How to Be a Better Human - How to fix our polarized conversations (with Robb Willer)

Episode Date: February 1, 2021

Is your family, community, or even your country more divided than ever? Today’s guest Robb Willer is here to share some compelling insights on how we might bridge the ideological divide and offer some intuitive advice on ways to be more persuasive. Robb is a professor of sociology, psychology and organizational behavior at Stanford University. He studies the role of morality in politics. His research shows how moral values, typically a source of ideological division, can also be used to bring people together. His political research has investigated various topics, including economic inequality, racial prejudice, masculine overcompensation and Americans' views of climate change. Willer's writing has appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post, including his op-eds "The Secret to Political Persuasion" and "Is the Environment a Moral Cause?” Willer received a Ph.D from Cornell University and a BA from the University of Iowa. Before becoming a professor, he worked as a dishwasher, construction worker, mover, line cook and union organizer. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How do you talk to someone who disagrees with you politically? In case you haven't noticed, this is something that a lot of us are not good at. Not good at all. One of the only things that I feel certain we can all agree on is that there are deep political divides all around the world. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you even disagree with me about that. Maybe we disagree about how much we disagree. I don't know. It's a minefield.

I'm Chris Duffy, and this is how to be a better human. Personally, I'm so conflict-averse, the last thing that I want to do is have a political argument with someone. And to be clear, there are obviously a lot of people out there whose viewpoints are so extreme who might fundamentally oppose your very existence that having a discussion with them is dangerous or it's out of the question. So let's just take those people off the table for a minute. But even when we're now just looking at the people who I can engage with, the people who are reasonable but just happen to disagree with me about an issue like where our tax money should be spent,

reasonable but just happen to disagree with me about an issue like where our tax money should be spent. Man, I still don't think that I have the tools to have a productive conversation with them. It's honestly been a long time since I have talked about a political issue with someone who disagrees with me and then walked away feeling like, wow, that was really productive. I'm glad we had that talk. That is very rarely my interaction. And I think it's probably because I'm bad at this. I'm very unequipped to do this. And yet there are so many really, really big and important issues right now that we need to be talking about. Things like race and health and gender, just to name a few.

And so on today's show, I'm going to interview an expert who gave a talk about how most of us, certainly including me, are getting political conversations very wrong. And I'm going to interview him about the surprising ways that we can all be better and more effective in talking across the political divide. When we talk about how to have political conversations, I don't mean between legislators or pundits. We're talking about the rest of us, who have people in our lives or our families, people who we really disagree with. For you, maybe that person is your conservative uncle.

Or if you are that conservative uncle, maybe it's your socialist niece. You know that if you get into politics with this person, it is not going to end well. Well, today's guest, Professor Rob Willer, he does not avoid those conversations. He has spent his entire career studying them. In some ways, he has a PhD in awkward uncle conversations. And what he's proven is that there are effective methods for connecting with, and maybe even convincing, people that we disagree with. Today, we're going to talk about some of the ways to stop dreading that conversation, and instead, see it as an opportunity. Rob has been working on this for years and he gave

a talk on some of his findings way back in 2016. Remember 2016? Well, he gave this talk at TEDx Marin where he explained how to win someone over. It turns out that one of the biggest things that most of us are doing wrong is we're putting together our arguments in a way that would convince us. But we don't need to be convinced. We are already convinced. Instead, we need to spend more time thinking about how to frame our positions in ways that will appeal to someone who sees the world in a very different way than we do. And what you're about to hear right now is a clip from Rob's 2016 talk. So what would work better? Well, we believe it's a technique that we call moral reframing, and we've studied it in a series of experiments. And, you know, we've studied it in a series of experiments.

