Loserthink, page 20
As I write this chapter, the United States is grappling with several different interpretations of reality around the same set of observed facts: was President Trump a Russian asset, or did the so-called Deep State try to frame him? Both theories fit the observed facts available to the public. Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley has suggested a third theory for consideration: that both sides of the topic are experiencing confirmation bias, and there was neither Russian collusion nor Deep State conspiracy, just a lot of people believing in conspiracy theories. If you are keeping score at home, that makes three entirely different realities that all conform to the facts in evidence, at least according to the adherents of each.2 Obviously, most of the players in this drama believe that the people who disagree with them have the wrong interpretation of the facts. Perhaps by the time you read this book, we will know which reality won out.
If you have a preferred religious belief, keep in mind that billions of people practice other religions and they believe you are the one in the cult while they are the enlightened ones. My point is that knowing cults brainwash their members won’t help you determine if you are in one. Brainwashing wouldn’t work if you knew it was happening to you. For the average person, confirmation bias will convince you that your group is the one that has life figured out while everyone else is flailing blindly. And that perception will almost certainly be an illusion. Once you learn to embrace the realization that being right and being wrong feel exactly the same, you’re halfway out of your mental prison.
Being absolutely right and being spectacularly wrong feel exactly the same.
The clearest signal you’re in a cult is that other members of the group actively try to prevent you from exchanging ideas with outsiders. For example, Democrats and Republicans increasingly avoid the company of the other, and the smart ones avoid talking politics in mixed company because it rarely ends well. One could make an argument that both Democrats and Republicans are evolving from whatever they once were to something closer to accidental cults that worship their preferred news sources and adopt the opinions assigned to them.
For the past several years, I have been writing about American politics using what I call a persuasion filter. Through that work, and the interesting people I have recently met, I have learned things about the true nature of reality that are so startling you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. We can test that assumption because I’m going to tell you right now: there are only about a dozen people in the United States—perhaps six on the political right and six on the left—who decide what the public thinks about politics. That small group routinely influences how the news is framed, and the rest of the pundits simply amplify the messages and brainwash the public through repetition. I’m sure you have noticed the sameness in how pundits handle their respective narratives on the left and the right. None of that is an accident. A handful of influencers create the framing for stories, the pundits amplify, and the public believes.
If you believe the news you consume is organic and unbiased, you might be less of an informed citizen than an accidental member of a cult, but without the bad haircut requirement.
If your view of reality is consistent with the past but fails to do a good job predicting the near future, you might be in a cultlike organization with a manufactured worldview. If members of your group discourage you from listening to opposing views, it’s time to plan your escape.
CHAPTER 14
How to Break Others Out of Their Mental Prisons
Once you learn to break out of your own mental prison, you might feel generous enough to help others do the same. I will teach you some techniques to do just that.
If you have ever tried to win a debate by providing better facts and reasoning, you know it almost never works. That’s because people are confident in their own abilities to understand the world. That confidence should be your target, not the totality of the argument. Rarely can you free someone from mental prison in one try. You will need to chip away at their sense of confidence about their opinions first, to weaken the prison walls until they can punch their way out on their own.
People who have studied psychology and persuasion are already primed to know they can be confident and wrong at the same time. But almost everyone else thinks their sense of confidence is a good indicator of how right they are. Maybe they have never noticed the high levels of confidence coming from the people who totally disagree with them. Confidence is not a reliable signal of rightness, at least not when it comes to the big political and social questions. We generally observe high levels of confidence from opposite positions on every issue. To help people out of their mental prisons, first you must train them to stop trusting their understanding of the world.
If you have ever found yourself in a debate online, you know it usually goes like this:
YOU: The grass in my lawn is green.
CRITIC: This idiot thinks polar bears can fly!!! LOL!
YOU: I never said anything remotely like that.
CRITIC: Then explain what you meant when you wrote, “The grass in my lawn is green.”
YOU: That has nothing to do with polar bears.
CRITIC: That’s what you want us to believe, but the overlap in the context of the larger media narrative is conflating your near-term bias to be larger than the whole.
Once your critic starts spouting word-salad nonsense like that, it is a sign of cognitive dissonance, and it means your critic’s argument has fallen apart. But it probably won’t help you much, because your critic will also be declaring victory based on the fact that you “refused to address his criticism.”
In my experience, perhaps 90 percent of the people who think they are disagreeing with me are only disagreeing with their own misinterpretation of my opinion. When you find yourself in a similar situation, as I am sure you sometimes do, I recommend using something I call the Magic Question.
