Automatic voter registration

Letter in Boston Globe
March 30 2018

Talking Past Each Other

Talking Past Each Other

Oped in Cambridge Chronicle

This is no longer linked. This is what I said:

Talking past each other

Living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a hotbed of progressive liberalism, I rarely get a chance to talk to a die hard supporter of President Trump. If I do try to convince one that Mr. Trump’s proposals are designed, if one can use such a deliberative word about his policies, to harm his base, I am usually unsuccessful.

I was equally unsuccessful years ago. Even at the business school at the University of Toronto, Canada I rarely had to face a hard right colleague; though I did have some inconclusive discussions with a Finance Professor who believed that for effective health insurance, patients needed to have some financial skin in the game. Without this, he thought that people would abuse the system. I disagreed arguing that it was unfair to clobber people with a financial penalty when they were already experiencing health difficulties.

I have since learned from Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, that the reason we talked past each other was because we were trying to argue from totally different core moral values and were not able to make sensible contact with each other views.

Haidt has demonstrated through surveying many thousands of people (check it out at: http://www.yourmorals.org/) that humans world wide endorse a set of six moral values http://www.moralfoundations.org/) they are: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity/Purity, and Liberty.

However different people rank these six moral values differently when they develop a moral framework for operating in the world around them. According to Haidt, for conservatives all six values are relatively high, but those of Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity/Purity are slightly higher than the other three. The situation is quite different for liberals; their moral framework is dominated by only three of the fundamental values (Care, Fairness, and Liberty). The other three do not enter into the picture to any great extent.

Matthew Feinberg and Robb Waller (From Gulf to Bridge: When Do Moral Arguments Facilitate Political Influence? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2015. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167215607842) explore what happens when liberals and conservatives discuss issues with each other using their own moral frameworks which is what we are most likely to do. 

For example, take the debacle that is the current debate about heath care policy. The problem is that liberals and conservatives have fundamentally different values.  If I try to influence a conservative, I shouldn't frame my argument in favor of Obamacare in terms of fairness and care---that it's not fair to be struck by a disease and be struck financially and that we as a society owe them care. That argument won't work for my conservative opponent, who would argue that most illnesses are due to people polluting their bodies with unhealthy food, inhaling smoke of some sort, or drinking. Therefore, folk should be given incentives to avoid these pollutants. Needless to say, neither of us would convince the other to switch positions. But, if we tried to argue our points by keeping the core values of our opponents in mind, then we might get somewhere. This would work this way: frame your argument in terms of your opponent's values.

Feinberg and Waller did just that in a further set of experiments. For the issue of universal healthcare, they crafted two messages: one the traditional liberal message of fairness, the other a conservative frame that argued that this would remove uninsured, diseased Americans from the streets of the nation (sanctity/purity). Conservatives rejected universal healthcare when receiving the fairness message but moved to a neutral position when receiving the sanctity/purity message. Similar results were found for liberals on the issue of military spending. When receiving a conservative message extolling loyalty (the military unites us) they strongly rejected increased spending; however, when the message was couched in terms of fairness (the military gives minorities and the poor a chance for advancement), they took only a slightly negative position.

Of course, it may be difficult to write a persuasive message in terms of another person’s antithetical moral framework. I know it is for me, nevertheless it is essential if you are to convince those with a different set of moral underpinnings. Learn to think like them and practice developing messages that appeal to them through their moral outlook. There are so many issues that need addressing through this procedure: climate, immigration, taxation, and even the role of government itself. 

One caveat: we should note though that the subjects in these experiments were within the political mainstream and not extremists on either flank.

The moral is clear. First understand where your political opponents are coming from. Second do your best to frame your arguments in terms of the moral framework used by your opponents. If we all do this, we have a fighting chance of restoring comity to our country.