And we've studied this on a whole slew of different political issues. So one of the first things that we discovered that I think is really helpful for understanding polarization is to understand that the political divide in our country is undergirded by a deeper moral divide. So one of the most robust findings in the history of political psychology is this pattern identified by John Haidt and Jesse Graham, psychologists, that liberals and conservatives tend to endorse different values to different degrees. So, for example, we find that liberals tend to endorse values like equality and fairness and care and protection from harm

more than conservatives do. And conservatives tend to endorse values like loyalty, patriotism, respect for authority and moral purity more than liberals do. All these studies have the same clear message. If you want to persuade someone on some policy, it's helpful to connect that policy to their underlying moral values. And you know, when you say it like that,

it seems really obvious, right? Like, why did we come here tonight? Why? It's incredibly intuitive. And even though it is, it's something we really struggle to do. People's moral values, I mean, they're their most deeply held beliefs. People are willing to fight and die for their values. Why are they going to give that up just to agree with you on something that they don't particularly want to agree with you on anyway? If that persuasive appeal that you're making to

your Republican uncle means that he doesn't just have to change his view, he's got to change his underlying values too, that's not going to go very far. What Dr. Willer has found is that it is possible to have a really effective conversation across a political divide. It is possible to convince people to change their stances on big substantive issues. You know, we kept saying when we were designing these reframed moral arguments, you know, empathy and respect, empathy and respect. If you can tap into that, you can connect, and you might be able to persuade somebody in this country. This is tough. This is challenging. But Rob has got the data to back it up.

In just a moment, we're going to hear more from Rob about this framework for persuasion that is actually backed by hard data and a little bit of hope. That is next on How to Be a Better Human. Don't go anywhere. We're back with How to Be a Better Human. And today our guest is Professor Rob Willer. I'm a professor of sociology, psychology, and organizational behavior here at Stanford University. He's a sociologist who studies how to have better political conversations. So moral reframing involves articulating a political position that you're advocating for in terms of not your own values necessarily, but the moral values of the audience or the person that you're communicating with. And so this often means making really different arguments than the ones we hear

most often, and maybe really different arguments than the ones that resonate the most with you. So for example, if you're a liberal, your first instinct in advocating for positions like immigration reform or same-sex marriage might be to make those appeals in terms of values like equality and fairness and social justice. However, we find in our research that if you're communicating with a conservative, you would likely be more persuasive if you could somehow articulate your issue position in terms of values that resonate more with conservatives like religious values or patriotism or respect for tradition and so on. Those kinds of arguments tend to be more persuasive. And they also, you'll notice as you make them like, oh, I haven't heard that argument because the people that hold these

positions don't have those values usually. So obviously polarization and social change, these are incredibly topical issues right now. This year, 2020, and presumably 2021, these are not issues that are going away. What made you want to start studying them in the first place? Because I assume you started before these were the hot button issues that they are. polarization for a long time for at least a couple reasons. So on the one hand, the personal aspects of polarization resonate with me. I grew up a political minority, a progressive in South Carolina. And so I had the experience of feeling politically alienated that a lot of people feel wherever they live, liberals and conservatives alike, you know, have had this experience at some point. And with rising polarization, it can feel worse, you know. So even though my family's got more or less the same political views that I do, and most of my friends, you know, have the same views, I definitely know something of what it feels like to feel, you know, like you're not being treated very nicely because of your political beliefs. So that part of polarization resonates with me and the polarization problem. But also I'm a pretty pragmatic political person who's very concerned with achieving

what I think of as political progress in my lifetime. And if you have that orientation that you would like to see some sort of progress as you define it, then you have to be concerned about polarization because you can't pass significant legislation around inequality, immigration, climate change, whatever it is, without going through the problem of polarization. polarization as a political barrier is something that pretty much everybody of any political stripe has in common now, that they got to find a way around this problem if they're going to achieve their political goals. There are two things that I think are so interesting about your research here on this specific issue. I think the first one is that the idea that so often when we're trying to convince people who disagree with us, we go about it by saying the things that convinced us, even though we already believe something different than the person we're trying to convince.

