The Art of Political Persuasion

David Hume and speaking to the affections

Thomas Kuhn and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The idea of the "paradigm"

Paradigms determine perceptions as well as interpretations.

Paradigms consist of concepts and the relationships.

Paradigms are associated with a unique vocabulary, which carries those concepts.

But the same word can have different meanings in different paradigms
- (e.g. mass in Newtonian physics vs. Einstein's physics or justice in politics).

The Incommensurability of Paradigms

- (The classic examples from physics)

Incommensurability of Paradigms
- Linguistic example: "home"

Paradigms determine how you perceive as well as how you understand.

The example of "should": Judeo-Christian vs. Confucian.

Accompanying reading: Amid trade fight, Trump says China will do "right thing"

Goethe

Knowledge precedes perception - not the other way around.

Perceptions of Incongruity experiment

All reasoning is motivated.

We are wired to see the world in ways that reinforce our current paradigms.

Example from the media: "Iran Test Fires Missile Can Reach Israel"

Media reflect prevailing paradigm more than they reflect "ground truth".

Paradigms are self-reinforcing (even when wrong).

Kuhn: "When paradigms change... the world changes with them."

Paradigms are soft-wired (sticky).

Soft-wiring

Political persuasion involves changing perception - not just interpretation.

Left vs. Right is the prevailing political paradigm.

This paradigm tacitly - and wrongly - assumes that the views of "Progressives" and "Conservatives"

1. Cover All Space,

2. Oppose each other,

3. See next video!

Left vs. Right cont.

1... See preceding video.

2... See preceding video.

3. Left and Right seem to be the same things - directions or sides. They aren't.

Psychologically, most on the Left aren't experiencing politics in the same way as those on the Right.

Left and Right talk past each other.

Left-wing people are more likely to see right-wing people as bad, whereas right-wing people are more likely to see left-wingers not as bad but as wrong.

Broadly, left-wing politics are more moral (politics of "good intention"); right-wing politics are more functional.

We judge those in another paradigm from within our own paradigm, and so we fail to address them in a way that speaks to the reason why they have the position they have.

This one is complicated. Each sentence counts. Watch this unit a few times.

Most reasoning and even perceptions of the world are motivated.

This is most true in politics.

Many things are at stake when it comes to forming (or changing) our political views. E.g.

- Understanding of self
- Positive experience of self
- Value of time and energy I've spent on things I care about
- Relationships with others

So political persuasion involves a lot more than just changing someone's opinion about something "in isolation".

Judgment is not justification.

Persuasion requires us to "hack" the process by which judgments are formed.

Westen's experiment on motivated reasoning in political psychology

Political judgments are primarily driven by

Emotional reaction to the source of the judgement (e.g. the person who is asserting it),
Need to resolve cognitive dissonance,
Judgments about moral accountability of the source of the judgement,
The pleasure (dopamine hit) of resolving dissonance;
NOT logic.

Hume was right.

Data show that most of the time, trust in one's political tribe (the team with which you identify) overrides consistency of political view

- (c.f. judgments about moral accountability in Westen's experiment).

Doing politics well is doing psychology.

Political persuasion is - like it or not - a form of sales and marketing.

Winning a supporter involves opening a mind enough to an argument
- That's harder than just making the perfect argument.

Your justification for your view is not how you arrived at your view, and is almost always unpersuasive.

I.e. Justifications don't bring us to judgments as much as the other way around.

Haidt's bar: "Must I believe this?" (high) vs. "Can I believe this?" (low)

How all politics are the politics of identity. If I identity with you,
- I trust how you see the world,
- I trust your motivations that determine your responses to the world.

Don't do zero-sum games. (You have to be wrong because I am right.)

Do solve shared problems, so reformulate the argument as a shared problem. (Homework.)

Don't impugn integrity, character or intelligence.
- To do so is to disrespect, which gets you disrespected, which eliminates your ability to persuade.

"Seek first to understand before being understood."
"Shut up for long enough to let the "customer" tell you how to sell him."

Taking the trouble to understand someone increases your respect for them, which makes you more effective at persuading.

Think of persuasion more like an offering than an attack - helping someone better understand her own beliefs than on forcing what you believe into her paradigm.

An ironic caution for libertarians.

Making common ground explicit builds identification and trust.

Common ground has many levels - political goals, cultural, emotional, human experience.

If possible, don't go to the dispute until you've established trust and respect.

Reframe disputes as statements of a shared goal. Then you can be on the same side and go in the same direction toward it.

Reflect back what someone is feeling, rather than telling him what he should think.

Example of Trump: "the Mexicans are not sending their best people."