THE MAGIC QUESTION
The most effective approach to addressing critics who misinterpret you, and then criticize their own misinterpretation as if it came from you, is this challenge:
State ONE thing you believe on this topic that you think I do NOT believe.
I’ve been testing this question on social media for a year, and it works great. If you let your critic focus on his hallucinations about your opinion, you will get nowhere. But if you change the focus to the critic’s opinion, it puts you in control of the conversation. In other words, you flip the conversation from artificial disagreement, in which your critic imagines crazy opinions for you and then debunks them, to one in which the critic is stating his opinion and you are agreeing. That process looks like this, in an exaggerated form:
CRITIC: You think a border wall is the only solution to immigration! LOL! You must be a racist or an idiot.
YOU: State ONE thing on the topic of border control that you think is true and you believe I do not.
CRITIC: Well, for example, you think we need a wall for every inch of the border.
YOU: I don’t think that. I think we only need a wall where it makes sense functionally and economically. We are in total agreement.
CRITIC: Well, you also believe a border wall will stop all drugs! LOL!
YOU: I don’t believe a border wall will stop all drugs. We are in complete agreement.
You might have to repeat this process, one point after another, until your critics lose their confidence in their ability to read your mind and discern your opinions. By itself, this technique will not bring down a prison wall. But it can weaken the structure.
When people have solid evidence to back their opinions, they generally lead with the strongest evidence and downplay the rest. But when people are experiencing cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias (which is our normal human state), they tend to use what I call laundry list persuasion. That happens when none of the evidence is persuasive on its own, so there is an attempt to make up for the shortfall with quantity. The idea here is that if one piece of evidence has zero credibility, ten pieces of evidence with zero credibility add up to something real. That, of course, is nonsense to an objective observer, but keep in mind we are talking about people trapped in mental prisons, not rational actors.
In my experience, if someone has up to three reasons for an opinion, that person might have a strong case. But people who present laundry lists of ten reasons rarely have a strong case. I can’t say this rule of thumb is predictive every time, but you can easily test the validity of a person’s laundry list with this request: Give me the strongest argument or evidence on your list that supports your point. Just one, please.
Your critic will usually smell a trap, resist your request, and demand that you consider all the damning evidence on the laundry list. Here’s how to reply: In the interest of time, would you agree that if I can debunk your strongest point, you should rethink all of your points that are weaker than the one I debunk?
If you can’t debunk the strongest point, you might be the one in the mental prison in this case. But if you can, I don’t recommend debunking anything else on the list, even if you have the time and desire. Remember, your goal is to reduce the other person’s confidence in their rightness. Taking their strongest argument off the table (if you can) should be enough to get that done. Don’t get lost in the weeds of the smaller points on the laundry list. Debunk the strongest point according to your critic, declare the rest of the arguments to be weaker than the one you debunked, and call it a day. If you do your job right, your targets will have less confidence in their opinions and over time it could help them punch their way through their lesser illusions.
Don’t play Whac-A-Mole with people who have laundry lists of reasons supporting their hallucinations. Ask for their strongest point only, and debunk it if you can. Target their undue confidence, not their entire laundry list.
PACING
This isn’t a book on persuasion, but the concept of pacing is important for breaking people out of their mental prisons. Pacing involves matching the person you hope to persuade by agreeing with as much of their position as you can without lying, in order to build rapport and trust before taking on the disagreements. Always talk first about the points on which you agree, to set the tone and establish yourself as a reasonable voice.
If you are debating a topic in the news, I find it helpful to start by noting that all news sources are unreliable at least sometimes. Most people will agree with that as a general statement. Once you have established that high-ground truth, you have set the table for persuasion. Remember, your objective is to weaken the other person’s confidence in their sources of information, and in so doing weaken the walls of their mental prison.
Agree with people as much as you can without lying, and you will be in a better position to persuade.
DEFINE THE WEEDS
One of the ways people lock themselves in mental prisons is by not differentiating between the things that matter and the things that do not. I blame the news and social media for that, because unimportant news can often be the most entertaining and most profitable. Our human instinct is to assume that whatever subject we think about the most must also be the most important. That is backward, of course, because we should be picking the most important topics to think about the most. The business model of the news industry and the design of social media almost guarantee we will be thinking the most about the least important topics. Your news sources can get more clicks about a political gaffe or a hypocritical opinion than they can from chattering about the boring details of a new law or discussing a disaster that was skillfully avoided.
Despite our collective addiction to unimportant news, most people can easily recognize what is important and what is “in the weeds” of triviality, but often it has to be pointed out and framed like this:
CRITIC: Your favorite politician said something offensive today.