Yeah. And I think the idea of reiterating your own reason for holding a political position, it's not crazy for very new political issues, like, I don't know, regulations on self-driving cars or something, where everybody hasn't heard all the arguments yet. We're still figuring the whole thing out. But for something like abortion or economic inequality or gun control, people have heard the arguments that, you have likely heard the arguments that you were persuaded by or not persuaded by for that matter. And if you're going to expand the base of support for your position, you're going to probably benefit from conceiving of some new arguments that are uniquely persuasive among the people that haven't already joined your side. Yeah. And that's the second thing that I

think is so fascinating about this is that the way that you put it is it's almost like we so often, instead of trying to convince people to support the issue, often we're trying to convince people to change who they are and what they care about. The fact that you have such hard numbers in your research of like you can actually get people to by talking about what they care about, you can get them to change what they support on this substantive issue. You know, we also find that liberals are more likely than conservatives to, you know, morally judge somebody who's actively not recycling when it wouldn't be that hard to recycle, for example. So it really, you know, is imbued with this, the power of morality for liberals, this issue

and where it really doesn't seem to be for conservatives. And this explains a lot of the difference in strength of opinion, because in a lot of ways, if you look at the public opinion data on the environment, the problem there in terms of achieving consensus around taking action on climate change, for example, isn't so much, according to John Krosnick and colleagues here at Stanford, it isn't so much that conservatives and Republicans don't believe in climate change. Majorities now do. It's just that it isn't a really high ranking issue of significant concern. And they also don't perceive it as worth economic trade-offs that they perceive

as inevitable for taking action. And so that's kind of where we're stuck. So when we approach that problem, we said, well, is there a way that conservatives could view environmental protection in moral terms? Like, is there a way to craft a way to talk about environmental protection that would resonate with conservatives' unique moral concerns? And so we found that making a new sort of environmental protection argument in terms of purity and sanctity, like protecting the sacredness of nature, tended to resonate more with conservatives than one that was just about protection and caring for the environment, which is a mode of rhetoric that we find resonates more

with liberals. A lot of your research takes the morals of liberals and the morals of conservatives. I don't think about morals as kind of lining up with like a political party, but you found that people who identify as conservative and people who identify as liberal tend to have different moral values that really speak to them the most strongly. Moral reframing is taking those morals that speak more strongly to the opposing group and using them to make your issue. Can you give us an example of a conservative argument made to appeal to liberals and a liberal argument made to appeal to conservatives? So for example, one thing we tested was whether conservatives could

advocate more effectively for their positions if they articulated those positions in liberal value terms. And so one example was we looked at whether arguments for high levels of military spending, a classically conservative political position, would resonate more with liberals if they were articulated in terms of the values of equality of opportunity and social justice and fairness. And so we tested a new argument for high levels of military spending that really emphasized the role of the military as an institution in the U.S. that can provide an opportunity for upward mobility for the poor and minorities, a place where they can achieve on a more level playing field than outside of the institution, and, you know, emphasize, you know, some significant points where in American

history where the military was a vehicle of equal opportunity, such as, you know, the racial integration of the military that happened before a lot of other American institutions. And we found that when liberals read that argument, they tended to support high levels of military spending more because they read the military as resonating with their values more than before they read the argument. And then the opposing side, right? So someone who comes at it like me with a liberal, with liberal politics, how can I put some of the arguments of things that I care about in terms that will be compelling to a conservative? Yeah. So one example that we

studied along those lines was same-sex marriage. And we were interested in whether a more persuasive argument for same-sex marriage could be made for persuasive among conservatives if same-sex marriage was framed as consistent with conservative values. And specifically, we sought to connect same-sex marriage to the value of group loyalty and, in particular, patriotism. And so we presented conservatives with a new sort of same-sex marriage argument that said things like gay Americans are proud, patriotic Americans who work hard and contribute to the economy and our society. And they want to buy homes and raise kids in this society, same as everyone else does. And, you know, they deserve the same rights as all other Americans. you know, they deserve the same rights as all other Americans. And we found that that sort of an argument was more persuasive to conservatives than an argument in terms of equality and fairness

