debate. It was to actually change someone's behavior.

It was definitely different from the kind of persuasion that I had been taught to embrace through high school debate, but it was way more effective. It was way more interested in the other person, and it was just really inclusive.

Mm-hmm.

You can't afford, when you're organizing a union, to write somebody off or write off their perspective or not try to have a productive conversation. You're trying to get everybody on board. And so there's a pragmatism to organize labor circles that I hadn't really encountered in my political background, which was more about debating, you know, for that mythical godlike neutral third party that just wasn't there.

One of the things that I'm observing from what you just said is that when we have debates with people and we argue with people, we're not actually just trying to have them come over to our side, to our point of view. We want them to come over to our point of view for our reasons. One of the things I'm picking up from your conversations with various people is that as you are talking to people, you were almost indifferent. If someone says, I'm going to weigh Marxist theory and figure out a path to join the union, great. If someone in the math department says, I'm going to do a cost-benefit analysis, and that's how I'm going to join the union, you're fine with that as well. So in some ways, you're less interested in the motivations and the reasons that people have and, as you said, much more pragmatic about the end goal.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I wasn't going to convince the English graduate student to not embrace critical Marxist theory. I wasn't gonna convince the math graduate student to be less analytical. Like, those were givens. I had maybe 30 minutes to go from where they're at to them seeing my perspective on this issue, or at least, you know, considering agreeing with me. And that meant meeting them where they were and paying them that respect.

Rob realized his first job in trying to persuade someone was not to marshal all the arguments at his disposal. It was to find some way to make a connection with the other person.

I think that for me, these conversations would go better if I had something I could tap into from my own background, my own personal experience, that would allow me to sort of build that bridge to their perspective. The way I often think about this is that, you know, that empathy or perspective-taking, it, it's like a bridge you build between people, and the blocks that you're using to build it are are pieces of your own experience. You can say, oh, you know, I know about Marxist theory too. Let's talk about this. You know, or, oh, I've actually engaged in a cost-benefit analysis on this too. You know, let me know what you think of what I did. Here's what I came up with. And when you've got those blocks, it goes a lot easier once you figure out where you need to be building towards.

That wasn't the hardest part, though. Rob realized that when he was trying to persuade people, He needed to have conversations with them, conversations where he wasn't doing all the talking.

It really is helpful to establish some sort of basic respect, a basic emotional connection of like, I'm respecting your perspective, and I have enough intellectual humility to be also listening to you. And also that I'm open to persuasion in this conversation as well. Because if you signal really early in the conversation that you're not open to changing their mind, you're asking a lot for the other person to be open to it. And if there isn't a power imbalance that dictates that they have to, they're gonna withhold that openness if you're not showing it as well.

There are many reasons it's hard to come across as open. When we care passionately about something, it becomes hard to see things from other points of view. The more we care, the harder it becomes to see that our perspective is just our perspective, not the only perspective. Second, many of us unconsciously assume that others know the same facts and information that inform our views. We forget other people have been exposed to different information, sometimes radically different information. To make things even more complicated, what our opponents believe is not just about the information they've received. Their beliefs are also shaped by their unconscious drives and motivations. If we don't know how they came to their positions, we might never understand why they believe what they believe.

That's right, yeah. And so if you're debating with somebody about an issue you disagree with them on where you'd like them to come over to your side, but your arguments are entirely in terms of your moral worldview, you know, your background, your ideology, your cultural perspective, and you're making those kinds of arguments, and they have a different background, a different ideology, you know, a different worldview, you're essentially asking them to really be someone they're not, you know?

Mm-hmm.

Like, to not just agree with you on the thing in question, but also to change their deeply held moral values, for example. But asking somebody to give up their moral values, You know, people are willing to fight and die for their values, right? Like, people really, really are invested in not changing their minds about, about that. So if the argument you're presenting to them requires them to change their values, you are taking on a much bigger task than just changing somebody's mind on minimum wage law.

Hmm.

And you could prosecute your case better if you made an argument that could fit with their values rather than challenge them.

So there's something of a dilemma here, Rob, which is when we feel really passionately about something, when we're really upset about something or we're in disagreement with someone— and that could be a romantic partner or a coworker or even a political opponent— the angrier and more upset we get, the harder it becomes for us to see things from another person's point of view. And you're saying that's precisely the point at which we need to see things from another person's point of view If we're going to have any effectiveness. There seems to be a real dilemma here, a paradox.

Yeah, I think there is. And it's a very difficult thing because it's exactly those people who are motivated to change the views of others who then have this motivation that can get in the way. Why? Because they can become angry at the person they're talking with. They can become impatient. And these are all understandable reactions. There's nothing wrong with feeling strongly about something. It's a good thing, I think. I feel strongly about a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff makes me angry, too. It's kind of, what do you do then? And what goal are you trying to pursue? And if the goal is persuading somebody, you may need to downregulate that emotional reaction and focus on getting into that person's head in order to construct an argument that would be persuasive to them.