YOU: That is true, but trivial compared to the economy and national defense, both of which are stronger than ever.
The losing approach here is to debate whether or not the politician was as offensive as claimed. It is more effective to accept minor criticisms while framing them as relatively unimportant. Here again, the objective is to persuade your critics that they are not good at sorting out what matters from what is in the weeds. You are not trying to change their minds outright.
Don’t argue in the weeds of a debate. Dismiss the trivial stuff and concentrate on the variables that matter. That gives you the high ground.
DESCRIBE THE LONG TERM
I often find myself in online debates with people who have a good grasp of the short-term trade-offs of a decision but they overlook the long-term picture. When that happens to you, rather than pointing out the omission, ask your critic to describe what the future would look like under their preferred plan. If they struggle to do so, it will weaken their confidence in their opinion.
If your critics can describe a long-term future that looks good for their preferred paths but you disagree, your best move is to suggest looking for a way to test your competing ideas small before committing to something long term. You won’t always have that option, but in many situations you will.
Ask people with opposing opinions to describe what the future would look like if their view of the world were to play out. Does it sound reasonable?
CALL OUT THE MIND READING
In an earlier chapter, I talked about how often we assume (incorrectly) that we can read the minds of others. I have observed over the past few years that when I point out that someone is forming an opinion based on what they believe to be their ability to read minds, they will often drop their confidence levels right away. If it doesn’t happen immediately after you cleverly label their behavior as mind reading, try this next: ask how many times in their personal relationships their mates or friends have incorrectly assumed what they were thinking. This approach hits people hard. We all know it is common for the people who know us best to misinterpret our thoughts and intentions. So what are the odds we can accurately deduce the inner thoughts and intentions of total strangers?
Once you have established with your critic the idea that mind reading is absurd, and they flail around for a bit to defend how good they are at it, you have already weakened their confidence. None of us are good at mind reading, and we know it, even if we don’t admit it.
Once you have introduced the mind reading criticism, people will be primed to notice it, and the idea will grow in power over time. I know that to be true because my followers on social media throw it in my face every time I cross the subtle line from judging people by their actions to judging them by what I assume are their intentions. It’s a sticky idea.
This is as good a place as any to remind you that I make almost every loserthink mistake in this book, and routinely. But I am also sure I am reducing my rate of loserthink over time simply because I focus on it. I expect you will have the same experience after reading this book.
The best way to avoid the mind reading illusion is to look for it in others. That will prime you to better catch yourself when you do your own mind reading.
FRAMING ISSUES
If you ask the wrong question, you usually get the wrong answer. The same is true for how you frame an issue. If you frame it correctly, you have a better chance of understanding it and dealing with it effectively. In the world of politics, partisans frame things for selfish gain, not for solutions.
As I write this, the president of the United States is asking for funding to build a “wall” on the border with Mexico, while the Democratic Congress is insisting we need some fences, sure, but not walls. The problem is framed in political terms as opposed to useful terms.
A more useful way to frame this situation is to point out that politicians shouldn’t be making engineering decisions. They should set the specifications, approve a starter budget, and let border experts and engineers decide what they need to build and where. I suggested such a framing in a tweet on December 14, 2018, in which I wrote, “Politicians shouldn’t be making engineering decisions. Approve the border control budget and let a panel of engineers decide how much is wall and how much is other. #Engineers.”
Once you see this framing, you realize the only thing stopping the government from funding an effective border upgrade is that they framed the problem as political and the public let them get away with it. It was always an engineering decision, working with the border security experts to understand the problem and its requirements.
Most of the other big issues in the country have the problem of bad framing. Democrats want the government to be a productive part of getting healthcare to citizens, but Republicans frame that as socialism versus capitalism. That political framing makes progress nearly impossible.
On the other side, Republicans want effective border control, and Democrats frame that as a case of good versus evil (mostly racism). That political framing makes progress nearly impossible too.
Democrats frame climate change as a case of wise scientists versus moronic science-deniers. Republicans frame climate change as a case of gullible simpletons who fall for junk science versus wise businesspeople who can see it is a scam. Neither framing is productive. A better frame is to see climate change risks as something the public needs to understand better so we’re all on the same side, wherever that leads.
Bad frames never produce good solutions. If you see someone locked in a mental jail because of a wrong frame, sometimes you can help by suggesting a more productive frame. There is no simple rule for finding the right frame, but in my experience everyone recognizes a better frame when they see it. So brainstorm framing options until one stands out as more productive, and test it with a few people to make sure they see it the same.
