Writing to Persuade: How to Bring People Over to Your Side - Trish Hall 2019
What really changes people
The psychology of persuasion
It’s tough to define exactly what transforms the way someone sees the world.
I can only look at my own life and guess at what made me shift away from my Republican family and adopt viewpoints that were different from theirs.
I had grown up feeling perpetually guilty about the inequality that confronted me. My mother had always had a housekeeper. Until she married my stepfather when I was fourteen, I never saw her do any domestic work, and yet I grew up in a house where the beds were made with crisp corners, light summer blankets were topped with perfectly ironed monogrammed covers, and silver was always polished. My mother worked in her family’s business, but I didn’t know what she did there, and she rarely talked about it.
Who was doing all that housework? It was Margaret Weiss, who we called Margie. She had started college but had to drop out when her family lost its money during the Depression. She had wanted to be a home economics teacher. Instead she became a housekeeper, first for my mother’s parents and then for my mother.
Watching my mother and Margie taught me lessons that have stayed with me. One, hard work doesn’t always pay. Margie had free room and board and earned a pittance. My mother also had free room and board, just by being born into a certain family. Two, money doesn’t guarantee happiness. Margie was happy. I knew her throughout her life, long after she stopped working for my mother. Thanks to her three successful children, she had a nice retirement. My mother, until she married a second time, always seemed discontented.
I was emotionally primed to become someone who did not believe that we all make our own lives through our own skill and hard work. To be a liberal.
How does change happen for others? My friend Arthur Brooks was born into a liberal family in Seattle and evolved into a conservative Catholic. It’s as if he and I switched places politically, and yet we have similar values and I admire him unreservedly.
Arthur’s conversion to Catholicism began when he was fifteen and visited the shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe during a school trip to Mexico. He looked up at the image of the Blessed Virgin and felt like Mary was appearing to him. A few months later, he started the conversion process in Seattle.
His Protestant parents weren’t thrilled; but they figured Catholicism was probably better than drugs, which he had started using in eighth grade. His next conversion was professional. In his mid-twenties, Arthur was a bohemian and a musician living in Barcelona, holding progressive political views: “I fancied myself a social justice warrior and regarded capitalism with a moderately hostile predisposition. I ’knew’ what everyone knows: Capitalism is great for the rich but terrible for the poor,” he wrote in an article for America magazine when describing his two conversions.
But when Arthur resumed his college education by taking correspondence courses, he learned while studying economics that 2 billion people had escaped poverty in his lifetime. What’s more, virtually all development economists agreed, that feat had been accomplished through globalization, free trade, property rights, the rule of law, and the culture of entrepreneurship. He became an acolyte for the American free enterprise system. He quit music, got a PhD in policy analysis, and taught economics and social entrepreneurship before taking over at American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank that promotes capitalism.
We met because I was looking for conservative voices for the Op-Ed page, and he offered to have coffee with me. Instantly I was taken with his warmth, his brain, and his ability to write without jargon and obfuscation.
I’m interested in what changes people. I’ve asked a lot of them whether they can identify something they believe that they didn’t always believe, and asked them to tell me what changed them. Many people can’t think of anything. Their ideas become so much a part of them that they can’t remember when or how changes happened.
I can think of cases where I was influenced by facts, but most of the changes I’ve experienced have been gradual. Shortly after moving to New York, I completely adopted the idea shared by my friends that rent control and rent stabilization were a good thing and the only way to keep apartments affordable in the city. But when I became friends with an economics professor at NYU, I found that he had a different perspective. He thought the regulations were unfair because they didn’t help people with the least amount of money; they helped people who happened to get to the city first, and then discouraged them from moving. They were imprisoned by their good deals. I was intrigued and began to think about what he had said—that poor people weren’t the intended beneficiaries of rent supports—when my other friends brought up the rent issue. I didn’t change my opinion overnight, but I did start to look at it in a more nuanced way.
Social science researchers, and philosophers before them, have some idea of what changes people, but they don’t expect simple steps or instant results. Sometimes change has to occur in person, person by person. Sometimes change is spread through the media, rapid and astonishing, like the “me too” moment that is putting sexual harassment and the work lives of women in front of the nation and ending the careers of many powerful men.
Here are some of the top takeaways on what works, from decades of research and studies by multiple experts in the field.
Some of the suggestions based on academic research apply only in one-on-one discussions—when you might, for instance, want to get your wife to do a better job of picking up her clothes—whereas others will work in writing or speaking. Some of these ideas have been touched on directly or indirectly in preceding chapters, but I think it’s helpful to have them in one list.
What Experts Find Persuasive
Give someone something. If you can figure out what people desire and make sure they get it, they’ll be much more likely to give you what you want. Even a small gift makes people more likely to do what you want them to do. People like to get presents, and they want to reciprocate. That’s why we had such strict rules at the Times and the Journal forbidding us from accepting gifts. I remember receiving a gorgeous smoked duck at the Journal; the gift was impossible to send back, so I sent it to a charity. I made exceptions only for flowers, because I figured they would go to waste. But even then, I put them out in the middle of the room so they wouldn’t be on my desk reminding me that a certain person was trying to get me to do something.
Just ask. Lots of us hate to ask for anything, so we just don’t do it. That’s a big mistake. Asking doesn’t hurt. Studies show that people underestimate the odds that someone will say yes to a direct request.
