When academic/best practices aren't enough in emotional conversations

February 25, 2022 12:46 PM

I've been having a social conflict with an acquaintance who's in the same FB group I'm in, but that's not the problem. My own brain's method of processing is the problem.

I'm currently in graduate school, in a master's program for community development. In the past, I was a DFL delegate to the Minneapolis city and Minnesota state DFL conventions and at those conventions, former rep/current AG Keith Ellison talked over and over again about how when phone banking, having honest personal conversations with undecideds and relaying your story in a heartfelt, sincere way was how they were able to convince people that voting for the state to allow same-sex marriage back in 2013.

Lecture notes and journal articles I've read in my grad school courses have also espoused the same thing. In fact, in a paper for my Understanding and Mainstreaming Gender class, I wrote about how deputy prime minister Freeland and the Francophone Liberal MPs of the day were able to call upon her personal sadness and their shared Francophone experiences to convince Belgian politicians in Wallonia to sign the Canada-European Union Trade Agreement in 2016.

However, when I tried to use those same tactics in a conversation with a former acquaintance from high school who has a different opinion than I do about masking requirements in public schools, they did not work. I'm also Internet-argument savvy enough to let the fact that she's being petty over having the last word not get to me. I probably shouldn't have had that conversation with her in the first place, but I'm a sucker for trying to get people to understand how I feel about a thing and also not trying to judge too harshly people whose opinions I don't agree with.

I guess what I'm trying to ask is what other resources can I read to learn how to adapt what I'm learning how to use in a professional context to interpersonal contexts. I'm seeing a therapist every two weeks and I'm familiar with GIVE, FAST, and DEARMAN from DBT; my depression/anxiety brain thinks that I'm just not good enough at using them yet.

posted by TrishaLynn to Human Relations (28 answers total)

It sounds like you expect these techniques to work like magic spells? They may increase persuasiveness in certain contexts, but anyone would tell you that they are not guaranteed to change minds, especially not in a single encounter. That may have something to do with you, but it has a lot more to do with the other person.
posted by praemunire at 12:51 PM on February 25, 2022 [38 favorites]

I mean, there is no magical trick to getting someone to agree with you. Keith Ellison's advice is very sound and I think can apply to both professional and personal interactions, but I wouldn't take your inability to get someone to come around to your views on masking in public schools as evidence that you simply haven't properly adapted these tactics to interpersonal conflicts.
posted by cakelite at 12:51 PM on February 25, 2022 [9 favorites]

Response by poster: To clarify: It wasn't a single conversation. It's been a series of PMs over the last week; unless you mean that the entire thing was a single encounter.
posted by TrishaLynn at 12:54 PM on February 25, 2022

I guess my first thought is why do you have friends? Like what is the purpose of friends/friendly acquaintances in your world? There's no right answer, this is a question for yourself.

For me, for the people I'm close to and trust, I like to be in agreement on big values things, and for folks to take hard stances on things that do not matter. That's what feels safest to me and also the most fun.

Constantly having discourse with people about things like e.g. do trans people deserve human rights or is covid real, those conversations do not make me feel safe, and those conversations are not with people I'm going to trust with friendship. I'm not going to waste my personal time trying to logic someone out of being a shithead.

But if we already agree on the big stuff? And we're just having fun? I would happily engage in a well researched academic debate on questions such as which is the best bird or are Roland Emmerich movies terrible or good actually.

Basically what I'm saying is if you're feeling so put on your back foot you need to bring "best practices" into a purely social conversation, for me, that would not be a social relationship I'd want to invest in.

And also in general I became a much happier person when I finally accepted my actions can't change what anyone else does, I can only change how I react, a hurdle I got over with a therapist.
posted by phunniemee at 1:09 PM on February 25, 2022 [8 favorites]

Has your masters program covered probabilistic vs determinism in interpreting research results yet? Those methods are more likely to work than other methods, but even if you did them exactly right, even over multiple encounters, they won't always work. Nothing always works.

Like others I also had the word "magic" come to mind when reading your question. Over an infinite number of trials, this approach will work more often than other approaches. But sometimes it won't work, and sometimes other methods will work. Probabilistic, not magic.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 1:10 PM on February 25, 2022 [13 favorites]

It may just be this person, it may be that it works better on strangers.

I don't know if this is helpful, but one slogan I've been keeping in mind as the uneven mask restrictions bounce against my personal practices, "I'm trying not to kill you more than you're not trying to kill me." Of course that's pretty confrontational if spoken out loud, but maybe it can provide some ethical angles to consider.
posted by rhizome at 1:11 PM on February 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

Best answer: I guess what I'm trying to ask is what other resources can I read to learn how to adapt what I'm learning how to use in a professional context to interpersonal contexts. I'm seeing a therapist every two weeks and I'm familiar with GIVE, FAST, and DEARMAN from DBT; my depression/anxiety brain thinks that I'm just not good enough at using them yet.

