Think for a moment about the conversations you have in the course of your life. On one end of the spectrum, our days are filled with casual interactions where we exchange pleasantries and relatively benign chitchat. Picking your kids up at school, you break the silence with another parent by commiserating about the school play next month that you definitely aren’t dreading. At the grocery store, you thoughtlessly banter with the cashier about the never-ending cold streak and the forecasted weekend snow. You don’t really expect to get anything out of these conversations other than to be a normal human being interacting with another one. On the other end of the spectrum, interpersonal interactions can be significant and life-altering: speaking with your spouse about wanting to make a significant career shift; confronting an aging parent about how their daily routines are going to have to change; receiving serious medical news from a doctor or medical professional. These conversations are intense and solemn, sometimes riddled with information that you will need to remember for the future. Of course, many conversations fall somewhere in between.
For the overwhelming majority of interpersonal interactions, we are on autopilot and react without thinking terribly hard about what we say or what is said to us. These encounters are relaxed, consistent with social norms and expectations, keeping us in our comfort zone. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with those conversations. They don’t, however, provide reasons for us to think deeply in a productive or meaningful way. They don’t move any needles or help us to confront important truths. In all honesty, not every conversation we have should be intensely serious: it would be too cognitively taxing and our brains would be constantly fried.
If you stop to think about the conversations you instantly remember from the last few days, what do they have in common? There are three important elements that determine the impact of any given conversation: the person with whom you were speaking (also known as the messenger), the tone of the conversation, and, of course, the content. All of these pieces are important, of course, and this book will touch on all three in various ways. For most of the book, I will focus on content. For this chapter, however, I’d like to focus on the tone of the discussion and the messenger—and in particular, I want to hone in on discomfort. Uncomfortable conversations are where the potential for meaningful attitude change exists. Times when our existing ideas or thoughts are challenged are those when, if approached the right way, we might take a breath and stop to think about new information we’re encountering. Problem is, we as a culture are becoming increasingly good at avoiding discomfort altogether and, well, we need to knock it off and learn how to deal with it rather than simply avoid it.
Timothy Ferriss wrote in 2007, “A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.”1 I’m an oddity (in more ways than one, believe me) but here is one way that’s relevant to this book: I enjoy uncomfortable conversations. More accurately, I should say that I have learned to enjoy them. I find them fascinating; in particular, I find the way others respond to them to be informative and telling. It wasn’t always the case. The affinity might stem from years of graduate school and conducting research on persuasion and attitude change, sure, but I think it truly started a few years after I came out to my family almost 20 years ago. After I was able to look back and reflect on the experience, to have some perspective and clarity around a life-changing series of events, I became convinced more that discomfort, within reason, has tremendous potential.
I’ve often been asked by straight friends and family about what it’s like to come out as gay. It’s a difficult question to answer for a variety of reasons. Coming out can be uncomfortable and disorienting because in addition to disclosing very personal information, coming out involves identifying oneself as different from the person with whom they’re speaking. It involves being vulnerable in front of another person, a person whom you may care for very much and feeling the uncertainty (and often sheer terror) about how it will change the nature of your relationship can be really jarring. Vulnerability can, however, bring about change. Leading a person to create a personal connection to something that was previously foreign to them can be a formidable motivator.
Historically, coming out has been fraught with negativity, closed-mindedness, and fear. For many, it continues to be an incredibly difficult undertaking; for others, especially more recently, it can be a more positive experience. It’s a different process and conversation for everyone, of course but the best words I can think of are Awkward. Terrifying. Uncomfortable. Every time I have to come out to a new person, it is fraught with uncertainty: what will this person think of me because of this information? Will the dynamics of our relationship change? I have been very fortunate to have supportive family and friends and I can’t speak to anyone else’s experience, of course, but uncomfortable conversations have led to a great deal of personal growth for me and, on occasion, when I’ve been lucky, they’ve fostered open-mindedness in others. I try hard to relish uncomfortable conversations whenever I can.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that coming out is necessarily the same as engaging in a political conversation with someone with whom you disagree. What I am saying, however, is that uncomfortable conversations can be some of the most productive. Further, a conversation can also have more than one effect and speaking with another person can be impactful, even if persuasion isn’t the primary goal.
I call this chapter “The Virtue of Uncomfortable Conversations” because there’s nothing wrong with confrontation or awkwardness in interpersonal communication; there’s nothing wrong with disagreeing with another person’s point of view. We’re losing our ability to know how to handle those situations without flying off the proverbial handle. We’re getting worse at disagreeing like grown-ups and it’s leading democracy toward sequestered opinion silos in which we operate in isolation, without divergence of any kind. So how do minds change?
