I like football. I also like talking about football: analyzing what each team did well and not so well in a match, my team’s strategy and playing style, and who the standout players were. You learn things from conversations about football, although none of this information has any real-life ramifications. It’s just entertainment.
Talking about politics is different from talking about sport. For me, these are interests of entirely different kinds. Political discussion is absorbing and often intense, but I wouldn’t describe it as entertaining or fun, like football. I’ll return later to the idea of politics as entertainment.
Professional football players have a more direct stake in the sport than fans do, not because they care more but because they have a responsibility to play well. By contrast, people whose jobs are as far removed from politics as most spectators’ jobs are from the stadium have a personal stake in election results and what happens in between elections. In a democracy, citizens’ views about good government have consequences, unlike football fans’ views about whether the Cats are the greatest team of all. It matters whether we have such things as a safe workplace, affordable health care, ease of access to the voting process, police who can be trusted, and a fair tax system. Talking about politics is participating in politics. Even if you’re not entirely sure what you think about an issue or haven’t decided whether you should support a particular candidate, discussion can be a means to discovering and clarifying your own views.
How we try and why we fail
For a lot of people, political disputation is exciting, even addictive. Not everyone shares this interest, and some find it unpleasant, but it’s not easy to avoid such conversations entirely.
I don’t propose to offer a how-to guide to persuasion. Its strength would also be its weakness: a focus almost exclusively on logic and evidence. I’d like to suggest a different approach to political discourse. But first, let’s look at the ways we’ve been doing it, and the reasons why attempts to persuade are so often impotent.
Presenting facts
‘People don’t change their minds on the basis of facts.’
This claim has been made so often that it’s almost become a platitude. I’ve put it in quotes because I don’t believe it. Perhaps I’d be more receptive if it were qualified: ‘some people’ or ‘people who have never studied science or philosophy’ or ‘people whose pre-existing beliefs conflict with the facts presented’. Or perhaps my pre-existing belief that human beings are fundamentally rational conflicts with a great deal of psychological research.
Over and over, studies have shown that it’s rare for people to respond to evidence when their cherished beliefs are challenged. Instead, we are more likely to seek information that agrees with our views, and to go to great lengths to defend those views. This tendency is one variety of bias: a strong preconceived opinion in favor of or against someone or something. It’s called confirmation bias and it can afflict even those who place a high value on the objective use and assessment of evidence. It’s uncomfortable to be mistaken, and when we have to make a choice between contradictory beliefs or values, the one that we’ve held for a long time may not be merely the one we find more appealing. It may represent who we are in our self-conception, and changing such a belief might involve time and introspection that we hadn’t foreseen. Other types of bias stem from similar psychological needs, many linked to political identity and membership in a political community.
Battling the anecdotal fallacy
A fallacy is not a false statement. It’s an error in reasoning: the statements that are offered as evidence for a claim do not support that conclusion, even if they happen to be true. Fallacies may be formal (flawed in logical structure) or informal (in which the information offered as evidence is irrelevant, ambiguous, or inadequate). One of the most pervasive and tenacious informal fallacies involves the use of a personal story or vivid examples.
Here’s one that’s not overtly political, as an illustration:
When we were kids, nobody wore bike helmets, the family car didn’t have seat belts in the back seat, our parents smacked us when we were bad, and we turned out fine!
The conclusion here is that some measures to protect children from harm, which are now legally required or socially expected, are really not necessary. On this line of argument, because people now in their 50s got through childhood without being killed, injured, or psychologically traumatized, it’s an overreaction to require helmets and seat belts and misguided to condemn parents for hitting their kids. To support that claim, the person offers firsthand testimony, ignoring any scientific evidence that would undermine it. But the sample size is small, and the assumption that personal experience is a reliable guide to ‘what works’ only has to be set next to someone else’s completely different experience to see the problem. Nevertheless, it exerts a powerful hold.
Information that is not only anecdotal but vague, unsubstantiated, or open to multiple explanations is also poor evidence. Consider this claim, which has been seen before but took root firmly in 2020:
There is widespread voter fraud in the USA.
Real examples of support that people offered were easy to find on social media:
- ‘I was getting ballots for people who used to live in our house. They moved to another state three years ago!’
- ‘People are coming forward about the fraud they are seeing. This was on the news. They’re postal workers, voters, people who were working at the election. Some of them said Republicans were not allowed to come in to observe, only Democrats, and covid was used as the reason.’
You can explain that casting a vote that will be counted requires more than filling it out and sending it in, that there are verification measures in place, and that it’s nearly impossible for a party to organize voter fraud on a scale that would affect election results, but the seeds of suspicion, sown and fertilized to feed a political agenda, are nearly as impossible to dislodge. First-person stories told by individuals feel more ‘real’ than news stories stating that ‘there is no evidence of fraud’; that ‘election officials of both parties have certified the election’; that ‘courts have dismissed lawsuits’; and that ‘a majority in Congress has confirmed the result’.
