Writing to Persuade: How to Bring People Over to Your Side - Trish Hall 2019

The power of moral values
The psychology of persuasion

Arthur Brooks is a passionate Christian and a passionate capitalist who believes that free markets are the best way to lift up all people, especially the poor. But he understands that in some quarters, his endorsement of capitalism makes him suspect. And, when he was a regular opinion contributor to The New York Times, he knew there were many liberals in that audience who probably disagreed with him on most matters.

During the time I edited his monthly column, while Arthur was president of the American Enterprise Institute, I was always impressed by his ability to find common ground. Here’s a good example: When he decided to write a column about the lack of conservative faculty on American campuses, he didn’t call liberals hypocrites for rejecting conservatives from jobs. He warmed up his audience.

He aligned himself with the typical liberal conviction that diversity is a good thing. Although I suspect he does this intuitively, he followed all the rules of persuasion: he empathetically established a bond with his audience, showed that he cared about the same things, and then introduced an idea that, based on that shared value system, should resonate with the audience.

He kind of tricked them, though. After establishing that they all wanted the same thing, he quoted a new study that found that for every politically conservative social psychologist in academia, there are about fourteen liberal social psychologists. He wrote that the study’s researchers found evidence of discrimination and hostility within academia toward conservative researchers and their viewpoints. And in one survey, an overwhelming 79 percent of social psychologists admitted they would be less likely to support hiring a conservative colleague than a liberal scholar with equivalent qualifications.

That was a smart move by Arthur, because it played on a core moral value of liberals: fairness. So what is the liberal reader to do? Say it’s okay to discriminate against conservatives? Not likely. It’s impossible to know how many minds Arthur changed with that article, but I can cite at least one: my own. That clever combination of playing on a moral value and then showing how it was not being applied made me see the matter in a new way.

In that essay, Arthur used one of the most important tactics in persuasion: address your audience from the perspective of their values and morals, not yours. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of moral perspectives. Some research suggests that your morals and values influence your ideas and your votes more than gender, race, wealth, education, or party affiliation.

People have strong feelings about what makes a good life and a good society, and they support viewpoints that confirm those feelings. If you don’t understand the moral framework of your audience, you can’t be convincing. You can’t expect someone to change their basic values, so you have to make your argument in a way that fits with their values.

Liberals and conservatives are associated with different moral values. In general, liberals endorse equality and fairness while conservatives support loyalty, patriotism, respect for authority, and moral purity. Republicans are associated with the sacred and Democrats with the secular, with material interests. Some psychologists trace the value differences to parenting, arguing that strict parenting and personal insecurity turn people against liberality and diversity. For conservatives, equality and personal autonomy are less important than the values of the families and family roles.

Sociologists have found that arguments are more likely to be accepted when they are framed in a way that comports with the moral values of the audience. But doing that is challenging. People typically present their arguments from their own moral perspectives because they don’t know any other way to persuade. It takes a real leap to put yourself inside the head of your audience and thoroughly take on its perspective.

Robb Willer, a professor at Stanford, and Matthew Feinberg, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, did numerous studies showing that people are more likely to accept arguments framed to acknowledge their values. Their studies showed how tough it is for people to make an argument from their audience’s point of view.

When Willer and Feinberg asked liberals to write a persuasive argument for same-sex marriage that would convince a conservative, and offered a cash prize, only 9 percent of them made their case by appealing to conservative values. They wrote from their own values of fairness. If they had wanted to persuade conservatives, they should have emphasized values like patriotism and group loyalty, saying for instance that “same-sex couples are proud and patriotic Americans.” Conservatives had the same blind spot. When asked to write an argument to a liberal audience in favor of making English the official U.S. language, only 8 percent of them could do it using the moral framework of liberals; 59 percent based their argument on conservative values.

In a similar experiment, Willer and Feinberg wanted to see what it would take to persuade liberals to support greater military spending. One message argued that we should “take pride in our military.” The other argued that military spending is necessary because through the military, poor and disadvantaged people can “achieve equal standing” and escape poverty. Liberals were much more likely to support more spending if they read the message about fairness than the one appealing to patriotism.

Values like these have major consequences in politics and public life. George Lakoff, for many years a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (2004), argues that Republicans have been much smarter than Democrats about marketing and reaching people through their moral values. Lakoff believes Democrats have suffered for their conviction that facts are the route to persuasion, a point of view embodied in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Progressives, he says, need to make their messages positive, reinforce what they are saying, and avoid helping those with whom they disagree. Lakoff describes that process as changing the frame through which people view an issue or an argument.

Here’s how George Lakoff would change the framing of a message:

When anti-immigrant politicians say: “Immigrants are [negative label].”

Respond by saying: “Immigrants are [positive label].”

Examples: “Immigrants are our neighbors.” “Immigrants are our families.” “Immigrants are our heroes.”

Never say: “Immigrants are not [negative label].”

The same goes for environmental issues.

When fossil fuel companies say: “Coal is [positive label].”

Respond by saying: “Coal is [negative label].”

Examples: “Coal is dirty.” “Coal is dangerous.” “Coal is harmful.”

Never say: “Coal is not [positive label].”

Always say what you believe, directly. Whatever the issue or argument at hand, remember that the word not generally ensures you will repeat your opponent’s argument and make it more likely to stick in the brains of your listeners.

To reach people, he writes, Democrats need to change the words they use. For instance, if they stopped saying “federal regulations” about the government’s role in assuring air and water quality and instead started saying “federal protections,” conservatives might be more drawn to that image of the protecting father and family. Or, they might stop talking about taxes and instead discuss what taxes are for—say, “investments in public resources,” so that people would understand that the government pays for what we all use—schools, roads, bridges, courts, and the like.

Is it shocking that liberals and conservatives approach the world with different values? It shouldn’t be. Look at the people you’re trying to reach, and put yourself where they are. Thinking about what they care about, as Arthur did with his article on discrimination against conservatives in faculty appointments, will help you have a better chance of changing a mind or two.