Previous research has generated significant insights about how attitudes can change and the conditions necessary for change to happen. Political scientist John Zaller became famous for what can be summarized as the “receive-accept-sample” (RAS) model.2 What he suggests is that when you’re asked a question about your opinion, the way you answer reflects considerations that you have received (that you have heard or read about), accepted (that you have decided are consistent enough with your prior beliefs); and then subsequently sampled from (based on what is relevant or salient at the time). This concept can be best understood with a bucket analogy. Everything you have seen, heard, or read goes into your head as if it were a bucket. When you express an opinion, you reach into the bucket for a sample of what’s in there but not every consideration has an equal likelihood of getting chosen: you are more likely to pick those that are most recent, that you accept as legitimate and valid, that come from trusted sources, or that are particularly relevant, surprising, or somehow noteworthy. You then take an average of those considerations and that constitutes your opinion at the moment.
Any one piece of new information, even if it is deemed consistent enough with prior beliefs, is unlikely to change someone’s overall opinion, particularly if the overall opinion is very strongly positive or negative or if someone has a lot of considerations in their bucket. That’s why opinion doesn’t change very quickly. As a result, often the best we can do is present the best considerations we can, the ones we think are most likely to be received and sampled. That means we have to consider the message and the delivery: no yelling or screaming, no name-calling, no demeaning, no preaching, no dismissiveness, no defensiveness. It’s often really, really hard to do.
There is considerable social psychological research that investigates the process of opinion change. Much of the academic research tells us that the first step down the road to successful attitude change is the motivation to process information or the willingness to listen. How do we get people to listen? Why, I’m glad you asked, because that’s why we’re here. The clearest, easiest-to-understand model, in my view, has one of the most complicated names: the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), developed by Richard Petty and John Cacioppo.3 Despite the clunky name, it’s a good way to conceptualize the likelihood of attitude change in situations where external (persuasive) communication is involved.
Figure 2.1 shows the totality of what Petty and Cacioppo are doing here. What they’re arguing is that when a person receives persuasive communication—seen in the upper left—there are two potential outcomes. The persuasive communication can have little to no effect or if there is an effect, it is short-lasting and the person quickly reverts back to their original thoughts (what they call the peripheral route of persuasion). Or it can lead to long-lasting attitude change and in turn to different behavior in the future (what they call the central route of persuasion). The model spells out the conditions under which a person will go down the peripheral route, with little to no meaningful change, and/or when the conditions are right for a person to experience longer-lasting, more meaningful attitude change. It’s a perfect fit for our purposes.
Figure 2.1 Central and Peripheral Routes to Persuasion
Source: Petty, Richard E., and John T. Cacioppo. 1986. “The Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Leonard Berkowitz, ed., Cambridge, MA: Academic Press, p. 126. Reprinted per the STM permission guidelines, https://www.stm-assoc.org/intellectual-property/permissions/permissions-guidelines/.
Don’t sweat the details here too much. What I’d like you to focus on is the very first step after a messenger sends persuasive communication to the receiver: the motivation to process the information, also known as the willingness to listen. This step has the potential to short-circuit the entire central route (remember, the one that leads to more permanent change) and lead a person down the path to little or no attitude change at all. It’s also one of the most important reasons that persuasion is so difficult: people like to feel consistent with their attitudes so they resist new information that might challenge their beliefs. Besides, it’s easier to rely on existing attitudes and beliefs: collecting and processing new information takes a lot of thought and can be (cognitively) costly and tiring. It’s far easier to dismiss a new piece of information and refuse to process it in the first place. From an attitudinal standpoint, where people are at the end of a conversation is very strongly related to where they started it for this very reason.
However, if you can find the right way (or more accurately, ways) to produce the right mix of the three important components—messenger, tone, and content—you have a shot at leading to some change. As we all know, however, there are myriad ways the train can come off the track with the intolerable Uncle John at the Thanksgiving dinner table. One of the most common is partisan identity (also known as partisanship). Partisanship serves as an important exemplar of the strength with which people push back against change so it’s worth a few moments of discussion before we talk about potential effects of persuasive communication and how to set reasonable expectations.