In campaigning, it is very powerful to reflect back a feeling of many people that is not being reflected back by any of the political mainstream. (This is how you make a successful political insurgency. Read How To Win Elections Out of Nowhere .)

Example of Sanders: "Unfair distribution of income and wealth."

Reflecting feelings of unfairness is particular powerful.

(Read As Sanders and Trump Push the Right Buttons, the Liberty Movement Must Wake Up .)

Speak to the Injustice.

The example of Brexit

A political "open goal"
- a problem that offends many people's sense of fairness (unmediated by ideology) and that is being exacerbated by all other political options/parties.

Political allegiance doesn't generally follow agreement on the issues. It's actually the other way around!

Quote someone whom your target already trusts to make the idea safe to him.

Ideas are safer to people if communicated in their favored vocabulary.

Doing so
- establishes respect,
- affirms motivation,
- subverts your expectation of me as "one of that tribe I don't trust/like/agree with".

The example of "social justice"

You can use a word without assuming the meaning assigned to it by your opponent.

Don't be typical of your tribe if talking to someone of an opposing tribe.

Don't step on a "mine of persuasion" or "identity mine".

Subvert whatever expectation your opponent will have of you as a political opponent.

A good way to do that is to use humor.
- Subverts the expectation of an experience of antagonism,
- At that moment, you're not having the experience of a zero-sum argument,
- Humanizes.

Asking questions is offering, not forcing.

Questions allow people to have the experience of arriving at your idea for themselves.

People are much more likely to commit to your idea if they have that experience.

The brain handles "one's own stuff" (including ideas) differently from "other people's stuff" (including ideas).

Questions are not propositions and so cannot be objected to.

Questions should have premises that appeal to the opponent but lead her to your answers.

When You've Made the Sale, Stop.

Interview with Grover Norquist

"There's a majority for "libertarianism" at the ballot box" ?!
- On several vote-moving issues, many people want to be left alone.

Rule of Thumb: Don't offer an opinion until you're asked for it.

Sell a Direction, Not a Destination.

Penn Jillette's question: "Could we solve this problem by increasing freedom rather than reducing it?"
- Direction of universal appeal,
- No ideology is required to begin the journey/question,
- Collaborative, not combative,
- Is humble and so invites humility.

"You've got to give some to get some."

A destination almost always involves a piece that the person you're talking to can't accept.

But you can almost always agree on the destination.

Since you can't get to your ideal political end point in one go, why insist on arguing for it when you don't need agreement on it to get agreement on the political action you want to see happen now?

Art of political persuasion involves deep humility.

Formulate your statement, and order your content, so that it is about - speaks to - the concern that motivates your opponent.

Example of selling free market principles to a progressive

Example of the welfare state.

Be explicit about sharing moral motivation.

Be non-ideological.

Use words and expressions that refer to what your opponent cares about.

Outflank them on their own side - not your own.

Speak to the shared problem: positive-sum, not zero-sum.

You already do this.

You'd only speak French to a monolingual Frenchman

Political persuasion is more like getting a date than winning a debate.

Assess the effectiveness of your statements using the metrics consistent with "will I get the date" rather than "will I win the debate".

Judgment formation is largely based on identities

Justification is largely based on arguments.

In a sense, all politics are the politics of identity - inasmuch as they come down to the answer to the question, "do I identify with this person?"

Most people don't hold their views in the way you do.

If you maintain a political worldview consciously, specifically, deliberately, don't assume others do too. (Most don't.)

Just because someone else has a cluster of political opinions that makes her more or less comfortable with a political label, that doesn't mean that s/he is as committed to the corresponding worldview (or even knows what it is) in the same way you are.

So don't create a problem that doesn't exist.

Libertarians are psychologically closer to progressives (both high in openness and low in conscientiousness) than they are to conservatives (low in openness and high in conscientiousness).

However, they differ from progressives by being higher in rationality and lower in empathy.

Since empathy enables you to understand and respond to people's passions, and passion dominates reason (as per Hume), this makes political persuasion particularly difficult for libertarians.

Seeing that something is so is different from reasoning why it is so.

Emotions and intuition are, like rationality, information-processing systems.

Everyone has a story that has brought them to their current beliefs.

If your path were different, so would be your beliefs. And that path was not one of deduction, but of lived experience.

Doxastically closed (high bar to changing mind) vs. doxastically open (low bar to changing mind)

People will be more open to your claims if they
- trust how you experience the world
- trust your motivations, which determine how you respond to your experience of the world.

People tend to rationalize in ways that enable them to maintain appealing moral identities in their community.

These are bound up with
- friendships,
- other relationships,
- credibility,
- perceived intelligence.

New political opinion can threaten those.