Be humble. When you qualify what you’re saying, you are admitting that you might not know all that can be known. This is like saying you are willing to listen. If you say, “That could be true,” it’s easier for your listeners to agree with you. Think about the words you use when you need to lessen antagonism because you’re writing for an audience with viewpoints different from yours.
If you tell a colleague, “You should have finished that by now,” that person will naturally become defensive. But if you say, “I am stressed because that work isn’t done,” you are removing the accusation.
Researchers have also found that if you say a person’s name more often, you are more likely to win their affection or trust.
See the value in becoming friendly with people who have different viewpoints. It will make all of us smarter and more flexible. You might not be able to change the world, but you can change yourself, a little, by reaching out. Start a conversation by pointing out something that you or your side was wrong about. That immediately takes the discussion out of combat mode.
Make people explain their positions. Academics have shown that people push themselves to think critically only when they know they will have to explain themselves to people who are well informed.
This means that if you are in a discussion or a debate, you need to force the other people to explain what they think. Ask how they would turn their ideas into policy, or how they think some current law works. If you try to get someone to walk you through her point of view and she can’t quite do it, she will see the holes in her argument and possibly be more open to what you have to say. When people can’t explain why they believe what they believe, they tend to ratchet down the intensity of their opinions.
Use charts and graphs. In a 2018 study, the political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler wanted to understand why Americans hold so many misperceptions. They tried to find out if providing correct information would cure people of their mistaken beliefs.
In several tests, they found that graphs and charts are more effective than text in helping people absorb information. Nevertheless, even the best formatted information runs up against resistance because people reject notions that threaten their self-worth. The two found that although self-affirmation exercises occasionally made people more open, their value was not as strong as prior research in the field had indicated.
Inform people of the socially accepted consensus. People want to be like other people and conform to social standards. If you show them there is a consensus around a certain idea, and you avoid being confrontational, your audience is more likely to come around to accepting that consensus.
Understand what people fear. People’s political beliefs are affected by what they fear, and how fearful they are. Political psychology research shows that conservatives react more strongly to physical threats than liberals do. Their concern with physical safety was probably determined early in their lives.
That’s why liberal politicians suggest to the public that danger is manageable. Republicans, though, are more likely to emphasize the risk of immigration or terrorism because jacking up fear helps them get votes.
Similarly, researchers have shown that when people were made to feel afraid about the flu, they were more likely to be against immigration, and when they were made to feel safer about the flu, their fears about immigrants abated. Our ideas are influenced by unconscious motivations that can be accessed by people who want to influence us.
Create friction to reduce bad habits, and eliminate friction to introduce good ones. We all take the easiest path. That’s not lazy, it’s just human nature. Anything that makes a choice even slightly easier draws people. We eat grapes at parties because we can pop them so easily into our mouths, and cookies at buffets rather than big messy slices of pie. Frictionless.
If you want to persuade someone to stop doing something, make it hard for them to do it, not easy. Smoking rates in the United States declined when there were fewer and fewer places to smoke. Eventually, it’s not worth the trouble when you have to leave your desk, take an elevator, and stand outside in 20-degree weather. Do you want people to drink more water and less soda? Make sure machines stock water. Want to stop eating so much sugar? Don’t keep any at home. If you have to drive to the supermarket for a teaspoon of sugar for your tea, you probably won’t do it. You want to socialize more? Have some standing dinner dates. Then you don’t have to go to the trouble of organizing it each time. Want to reduce time spent on social media? Take the apps off your phone.
Be warm and friendly. Make people like you. Compliment them. We all respond to compliments. People like to say yes to people they like, and they’re much more able to say no to people they don’t like. People need to talk about what they have in common before they tackle points of disagreement.
Sneak past emotional barriers. You need to avoid getting people upset if you want to get them to hear your ideas. You need to sidle up to them to get past the resistance that people naturally erect.
Target your audience through its values. Do not judge. Understand who you are addressing, and tailor your work to that. Let’s say you are trying to persuade the last holdout in your family to quit smoking. Research suggests that if you connect that behavior change to some crucial part of a person’s identity, you might make more progress. So, if you push the idea that someone will be a good person, father, member of the community—whatever your audience holds most dear—then you are more likely to succeed in changing behavior. For some people, believing they could live longer would be influential; for others, that’s too abstract, and they would be more likely to change by thinking about how their premature death would leave their family bereft. Connect the behavioral change to a central part of a person’s identity. That might require a number of efforts. It’s not easy to dislodge a long-held idea or habit.
Show confidence and authority. It’s tough to be both humble and confident, but it can be done. You need to show calm confidence.
Never repeat a falsehood. Reframe the argument so that you are not repeating the one you disagree with or helping to spread falsehoods.
Seek small steps, minimal effort. Call for small steps. I feel gloomy about a warming climate and can’t imagine what I can do about it. But if someone could convince me that I could do some little thing that would make a difference, I would definitely be persuaded. That’s why I’ve been faithfully recycling all these years, and trying not to use paper towels, even though both of those actions at a larger scale might be meaningless. I feel they make a difference, so I do them.
These ideas are just a few that have come out of social science research. The field is constantly evolving, and it’s fun to keep up with what is being discovered about our all-too-human natures.