Most arguments about politics never seem to get anywhere. Anyone who has argued with an opinionated relative at Thanksgiving about same-sex marriage or gun control knows that it's virtually impossible to sway someone with strong views.

Psychologists have found that there's a good reason for this. Whenever we engage in political debates, we all tend to overrate the power of arguments we find personally convincing — and wrongly think the other side will be swayed. On gun control, for instance, liberals are persuaded by stats like, "No other developed country in the world has nearly the same rate of gun violence as does America." And they think other people will find this compelling, too. Conservatives, meanwhile, often go to this formulation: "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." What both sides fail to understand is that they're arguing a point that their opponents have not only already dismissed but may be inherently deaf to.

"The messages that are intuitive to people are, for the most part, not the effective ones," Robb Willer, a professor of sociology and psychology at Stanford, tells me on a recent phone call.

Willer is studying whether there are scientifically supported techniques to break through political deadlock. Which sounds preposterous, right? After all, past research has found that attempts to convince political opponents of an alternative view never go anywhere.

But Willer has shown it's at least possible to nudge our political opponents to consider ideas they'd normally reject outright. In a series of six studies, Willer and a co-author found that when conservative policies are framed around liberal values like equality or fairness, liberals become more accepting of them. The same was true of liberal policies recast in terms of conservative values like respect for authority.

So, his research suggests, if a conservative wanted to convince a liberal to support higher military spending, he shouldn't appeal to patriotism. He should say something like, "Through the military, the disadvantaged can achieve equal standing and overcome the challenges of poverty and inequality." Or at least that's the general idea.

Willer cautions that it's still extremely difficult to convert a political opponent completely to your side, even with these techniques. "We found statistically significant effects," he says. "They’re reliable. But in terms of magnitude, they are not large."

Still, it’s significant that he found any results at all, considering the difficulty political scientists usually have in getting partisans to sympathize with the other side on issues such as health care, military spending, same-sex marriage, and English as an official language. (Willer says his experiments' effect sizes were "pretty big for this literature.")

Willer's conclusions may not heal American democracy, but they could help, let's say, lower tensions in a heated family argument.

How to sway the other side: Use their morals against them

Evidence continues to mount that political sensibilities are, in part, determined by biology. These inborn sensibilities create our "moral foundations." It's the idea that people have stable, gut-level morals that influence their worldview. The liberal moral foundations include equality, fairness, and protection of the vulnerable. Conservative moral foundations are more stalwart: They favor in-group loyalty, moral purity, and respect for authority.

Politicians intuitively use moral foundations to excite like-minded voters. Conservative politicians know phrases like "take our country back" get followers' hearts beating. What moral foundations theory tells us, however, is that these messages don't translate from one moral tribe to the other. "You’re essentially trying to convince somebody who speaks French of some position while speaking German to them," Willer says. "And that doesn’t resonate."

For a liberal to effectively argue with a conservative, Willer hypothesized, she has to go after the conservative gut (or vice versa).

Here's an argument on same-sex marriage that a liberal might find appealing:

It's only fair that same-sex couples get to marry and enjoy the rights of millions of American citizens.

But conservatives may not find this particular appeal to fairness quite as compelling. So, in that case, Willer suggests reframing this way:

Gay Americans are loyal patriotic Americans who contribute to the military and the American economy, and they deserve the same rights that you have as an American.

The differences are subtle, but experiments suggest that this sort of reframing can work. The second phrasing appeals to the conservative moral values of patriotism, in-group loyalty, and social order. Willer found that when presented with this conservative argument for same-sex marriage, conservatives were more likely to accept it.

The same was true for the other policy areas.

For example, if conservatives wanted to sway liberals on the desirability of making English an official language, they might want to appeal to fairness. Willer's study suggests this framing: English only "would compel immigrants to learn the language, leading them in turn to face better job prospects and less discrimination."

The chart below shows how well the moral reframing worked for each policy area. To be clear, there's only so much that reframing in terms of values can do: It can't turn an anti-Obamacare conservative into a proponent, but it can soften his stance and get him to listen to counterarguments. Similarly, liberals who started out moderately against English as an official language ended up favoring it slightly after the reframe.

Reframing messages in this way isn't easy. It requires one to empathize with the other side and try to understand what they might be thinking. And studies suggest we're bad at doing that. In the same paper, Willer asked liberal and conservative study participants to craft persuasive arguments to sway the other side on some topics. Very few participants used the other side's moral language — which suggests we don't even consider that our opponents have different morals than we do.

Of course, this sort of reframing can also be dangerous in the wrong hands. "Moral reframing is not always a tool for the social good," Willer warns. (To use an extreme example, consider Nazi "reframing" of racist policies in terms of purity.) But when it comes to finding areas of agreement, it might better than the status quo. "This is the best technique we’ve found yet," Willer says.

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