Persuasion is more than just showing the other person you’re right, Joshua Bandoch says.
“When I try to win against you, it’s usually at a cost to you,” Bandoch, a policy analyst, TedX speaker and author of “How to Get What You Want: Mastering the Art and Science of Persuasion,” tells this week’s Overton Window Podcast. “I do think most people are like, ‘I wanna win. And if that means you lose, hey, you know, whatever.’ That just makes you a loser, which stinks.”
In personal and political matters, Bandoch recommends building alliances over pursuing total victory.
“The trouble arises when we first think about the Latin root of the word ‘convince,’” Bandoch says. “It actually means to vanquish or to conquer. And conquest is barbaric. It’s not persuasive. So what is persuasion? Persuasion is shared action. It’s shared because it’s something that we voluntarily do with others and it’s action because it’s about getting things done. It is a win in the sense that there’s success, but I’m not winning against you. I’m winning with you.”
Bandoch describes “Yoda-like conversations” in which he has advised colleagues and associates to put the viewpoints and concerns of other people above the desire to be proven right. “Going from me to we” is his shorthand for the practice.
“There are missionary and mercenary reasons to put them first,” he says. “The missionary reason is that it’s the right thing to do. When someone genuinely, authentically engages you and understands you, that feels good and that builds connection. There’s also the mercenary reason, which is that it’s the best way to get what you want, because when you understand somebody else’s interests and goals, there’s always going to be overlap and usually a lot more overlap than you could ever expect. And that’s where you press on and that’s where you share action.”
Listening for the concerns of interlocutors is so important that Bandoch breaks it into “passive” listening, in which one takes in the other person’s experiences and beliefs, and “proactive” listening, in which on asks deeper questions with an eye toward finding solutions.
“People think that the person talking is in control of the conversation,” Bandoch says. “But the listener is, because when you’re listening, the person you’re talking to is just dumping all this information at you. And if you can collect it and figure out where to press on things, you can find opportunities to work with people that you never thought in a million years you could possibly work with.”
Seven moral “tastes” govern how most people respond to situations, Bandoch says: care, equity, proportionality, loyalty, authority, purity, and liberty.
“People with different political ideologies tend on average to sort and are sensitive only to certain moral values and moral tastes,” he says. “Folks on the left are primarily sensitive to care, equity, and a certain kind of liberty, more of a positive liberty, sort of support for being able to do things, say like a welfare program. Conservatives, by contrast, are not sensitive to care and equity. They’re sensitive instead to proportionality, liberty, loyalty, authority, and purity.
“When a conservative is making conservative appeals to a progressive, those are just things that either, they don’t resonate or the person might even find those things offensive,” he says. “So to appeal to their values, don’t feed the vegetarian veal, feed the vegetarian a tasty salad or, you know, a tasty vegetarian Indian dish or whatever they like, whatever spices it is.”
Bandoch draws a hard line between persuasion and the type of mass manipulation favored by the traditional captains of consciousness.
“Again, there are missionary and mercenary reasons not to manipulate,” he says. “The missionary reason is that it’s wrong. Do you like it when people manipulate you? And the mercenary reason is that it’s gonna come back to bite you hard because people usually find out pretty quickly that you’re trying to manipulate them. They just kind of feel it. And that means you’re not going to get what you want.”
A determined focus on persuasion, Bandoch says, is effective in dealing with family members, friends, co-workers, and associates. In the policy space, he shows how emphasizing empathy can build public acceptance of occupational licensing reform and recounts citing the example of former First Lady Michelle Obama’s childhood living in a now-illegal accessory dwelling unit to build support for zoning deregulation among Chicago liberals.
“America was founded on persuasion,” Bandoch says. “There was a convention. They were holed up for four months, and they came out with this document. Not everybody got what they wanted, but it was an amazing and beautiful document, and then they went out and they advocated for it. So part of it is stepping away from the polarization back to what America is founded on, which is free speech and persuasion. So that would be like the biggest meta thing.”
Listen to the full conversation on The Overton Window Podcast.