and social justice. If you can argue both sides of any issue persuasively with moral reframing, it seems like that might not actually always be a good thing. Like there are some stances I don't want people to have more compelling arguments for, maybe even a lot of stances. Yeah. So I think an important point is there's nothing inherently virtuous about moral reframing. It's a tool like any other that's potentially effective, and then it is as virtuous as the end that you put it to. So it's easy for us to come up with compelling examples from history of moral reframing being used to justify terrible things. So we think about purity arguments made by the Third Reich or equality arguments made by the Khmer Rouge or

patriotism arguments made by nationalist dictatorships. These are terrible things. And examples about moral reframing can be put to bad ends. So it's like a hammer where you can use it to build a house or to injure someone. And so, yeah, it's virtue resides in the end that it is put to. Yeah, it's I mean, I think that's a really important point and an important thing to think about is that like convincing people to believe something that they don't inherently believe is not always a good thing. But I do think that it challenges me at least to think about how a lot of the issues that feel extremely pressing and feel so divisive in the country that perhaps it is more important to figure out, like you said, in the way that a

political lobbyist would be like, not the perfect bill, but the bill that will pass. And this seems like you've kind of identified a way where it seems like how could we ever agree on these things? And potentially there's actually much more overlap in terms of what we would care about and agree on. And here would be my case for considering moral reframing in everyday life. I'll make two points on this. One would be that the United States is like an unbelievably demographically and culturally and politically diverse place. As a country, we have substantial ethnic diversity. We have huge levels of socioeconomic class differences. We have regional differences that matter a lot. We're riven with polarization. There's political polarization. So it's these huge differences

we're trying to communicate across in the US, more so than most contexts. And if we're going to say that we need to agree on this thing for the exact same reasons, we are definitely going to limit what level of consensus you can build to, how big of a majority you can have. I think that if you really want to succeed politically, there's going to have to be some comfort with agreeing with someone for somewhat different reasons, which, I mean, great problem to have given our levels of polarization. I would love for my political positions to be supported by 60, 70% of the American population and be really politically viable, even if half those folks have

a different reason than the other half of the folks for holding the position. So that would be my sort of pragmatic case for moral reframing. And then my principal case, well, you know, while I generally think moral reframing is as virtuous as the end that you put it to, I do think that there is something respectful about taking the time to try to connect the thing that you're trying to convince somebody of to the things they care most deeply about. I do think there is something respectful about saying, okay, you're coming to this conversation with these commitments. I'm going to dedicate some mental energy to how the thing I'm telling you, you ought to consider believing and connects to the things you care most deeply about. Yeah. And I mean, in some ways, what you're describing is like the definition of empathy is to put yourself in someone else's shoes and to think about it in that way.

And I certainly think you'd be hard pressed to find many people in the United States right now who don't think that we could use more empathy in political conversations. And finding more common ground seems like it would certainly be a useful thing. Yeah. And that empathy is the first thing polarization takes from you, because it means you're probably communicating with different people. You probably have very different friend groups. You have different families. You may live in a different part of the country based on your political stripe. And then constructing some sort of bridge to the perspective of the people you disagree with just gets harder and harder with less shared experience, less personal interactions, fewer personal interactions

with people you disagree with. In just a moment, Rob is going to tell us about the situations where it might not be appropriate or might even be dangerous to try and convince someone. And we're going to talk about how to navigate the murky waters of political dialogue when it's not just the issues you disagree on, it's also the underlying facts. Rob has got the research-backed techniques right after this. Okay, this is How to Be a Better Human. We are back with facts. Rob has got the research-backed techniques right after this. Okay, this is How to Be a Better Human. We are back with Dr. Rob Willer.

