How to Sell a Ferrari and Talk to Your Wife
The Art of Unreasonable Persuasion
Think about the last time you tried to change someone's mind. Maybe it was a political debate with a friend, or a disagreement with your spouse about money. Chances are, you probably relied on facts, logic, and reasons to make your case.
But did it work?
More often than not, probably not.
Why are People so Unreasonable?
Research in psychology and communication shows, that when it comes to changing minds, attitudes trump arguments. In fact, when we try to force our reasons for our attitudes upon another person, who does not share the same attitude, we are engaging in a type of anti-persuasion. As regular readers will know, I believe that this kind of anti-persuasive dialogue is destroying our trust and faith in one another. So I wanted to explore what the science says about how persuasion works, and then how we effectively apply those techniques ourselves.
Only you change your own mind, and only they can change theirs.
I know that seems simple and obvious, and yet I rarely see people behave like this is true. Of course, it is true for them but when they interact with other people, and get into a disagreement about something, the first thing people do is to start issuing Reasons back and forth.
Of course, I myself made this mistake last night with my wife, when we were discussing how to handle a medical billing error. She wanted to pay and then dispute the bill, and I wanted to not pay it and dispute it. So we went back and forth, round and round, and got angry with each other.
It’s a common mistake because ever since the Age of Reason people have wanted to believe that Reason is “a superior means to think better on one’s own”. You know the type - Independent Free Thinking First Principal Rationalist View are My Own.
But that view is simply wrong, as Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber write in The Enigma of Reason:
We produce reasons in order to justify our thoughts and actions to others and to produce arguments to convince others to think and act as we suggest. We also use reason to evaluate not so much our own thought as the reasons others produce to justify themselves or to convince us.
Whereas Reason is commonly viewed as the use of logic, or at least some system of rules to expand and improve our knowledge and our decisions, we argue that reason is much more opportunistic and eclectic and is not bound to formal norms. The main role of Logic in reasoning, we suggest, may well be a rhetorical one: logic helps simplify and schematize intuitive arguments, high- lighting and often exaggerating their force.
To state it more simply, your Reasons (Noun, facts, figures, data, citations, etc) are your justifications for your attitudes, and more often than not a disagreement is about Attitudes, not Reason. If you want someone to change their mind it’s not about their beliefs or reasons it is about their attitude.
Ferrari Attitude
A belief is about truth, the more confidence you have in something the more likely you are to believe that it is true. Attitude on the other hand is about the goodness or badness of something. To give a fake but visual example, most people will agree that this is a picture of a green Ferrari, that is a belief. If this is the ‘ugliest color imaginable’ for a Ferrari is a matter of attitude.
Attitudes have a bad reputation. But they do help us make quick and energy-efficient sense of the world. Thinking takes a lot of work like riding a bike through a city center, attitudes are like taking the bypass. But when two people are having a disagreement about a direction, it’s because they are using different mental shortcuts around the issue.
And by they, I mean me, because while my wife and I danced around the reason to pay or not to pay an erroneous medical bill, what was really at the heart of our disagreement was our attitudes towards the bill. I wanted to vent my frustrations back at the medical office and the insurance company and my wife just wanted to avoid further aggravation. But of course, neither of us offered that up as a reason. It was only later that our attitudes became clear.
Attitude Adjustments
To change someone’s attitudes, we have two explanations, one from Richard E. Petty and John T. Cacioppo called the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) and another in Shelly Chaiken’s complementary heuristic-systematic model (HSM). While the details differ between the two models, what they both agree on is what you may already know as System 1 Fast thinking and System 2 Slow thinking from the Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Most of the time, we operate on a kind of autopilot throughout our lives. To do this we rely on past experiences, heuristics, and group agreements to help us make a quick sense of the world. This lazy type of thinking is very beneficial. Because it does not require a lot of energy and it works out most of the time. We do want to hold correct beliefs (Correct being self-serving and group serving) but we want to get those correct beliefs to use them so we do not have to think the next time. It’s an efficient way to think, like taking the bypass around the city. But it’s not the most effective way to think.
Because when you are on the bypass, what do you see except advertisements, celebrity marketing, repeated signs of danger, and heuristics of when and where to take an exit? This is the type of thinking that lets repetition convince you that something is true through the pure force of media manipulation. This heuristic type of thinking is the avenue through which marketing, propaganda, deepfakes, and bullshit of all kinds make their way into our heads. Because what those marketers are doing is giving you Reasons to want what you want, and to want what that they can provide. Most advertising provides consumers Reasons why their attitudes are good, that those brands hold those same attitudes, and together we can express those attitudes even more.
On the plus side, this lazy thinking is also the least durable.