I mean...you do recognize that actually some people are just different from you, right? We aren't machines that spit out outcomes based on you turning our dials precisely right. That person may absolutely never, ever agree with you, for various reasons in their own world schema, misperceptions they have that you don't know about, or just plain hatefulness and spite.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:12 PM on February 25, 2022 [27 favorites]

Persuading people to change their opinion about social issues is very very hard. I don't know the Keith Ellison story, but there's the famous LaCour scandal that came out in part because the paper's "findings" -- that canvassing can change people's minds about gay marriage -- were so surprising and counterintuitive.

Regarding your masking conversations, do you have kids in public school? If your acquaintance does and you don't, or you do but your kids are differently affected by masks from theirs, it's going to be pretty hard to call upon your personal and shared experiences. And if you trust different news sources from theirs, that's going to be hard too, because _every_ news source has proven to be a little bit untrustworthy regarding the pandemic. The global medical community is also not in agreement about the school masking issue. I think you're picking a completely impossible battle.
posted by redlines at 1:17 PM on February 25, 2022 [5 favorites]

Best answer: Even the most skillful and persuasive person using skills for persuasion perfectly doesn't persuade everyone. These skills increase your interpersonal effectiveness; they don't magically bend people to your will. Sounds like you don't need to get better at interpersonal skills so much as you need to get better at accepting their limits.
posted by shadygrove at 1:37 PM on February 25, 2022 [10 favorites]

having honest personal conversations with undecideds and relaying your story in a heartfelt, sincere way was how they were able to convince people

These practices are more successful in aggregate, not 100% of the time individually. There are always some people you can't reach.
posted by mhoye at 1:40 PM on February 25, 2022 [10 favorites]

I also just want to point out that there is a huge difference between understanding and accepting a viewpoint, and agreeing with it. You are conflating them, but they are not equivalent.

Also, as a former academic I have found that 100% or so of the times you go into a conversation trying to use tactics to convince someone, you are going to lose the audience. It puts people's guards up because it becomes very obvious that your intent is not to genuinely engage in a two-way discourse, but to proselytize.
posted by sm1tten at 2:06 PM on February 25, 2022 [10 favorites]

former acquaintance from high school who has a different opinion than I do about masking requirements in public schools

Approximately 14% of adults in the US believe at least some aspect of Qanon tenets, and it's something like 30% who just can't stand to do anything they're told. If there was an academic best practice to get some bozo you knew in high school to stop thinking Tom Hanks runs a pedophile ring, those numbers would be lower. Don't take it personally.
posted by Lyn Never at 2:08 PM on February 25, 2022 [7 favorites]

Best answer: this is a bewildering question. This person has their own life experiences, and peers, and friends, and family, and environment, and habits of media consumption, and perceptions and observations... and all of those inputs, plus factors we don't even know about, have led her to the opinion she holds. Why would you think that you - who are just some acquaintance in a FB group - would be able to override all of that by some trick of rhetoric? Delivered in a series of PMs no less, not even a person to person conversation?

Would you change everything you know and believe because someone on FB told you to?
posted by fingersandtoes at 2:23 PM on February 25, 2022 [14 favorites]

Would you change everything you know and believe because someone on FB told you to?

Tragically this is not as good a counterargument as we might wish.
posted by mhoye at 2:31 PM on February 25, 2022 [6 favorites]

People have already covered that the key problem here is you are focusing one one data point (i.e. one person), but also, the examples you give are all about a person being exposed in an intimate way to a new viewpoint. And it seems to work best when people are turning groups of people into 2D stereotypes.

So, a person who views people who have abortions as "evil" listening to a person narrating how hard and conflicted they were when choosing abortion, but that it was something they did for [x], [y], [z] reasons that are relatable, well, then the anti-abortion person may still be against abortion, but may be less likely to consider anyone who is pro-choice as evil.

You say you used the "same tactics" but I guess I wonder how? You described why you value masks in schools? You're not currently a K-12 teacher clearly, but are you a parent with a child impacted by COVID risk, whereas this person isn't? If not, I'm not sure how you'd be able to change this person's mind using this method - it really requires a personal connection to to the issue at hand (and yes, of course we all feel somewhat connected to COVID practices), but you need to have a more personal connection to the person you're arguing with for this strategy to work.
posted by coffeecat at 2:34 PM on February 25, 2022 [4 favorites]

You are not the only voice; the person is hearing, and has heard lots of voices/ opinions. The deal with phone-banking and any other means of changing peoples' minds and behaviors is that you hope to affect the people with whom you interact. If you are good at being persuasive, you might bring, say, 20% of people 10 units closer to your viewpoint. If they started a lot farther away, they will still not think what you hope or behave as you wish, even if you successfully moved them some distance. Also, the person may get multiple appeals; your ideas might not resonate, someone else may hit on something that will matter to a person. Remember that the other side is still working on the person with their persuasion.