Unsurprisingly, one of the most common and often vicious areas of disagreement in American political life revolves around partisan identity. It is an incredibly strong emotional attachment, as anyone who has read the comments on nearly any online political news article or Facebook post knows. Partisan identity serves as a filter through which “the elements of politics are perceived and evaluated.”4 It is one of the main drivers of the “us vs. them” mentality because, among other reasons, we want to protect our status as someone with a partisan attachment and/or to maintain a consistent ideological worldview. Defined as an affective bond rooted in feelings toward groups affiliated with parties, partisanship is often seen as a social identity. Attachment to a political party drives explicitly political decisions like vote choice and also how we behave toward groups that we associate with political parties.5
Partisanship also, however, tends to produce systematic biases in what political information citizens attend to and how that information is interpreted and evaluated.6 Partisans expect their own party to perform better, to produce high-quality candidates, and to take appropriate stands on issues.7 In the heat of partisan rhetoric and political campaigns, partisan identities become more and more important to attitude formation, leading citizens to privilege their identity as Republicans, Democrats, Independents, or others;8 it also makes people more likely to conceptualize politics from an explicit “us vs. them” perspective. We’ll delve into this mindset more later but suffice to say that established partisan commitments exert a broad and powerful influence on political perception, evaluation, and decision-making.9 As we know, that worldview tends to lead to a whole bunch of undesirable behaviors, particularly because of how strongly citizens take cues from elected officials.
For decades, political scientists have observed that ordinary American voters don’t take the time and energy needed to become perfectly informed—a concept that is itself in contention— even on the most pressing political issues.10 The thinking is this: elected officials and media gatekeepers (also called elites) are constantly trying to find the right mix of issue positions to attract as many people as possible. Ordinary voters pick up on the cues that are being made and eventually, mass public opinion changes to match these new cues.11 People who shift their beliefs in ways that are more ideologically extreme (conservatively or liberally) are usually taking cues from elected officials and other partisan figures who share their beliefs.12 In general, very few people have the patience and motivation to closely analyze political arguments and fewer still have enough political knowledge to analyze them in a relatively fair, balanced, unbiased way.13
There are direct links between partisan identity and biased processing of information; in particular, when partisan cues are present and emphasized, information becomes less relevant and people often ignore substantive facts altogether.14 When partisanship is less relevant, content will have a greater impact in attitude formation and people will be more likely to turn to other cues that may be evident in the content.15 By ignoring, discounting, distorting, or counterarguing against other readily available information, some of which may contradict their partisan commitments, citizens can more easily make decisions and maintain consistent attitudes. It also makes thinking and deciding easier.
When partisanship strongly colors the way individuals view the political world, it can create a systematic bias toward existing beliefs and can incentivize one to adhere to party cues that are relatively easy to adopt.16 The result of this elite cue-taking is important: as elites become more polarized, as has been increasingly the case for decades now, they clarify party positions for the masses. As a result, when elite opinion changes, there are reasons to believe that mass opinion may change (or conversely, that it may be resistant to change). People engage in biased processing and selective exposure because they like the consistency of prior opinions and because they want to protect their existing partisan identities. Additional information, as a result, becomes a potential threat to a person’s existing identity.
Political information (and therefore political knowledge) is unevenly distributed across the population. Some groups, like people with more formal education and more political interest, tend to seek out more political information and more detailed information; those with less education and no political interest can avoid political information altogether, resulting in relatively negligible political knowledge.17 Not only will more educated people seek out information but they are also more likely to process it, creating even more of a gap in knowledge between the two groups. As a result, low-information groups simply cannot increase their political knowledge at a rate that allows them to keep up with their more knowledgeable counterparts; they may be less able to vote in line with their own interests and more prone to being manipulated by a campaign and its advertisements.18
It follows logically that strong partisans are more motivated than weak partisans to maintain their worldviews. However, these same strong partisans are also better equipped to be biased information processors, which we already know leads them to counterargue against incongruent information and accepting “friendly” information at face value. Intriguingly, partisans tend to score lower on tests asking about (factually) correct political information. There is a causal relationship between a strong partisan identification and incorrect perceptions about the opposing party as well as faulty recall of factual political information; those who are ambivalent about partisanship demonstrate more accurate attitudes with far less bias.19 In sum, political psychologists conclude that significant attitudinal and behavioral differences between partisans who consume the same information aren’t due to randomness or general political ignorance: there is systematic information bias among partisans in the United States. This is a theme that will reoccur time and time again throughout this book.
At least in part, this bias comes from media sources and our increasing ability to self-select them. How we experience news has changed significantly over time: we have a more amazingly diverse array of sources for news than ever before. It used to be that people would read their local newspaper, listen to their local radio station, and watch one of the three national news networks. Now, with little to no effort at all, social media feeds dominate choices to consume political information, closely curating our headlines based on algorithms that reinforce views we already have. We have an increasingly imbalanced diet of political information and in many cases, Americans prefer to avoid political coverage altogether in favor of more entertaining programming.20 It’s far easier to allow Facebook, Apple News, Twitter, and Instagram to make our choices for us: it’s certainly more fun than listening to NPR or watching C-Span. (Sorry, C-Span, I’m a political scientist and even I can find you boring).
