Changing Distrust and Disdain For People We Don’t Really Know – A Takeaway From Persuasion Research

When I published the first edition of Persuasion In Practice, I was a newly minted Ph.D. in my late twenties. It’s still selling. Not Malcom Gladwell selling, but Public Opinion Quarterly described it as a “landmark contribution” to the field of communication. In the halls of academia for a young scholar, that was more than good enough. As my senior colleague, Ev Rogers, told me, it could have gone the other way had I written a bad book pre-tenure.

I’d studied persuasion for years by then and many more since. I came to understand what methods tend to motivate human beings to change their minds and actions. There is no one way, just as there is no single way to lead. Much depends on the context. But there are better ways – ones more likely to succeed in certain types of situations. 

As Aristotle observed, we can often understand the workings of things by asking what ends they serve. And so we might start when trying to end prejudice by asking what purpose it serves. Sometimes that’s difficult to grasp. A conscious purpose can become an unconscious habit, lost deep in the recesses of our personal, familial or group history. At that point, it’s difficult for people to rationalize hatred and superiority and so often they don’t. To use a term commonly used today, “It is what it is.”

Lora King, Executive Director of the Rodney King Foundation, asks in a CNN short segment “Why are we still here?” and “What is enough?” when it comes to prejudice and the killing of young black men in particular. Can we finally rid society of deep-seated racism? Is this the point in time when the unconscious can be made conscious for the vast majority of people so that change can happen?

There are a number of ways to bring about change. One that should be included in any toolkit used by police departments reorganizing and revising training comes from persuasion research. Counter-attitudinal advocacy involves the preparation and delivery of a belief-discrepant message. This approach can engage a person in learning what it’s like to be another person, spend time “in their shoes,” and articulate that experience. 

An example given by persuasion researchers Gerald Miller and Michael Burgoon is a father asking his teenage son to prepare a kind of report with all the messages he can muster against smoking marijuana. In the course of doing so, the son learns on his own why he should be wary of the weed. Of course, this example is different than attempting to alter deep-seated prejudice. And we know from other research that if people believe they’ve been forced to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, they’re less likely to change their views. Instead they reason, “They made me do it.” 

Nevertheless, there is much to be said for learning that what you thought of another person is not how they are. In other words, even if asked or nudged to engage in this activity, learning and change can and often do occur.

Something similar was recently discussed by Virginia Heffernan and Elliot Williams in this Slate podcast – “Getting On The Same Page About Racism.” Heffernan suggests that police take courses in a language they don’t speak and that they become anthropologists of a sort learning before they become police about the history of the region and people they’re about to protect and serve. In the same podcast, Elliot Williams discusses the various types of events to which police are expected to respond. Instead, they should become specialists who have truly visited, studied and understand the particular types of problems they’re expected to address. This could go a long way toward altering a tendency to treat everything as a nail when you have a hammer in your hand.

Decades of studying persuasion can’t be condensed here, but one potential technique to at least substantially diminish prejudice is counter-attitudinal advocacy. It’s not the end all of persuasive approaches that need to be implemented to foster enduring change, but it’s one of many techniques supported by extensive research. There is an entire field of study devoted to bringing about change. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We simply need to know it’s there.