How to fix our broken political conversations
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzdbOYrBYFE Video ID: jzdbOYrBYFE ============================================================ a quick new idea daily from the world's greatest tedex TOS I'm your host atosa Leoni and this is tedex shorts Rob Willer studies the forces that unite and divide us as a social psychologist he researches how moral values typically a source of division can also be used to bring people together through what he calls moral reframing Rob shares compelling insights on how we might Bridge the ideological divide and offer some intuitive advice on ways to be more persuasive when talking politics you probably have the sense as most people do that polarization is getting worse in our country that the Divide between the left and the right is as bad as it's been in really any of our lifetimes but you might also reasonably wonder if research backs up your intuition and in a nutshell uh the answer is sadly yes in study after study we find that liberals and conservatives have grown further apart they increasingly wall themselves off in these ideological silos consuming different news talking only to like-minded others and more and more choosing to live in different parts of the country and I think that most alarming of all of it is seeing this Rising animosity on both sides liberals and conservatives Democrats and Republicans more and more they just don't like one another you see it in many different ways they don't want to befriend one another they don't want to date one another if they do if they find out they find each other less attractive and they more more don't want their children to marry someone who supports the other party particularly shocking statistic you know in my lab the students that I work with we're talking about some social some sort of social pattern I'm a movie buff and so you know I'm often often like what kind of movie are we in here with this pattern so what kind of movie are we in with political polarization well could be a disaster movie certainly seems like a disaster could be a war movie also fits but what I keep thinking is that we're in a zombie apocalypse movie right you know the kind there people wandering around in packs not thinking for themselves seized by this mob mentality as trying to spread their disease and Destroy society and you probably think as I do that you're the good guy in the Zombie Apocalypse movie right and all this hate and polarization it's being propagated by the other people because we're Brad Pit right free thinking righteous you know just trying to hold on to what we hold dear you know not foot soldiers in the army of the undead not that never that but here's the thing what movie do you suppose they think they're in right well they absolutely think that they're the good guys in the Zombie Apocalypse movie right and you better believe that they think that they're a Brad Pit and that we we are the zombies and who's to say that they're wrong I think that the truth is that we're all a part of this and the good side of that is that we could be a part of the solution so what are we going to do what can we do to chip away at polarization in everyday life what can we do to connect with and communicate with our political counterparts well these were exactly the questions that I and my colleague Matt Feinberg became fascinated with a few years ago when we started doing research on this topic and 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 hey 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 and Matt and I were thinking that maybe this moral divide might be helpful for understanding how it is that liberals and conservatives talk to one another and why they so often seem to talk past one another when they do so we conducted a study where we recruited liberals uh to a study where they were supposed to write a persuasive essay that would be compelling to a conservative for in support of same-sex marriage and what we found was that liberals to make arguments in terms of the liberal moral values of equality and fairness so they said things like everyone should have the right to love whoever they choose and they they being gay Americans deserve the same equal rights as other Americans overall we found that 69% of liberals invoked one of the more liberal moral values in constructing their essay and only 9% invoked one of the more conservative moral values even though they were supposed to be trying to persuade conservatives and when we studied conservatives and had them make persuasive arguments in support of making English the official language of the US a classically conservative political position we found that they weren't much better at this 59% of them made arguments in terms of one of the more conservative moral values and just 8% invoked a liberal moral value even though they were supposed to be targeting liberals for persuasion now you can see right away why we're in trouble here right people's moral values I mean they're their most deeply held beliefs people are willing to fight and die for their values why 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's 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 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 in one of these experiments we recruited liberals and conservatives to a study where they read one of three essays before having their environmental attitude surveyed and the first of these essays was a relatively conventional pro-environmental essay that invoked the liberal values of care and protection from harm it said things like in many important ways we are causing real harm to the places we live in and it is essential that take steps now to prevent further destruction from being done to our Earth another group of participants were assigned to read a really different essay that was designed to tap into the conservative value of moral Purity it was a pro-environmental essay as well and it said things like keeping our forest drinking water and skies pure is of vital importance we should regard the pollution of the places we live in to be disgusting and reducing pollution can help us preserve what is pure and beautiful about the places we live then we had a third group of participants that were assigned to read just a non-political essay was just a comparison group so we could get a Baseline and what we found when we surveyed people about their environmental attitudes afterwards we found that liberals didn't really matter what I say they read they tended to have highly pro-environmental attitudes regardless Liberals are on board for Environmental Protection conservatives however were significantly more supportive of progressive environmental policies and environmental prote ction if they had read the moral Purity essay than if they read one of the other two essays we even found that conservatives read the moral Purity essay were significantly more likely to say that they believed in global warming and were concerned about global warming even though this essay didn't even mention global warming that's just a related environmental issue but that's how robust this moral reframing effect was if you want to persuade someone on some policy it's helpful to connect that policy to their underlying moral value it's incredibly intuitive and even though it is it's something we really struggle to do you know it turns out that we go that when we go to persuade somebody on a political issue we talk like we're speaking into a mirror we can't afford to hate them any longer and we can't afford to let them hate us either empathy and respect if you think about it it's the very least that we owe our fellow citizens want to hear more from Rob or in need of more intuitive advice listen to Ted's new podcast how to be a better human now streaming wherever you get your podcast the tedex talk you just listen to was recorded in Fredick California all tedex events are independently organized by volunteers who believe in Ted's mission of ideas worth spreading special thanks to the organizing team at tedex Marin want to listen to more tedex talks explore the entire archive on the tedex YouTube channel I'm atosa Leon thanks for listening and see you tomorrow