When you are having conversations or when people who are listening to this, they are trying to have conversations across a divide. Are there red flags for potentially a person who is just, there's no way to reach them or where conversations don't make sense even with moral reframing? there's no way to reach them or where conversations don't make sense even with moral reframing? Obviously, there are people who have, I think, political commitments that you might find just distasteful and not worth engaging with, like people with deep racial prejudices or deeply sexist views about gender. For example, I don't think there's any obligation or necessarily any utility in trying to articulate a political position

in terms of those prejudices, for example. So I think that there's reasonable limits to the idea of meeting people where they are. To me, it feels like one of the hardest things about communicating across a political divide right now is that we're not getting our information from the same places. And a lot of times we're not even getting the same information at all. So it's not always just a question of policies. It's also trying to debate

like the underlying facts. And I wonder how much more difficult these competing media narratives have made these conversations. These informational divides are really, really difficult. You know, the echo chambers that we find ourselves in on social media and in terms of our mass media choices as well are really difficult to navigate. I think that one thing that we've been working on lately, and we don't have strong enough results

to say that this is a finding yet, is to try to reframe the idea of being skeptical about one's immediate intuitions about information, political information you're consuming. And one thing we're trying to play around with is, is it possible to get people to be more skeptical of those first reactions to their political content by making that skepticism seem to be consistent with their political values, consistent with the idea of being fair-minded for a liberal, consistent with the idea of being, you know, a loyal American or, you know, a skeptical consumer of political media? Is there a way to construct that as a patriotic thing to be so that it might resonate with conservatives? Because I think that just trying to tell people just to be more discerning,

to be more accurate, it has limits because they think they are being accurate in their reasoning. But what gives me hope about your research is that it seems like you have found ways on other issues for people who are across the political divide to speak to people who are maybe behaving irresponsibly and in a way that they can hear. And have you found any of that for COVID or is it too early or what's the status of that? We've personally looking at the public health literature, I'm convinced that in this space where you're asking people to do stuff that feels very counterintuitive to them, that's costly to them, like do stuff that's inconvenient or don't do things you really like doing, that it's just so critical to have trusted

sources be the people you're hearing that message from. And so this was one of the big takeaways from the WHO and the Obama administration's activities in West Africa in Ebola response was you needed to find trusted sources, people that were legitimate sources of information. If you're going to ask people to do these really counterintuitive things, like don't go to a family member's funeral or wash your hands an absurd number of times a day. If you're going to try to convince people of these things, they needed to hear it from someone they really believed. How do you have those conversations? What are the specific things that people can do?

These are not the only ways to have good political conversations, or this is not, moral reframing is not the only way to have a good political conversation. It's a good technique for persuasion. It's a pretty good technique for finding middle ground. It's a pretty good technique for conveying some respect for someone else's moral worldview. But there's other approaches too. I think one of the things that I'm convinced by is that listening, you know, taking some time to pay somebody the respect of really listening to their position, you know, trying to elicit from them, you know, their deeper reasons for the positions that they've taken, showing that sort of attentiveness to where they're coming from, can be very effective for not just having a good interaction, but then potentially being persuasive to them. And it's sort of counterintuitive, like,

let somebody else talk, let somebody else give their reasons in full before offering your own perspective could actually be a way to convince them. But research by David Brockman and Josh Kala on the technique of deep canvassing suggests that that is a kind of counterintuitively good approach to persuasion. Also, relatedly, embedding your own perspective in a personal narrative can be effective. The same research suggests I came to this view because of these experiences that I had can personalize it, make it seem like you're not just an ideologue that signed up for an ideology because of where you lived or what school you went to, but instead that you had a personal reason that you lived or what school you went to, but instead that you had

a personal reason that you became invested in it that was relatable, potentially relatable for the other person. Yeah, it's interesting. A lot of the same tips that you would give relationship partners, you know, whose relationship you're trying to encourage to be going better, a lot of the same advice that a marriage counselor might give would apply pretty well to the sort of advice you'd give people of opposite political stripes trying to have a decent conversation. What an apt metaphor for America right now, too, that we are in desperate need of a relationship counselor, a marriage counselor to keep us together. Yeah, we want to have good conversations, but we're walking through a minefield. you know? And I think one of, you know, one of those tips is to add some subjective language to the way you're saying things. So rather than saying

