Convincing a conservative to support same-sex marriage may sound like an impossible task, but two professors say they’ve discovered how to effectively do it. They’ve uncovered a powerful arguing technique that persuades even staunch political opponents, and they say it could help bridge the political divide in the United States.
Convincing a conservative to support same-sex marriage may sound like an impossible task, but two professors say they’ve discovered how to effectively do it. They’ve uncovered a powerful arguing technique that persuades even staunch political opponents, and they say it could help bridge the political divide in the United States.
When trying to convince a political opponent to support a particular position, the secret is to appeal to their own moral values—rather than trying to persuade them using yours.
Join 500,000+ readers who start their day with Quartz.
By subscribing, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
Our natural style of arguing is often ineffective, argue Stanford sociology professor Robb Willer and Matthew Feinberg, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the University of Toronto. We have a tendency to try appeal using our own sense of justice, but this can get us nowhere in the United States, where politics is increasingly partisan and research suggests that liberals and conservatives have contrasting moral perspectives.
In a paper published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin on Oct. 7, the professors set out the results of six online studies involving 1,322 participants. In the first two studies, the researchers found that people often refer to their own values, and even contradict their opponent’s moral views, when making a political argument.
Some 93 liberals recruited from Amazon $AMZN Mechanical Turk online marketplace were asked to write an argument to convince conservatives to support same-sex marriage, while 84 conservatives were asked to write an argument to convince liberals that English should be the official language of the United States. Both sets showed a tendency to frame the issue through their own moral prism. Some 34% of liberals wrote arguments that contradicted conservative values, while 14% of conservatives wrote arguments that contradicted liberal values.
The researchers then conducted a series of tests to see whether liberals and conservatives would be persuaded by arguments when they were based on their own moral beliefs (purity and patriotism for conservatives, and fairness and equality for liberals). They found that:
Willer told Stanford News that the research could help build cross-party support for hot-button issues in politics.
“Morality can be a source of political division, a barrier to building bi-partisan support,” he said. “But it can also be a bridge if you can connect your position to your audience’s deeply held moral convictions.”
