By MARTY LEVINE
The art of persuasion means understanding your audience; knowing how to appeal to their own values, rather than yours; and understanding that what you call “evidence” is not necessarily evidence — for starters.
Calum Matheson, Communications faculty member and expert on debate, the spread of disinformation and what constitutes a successful argument, explained these ideas and much more at the Dec. 5 “Be Civil, Be Civic: How to Agree and Disagree” workshop as part of the Faculty and Staff Development Program’s new Year of Discourse and Dialogue class series.
The ability to convince anyone of anything nowadays has certainly been hampered by our current information overload, but “it’s more that the kind of information has changed,” Matheson said.
Once, most information that reached people was social information about each other in their small towns. Now the scale of information available to us, about the entire world, is overwhelming, he noted — and we are asked to make decisions based upon it, such as picking a president.
In pre-internet eras, if you argued with a neighbor you had to keep seeing them in town. In the social media era, “the penalty for being uncivil is lower than it ever was.”
“It can sometimes be difficult to make those decisions confidently,” he said. “That key element that allowed us to make decisions confidently is no longer there. You have to know who to trust” as a source of your information. But the world faces the decline of authority in many institutions and offices. “We’ve democratized the notion of truth,” Matheson said, which helps us challenge bad ideas but has also served to confuse some people about what can be called a fact.
“Most people are emotional in the end ... they’re about feelings, not facts,” he added. Researching and thinking through every fact and nuance is not usually possible in any case: “It’s not really feasible for you to know everything about everything that you have to make decisions about.” On the other hand, gut reactions are too often wrong. “There has to be some sort of middle way,” he said.
One useful method of judging right and wrong is to see whether an argument is even structured properly. Arguments must themselves be valid (well-constructed) before they can be judged to be sound (true in their individual pieces), he explained.
The trouble with most arguments is that what we present as “evidence” is not the direct evidence. We don’t argue for our side by conducting a scientific experiment in front of someone, or taking them to a foreign country to show them what is happening there. We merely tell them what others have proven in a lab or seen with their eyes. What we call “evidence” is often merely a claim that someone else has the evidence. If we can’t present “justification for making the claim based on the evidence” — sometimes called a “warrant” — then the argument may be invalid on its face, and we can dismiss it more easily, he said.
Most of our “evidence” is really not evidence but merely an appeal to others’ facts and or to logic. He noted that most of the time when you have to make a decision, you don’t have time to present true evidence. In fact, Matheson said, evidence should be a process: you need to evidence something yourself for it to be true evidence.
Instead, we argue in one of the three ways Aristotle pinpointed long ago: by appealing to facts, or to emotions, or to the character and expertise of ourselves or someone else. Not one of these things is an appeal to the evidence directly.
What’s makes all three appeals work? “The audience,” Matheson said.
The audience has to be ready to believe in facts and logic, or ready to share your emotions, or able to believe your experts.
His top advice about persuasion is thus to “always start with the audience.” Your goal should be to get them, by their own choice, to do what they wouldn’t necessarily do on their own. Thus, what is true to you doesn’t really matter. What is true to them, logical to them, emotional to them, or based on an authority they believe, matters most in your argument.
By appealing to the audience, you aren’t being dishonest to yourself or them, Matheson said. One audience may be ready to believe a certain kind of expert while another audience may see the worth of certain types of logic, but they can both come to the same conclusion in the end.
“It is much, much easier to convince someone that a course of action seems against their values than to get them to change their values,” he added. And telling someone that they are simply wrong doesn’t work — in fact it tends to harden their opinions. Instead, Matheson suggests a different approach: From my values, I think we should do this, and this same conclusion follows from your values too. This can create practical cooperation and make people work toward the same goal, even when the two sides have different perspectives.
He also recommended that those trying to persuade others of their viewpoint be strategic: “Decide what your goal is and what is important to you,” he said. People believe things that are wrong all the time, but not every mistaken viewpoint is important enough to need correcting. Some may simply have no effect on the world.
“One of the hardest things to do,” he admitted — especially when aiming to change opinions that one fears will undermine the future of our democracy — is to be empathetic. “You have to approach people with understanding of why people believe what they believe.” For instance, he said, conspiracy believers in this complicated world are often “very afraid.” They may believe that Freemasons control the weather because it helps control their own fears caused by the world’s chaos.
“Your goal is to change a mind,” Matheson said. “You want to start by thinking: why would a person believe this? You have to think from their perspective. And you have to start by thinking: What am I trying to accomplish and why does this matter to me?
“Humility is really important … strategically,” he said. You can practice humility by asking people on the other side of the argument to further explain their reasoning. “People like to imagine whatever change they come to, they come to themselves. If you can get someone to say something that is close to what you believe and agree with that,” that is the easiest way to get someone to change their mind. He pointed to several examples of people with abhorrent ideologies whose minds were completely changed when those who disagreed with them treated them kindly — although he cautioned that it is not up to the victims of violent viewpoints to convince holders of their harm.
“There’s a cost to persuasion,” he concluded and that can sometimes be the end of a relationship, or just the spending of goodwill that you would rather use later.
And, he added, sometimes you can simply identify with someone’s logic enough to find the flaws in it. “Wanting to be right and wanting to convince someone are sometimes mutually exclusive goals,” he allowed. Simply aiming to make someone feel bad about their beliefs is never a good strategy. “Some of the most effective administrators … even strongly dislike the people they are working with … but they know how to achieve mutual benefit.”
Asked about dealing with possible conflict in discussions at work, he advised that it is important to be honest about this potential. “If you know that conflict is likely … and you know that other people know that too... say ‘We have important issues to discuss that I know we are not going to agree on completely.’ ” Another tack is to start with a discussion of the ground rules for what is about to take place.
But don’t allow the discussion to be derailed by someone spouting reams of contrary and impossible-to-prove counterpoints — simply say that these may be true or not but are they germane to what we are trying to accomplish today? He suggests adding: “I see why that thing might be important to you and maybe that is an issue we can discuss more fully, but because we are faced with this circumstance, I think we should go back to” the main point of the meeting.
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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