For a consumer brand to keep its market share, it has to keep up its advertising to hit enough spots and dots (ads per person) or the effect will wear off. It also does not work on those with a superior personal knowledge of the subject, for example, if you have test-driven a BMW and you did not like it, no amount of advertising will change your mind again. Because those people have formed their attitudes through System 2 thinking.
System 2 thinking, or systemic thinking, or central route processing is a form of thinking about a subject directly. There's a duality to System 2 thinking: it is responsible for our most firm conclusions, yet it is also the most adept at dismantling the very conclusions it has constructed. Because what the ELM and HSM also both agree on is that people only engage in this hard System 2 thinking when they are actually invested in the outcome. Nassim Taleb would call these people those who have ‘skin in the game’. Because regardless of the question, this car or that car, true or false, we buy things and buy into beliefs, not on truth but on the value that they provide.
The Value of the Message
The psychology of persuasion largely revolves around a 5 part model of communications that was developed by Yale Professor Harold Lasswell in 1948.
It goes like this:
Who - This is the speaker.
Says What - This is the message content
In What Medium - This is the context that the message was sent through
To Whom - This is the audience or recipient of the message
To What Affect - Agree or Disagree
Let’s think about the medium of a one-on-one conversation. The Who and Whom effects largely come down to two elements:
Are we in the same group or are we in opposing groups?
What are our relative positions within the group, eg status?
While both of those points are books in their own right, they can be simplified into this diagram.
Or this Meme:
Basically, the group gives people a shared set of attitudes and values. That alone allows a speaker to better craft a persuasive message to anyone else who shares the same values. Furthermore, the higher the status of an individual in our own in-group the more people are inclined to trust them.
However, the status of a person in the opposing group has the inverse effect, the king of our enemy is clearly a despot. When people from the out-group try to present a persuasive message, they do it all wrong, they focus on the wrong facts, and they like things that are obviously bad.
Like mediums, group affiliation, and status add in a lot of complexity in terms of what is the best and most persuasive approach to get your point across. Affiliations and Status are both important us as social groups, but it’s distinct from us as individuals changing our minds. I’ll come back to these group dynamics in later posts, but for now, I want to focus on the Base Case of how an individual changes their minds and attitudes about a particular subject.
In the base case, medium, status, and group affiliation are fixed. Because most of our conversations are with people that are in our own group (Neighborhood, family, work, school etc) and most of the time the status of both the speaker and the audience are equal. These are the conversations between spouses, coworkers, neighbors, and classmates. You both have a lot in common, but there is some point about which you both disagree with each other. How do you have the conversation, how do you persuade that person?
Our medium is at a table, or in the car, or wherever both people are physically present in the same space. This is far and away the most persuasive medium, humans are hardwired to interact face-to-face to such a degree that the mere physical presence of another person is enough to release oxytocin, the hormone of love, trust, community, and friendship. We are safer together, and that is why we trust one another enough to listen face-to-face.
“You listen” said the master,” not to discover, but to find something that confirms your own thoughts. You argue, not to find the truth, but to vindicate your own thinking.”
-Anthony De Mello
Persuasive Dialogues
Several great books have been written recently on this subject including How Minds Change by
and Supercommunicaters by .The core of both books is that you do not change someone’s mind through reasoning with them, you change someone’s mind by getting them to reason with themselves. Through their attitudes, according to their values, and for their own benefit.
Not Yours.
The best-defined method for one-on-one persuasion actually comes from a group that calls themselves Street Epistemologists.1 These people will literally ask random people on the street if they want to discuss their beliefs on anything, religion, vaccines, politics, you name it. Collectively they have recorded, analyzed and debriefed on hundreds of these conversations, and they have outlined the most detailed elements of what a persuasive conversation looks like.
1 - Start with rapport. The benefit of small talk is to show that we are honest and harmless. No one wants to be deceived just as no one wants to be shamed. Even trivial things like sports affiliations can create bonds of trust. Deeper things like faith and parenthood even more so. The point is to settle on a common value, these things are good.
2 - Ask for a specific claim. When you come to a disagreement, ask for the other person to make their claim specific. It’s better to start with a statement about a belief in fact (true/false), rather than attitude or opinion (good/bad). Remember you can not change their attitude directly, so you want to start at a higher level of facts.
3 - Confirm by repeating the claim back in your own words. Make sure that the other person agrees with your descriptions, and allow them to modify that description until you both agree on the core of the disagreement.
DO NOT open new tabs by saying “whatabout”. Stay focused on one thing. Opening new lines of disagreement will only end in a disagreeable stalemate.