We ran a recent episode featuring the research of the psychologist and neuroscientist Kurt Gray at the University of North Carolina. And he talked about the importance of moral humility. We talk a lot about intellectual humility, the idea that we may not know everything and that we might be wrong about the things we think we know. But moral humility is about emotionally accepting that the feelings of people who think differently from us are legitimate. You talk about this idea too. Tell me about your notion of moral empathy.

Yeah. So one thing that we find in our research is that people whose political worldviews are rooted in their moral values, who really deeply moralize their perspective on some political issue, they are the ones that especially struggle to understand the perspective of people who disagree with them and to understand that the most persuasive appeal would be one that might not be persuasive to them. That doesn't mean you're wrong if you have that kind of moral investment, but it does mean that it's going to be hard to connect.

Can you talk about sort of the role of our own emotions here? In some ways, partly, we're so angry and so upset and so outraged about things that it becomes very difficult for us to say, what do I have in common with these people on the other side of the barricades?

Yeah, so once you have a strong connection to your political identity, it becomes very easy for you to trigger this, for you to experience this emotionally laden frustration, even contempt for the people on the other side of the political divide, people that have a rival political identity. And when you realize you're in an interaction that is connected to those identities, you now import, and they may too, all of this baggage from all the thinking you've been doing about how frustrated you are with these other folks. And so you're not just having a conversation about, you know, school zoning or whatever you think you're discussing. You're bringing all this other stuff into it too. You're also thinking about gay rights, and you're also thinking about race in America, and maybe economic inequality. and immigration and what you saw last night on MSNBC or Fox News and what they probably saw. And once all that stuff is brought into the debate, things get really, really difficult to resolve in a constructive way.

Connection and moral empathy are prerequisites for persuasion. If you want to change hearts and minds, you have to understand what's in those hearts and minds to begin with. Most of us try to bypass this requirement, focusing only on what's inside our own heart and our own mind. When we come back, strategies we can all learn to become more persuasive. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France business cabin offers comfort throughout the journey with priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on— the versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order, and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the 13th century, the Italian mystic Saint Francis of Assisi offered up a prayer. In it, he said it was more important to understand others than to be understood by others. It was good advice 800 years ago, and it turns out to be good advice today. And not just from a spiritual point of view, it turns out to be psychologically insightful when it comes to our ability to influence others. At Stanford University, Rob Willer studies the psychology of persuasion. Rob, we've looked at how we are often ineffective when we try to ram our ideas down other people's throats. But you've run experiments where you measure what effects forceful arguments have in helping us to recruit allies. Can you tell me about this work?

Yeah, so some of the work that we've done on this has focused on the tactics used by activists that are agitating for social change on some kind of a cause. And what we found in our experiments is that people tend to have negative reactions to what we describe as extreme protest tactics. So this would be like the destruction of property, You know, extreme disruption of you know the flow of everyday life for people, and certainly the use of violence. So when activists engage in even a relatively small amount of of this form of activist behavior, it tends to put people off. So observers who are kind of watching protesters trying to figure out how should they position themselves on this issue, will they be persuaded by the protesters or not? When they see those kinds of tactics, they tend to. view the protesters as less moral. They disidentify with them, and they not only are not influenced by them, they can exhibit a sort of negative influence pattern where they turn away from the positions and policy platforms of protesters.

So in one study, you posed a scenario about animal rights protesters. Volunteers read an excerpt that said activists had broken into a cosmetics testing lab, drugged a security guard, ransacked the place, and spray-painted messages on the walls of the building. They also freed hundreds of animals. How did volunteers respond to this story?

So volunteers were turned off by activists who engaged in these extreme— I mean, this is in some ways just about the most extreme activist tactics we've ever presented to participants in studies. They were turned off, saw these activists as more extreme, and turned away from animal rights as a cause that they supported. However, if those same activists were portrayed In another condition of the experiment, as not engaging in these sort of violent tactics, but instead engaging in, you know, peaceful, nonviolent resistance, the reaction was very different. They were not seen as extreme, and it didn't lead to this negative influence effect.

So in other words, people were not rejecting the activists because they necessarily disagreed with the cause, but because they disagreed with the methods.

That's right. And we've tried really hard in this research to, whenever possible, control for the message, control for what policies are being advocated for by activists and only experimentally study and vary how they're making their case, what sorts of tactics they're engaging in, because that's the thing that we were interested in.

So in another study, you had some volunteers read about a Black Lives Matter protest. Some volunteers heard activists protesting against racism. Others heard about activists who used a chant in an actual protest. I want to play you a little clip.

Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon.

Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon.

Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon.

The protesters are saying, pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon, a derogatory reference to police as pigs. Now, saying angry things about the police doesn't seem as extreme as drugging a security guard, but what effect did this language have on potential allies?

So in this research, we found that that kind of language had a similar effect, just in terms of also creating this negative influence effect. It wasn't as large of an effect, if I recall correctly, but it did tend to turn observers away from the cause of police reform.

It seems that there's a dilemma here in some ways, which is that I think protesters feel, just like we often feel in interpersonal arguments, that the more passionately we make our argument, the more likely we are to persuade someone else. I think at the level of groups, we also believe that the more passionately we pursue our cause, the more likely we are not just to convince our opponents, but to attract allies to our cause. And I think your research is suggesting that that might not always be the case.

Yeah, that's right. We call it the activist dilemma to really describe these many dilemmas that activists face in trying to take effective action in the world. We found that when we surveyed a small sample of self-identified activists, that they tended to think that the more extreme protest tactics would be more persuasive to bystanders, not less persuasive as our research had found. Why did they think that? Well, perhaps because those protest tactics matched their own, you know, viscerally felt, you know, motivations better. And so for them, that was maybe a more relatable set of protest actions. And so you say, oh yeah, that'll be more persuasive. reaction makes sense. That's how you should protest this issue that's totally outrageous. And that's not to say they're wrong. They may be very right about the flaws of the status quo. I tend to agree with many, many activists on these things. But the challenge is that certain tactics do turn off potential supporters in a way that can be, on the whole, counterproductive for a cause.

You say that one way to become more effective at persuasion is to employ something that you call moral reframing. And you've run studies where you test the effectiveness of messages that use moral reframing. Can you explain what it is and what the studies have found?

Sure, yeah. So moral reframing involves recasting an argument for a political position that you're advocating for in terms of the moral values of the people that you're talking with. And so this might seem incredibly intuitive, like, of course you should frame your argument in terms of the values of the person you're trying to persuade. You know, after all, if you were Trying to sell a car, let's say, you would talk about the value of the car, uh, for the person you're trying to sell the car to. You, you know, you talk about its reliability, you talk about its good features. You wouldn't talk about how excited you were to get their money and all the stuff you wanted to spend it on. You would easily transcend your perspective to get into the perspective of the recipient.

Uh-huh.

Uh, but with politics and, you know, religion, these things that we have deep moral investment in, we really struggle to do this.

I'm wondering if you can give me some examples of ways that people on different sides of the political spectrum— pick a couple of hot-button issues— what are ways in which people can speak to someone from the other side using the moral frameworks of their opponents rather than their own moral frameworks?

Sure, yeah. So one of the first issues that we took on with this research was same-sex marriage. And we were interested in whether the typical arguments for same-sex marriage that are made that are in terms of values like social justice, fairness, equality, that maybe they're not as persuasive as they could be with conservatives because they don't, uh, they don't target deeply held conservative values. And maybe you could make more persuasive arguments that tapped into things like loyalty and patriotism, these more like uniquely conservative values. And so we tested this by presenting conservatives with either fairness and equality-based arguments, um, on, you know, in support of same-sex marriage, or these, these very different arguments in terms of patriotism. Uh, so this argument said things like same-sex couples are proud and patriotic Americans, they share the same basic hopes and desires as all Americans, like other proud Americans, gay couples peacefully build lives together, buy homes, and contribute to the American economy and society. And what we found was that conservatives who heard that patriotism and loyalty-based argument were more supportive of same-sex marriage afterwards. It reduced polarization on same-sex marriage and in favor of the liberals' position on it.

Rob also tested his strategy of moral reframing on the other side of the aisle. He gave liberals an argument about increased military spending. But this argument wasn't a traditional one about patriotism and protecting our borders. Rob and his colleagues presented an argument that focused on more stereotypically liberal values like equality and social justice.

And it said things like, through the military, the disadvantaged and the poor can achieve equal standing. And being in the military means having a reliable salary and a future apart from the challenges of extreme poverty and inequality. And so This argument really tried to say that you could see the military as a vehicle for upward mobility for people that struggle to access the kinds of resources and experience that they can gain through the military. It's the kind of argument that might persuade a liberal, and we found that when liberals heard this argument, they supported high levels of military spending more.

I'm wondering whether you ever get pushback on this, Rob. Do people who feel very passionately say, Rob Willer is telling me that I need to tone down what it is that I'm saying, that I need to actually look at things from the point point of view of my opponents, and these are people whom I not only disagree with, these are people whom I despise.