Citing authorities that you respect (but they don’t)
People try to rebut claims by ‘fact-checking’: summarizing the evidence against a claim and citing the sources, or (on social media) simply pasting a link to an article into an online conversation. If the linked material is not so abstruse as to baffle, intimidate or bore, the effort can pay off. It does require us to take the time to read and consider, though, and the discussion may get no farther than the citation of the source.
I’m pretty sure I know which of my Facebook friends read articles I might post from Jacobin or The Nation, and which ones believe (with some justification) that even The Washington Post and The Guardian are biased. Similarly, I don’t bother reading or watching anything from Fox News or Prager ‘University’. We all say we’d like to find news sources that are free of bias, but at the same time we tend to read or listen to the ones whose interpretations of the facts are more like our own.1 (Tip: Citing a source that the other party respects can be a handy tactic for keeping a conversation going, if it doesn’t require you to pretend to believe other things that you don’t.)
Debating politics on social media
Much has been published on how the coronavirus pandemic has changed people’s use of social media and other online activity.2 For much of 2020 and continuing into 2021, residents of Australia were prohibited from traveling overseas. My spouse and I returned from Christmas holidays in the United States in early January of 2020; almost a year and a half later we haven’t left the state of Tasmania, even to visit the mainland. Not only do I work from home, a significant part of my social life still takes place online.
Online debate can be quite different from similar conversations at a party or in the lunch room at work. You can’t see the other person, except for a picture, which might be a photo of the person’s pet or a cartoon character. There are no cues provided by facial expression, vocal intonation or body language. Dialogue in the form of text can feel more abbreviated than the same words when spoken, even if assisted by emojis to indicate ‘I’m joking’ or ‘I like you even though I don’t agree with you’. Plus, most people don’t write long paragraphs on Facebook and Twitter. You can control who sees and engages with your posts on your own Facebook page, but everybody else controls theirs as well, and not all of your friends’ friends may be people with whom you really want to talk about politics or anything else. Even people who are normally polite sometimes can’t resist participating in exchanges in which somebody else gets verbally roasted, and once it’s out there, there’s no going back.
The term ‘political polarization’ refers to the extent to which political parties’ platforms are opposed and the degree to which the supporters of each dislike those of the other side (or perhaps just dislike their views, if they can separate the person from the position). It can also refer to the homogeneity of views on each side: in other words, supporters of a party tend to have similar opinions. In such an environment, what passes for political dialogue can amount to cheering and booing. As people discover that this is unproductive and often unpleasant, some are more carefully selecting those with whom they interact. People who agree with us don’t demand that we justify our opinions. But while it’s more comfortable to talk only to your own team, it’s just as pointless as sparring. Neither kind of conversation results in anybody changing their mind.
Argument
The word ‘argument’ is commonly used to mean a verbal dispute or quarrel, but that’s not what is meant in the context of evidence for claims. An argument is a statement (the conclusion) plus one or more additional statements offered as evidence that the conclusion is true (these are the premises of the argument). The strength of the argument will depend on the extent to which the premises support the conclusion: that is, make it more likely to be true.
People employ various methods of convincing others of all kinds of things, including claims about what is morally right and politically desirable. Providing logically and evidentially strong reasons to believe a claim or to behave in some way is, in my view, the most solid basis for persuasion. While the truth of a particular argument’s premises and how much support they provide may be disputed, there are established criteria for evaluating arguments. By contrast, rhetorical techniques that depend on appeals to emotion or authority (for example loyalty to a group, fear of a perceived threat, tradition, or what we were brought up to believe) may be clever, appealing, or comforting, yet have no objective evidentiary connection to the claim the speaker wants to convince people to believe. Examples are easy to find in political history, and in commercial advertising.
Some people who are skilled at argument are effective communicators on other criteria as well. The work of some contemporary academic philosophers is a pleasure to read, whether they are writing for specialists or for a wider audience.3 I had intended to list some current or recent political figures, also, who are both outstanding stylists of language and very good at making a persuasive case for their views, but am at a loss to think of any. Barack Obama is a wonderful orator. His speeches moved people. But I doubt that they moved the people who wouldn’t have voted for him no matter what he said.