In addition to verbal persuasion with well-reasoned ideas and authentic emotional appeals, by speaking out, we affect the social climate and humans react to the climate, though it is mostly impossible to measure. Keep phonebanking, sending postcards, speaking out. Be factual, respectful, authentic.

We are in the midst of a pervasive campaign of lies. I believe the US as a democracy is in serious danger; we have lost a lot of ground to the Extreme Right. As individuals, our single voices are not very strong, but in numbers, we can be heard. I also keep in mind that when I engage with someone on social media, I may be encouraging someone in their circle.
posted by theora55 at 2:49 PM on February 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

Yes, personal stories are persuasive, but that doesn't mean one individual is generally going to change another individual's mind by telling them stories.

Just like an effective medication doesn't fix everyone's condition, perfectly, without side effects.
posted by champers at 2:57 PM on February 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

My own brain's method of processing is the problem.

... my depression/anxiety brain thinks that I'm just not good enough at using them yet.

Cut yourself and your brain (and your friend!) a break, and realize that your inability to change someone else's mind does not reflect any inadequacy on your part, or your failure to find the One Weird Trick that will make the sale.

Also, sometimes being a friend means accepting that other people think differently from you, and not being too fixated on trying to change them.

If you keep coming back to the same topic over and over, trying to convert them, they're going to start to perceive you as the equivalent of a really persistent religious proselytizer or MLM salesbot, and it's probably going to sour if not kill the friendship.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 3:15 PM on February 25, 2022 [5 favorites]

Adding: I have found that sometimes when I make an argument to someone and don't convince them, that later, it turns out that something I said did in fact stick with them, and shift their thinking to some degree -- but not right away.

Try letting it go. Keeping the pressure on may only cause them to dig in their heels. Dropping the subject may give them breathing room to consider your arguments in a more relaxed frame of mind, and perhaps it will turn out that you planted some seeds that will eventually bear fruit.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 3:18 PM on February 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

There's also a reason that most organizations that depend on changing people's minds and mobilizing -- unions, grassroots movements -- don't rely on organizing people via the internet. It's much much harder to connect to someone and move them by text or DM than it is by phone, which itself is much harder than in person. It's just how our brains are, it's easier to ignore/blow off people online, when you're not face to face with them.
posted by LeeLanded at 3:39 PM on February 25, 2022 [4 favorites]

I don't know about Minnesota, but I remember when Maine had its 2012 marriage referendum the number I was given for how many people changed their minds once a volunteer got them on the phone was 25%, which was exceptionally high. It was enough (that time) to get the bill passed, but for the volunteers' part, that giant success meant 75% of their phone calls were kind of a bummer.
posted by lampoil at 3:46 PM on February 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

I am convinced that arguing on the internet (especially being text-based and often non-synchronous) is like wrestling a pig in mud. You're not going to win, and after a while, you realise the pig likes it.

To be fair, in the circumstances of arguing online, you don't have the opportunity to use your observations of body language, tone, facial expression etc, to be able to tell when you're working with a personal belief structure (all Z people are evil and icky) or uninformed ignorance (my TV says all Z people do this wrong thing and they don't have any justification for it. I won't really care until I'm forced to interact with Z people).

You don't have the opportunity to use body language, facial expression and tone to imply "I'm listening to your point of view and genuinely trying to understand it. I'm not against you."

Also, some people when online don't recognise their conversation partner as truly human. They know the argument can be ended instantly by either person alt-tabbing away - it's all fair game like unmoderated comments on a news piece.

And lastly, I don't know who first said this "a man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still" (probably applies to any gender) and "you can't reason someone out of an opinion they didn't reason themselves into."
posted by b33j at 5:50 PM on February 25, 2022 [5 favorites]

I think the idea of planting seeds that may affect the person later on is very important. When I was in high school, I became very involved in a fundamentalist religious group. It was not quite a cult, but it became my whole life for several years in a way that was Not Good. My brother would gently raise issues and ask questions that I outwardly completely dismissed, but his questions were working on me and I was eventually able to find my own way out. Being assigned a Muslim roommate in college also helped, though we rarely talked about religion - I just saw her living her life and realized that it was an accident of birth that I was Christian and finally couldn't believe that God was going to send millions of people to hell because they were born into non-Christian religions. While you aren't asking specifically about religion, I think some of the anti-masking rhetoric is very much like religious belief.