As the infusion of mass media information into a social system increases, partisan and knowledge polarization gets worse. People with higher socioeconomic statuses tend to acquire this information at a faster rate than the lower status segments such that the gap in knowledge between these segments tends to increase rather than decrease. For example, when given the opportunity to collect information with arguments and information in an experimental setting, people who already have a lot of political knowledge were more likely to ignore information from the opposing side and to choose information from sympathetic and nonthreatening sources. On the other hand, those with less information chose even-handedly, both pro and con arguments. On average, knowledgeable people chose to read three arguments favoring their own side of the issue for every opposing argument they read.21 The conclusion is this: after acquiring more ammunition for their prior opinions (by choice), knowledgeable people and partisans are more entrenched in their original attitudes, even when given an opportunity to view contrary evidence.22
A great example of the interplay between information and attitude formation comes from a 2010 article by political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler. They randomly assigned participants to read different versions of news articles, testing the effect of information on political attitudes. Specifically, they gave groups different versions of a news article about President George W. Bush and his reasoning for becoming involved in the Iraq War. One version simply summarized the president’s reasoning, writing, “There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks.”23 Another version added additional information correcting that assertion, reporting that no, there was not any evidence that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Their findings show that strong conservatives who saw the correction became more likely to believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (again, which was identified as incorrect information). They tested this effect over a bunch of different issues, with similar results: even when presented with factual contradicting information, strong ideologues and partisans strengthen their incorrect existing beliefs grounded in ideology and partisanship. Partisan identity is just one way that can motivate us to be biased information processors.
OK, so people feel more comfortable consuming information and processing it in a way that supports their prior beliefs, information, and feelings. So what? What’s the harm? Social psychologists study phenomena like motivated reasoning and selective exposure, which lead us to unfairly discount information because of our existing lenses and to perceive people who disagree with us as disagreeing more than they truly do. As “news consumers increasingly have the ability to customize their news environments to their own tastes, the likelihood [increases] that news will simply reinforce existing views and produce a subsequent polarization of partisan groups.”24 Ignoring divergent views deprives us of a shared base of information we can use to deliberate and to discuss important policies. Further, it leads us to think that there is more conflict and disagreement among groups than reality suggests and increases ideological fanaticism due to ideological echo chambers and closed-minded enclaves.25
So that’s it! Let’s throw in the towel. Democracy is dead. It’s becoming easier to ignore divergent views; identities are leading us to dislike each other more and to ignore what we have to say. All is lost; the sky is falling; woe is me; . . . et cetera.
Well, not so fast. Things aren’t great at the moment but they can get better. It’s all about setting the right expectations and considering your audience. As powerful as each of us likes to think we are, we generally don’t have the power to instantly change someone’s mind, regardless of what we say or how we say it. It is unrealistic to think that a person with divergent views will change those views based on one conversation, regardless of how strategic and well planned it may be. Luckily, instant persuasion is not only unlikely, it’s not the primary reason we need to engage with others in a better way. There are important effects to political conversations other than persuasion.
It is absolutely critical for communicators to create realistic goals for an interpersonal conversation before it starts; important elements of conversations are often neglected in this high-pressure, contentious political environment in which we find ourselves. Here are some questions and things to consider when starting to think about how to engage with others about political issues and topics:
(1) Is the person with whom you’re speaking reasonably able to have a meaningful conversation or will it instantly devolve into a name-calling screamfest?
(2) If you’re reasonably certain you can have a conversation as opposed to an instant argument, be sure to listen as much (if not more) than you speak, at least at first. Give the person the chance to articulate, if they can, why they think what they do without jumping to conclusions.
(3) Ask follow-up questions in response to their statements and avoid making declarative, judgmental statements in response. Openly acknowledging uncertainty, confusion, and divergent viewpoints creates the best chance for meaningful discussion.
This is the basic shell of the kind of conversations we need to be having: ones that maximize the likelihood (but again, don’t guarantee) of motivating someone to process the information we’re trying to provide to them.