Right. Yeah. No, we've definitely gotten pushback on this research. I think sometimes people mistake my motivation as one that's critical of your average protester or activist or is interested in doing tone policing, and it's really not the motivation that brings me to the research. I am very interested in what kinds of tactics and strategies for achieving social change are more or less effective. And I'm also, you know, really interested in ways in which it can be really complicated and more complicated than you might think from just reading, like, our first paper on extreme protest tactics.

Some years ago, Rob had the chance to put his own research to the test. He was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and had parked his car on campus while he went on a trip to the East Coast. The morning after he flew back to California, Rob went to retrieve his car from the parking lot. There was just one problem. He couldn't find it.

And I could not remember if I had even driven it the day before because I was kind of tired and running errands, and I just wasn't sure where my car was and whether it had been stolen or whether I had just left it somewhere. And the car was so old and, you know, just run down that it seemed unlikely it was stolen, you know. Uh, it seemed more likely I had left it somewhere, even though that's a very spacey thing to do. And I remember I went to like the local grocery store and I was like, hey, did you guys tow a car from this parking lot by any chance? And the person was like, you're telling me you don't remember if you parked your car here yesterday? You know.

The absent-minded professor here.

Yeah, I'd use that crutch, you know, of like, yeah, yeah, you know, absent-minded. You know, they're like, oh yeah, I had a roommate that was like you. And I was like, could you just tell me if you towed the car? You know?

They hadn't towed the car. Rob had no idea where it had gone, and he had little time to think about it. He was scheduled to teach a class in Germany for a week and a half. Rob went on his trip and reported the car stolen, planning to take care of it when he got back. But when he returned home, he discovered that the police had been trying to contact him. The stolen car had been found and had been dropped off at an impound lot in Oakland. Rob hitched a ride with a friend and went to the lot.

And it's just this kind of Mad Max dystopian scene, you know, like all these cars are, like, falling apart and it's all barbed wire and it's very Razor wire. It's very intense. And I go in, there's behind, like, 2 inches of bulletproof glass is this person that's working at the impound lot. And I ask him, you know, about my car. He's like, yeah, we've got your car.

Rob's car was in terrible shape. It was falling apart, missing a catalytic converter. And for some reason, there was an empty bucket in the backseat. Rob had no time to ask questions. He was ready to leave the automotive purgatory. But when he went to fill out his paperwork, the clerk delivered some bad news. Rob owed $600, the fee for holding his decrepit car at the lot for days on end.

It just doesn't seem fair. You know, like, I was out of the country. I don't know if this helps at all. And he's like, yeah, it's going to be $600. And I was like, you could keep the car. Would you keep the car? Would that be— would that neutralize my debt? Because it's— to me, it's not worth $600, especially in this condition. And I remember the guy was like, Yeah, we'll keep your car, but you would still owe us $600.

Rob's blood was boiling. He felt the way he did all those years ago, an exhausted young restaurant worker angry at his roommate for intruding on his sleep. But this time, instead of throwing a shoe, Rob stopped. He thought for a moment. He considered what it might be like On the other side of that bulletproof glass.

And so I asked him, I was like, what percentage of people, like, freak out right now in this conversation? And he said, like, 70% of people. And I was like, cool, all right. You know, the reason I was interested in that was because at this time I was teaching Introduction to Social Psychology, and I was giving this essay assignment to, you know, hundreds of students every year. But it also made me very interested in, you know, what— at what rate do people make the right choice here, you know? And, uh, and when he said 70%, I was like, okay, I'm gonna do my best to not be in that group, you know? And I turned to my friend and we started trying to strategize. What are we gonna do? You know, like, is my car drivable? If it's not drivable, could we sell it from the parking lot? of the impound lot. You know, like, what, what are we gonna do, uh, to solve this dilemma? And, and the guy behind the glass starts looking up, like, the Blue Book value for the car and, and quoting us, you know, uh, what we could expect and giving advice on towers. And it's, like, really helping us. And I was like, oh, wow, you know, like, some of this is because we connected when I didn't do the easy thing that I was so emotionally tempted to do of unfairly going off on this guy. Uh, And downregulated that and was a decent person instead. And he reciprocated it and was really decent back. And it was me learning this lesson even a little bit more.

And what happened to the car eventually?

Yeah, I donated it to charity. But yeah, it— you know, it was so easy to break into. It was surprising that it had taken that long to be actually stolen.

Yeah.

And also they had left my San Francisco Giants foam finger in the car. I guess they were A's fans.

When Rob Willer is not negotiating with people about impounded cars, he's a sociologist at Stanford University. Rob, thanks so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Absolutely.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Next week in our Us 2.0 series, when we are fighting with someone, we're often tempted to tell them to take a walk. New research suggests we should take that walk with them.

Moving together, side by side with one another, across our differences, there's increasing evidence that that helps us make connections.

I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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