Also, it's really important to talk to people so that they feel they can change their minds. It would have been much harder for me to admit I'd been wrong if my brother had been treating me like I was a terrible person.

(Also, never say "I hear you." As far as I can tell, it means "I am going to pretend to listen to your position so I can proceed to telling you how you're wrong." It also sounds like something that someone just told people they should say. It makes me want to spit fire.)

This essay that was just posted on the Blue seems pertinent: That Time When I was in a Cult and Got a Loving Letter from a Friend.
posted by FencingGal at 7:03 PM on February 25, 2022 [5 favorites]

Apart from the fact mentioned already that you can't evaluate any technique by whether or not it will persuade a particular person (there are always going to be failures), there is a fundamental difference in the topics of persuasion here.
I would guess that the techniques you are applying are successful in situations where the person doing the persuading has a very different identity than the person being persuaded, and that different identity is at the heart of the topic of persuasion.
"I'm gay, you're not, this is how these laws that don't affect you, affect me. You can trust me on this. "
I suspect that the people who were persuaded by those arguments had a lot less to lose, in their own minds, by changing their minds.
The masking issue is a lot more complex in terms of identity. From your friend's perspective, you are not a person who has more insight into the issues because of lived experience. Even if you feel like you do, they feel like they do too. They also have a lot more direct experience invested in masking or not, than whether strangers they have never met can get married or not.
They are angry and afraid for themselves and their loved ones and whether that fear is rational or not, it's strong.
In a situation like this, you're only likely to persuade them to change their habits if they trust you a lot and depend on your advice, or if you have some material way to force them by withholding something they want.
posted by Zumbador at 7:45 PM on February 25, 2022 [5 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks so much, everyone. Yes, even y'all who were more blunt than others; they were all words I needed to hear. And as long as I'm being sappy about it, it turns out all the resource I needed was the time to move into wise mind, some Reality Checking courtesy of you fine people, and forgiving myself for my mistake in contacting her in the first place.
posted by TrishaLynn at 9:46 PM on February 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

I also want to say that phonebanking and talking to dozens of strangers with our voices is very different than exchanging written messages with someone.
posted by bluedaisy at 11:04 PM on February 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm not going to waste my personal time trying to logic someone out of being a shithead.

Wise words. Wise words indeed.

The hard part happens when somebody whose company has hitherto been enjoyable turns into a shithead. The immediate inclination is to do whatever it takes to pull them out of it, but sadly that often turns out not to be possible. I don't know a better way to deal with that than to cut contact and let them get on with it while grieving the loss of what used to be a good relationship.

It seems to me that the reason it's often impossible to stop somebody turning into a shithead is that doing so is generally a consequence of a longstanding habitual failure to be curious about how they and this wild world we all live in actually work. Those who seek instead the illusory certainties of broad-brush, monochrome worldviews constructed from dogma lacking in nuance, with the inevitable gaps and voids papered and spackled over by reassurances from others of like mind, are at greatest risk.

I see participation in algorithmically-curated social media as hugely more reinforcing to that kind of spurious reassurance than anything resembling honest exchange, and that's why I choose to avoid using (and thereby implicitly supporting) social media platforms that work that way.

I think of doing my level best not to turn into a shithead as an obligation to my community. But not only do I have no ability to prevent somebody else from failing to exercise what I see as that basic responsibility, I don't presume to have the right. So yeah, I'm not going to waste my personal time trying to logic someone out of being a shithead.

People can recover from shitheadery but they have to start by wanting to, and whenever I find myself dealing with somebody who shows no signs of wanting to I just remind myself that there are so many non-shitheads I could choose to seek out instead.
posted by flabdablet at 9:55 AM on February 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

To paraphrase, and perhaps generalize, a number of well- known quotations, its difficult to get a person the believe something when benefits accrue to them for not believing it. The benefits can be real or merely perceived, present or future. Rich people really believe in low taxes and trickle down economics though economists don't.

Separately, folks who argue a particular position recognize the rhetorical devices the encounter. I was once taught a technique to use to reduce conflict, and the very first time I tried it, my wife's immediate response was "Don't try that shit on me."

My own approach is to present the most real and authentic version of myself that I can, and to try to project openness and reasonableness, to avoid schoolyard taunts and artificial bugbears (It was Hillary! ). That way I can hopefully add weight to my opinions.
posted by SemiSalt at 7:39 AM on February 27, 2022 [1 favorite]