I use the old-fashioned word ‘orator’ deliberately. Politicians sometimes write articles, especially before an election or in response to a momentous event or crisis. Their statements intended for media dissemination are carefully crafted, scrutinized, and quoted as needed. But even in the lead-up to an election, their public communications aren’t really for the purpose of persuading people to believe anything, or even to articulate views that voters already hold. Instead, the candidates are engendering the feeling of identification with them. The efforts of the politician and the party, assisted by the media, produce a candidate who makes the voters feel righteous about their feelings. Supporting a candidate or a party is a form of self-expression. What the candidate says may not contain much in the way of argument, or even much in the way of rhetoric: it doesn’t have to as long as it resonates with people.
What we do when dialogue fails
At the beginning, I suggested that talking about politics can help us to understand the implications of our own positions and decide whether they’re well-founded and worth keeping. However, political discourse is not always so orderly. Science competes with the belief that what passes for fact is really a hoax; people’s interpretations of facts are shaped by preferences; half the population think news organizations are controlled by powerful right-wing billionaires and the other half think the media are pushing a socialist agenda. We can’t even get as far as an examination of politicians’ words if they came to power not by winning debates about justice and injustice, but by liking and hating the same ideas and people liked and hated by the voters. They need only express approbation and scorn. If this can be called rhetoric, it’s even more debased than flattery (since it doesn’t need to acknowledge its enablers) and argument doesn’t even enter the picture. Those who try it will get nowhere.
So we retreat, and choose to talk only with people who employ the same methods: facts, logic, raising and answering objections, sometimes politely agreeing to disagree, occasionally coming to a third position through compromise. And those who can’t or won’t use these methods also continue to talk only to one another. This kind of polarization isn’t exactly the same as the kind in which people identify with a group based on the content of the views, but it has similar crippling effects on dialogue.
Alternative approaches
Recently there’s been a great deal of advice in the popular media on how to change minds, and most of it has very little to do with arguments and facts. We are urged to lay off the debunking, because for many people a challenge to deeply held beliefs can feel like a personal attack. We are told to reframe the debate to align with the values that they care about rather than our own and emphasize implications that will make a difference to them. We are encouraged to find some personal connection to engage them.
These suggestions may be more effective when the person doesn’t know you well enough to know your political allegiances and priorities, or to suspect your motives. The tactics also are also likely to be better suited to face-to-face conversation than online. (This is especially true of those who have been using social media long enough to have proudly shown their political loyalties to friends, friends of friends, and total strangers.) Online conversations are often not amenable to careful, deliberate efforts to find common ground. Other people jump in – people you forgot to exclude via the settings, to your great regret. Reframing the debate to reflect aims that the other person cares about can confuse your usual allies, unless they understand what you’re up to and refrain from indignantly jumping in themselves. With all that in mind, here is a modest suggestion for anyone who both cares about politics and shares my proclivities: spend less time on social media. Even if you’ve been very selective or very lucky in your circle of contacts, how many minds have you changed this week?
Rhetorical techniques for everybody, including philosophers
Whether a conversation takes place in person or online, tone matters – even in cases where we haven’t given any thought to whether our carefully constructed argument even has a tone. In a book or article, the author’s attitude to the reader may be something that the author would be well advised to take some time to work on, but in other cases it may be indiscernible and not an issue. However, in presentations to a live, broadcast or online audience, in face-to-face dialogue, and with interactive media, tone is a crucial element.
Perhaps successful students of philosophy develop thick skins in the course of their studies, but quite a few non-philosophers find philosophers blunt or even scathing:
I’m just one data point, but my favorite undergraduate professor disagreed vociferously, sometimes scornfully, with my political views, and it was the challenge and fun of dealing with that disagreement that contributed to my wanting to continue to study philosophy. I don’t think that’s all that unusual among people who go on to become philosophers.4
Unvarnished frankness verging on scorn is not a conversational trait that’s likely to build respect and goodwill, and philosophy experiences more than enough misunderstanding without adding a reputation for combativeness and condescension. ‘Tone’ doesn’t mean just refraining from disparaging putdowns. It encompasses the ability ‘to be critical while remaining charitable, of aiming not to “conquer” but to “come at truth,” not to be right at all costs but to understand and advance the collective understanding’.5
Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s 2013 book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking is a hefty but accessible compendium of techniques for thinking about difficult issues. In the first section of the book, Dennett offers some ideas for moving discussions forward. Adapted from the work of mathematical psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport,6 these are the widely cited ‘Rapoport’s Rules’:
- You should attempt to re-express your opponent’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your opponent says, ‘Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.’
- You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
- You should mention anything you have learned from your opponent.
- Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.7
Political debates don’t always start at the beginning. Laying out each person’s argument can expose implicit assumptions that they may wish to rethink. More importantly,‘Rapoport’s Rules’ aim at tempering the inclination to push back, making the person more receptive and turning a debate into a dialogue.