4 - Clarify definitions. Words do not mean the same thing to all people.
has made the point that this is a primary source of a lot of our discontent and mistrust in each other. We use one word, and another group of people interprets it as another thing. This is especially true for loaded words like Woke, Capitalism, The Government, or Elites. These are the words that often cause us to talk past each other, and argue against ourselves.Make sure that you are speaking the same language, and use THEIR language, not your language.
5 - Confidence Level. Ask the other person to give a confidence level between 1-100.
Often times when we say something and another person attacks us, what was a 60% confidence will shoot to 100% because we are subconsciously defensive. This is what I mean by anti-persuasive, when we stay in System 1- heuristic thinking we will defend our 60% beliefs with the same force, and the same tools, as we defend our 99% beliefs.
Furthermore, we never really do this with our beliefs, so people can take a long time to answer. This is critical. Because when asked to give a numerical answer to something, we are forced to switch on our logical System 2 reasoning because that is how we generate numbers in our minds.
This is where the conversation actually begins because it is only after this step that a person has fully activated their analytic mind, they have exited the bypass lane and are no longer taking heuristic shortcuts, but are examining the heuristics themselves.
No matter what the numbers they give, use those numbers as the basis for the next question.
6 - Ask for Reasons. We have activated the systematic response pathway, and now you can ask for their reasons. Say someone says they are 80% confident the moon landing was faked, you can ask why not 100%. If they give several reasons, try to find the common thread, or focus on one that you find interesting, and ask “If this was proven to not be true, hypothetically would that change your confidence.” If they say no, then it was not a good reason, but continue with this line of questioning until you find the real, and to them, good reason for their beliefs.
The goal is to understand why this attitude about this topic is valuable to this person. No one thinks that they are wrong and continues in their belief. People hold beliefs (True or False) because they provide value. Sometimes that value is group solidarity, Go Team! Sometimes its an emotional stance, like an Optimistic Entrepreneur.
What you want to uncover is what purpose does this belief serve for this person.
7 - Method. This entire process has built to this last line of questioning. Now that you have their reasons, and you know which reason is the real reason, you need to ask them how they got to that conclusion. This can take a million different forms depending on the topic you are discussing.
The objective of this step is to get people to reexamine their own reasoning, and asses how much value this belief is providing them. In the end you want to answer two questions - is the method good? Could the same method be used to arrive at different competing conclusions as well?
Street epistemologists have found this line of questioning especially useful: Could someone else use this method to arrive at a different conclusion from them? Now imagine a 3rd person is looking at both arguments, how would that 3rd person interpret the different arguments?
8 - Listen Summarize Repeat. It can sound trite but it is true that people want to be understood. By summarizing and repeating back to another person what they just said they know that you actually listened to them. You did hear what they said and were not just waiting for your turn to talk. Particularly, when someone has shifted during your conversation, getting them to acknowledge that change, however small, helps reinforce their new thinking patterns.
9 - Good Luck. You want to leave on the same note of friendship that you established at the start of your conversation. Often whatever conversation they just had with you is just the start of many more conversations for them. But they will remember you as a friend, someone with whom they could safely be honest.
Persuasive Values -
While the Street Epistemologist have the most detailed and honed approach, in regular everyday conversations, I find it is better to think of these steps as a set of values.
Build trust and seek openness.
If someone is going to change their mind, they have to be open to changing their mind. So they have to trust you enough to listen in the first place. Yet often times even people we are closest to, like spouses and friends, can have mental blocks that close them off to talking about an issue. Some of the hardest minds to change are those of drug and alcohol addicts. Often they say a person has to hit rock bottom before they are open to change. But not always, drug and alcohol therapists, who practice something called motivational interviewing, suggest people mostly lack motivation to think about an issue for four reasons:
Ignorance - Many of us hold views that we picked up from our experiences, but have never really considered. No counter-evidence has been presented. These are often the most reasonable people because they are not locked into a fixed belief upon which several other beliefs also depend, limiting the whatabouts. For these people, just opening a conversation is all you need.
Threats to Agency - Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Which is true. It's why you can’t replace someone else’s opinion with your own. What you can do is explore why that opinion is so valuable to them. If they find it’s hurting their agency, or that another idea might be better, it will stick with them. Maybe they even try it. If it works, they are persuaded. In fact they came up with it all by themselves!
Hopeless to Change - Everything is awful, and collapse is imminent. Trying to motivate the hopeless on any issue is much harder than motivating the agentic or the ignorant. Because if the end is nigh, who cares about learning new things? This deep lack of motivation is more than I can cover here, but if you run into this attitude, recognize that the challenge is personal as much as epistemic.
