How to Influence People—And Make Friends

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Tertullian, a second-century North African theologian, is often called the “father of Latin Christianity.” A prolific author, he was the writer credited with first using the Latin term trinity for the belief in the oneness of God, Jesus, and the holy spirit. He also chronicled the everyday lives of ordinary Christians in the Roman empire, critically commenting on how their powerful pagan overlords regarded them:

It is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many [Romans] to put a brand upon us [Christians]. See, they say, how they love one another, for [they] themselves are animated by mutual hatred; and how they are ready even to die for one another, for they themselves will sooner put [others] to death.

Tertullian’s fellow Christians didn’t just love one another, of course. They followed the teachings of Jesus, who had enjoined them to love their enemies as well.

This love was seen as stupid and weak by many Romans at the time, but it eventually won out: The once-fledgling faith gradually drew converts from all over the empire and in the end became the official religion of Rome. If those early Christians had been violent and hate-filled, the faith would probably have come and gone like any number of cults over the centuries.

No matter what your religious views, if you want to persuade others to consider a better way through the strong disagreements of these tumultuous times, you can take a valuable lesson from these early Christians. Amid a contentious election, unrest on campuses and in cities, and a world full of conflict, you may find that if left to your instincts, lashing out is all too easy.

If you succumb to rage, you are likely to end up wielding your most sincerely held values as a weapon. Doing so will influence no one who doesn’t already agree with you. Worse, it will provoke equal-but-opposite angry dogmatism. If, however, you fight such reflexive inclinations and learn instead to offer your values as a gift, others might actually change their mind and follow your lead.

[From the May 1892 issue: Private life in Ancient Rome]

Humans have a need to share their beliefs and values with other people. When you feel strongly about something, positively or negatively, it’s hard not to talk about it; opinions feel as though they were made for sharing. This has a solid logic: Sharing emotions and opinions can lead to imitation, which can in turn create coalitions and reinforce relationships. When you share a feeling about something and someone agrees in both their behavior and expression, social psychologists have found, you may become more emotionally attuned to one another and have more positive social interactions.

The emotions and opinions we share with others to build a relationship are as likely to be negative or critical as not. Think of a conversation you had with a work colleague when you complained about your idiot boss—how your colleague sympathetically adopted your attitude of bitter disdain and how that exchange reinforced the bond between you. Researchers have shown that gossip is a common way to promote trust among members of an in-group, even if it involves reckless calumnies about others.

Positive emotions, though, may be better at eliciting mimicry than negative emotions. In one 2007 experiment, people were shown videos of people laughing, yawning, frowning, or maintaining a neutral expression. They found that viewers were 83 percent more likely to emulate laughter than frowning (and they were even more likely to mimic yawns). Similarly, in 2015, psychologists writing in the journal Emotion found that people tend to imitate the behavioral mannerisms of people who intentionally helped them.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Why it’s nice to know you]

Besides creating a bond, another reason you might want to induce someone to model themselves on your feelings is to get them to modify their views. To achieve that result, you can usually choose whether to frame your views positively or negatively. So you might tell someone either that you’re voting for a particular presidential candidate because you believe this person will make the country stronger and fairer and you want that better future, or that the other candidate will ruin democracy forever and anyone who disagrees is a fool.

The angle you choose is important, and that choice will depend on your goal and your interlocutor’s disposition. If the intended audience—say, your carefully curated silo of social-media followers—already agrees with you, then your negativity can raise the intensity of their views. In particular, as the psychologist Ronald W. Rogers demonstrated in the 1970s with his influential “protection motivation theory,” people can be very effectively influenced when an appeal focuses on the noxiousness of a threat, the probability that it will occur, and the potential efficacy of a response. For example, you might try to fire people up by saying, “If we don’t all work for Candidate X, this will probably be the last democratic election in U.S. history,” or, “If we don’t turn out to vote for Candidate Y, immigrants will bring crime to our town and take our jobs.”

Of course, this kind of negative framing won’t work for someone who isn’t already inclined to think the way you do. If I don’t think the opposing candidate actually is a threat to democracy, I will simply judge your statement to be hyperbolic and biased—and you won’t get me to mimic you at all.

