Online activists were able to swing voter opinions not by planting fake news stories in the traditional media, but by putting them onto social media. If we begin imagining and believing that the worst possible thing will happen, we are in a permanent state of heightened anxiety. And equally we need to stop labelling anyone who challenges us to become more robust and resilient, or questions our explanations as to why things are as they are, as being akin to Hitler. Identify Mental Filters and Prejudices. Reverting back to the past, as proof that their opponent’s strategies will not work and should be rejected. No less an author than Aristotle described it as the key to the art of persuasion and a function of both politics and the science of logic. Humans have the tools to perform heuristic processing because it keeps us safe, and because we frequently don’t have the luxury of being able to process all information systematically. Europarl8. In a political context, this might look like the rhetoric used by politicians outside of election time, or the discussions at the Citizens’ Assembly: lots of information, released over time and with responses invited, with the goal of convincing the audience through logic to adopt the desired position on a long-term basis. However underlying any political thought, there needs to be a set of clear moral and ethical principles that you can defend from any possible argument. A classic example of a seriously bad argument that arises out of this type of thinking, is the ‘either you are with us or against us,’ argument. from the UK’s vote to leave the European Union, the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, the discussions at the Citizens’ Assembly, the infamous Daisy advertisement from the 1964 US presidential election, her account of targeted online advertising during the 2016 US presidential election. “There’s a whole host of things going on in social psychology, psychology, and behavioral economics about how humans act and how preferences are formed” that can shed more light on “why politics is the way it is,” said Matthew Blackwell, an assistant professor of government in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences who has co-authored a new paper on how a person's political attitude is developed. That cannot happen if we alienate particular sides of the debate. Believing they have some kind of ability to mind read and a right to assume a pose of moral superiority. Sometimes we believe we know what’s going to happen in the future; this is a state of delusion. We may all agree that right now there needs to be a coming together to realign our political notions of Left and Right. That was then, and this is now. All people who question an “oppressed ” group’s narrative are simply seen as heartless cold bastards who want to harm people. “The less they know about your policies, the less strife they’ll feel in voting for you if they disagree with you,” he said. Arguably, they can never really enjoy the ‘Glory of the Victory.’ Their arguments are eventually seen through as not being robust, their proponents are not trusted and despised, and it is only a matter of time until they are faced with a humiliating defeat along side an increased array of enemies.. It is not only done by people we disagree with. In today’s political world, the desire to reconcile cognitive dissonance drives the growing tendency of political candidates to emphasize apolitical qualities such as personality and demeanor while deliberately cultivating vagueness about their policy positions in an effort to minimize cognitive dissonance in voters’ eyes, said Blackwell. That cannot happen if we alienate particular sides of the debate. Consider by comparison how long it would take to convince people logically that Goldwater’s election would raise the odds of nuclear war, and the power of the peripheral route becomes apparent. If we don’t consciously use courage, we stay in our comfort zone and are vulnerable to attack. Political pundits, strategists, commentators, mainstream media, private and public sector organisations, party members, think-tanks, financial backers, as well as the general electorate, are all engaging on different levels in a battle to persuade you to vote for the issues and vision they believe in. Its about how these social changes relate to human life. We may believe we know what others are thinking: we actually don’t. When that happened, it was assumed that other audience members who saw these "seeded" stories would feel that they had been told the story by someone they trusted, leading them to use heuristic processing instead. That is the problem with both left-wing and right-wing utopianism. So, for example, while few observers would be surprised if a lifelong Democrat cast a vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, they might not expect a Republican to go against his or her own party affiliation and vote for her. Although most people who really know us may know what we mean, what about our political adversaries? Winning is more important to them than how they win, and as long as they can get away with what they are doing, they feel vindicated. Predicting the worse and invoking fear in the public, in order to be able to manipulate them more efficiently . The latter, in particular, has been cited as the reason for various political earthquakes that have occurred in the past few years, from the UK’s vote to leave the European Union to the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. To know oneself is to be aware of what we are thinking. Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer, By Christina Pazzanese Harvard Staff Writer. Our thoughts jump to apocalyptic scenarios, missing out on the preventative strategies we can adopt, and underestimating human abilities to solve problems. In other words, we are not restricted to research from the world of politics when trying to understand how these processes work. Former governor, scholars from various fields wrestle with ways to launch change, Chan School economist sees peril in shifting branches of government after election, Epidemiologist estimates how many COVID-related deaths may be linked to remarks, Study finds 80% of married couples share heart disease risk factors and behaviors, © 2020 The President and Fellows of Harvard College. This causes us distress. It occurred with the advent of the printing press and newspapers and later again with the emergence of radio and television and has now happened again with the arrival of social media. The art of persuasion has been central to politics since humanity first began to organise itself into communities. Example sentences with "political persuasion", translation memory . It’s about the creation and telling of good stories. Copyright © CULTURE ON THE OFFENSIVE | All rights reserved. Each has its own set of traits, but are they born that way? Another model worth considering is the Heuristic-Systematic Model (HSM) developed by Shelly Chaiken and colleagues. And since anyone can ramble about the “art” part, we are going to focus on the science of political persuasion. We then become distracted from the core issues. Some people find it easier than others. But precisely how to move voters successfully is a matter still not fully understood — and the raison d’etre for political strategists and pundits. After that, it is hard to be taken seriously. When we notice only what our filter allows us to notice, and we dismiss anything that doesn’t ‘fit’ into our rigid belief system, it is like looking through dark blinkers. We are just more likely to be oblivious to their persuasion techniques if we support the outcome. Concerns around fake news, the ability of stories to go viral to reach huge audiences without being subject to fact-checking and the emergence of companies with expertise in social media targeting and manipulation, such as Cambridge Analytica, have come to dominate headlines. We need to judge people as individuals and by the content of their character and actions, or we become divisive and destroy solidarity. Those people emerge at times of political unrest and social uncertainty and inspire us in different ways. Putting far too much emphasis on how things affect them and how they make them ‘feel.’. There is a considerable body of literature from psychology that examines how persuasion works. Similarly, they may disapprove of something simply because an opposing group approves of it. The other is a shorter route, which relies on finding short cuts to the point where the audience adopts the desired position ("pizza is tasty so let’s order pizza tonight"). Shown only once on broadcast television, the campaign to re-elect Lyndon B Johnson used fearful imagery of nuclear war to lead the audience away from change (i.e. This article discusses the notion of ‘persuasion’ applied to a political method. RTÉ.ie is the website of Raidió Teilifís Éireann, Ireland's National Public Service Media. New political affiliations are emerging, and it is widely agreed that we we need a new kind of political discourse. “You have to engage with that cognitive dissonance about whether or not that’s actually a thing you would be able to do.” The big danger for a party is that voters who can’t reconcile their previous support for different candidate might simply sit out the general election. “The more we think about these different mechanisms in people’s heads, I think the better we’re going to be able to … figure out what messages are going to work and what strategies are not going to work.”. Words have power Copyright: convisum / 123RF Stock Photo. According to the ELM, a persuader can reach their desired goal by one of two routes: a "central path" and a "peripheral path". The paper offers a new framework for understanding the origin of political attitudes and preferences and how they may change over time, and presents a formal theory about how people adjust their political preferences in order to downplay cognitive dissonance, a theory that has predictive power. © RTÉ 2020. We can actually only know what is likely. We need your consent to load this YouTube contentWe use YouTube to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Hall attests that online activists were able to swing voter opinions in key areas not by planting fake news stories in the traditional media, but by putting them onto social media. Pope Francis has again displayed his activist side by delivering a papal encyclical, a formal letter to the world’s Catholic community, titled “Laudato Si” or “Praise Be to You,” which addressed issues involving climate change and the poor. Building the capacity for critical thinking is the best way to protect against these forms of manipulation. Meáin Náisiúnta Seirbhíse Poiblí na hÉireann, From fake news to social media targeting and manipulation, we are often susceptible to persuasive techniques in politics. Consequently, without being mindful of using those three tools to inform our thinking, we may occasionally win arguments in the short term, but we can’t arguably produce sustainable arguments. CULTURE ON THE OFFENSIVE advocates that the most effective philosophical and political thinking processes, are embedded in Empathy, Clarity and Courage. Anything more realistic is either dismissed, or we make feeble excuses for not taking in evidence that doesn’t conform to our predjudices. In the 1980s, Richard Petty and colleagues developed the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). One of the most common shortcuts taken by the peripheral route is the use of "emotion as argument" - i.e., bringing the audience to an emotive state that is likely to suit the outcome desired by the persuader. In a new working paper, the researchers say changing political attitudes can be understood in the context of “cognitive dissonance,” a theory of behavioral psychology that asserts that people experience uneasiness after acting in a way that appears to conflict with their beliefs and preferences about themselves or others.
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