No matter what else is said about him, Donald Trump is widely recognized as a master of attracting and holding attention.
.. Look at his response to Lester Holt’s first question of the night: “When you look at what’s happening in Mexico — a friend of mine who builds plants said it’s the eighth wonder of the world — they’re building some of the biggest plants anywhere in the world.”
.. Time after time he would start a sentence only to immediately cut himself off with a short self-serving interjection before completing his thought.
.. Discovered in the 1920, the Zeigarnik Effect maintains that an interrupted or uncompleted task commands our attention much more than a completed one.
Hypnotists Flips Pro-Choicers to Pro-Life in Seconds (I explain how)
The hypnotist asks questions and lets the subjects talk themselves into changing their opinions. If he directly challenged their beliefs they would just harden in their resistance. But he gives them encouragement and the freedom to do it on their own. That freedom is an illusion. He is changing their minds for them.
The Persuasion Advantage and Climate Science
My view is that the left has more climate science experts and the right has more persuasive arguments. My usual bias is to side with the consensus of scientists. But it’s hard to understand why their side is so unpersuasive.
The Simple Psychological Trick to Political Persuasion
Conservatives are more likely to support issues like immigration and Obamacare if the message is “morally reframed” to suit their values.
.. Rather than emphasizing concern over the harm that might come to refugees, says Matt Feinberg, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, to truly persuade Trump supporters on the matter it would have been be better to go with something like this:
“These refugees and immigrants are just like our family members who came to America in years past to seek a better life. All our ancestors wanted was to live the American dream, and that’s why today’s immigrants and refugees have chosen to come to America, so they too can live that same American dream that brought our families here. That dream is what our nation was founded on, it is what brought our grandparents and great-grandparents to this great land, and it is the great success story that these immigrants want to be a part of.”
It’s a message high on patriotism and loyalty—two “moral frames” that research shows are more important to conservatives than are traditionally more liberal values, like reciprocity and caring.
.. One reason this is so hard to do, they explain, is that people tend to present their arguments in a way that appeals to the ethical code of their own side, rather than that of their opponents.
.. just 8 percent of the liberals in Willer and Feinberg’s study were able to craft an argument that would appeal to conservatives’ value of loyalty toward your own kind. (So something like, “Our fellow citizens of the United States of America deserve to stand alongside us … We should lift our fellow citizens up, not bring them down.”) What’s worse, some of them picked an argument that directly contradicted what many conservatives value, with arguments like, “your religion should play no part in the laws of the United States.”
..Previously, they had found that conservatives were more likely to endorse environmental protections when researchers activated their concerns about purity, rather than the more liberal concern about “harm”: A picture of a forest covered in rotting garbage, in other words, performed better with Republicans than a forest of tree stumps..researchers tested four different hot-button political issues, each time trying to reframe it in terms of the values that the Moral Foundations Theory tells us are more important for the opposite political side. Again, for liberals that’s “harm and fairness (e.g. benevolence, nurturance, equality, social justice),” and for conservatives, “group loyalty, authority, and purity (e.g., patriotism, traditionalism, strictness, religious sanctity).”