things authoritatively as clear facts that, you know, can, you know, add something that conditionalizes that I really believe that, or I have come to think that, you know, something that says. It's not objectively wrong the way you load the dishwasher. I just feel that the way the dishwasher is being loaded does not make sense. That's right. That example seems like it somehow wouldn't work as well. Oh, no, no, no. That's a political position for me. That's not a personal position. Let's be very clear. Listening, you know, paying some respect, finding points of common ground and highlighting them and holding them up of like, well, I really agree with you about this. You know, like when you said that, that totally resonates with me.

And I completely agree about that. Highlighting those points of agreement can really help to build some kind of cohesion. Yeah, I just feel like that really makes so much sense and resonates with me. And I just kind of keep in my head going back to the environmental issue. going back to the environmental issue. And I think it makes so much sense. They're like, oh, you really care about the purity of water and you care about America

continuing to be a national leader. Yeah, those matter to me too. And I also care about it being fair that vulnerable people shouldn't drink poisoned water. And like, you care about that as well. But we just, the fact that you can kind of see like ways in which we each approach

an issue from different ways. I don't know. It's so rare to have a conversation where you talk about politics and you end up feeling hopeful. But I genuinely do talking to you feel like there are ways that we can. This isn't just a hopeless divide that can't be bridged. And that doesn't mean it's not challenging or very challenging. It's really challenging.

Yeah. But I think it's going to have to start with us, because I think that if you look at the media, if you look at politicians, the incentives are not really lined up for them to reach across party divides. You know, they're caught in an incentivized position of promoting polarization, if anything. And so if those incentives are going to change, we have to try to form more consensus on more issues all on our own. And so we Americans are going to have to start fixing this on our own. We can't just look to media sources and political leaders to do it for us. I think since I gave this talk, one thing I've developed a greater appreciation for is the idea that if you want to persuade somebody that it's not just about what you say, it's about how much you listen. And if you can figure out a way to listen respectfully to someone

before you offer your own perspective, that can counterintuitively be a path to persuasion. And here I'm really convinced by research on this technique called deep canvassing, which finds that you're taking the time to really find out where somebody's coming from, to pay them the respect of listening to their perspective and finding points of common ground and highlighting them wherever possible. That's a way to convey respect, and it also can be a way to persuade somebody. Talking with Rob, one of the things that really struck me was the idea that if we actually care about making progress if we care about having tangible gains in terms of laws and policies one of the big things we have to change is being so precious about the way in which we communicate

things yes we want to say them in a particular way but that's not really working and I And I think that Rob's research, it's challenging. It's challenging to me in the sense that you have to think about people who disagree with you, think about what they value, and then try and make this fit their values. That sometimes feels really tough or something that I don't want to do. But I think we really care about progress. We care about attacking the polarization in this country and making progress on some of the huge issues, things like climate change that need to be addressed right now that we don't have time to wait on. I feel like this is an actual way forward. That's one of the other things I find really powerful about this is that it's something we can all do. We can all be better humans by thinking about communicating more clearly and with a little bit more empathy. Well, thank you so much for helping all the rest of us, everyone listening

and me to be a better human. And thank you so much, Rob Willer, for being on the show. Yeah, it's a great pleasure to be on the show and a pleasure to meet you, Chris. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of How to Be a Better Human. That's our show for today. Thank you to our guest, Dr. Rob Willer. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. This show is produced by Abhimanyu Das, Daniela Balarezo, Frederica Elizabeth Yosefov, and Cara Newman of TED, and Jocelyn Gonzalez, Pedro Rafael Rosado, and Sandra Lopez-Monsalve from PRX Productions. For more on how to be a better human, visit ideas.ted.com. We'll see you next week.