Political engagement
Let’s suppose more of our political discussions not only employ well-constructed arguments but also exemplify kindness. Maybe we reach agreement on some issues. Maybe some people decide to change their voting intentions. From little things, big things grow.8 Let’s suppose, further, that we stop trying to convince people who are not receptive, and pursue other topics of common interest in our interactions with them. Football, perhaps. Everybody’s happier. But if we still want to make political change, there is more we can do, and it’s not at the level of individual conversations, especially online ones.
American political scholar Eitan Hersh argues in his 2020 book Politics is for Power that much of what passes for political engagement amounts to ‘consuming’ politics as a form of entertainment and self-expression. Commenting on politics in our online communities has no influence on the events that are taking place, and most of the time it doesn’t influence any of our fellow cyber-citizens who are doing the same thing. Hersh calls this pastime political hobbyism. What we do on Twitter, in the comments following an opinion piece, or in our own blogs doesn’t involve the kind of work done by volunteers for political organizations: neighborhood meetings, coming up with strategies for accomplishing goals one at a time, and talking with people in person. It’s easier to diagnose problems and suggest solutions from behind the laptop than to do the slow, hard work of organizing. Activism is usually group work, whether we like it or not. It usually requires showing up in person rather than fitting in time to write something provocative, stir up our opponents and then rant about them to our friends online.
One of the most effective ways to gain people’s trust, and ultimately their support, is conversation – face to face, not online. It involves asking open-ended questions to get people to articulate why they feel the way they do. It often involves personal stories.9 The difference between the fallacy of anecdotal evidence used to support a claim and the use of stories that illustrate why something matters to people is in the telling. The difference between lecturing and listening may be more obvious, but it’s a crucial part of a task that’s quite challenging for those of us who are most comfortable with written communication.
Wish me luck, and the same to you.
References
Hersh, Eitan, Politics is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change, Scribner, 2020
See also
Plato, Gorgias, in Hamilton, Edith and Cairns, Huntington, The Collected Dialogues of Plato including the Letters, Bollingen Series LXXI, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1961
Photo credits
FOX NEWS channel (store?) at George Bush Intercontinental Airport, by Jason Eppink on Flickr, licensed under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)
Fence, Indianapolis, Indiana, by Steve Baker on Flickr, licensed under CC Attribution – No Derivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY–ND 2.0)
Trump versus Biden conversation, Scenes from the Counterprotest against the DC MAGA rally, November 14 2020, by Geoff Livingston on Flickr, licensed under CC Attribution–Non-Commercial–NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Amnesty International Refugee Rights Action Group Tasmania, Australia, photo by Yabbo Thompson
Citation
Please cite as: Miller, L. Elaine, ‘The Knack of Persuasion and the Art of Dialogue’, It Could Be Words (blog), 25 May 2021, https://it-could-be-words.com/the-knack-of-persuasion-and-the-art-of-dialogue
- For a useful discussion of bias in news media, see AllSides.com, particularly ‘How to Spot 11 Types of Media Bias’, https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/how-to-spot-types-of-media-bias [↩]
- See for example Koeze, Ella and Popper, Nathaniel, ‘The Virus Changed the Way We Internet’, The New York Times, 7 April 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/07/technology/coronavirus-internet-use.html and Molla, Rani, ‘How the Pandemic Has Changed Social Media’, Vox, 1 March 2021, https://www.vox.com/recode/22295131/social-media-use-pandemic-covid-19-instagram-tiktok [↩]
- A few examples are Daniel Dennett, Martha Nussbaum, David Lewis, and Frank Jackson. If you know of others, you might like to list them in the comments section. [↩]
- Weinberg, Justin, ‘Political bias in philosophy’, Daily Nous, 26 August 2015, in a comment [↩]
- Popova, Maria, ‘How to Criticize with Kindness: Philosopher Daniel Dennett on the Four Steps to Arguing Intelligently’, Brain Pickings, https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/28/daniel-dennett-rapoport-rules-criticism/ [↩]
- Rapoport (1911–2007) was an American mathematician specializing in mathematical models of psychology, conflict and cooperation. He was accomplished in many other fields as well and was recognized for his long-term peace activism, particularly using game theory (the study of strategic interaction among rational decision-makers) and game-theoretic models of conflict resolution. [↩]
- Dennett, Daniel C., Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, W.W. Norton, 2013, pp. 33–4 [↩]
- Carmody, Kev and Kelly, Paul, ‘From Little Things, Big Things Grow’ (1991) [recorded by Paul Kelly & The Messengers on Comedy (1991, Mushroom) and by Carmody, with Kelly, on Bloodlines (1993, Festival)] [↩]
- From Amnesty International resource sheet, ‘Refugee conversation guide 2017’ [↩]
I cannot wait to read this one!
Looking forward to chatting soon, Anja!