Silenced majority reflects this fact.

Reputation is always online.

We're soft-wired, thanks to dopamine, to stay believing what we believe.

Political identity depends on
- Shared inner experience,
- Shared moral motivations.

What you talk about signifies identity more than does your opinion.

Choose a topic that signifies political identity.

Often, political identities are fundamentally cultural identities, which are just justified using political arguments.

Example of gun culture and 2A

Politics can be a conscious expression of a cultural division, born out of judgements formed for all kinds of (non-political) reasons.

Example of gay adoption

An abstract argument doesn't change presently lived experience.

So form relationships, rather than have arguments, where possible.

Relationships
- close the cultural gaps that seem like political ones,
- teach you how to speak to them more persuasively about your views.

Listen for experiences, not just arguments.

When you're appealing to self-interest, remember that it is typically dominated by the interest of the group with which the person identifies.

The triplet game shows that we test things we think by trying to confirm them.

The brain favors what it already has: so we look for reinforcement of what we believe.

We must remember that when we seek to persuade.

Moral axes

The most universal:

Care vs. Harm
Justice vs. Injustice - esp. important (see later)
Freedom vs. Oppression

Less universal:

Loyalty vs. Disloyalty
Authority vs. Subversion
"Sacredness" e.g. flag, religious book, "the environment"

The asymmetry of left and right.

Liberals, Conservatives, and Libertarians live in different moral universes.

Liberals most concerned with Care vs. Harm
Conservatives most concerned with Fairness vs. Unfairness
Libertarians most concerned with Liberty vs. Oppression

Liberals vs. Conservatives = Care vs. Fair

Fairness means different things to Liberals vs. Conservatives vs. Libertarians

For Liberals, equality is an important corollary for fairness

Only Conservatives are really concerned with loyalty and deference to authority as inherently moral.

Different groups sacralize different things.

Experiment of 60 sentences

We have a moral gut reaction to statements before we have even worked out what they mean, proving the system that reacts favorably or unfavorably isn't the one that understands.

Progressives: moral universe has two dimensions - care vs. harm and fairness vs. unfairness

Conservatives: moral universe has all six dimensions.

Must formulate messages to moral universe of target audience.

E.g. If talking to progressives, formulate positions as statements of care (especially toward those who may be experiencing harm). (Homework)

E.g. If you're talking to conservatives, must formulate positions as statements of fairness (and other dimensions)

A healthy society needs both types, and evolution has selected for both.

The ultimatum game

People will hurt themselves materially to correct a perceived injustice.

Empirical basis of political insurgency etc.

Q,v. Trump, Sanders, Farage

Power to Take Game

Humans are so strongly disposed to "justice" that they will not only pay a price to get it: they will also cause others to pay a price to get it.

Individual human nature is directly reflected in many important policies whose imposition on society we support.

Third-Party Punishment Game

People pay to punish unfairness in interactions even between strangers.

Perceived "Justice" depends on one's position/perspective, though.

(C.f. progressive taxation)

Empathy affects desire for justice and willingness to pay to punish an injustice.

Public Goods Game

Cooperation skyrockets when people start punishing for violating their preferred "fairness" norms.

As with so many things, we get what we incentivize when it comes to cooperation.

Coercion serves cooperation, which actually serves self-interest.

I.e. Individuals in community choose collective coercion for individual benefit.

Concern with justice provides the firmest moral common ground.

All people react strongly to perceived injustice.

Many (including recent) political insurgencies harness this.

Political persuasion is effective when it addresses shared injustice.

Fairness of outcomes can be in tension with fairness of means.

Example of inheritance

This tension is important to understanding difference between Left vs. Right.

Left vs. Right also reflects fundamental the moral tension Care vs. Fair.

Political moral sweet spot: attack unfairness without being uncaring.

Example of bank bailouts

Fairness moves all of us, but comes in different flavors.

Example of free trade

Progressives morally judge outcomes in light of inputs, applying principle of proportionality, independently of how inputs are turned into outputs.

Consider equality as special case of proportionality (fairness) with equal inputs.

Meaning of "fairness" varies among paradigms.

Group identities are often formed around a sacralized thing or idea.

Rationality is suspended around "the sacred", in relation to which special behaviors are exhibited.

The sacred thing or idea can become the thing around which no dissent is tolerated.

Special care must be taken when discussing someone's "sacred". If in any doubt, lay off!

The most dangerous mines to tread on in persuasion are sacred topics. Touch one and the attempt to persuade likely blows up.

A proportion of the Left sacralizes victim groups.

Sacralization of victim groups is causing people not to speak up.

A proportion of the Right sacralizes the flag.

Find out your opponent's sacred!