Rationalization Loop - These are people who have too much information. They not only know their own position on the issue, they know all your counterarguments and make them before you can even ask. These steel-trap minds are a fortress of certainties, which is why for this type of motivation it is essential that you move the conversation to those certainties.
Activate System 2 thinking.
Therapists, political campaigns, marketing focus groups, literally everyone who has ever studied persuasion or how minds change has been emphasizing the importance of asking for numbers regarding beliefs. It’s not just to collect data, it’s so that people activate that part of their thinking.
Everyone engages in motivated reasoning, taking the bypass, because it is faster and it mostly works. To change a mind is to get past the reasoning facade, and find the motivating value. Where are you trying to go? What if there was a better way?
Explore Rationales and Methods.
People don’t change their minds, they change their thinking. The specifics of how to do this varies widely with the topic, but let me give an illustration from Rory Sutherland.
Let’s say that you want to drive to the airport. If you put that into Google Maps, it will tell you to take the highway, it will take 45mins on average. And 4/5 times that is the fastest way to get to the airport. Except, for the 1/5 times when there is an accident or road work, and you get stuck between exits, now it’s 1.5hrs, and you missed your flight. Taking the highway is the best route because it’s the most efficient at getting you to the airport quickly.
Now consider, taking the local route. Google Maps tells you that this will take you 55mins, so 10 more minutes. But it is also 55min for 99/100 trips. If you take this route it’s less likely that you will ever miss your flight. Taking the local is the best route because it’s the most effective at getting you to the airport in time to make your flight.
Which do you think is the best route?
People are only willing to explore better possibilities if they are going in that same direction because that direction is what they value. Once you have a shared point of value to reference, it’s up to you how you want to explore the vast space of possibilities.
But if you can’t find a shared direction, if you don’t active System 2 thinking, and if you don’t establish a shared connection, people might hear you, but they won’t listen and they won’t be persuaded.
Stay friends.
“We are on the same team” is a theme that needs to be established in the beginning, illustrated throughout the conversation, and emphasized at the end. The moment you try to other, or shame, or in any way present that you are one and they are not …You…. Lose.
And the same thing can happen when people try to appeal to authority/superiority. Superiority of position (I am the parent, I’m the boss.) or Superiority of credentials (I’m a doctor, I have degree X), intended or not, is belittling. If at any point in the conversation, you appeal to the reason of “because I said so”…. You…. Lose.
When you appeal to status, or try to cast them out of the group, you are diminishing the other person, you are being anti-persuasive. Because if they accept what you are saying is true, it would diminish them even further. No one wants to be made to feel bad, and we mistrust those who do so.
Settling Disagreements & Selling Cars
In retrospect, instead of getting into an argument with my wife about how to deal with that medical bill, I should have taken my own advice and asked her what confidence she placed in her approach. My mistake was to not active that System 2 type thinking. From there we could have had a much better discussion about which path to take and why. Eventually, that is what I did.
As for that Ferrari in the ugliest color you can imagine. Assume, you are rich like other Ferrari owners, and the price is immaterial.
Let me ask you this, on a scale of 1 (Best)-10 (Worst) how much do you hate the color?
Why not 10?
What if I told you, that Ferrari only made that color for one year?
What if I told you, that was the last Green Ferrari in the world?
What if I told you, that if you buy this Ferrari you are 1st in line for the next F40 supercar?
What if I told you, that the next Ferrari would come in Red?
Now let me ask you again, on a scale of 1-10, how ugly is that color?
In a world increasingly divided by conflicting beliefs and attitudes, the art of changing minds has never been more important. As we've seen, the key to effective persuasion lies not in bombarding others with facts and arguments, but in understanding and engaging with their underlying attitudes and values. By building rapport, asking questions, and guiding others to examine their own thinking, we can create the conditions for genuine attitude change.
This is not easy, of course. It requires patience and a willingness to listen. It means resisting the temptation to prove others wrong or to win the argument at all costs. But the rewards are worth it. So the next time you find yourself in a disagreement with a friend, spouse, or colleague, remember the lessons of persuasion science.
Instead of asking "Why are people so unreasonable?", ask yourself "How can I understand this person's attitude?" Instead of trying to force your reasons upon them, seek to explore the reasons behind their beliefs. And instead of aiming to win the argument on points, aim to win the point by changing the argument.
Remember, you can not push your beliefs onto someone else, but you can invite them to your way of thinking. The art of changing minds is not about manipulation or coercion. In the end, it’s about the courage to engage with others' attitudes and values.
It’s not arguing.
It’s not convincing
It’s Persuading.
Street Epistemology is a useful group to learn from because they have rigorously tested their methods. This is not an endorsement of their Epistemology, with which I have my philosophical disagreements. But we can learn from everyone!