Earlier in the chapter, I mentioned the impact of coming out as LGBT and how that discomfort can lead to something meaningful. Coming out isn’t about “persuading people to like gay people.” No. It is an opportunity to be open and honest with others, to introduce their reality and truth, and over time, to earn common ground, respect, empathy, and humanity. I am continually coming out to people, 20 years after the first time, in ways big and small. When a well-meaning stranger tells my daughter that she has beautiful hair that must be just like her mommy’s hair, I often get awkward glances when she replies that she has two dads. When teaching and peppering my lectures with anecdotes from my personal life, I think twice about the pronouns I use to describe my spouse and whether it is appropriate or relevant for my students to learn I’m gay. When meeting new parents at the Kindergarten parents’ social, I respond to people who ask about my wife with, “Well, my husband . . . ”
These conversations don’t always go well; they can be awkward, resulting in the dreaded, “Oh, I have a lot of gay friends,” for example. More often than not, the conversation ends abruptly. When coming out to more personal circles like family and friends, sometimes friendships are lost, family members are estranged, or significant trauma and life change ensues. However, coming out can be a great exemplar of how a conversation can be productive without needing to accomplish the elusive, complete attitude change and demonstrates how uncomfortable discussions can encourage a more respectful, civil society. Revealing vulnerability and sharing something personal can be a meaningful and powerful motivator.
Sometimes “success” can merely be that two people have a clearer understanding of the other’s position. No positions changed, necessarily, but even encountering others’ beliefs is in and of itself important. “Success” can also mean likeability; while attitudinally, disagreement may remain on issues, those in conversation may find the other person more agreeable, familiar, and likeable. There can be more trust and less mystified (and often stereotypic) misunderstanding of another. The infusion of more information isn’t inconsiderable: (recall the receive-accept-sample model from above). Recent information, even if it doesn’t immediately change someone’s mind by itself, can become a consideration from which people can sample their attitude, and the collection of additional considerations can have a snowball effect. Perhaps most importantly, in reference to the Elaboration Likelihood Model, a listener might find increased relevance to the information and be more motivated to listen and to process information.
Any individual change may feel small but they can be cumulative: the elusive goal of persuasion is really the end result of a bunch of smaller changes that occur slowly, over a period of time. A single conversation need not run the gamut from complete disagreement to complete agreement to be a success.
American culture provides us with so many opportunities to divide ourselves: political partisanship, ideology, race and ethnicity, gender and gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, class and socioeconomic status, education level, region, . . . and so on. In general, it is far easier to self-select into information with which we already agree; we tend to process information in a way that supports existing beliefs; and many prefer to live, work, and engage with people who are like us. Should we throw in the towel? Are we beyond the point of no return? Common ground might not always be possible, so understanding the other person’s ground might be a more realistic goal for a given conversation. Not everyone can be reached. Not everyone can be persuaded. But to have any chance to succeed, we need to tear down our identity blinders, get out of our partisan and ideological silos, and be uncomfortable in conversation.
Maybe I’m a naive optimist but I think we can do it. It isn’t the case that public opinion never changes, so let’s look at the times when it has changed for guidance. Attitude change is generally very slow over time but LGBT rights is one issue domain that bucked that trend; as a result, there are lessons to be learned from historical examples and personal anecdotes. In essence, the message is, “Persuasion can work. Look how it has worked for LGBT rights. It can work again.” As alienated as the American ethos is on so many identities and policies, I want to focus on ways to try to bridge those divides, to identify practical ways to look beyond differences, and to explore strategies and tactics that will help us engage with people with whom we may disagree.
I also want to make one thing perfectly clear: this book is not about “being nice.” It’s not about permissiveness, agreeing to disagree, or the dreaded civility. (More on this idea in the concluding chapter.) I’m not arguing that you should water down your views or cave in to anything or to anyone to be seen as more agreeable. There are indeed times to yell and to scream, to identify injustice and to fight against it with all your might. Sometimes political differences are too strong and you simply can’t reach someone; their blinders are just too effective and no matter what you do, they will not listen to you. There’s nothing you can do about that, there really isn’t. The point is this: there are ways to converse with people about important things in ways that maximize the likelihood that they listen to you . . . and maybe, with some luck and a lot of effort and time, possibly change their mind. Openly acknowledging uncertainty, confusion, and divergent viewpoints creates the best chance of meaningful discussion. It’s just not something we do very often and there’s no time like the present to work on improving that.
Next up, chapter 3 draws our attention to what not to do: being condescending, belittling others for their views, and resorting to shame. Other important considerations include respecting status differences between you and the person with whom you’re speaking and resisting the urge to treat politics as a competitive sport. Then, we can turn to strategies and tactics to use to increase the likelihood of a meaningful political interaction.
All isn’t lost. We just have some work to do. Okay, a lot of work. Let’s get started, shall we?