To an even greater degree, if I disagree with you and your views contain hatred and anger toward opponents, what you say will harden my values against yours. This is the so-called boomerang effect, demonstrated in the 1960s by two psychologists who showed that when people are insulted over the opinions they hold, they are much more likely to dig into their position against that of the insulter.

[Arthur C. Brooks: A gentler, better way to change minds]

The boomerang effect can be hard to observe when we’re dealing with a complex social interaction involving such abstractions as opinions and feelings. To give a more concrete instance: Imagine I came to your house with a beautiful bunch of flowers to share with you, but when you opened the door, I hit you with the bouquet. Obviously, the gesture would hardly make me a persuasive person or recommend my views to you; all you’d want is to get me off your porch. This is essentially what happens when you use your values as a weapon, not as a gift.

If you suspect you’ve been inflicting your views and feelings on others as though you were walloping them with what you wanted to share, that imaginary scenario may be worth reflecting on. On a larger scale, this kind of behavior may be why every debate in America today seems to go straight to DEFCON 1, a level of alarm and vigilance on the brink of outright war. So, if you want to be more persuasive, consider a few new ways to understand and manage your own feelings, and share them more positively—in other words, turn them back into a gift, rather than wielding them as a weapon.

1. Focus on what we agree on.
Agreement in beliefs can be quite hard to come by when all that you and those around you have been focusing on is your disagreements. But this can be done. Consider the words of President Barack Obama. After his hard-fought reelection victory in 2012, a campaign that was at times bitter and vituperative, he could have reinforced the ideological differences he had with Republicans and said that their views were inferior, dangerous, and rejected by all right-thinking people. But that would have simply boomeranged the losing side in that election even more into greater bitterness.

Instead, Obama focused on unity, on “the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on Earth … love and charity and duty and patriotism. That’s what makes America great.” Even more impressive, perhaps, in their magnanimity were the words of concession from Mitt Romney, the defeated candidate. After congratulating Obama on his victory, Romney exhorted the country to unite behind the president. “We look to Democrats and Republicans in government at all levels to put the people before the politics,” he said. “I believe in the people of America.”

2. Stop talking.
The easiest way to turn your values from a weapon to a gift is to close your mouth and listen when someone disagrees with you. This was the fundamental conclusion from two scholars in 2016 writing in the journal Science. The scholars were seeking to understand how people might change their views on sensitive topics, such as minority rights. What they found was that it did not involve forceful arguments, righteous anger, or overwhelming data. In fact, people were most likely to shift their sympathies when they were prompted toward “perspective taking”: Canvassers asked respondents to talk about a time when they felt judged negatively for being different, and then, after listening to the respondents’ answers carefully, the canvassers encouraged them to apply that experience to how they might think about other people considered different. True listening is a gift—and people find it very persuasive.

3. Refuse to be used.
I have my own version of the old saying “If you’re playing poker and don’t know who the sucker is, it’s you.” Here’s mine: “When you hate for ideological reasons, someone is profiting—and it isn’t you.” In today’s controversies, many people are eager to conscript you into a culture war in order to gin up political support, increase their power, build television viewership, gain greater social-media following, or boost their ego. This year, declare your independence from the Outrage Industrial Complex in politics, in media, and on campus by offering your views as a source of hope and love.

[George Goehl: How we got Trump voters to change their mind]

If weaponized values are not effective in persuading others, why do we persist in using them this way? The answer is simple: It feels satisfying, like scratching an itch. But the ultimate effect is more like scratching a poison-ivy exposure: It’s devilishly hard to resist and momentarily feels wonderful, but the result gets worse and worse as the itch turns into a festering wound.

We can realize far greater happiness in the long run when we resist that immediate urge. In the Apologeticus, Tertullian makes this point when he speaks of “the joy of the people in our trouble.” Such a cheerful display of love and acceptance in the face of persecution seemed “utterly reasonless” to non-Christians, but Tertullian’s fellow believers were making a gift of their faith in a way that eventually overcame the hostility.

Similarly, if you decide to share your values as a loving gift and turn your back on hate, you will probably, at first, hear harsh words from some former allies that your new outlook is reasonless. Smile, listen, and answer them with kindness and more listening.