SIO324: How To Be Persuasive, According to Science

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:11 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 324. I'm Thomas and I am joined by Dr. Lindsey Osterman. How you doing?

0:00:19 Lindsey: Wonderful. How are you?

0:00:21 Thomas: I don't believe you. Persuade me that you're doing wonderfully. Sell me this pen!

0:00:24 Lindsey: I'm an expert. I'm an expert on being wonderful. And I am, in fact, wonderful. Yeah.

0:00:31 Thomas: We're gonna talk about persuasion here. This, um, I think this is a good topic because, you know, frankly I'm incredibly worried about the trajectory of this place that we Call this crap country. And uh, it feels like there's nothing. I said this on the OAQA the other day, but like, meant to do an episode on this show talking about some of these ideas, but anyway, I'm worried that there's no force that is making things better with respect to the divide in facts, you know, like we just all kind of know that there is half the people, whatever the amount of people in the country that are in a different reality, as we've been talking about for the last five, six, six years.

0:00:41 Lindsey: Mm -hmm. Yeah?

0:01:10 Thomas: And we're all just forced to watch that in slow motion and be like, wow, man, there's a guy like Austin Powers, you know, like there's, there's a guy that's going to get run over by this, you know, steamroller, whatever that is in that movie. And there's just, we're just, just slow motion. Like how far are they going to go? How far out of, off the beaten path of facts of the fact universe are you going to go? And I don't really see how that's getting better, but fortunately we're going to talk talk about possibly some ways to convince people who disagree with us here. I can't wait.

0:01:44 Lindsey: Yeah. I don't want to oversell It. I don't think I'm about to, like, fix the country or anything. But, know, one thing I think that's relevant from this issue that talking about here with the divide in facts is that you Fox News and other super right-wing sources have perfected the art of sort of undermining the credibility of any messages that Disagree with theirs. Is, it is, I think, a pretty central part of what we're going to be talking about today is how to, how to encourage perceptions of things like credibility. So I don't know, like, yeah.

0:01:46 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, all right. I won't oversell it, but we're going to, we got to start somewhere, you know?

0:02:18 Lindsey: Yeah. So hopefully this is, hopefully there's some, some practical value here. I think there are. I ran across this article a few months ago. It was around the time that we, we talked about doing an episode on persuasion, sort of summarizing best practices and trying to persuade someone. And obviously, you know, we're interested in this from, like, a political sort of perspective, how do we persuade our right-wing family members of things? Yeah, like, I don't know, I feel as overwhelmed by this task as anybody else in the current climate. And a lot of that's backed up by persuasion research. You know, there's a lot, lot of research suggesting that there's all these things that, that increase, like, resistance to persuasion, you know, like how threatening the persuasive Message is to the person that you're trying to talk to, um, the person you're trying to persuade has been inoculated with counter arguments to your position, which, you know, a lot of these right-wing sources are very good at doing, um,

0:02:59 Thomas: Yeah.

0:03:10 Thomas: Won't take the vaccine, but they will get inoculated against reality. They are very firmly in that camp. All

0:03:14 Lindsey: Yeah. Exactly, um, and then, as we were talking about this, also this, uh, issue, you, of credibility. Like, does the person view you as credible? And if they don't, that can be a big barrier to persuasion. And so, you know, some of these things you can control, some you can't. But this paper focuses on one particular dimension that we can exert some control over in terms of our persuasive endeavors. And I think it has some really interesting practical applications in terms of how we approach this. So hopefully people find this interesting and useful. We'll see. This paper is by Hussain and Tormala. It was published in 2021, so not that long ago. And it's called "Undermining Your Case to Enhance Your Impact: A Framework for Understanding The Effects of Acts of Receptiveness in Persuasion." To get us started, let's consider a few questions, right? So I would, would like you to imagine that you are a policymakers and you're about to present a plan to reopen the economy during the coronavirus pandemic.

0:03:56 Thomas: Okay.

0:04:12 Thomas: You mean, I mean, it kind of is open. You You mean like a year ago or whatever?

0:04:16 Lindsey: Yes, yeah, so like during the shutdowns you're about to propose a plan reopen. So I'd like you consider which of the following strategies you would use in order to persuade others of your plan. So in other words, which options seem like they would be the most persuasive? So So first of all, would you express confidence or doubt about your plan?

0:04:17 Thomas: Okay. Sure. Okay. Mean, confidence or doubt about it. I feel like you'd want to express confidence in your plan. I mean also as a politician, I mean you kind of have to.

0:04:43 Lindsey: Yeah, Yeah. Okay, cool. So two, would you describe your past mistakes or successes as a policymaker?

0:04:51 Thomas: If my goal is to persuade people or am I answering your quiz, I might answer one way. But in terms of like getting reelected and existing within our country's political frame, I think the answer is going to be very different, which I think is why we're facing problems. But let's say I'm trying to persuade, I would want to be, feels like I'd want to be open about, was it past successes and failures that she said?

0:05:15 Thomas: Yeah, it feels like I'd Want to be open About that, maybe that builds my credibility or something.

0:05:03 Lindsey: Uh-huh. Sure, yeah. Mm -hmm, yeah, yeah yeah, okay. All right, three, would you present arguments supporting or opposing your plan.

0:05:26 Thomas: I feel like I want to do both.

0:05:29 Lindsey: Yeah. Cool. All right. And finally, would you ask questions of those that you're trying to persuade or would you make declarative statements about it?

0:05:40 Thomas: Well, that's tough. Because like, what am I in a town hall? And am I making a speech? I kind of, you can't really ask questions in a, if I'm doing a State of the Union address or something.

0:05:50 Lindsey: Let's say that it's a situation in which it would make sense, like you're having a conversation in public with someone. And

0:05:56 Thomas: Oh, okay. I feel like asking questions is basically always going to be a good tool in conversation or persuasion somewhat, you know, like getting the other person involved, make him feel like they're heard.

0:05:57 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, okay, cool. Cool. All right. So when Hussein and Tormala asked those questions of 253 participants, which they collected online, they found that when most people imagine themselves to be in this position of being a policymaker, most people's intuitions were that it would be most persuasive to convey certainty, make declarative statements rather than asking questions, focus on supportive arguments rather than contradicting ones, and highlight prior successes rather than mistakes, right? So some of those align with your intuition, and some of them don't. Did better on this, I think, than the majority of the participants in their study did. Because a lot of these pairs that I gave you, certainty versus uncertainty, declarative versus asking questions, etc. Surprisingly, it looks like under at least some circumstances, the option that seems less persuasive is actually more persuasive to people. So uncertainty is often more persuusive than certainty. Asking questions is more persuasive than making declarative statements.

0:06:29 Thomas: Wow.

0:07:08 Lindsey: Highlighting, you know, possible drawbacks of your plan can be more persuasive, as you said, in terms of establishing credibility. Admitting to like past mistakes, also is a way of potentially establishing credibility, so that that can be more persuusive.

0:07:21 Thomas: Can I ask though, because I really do think that if I had to tackle this question in real life, like even though I know a lot of those things, or at least I was reasonably certain of a lot of those answers, some of those answers. I think you're forced into as a politician in this day and age, as a policymaker, you're forced into that. It feels like you have to do the, I'm 100% certain this is the way we're going to do this. It's great. Don't ever highlight your mistakes. You know, just so I just, I guess the only reason I say that is, are you confident that the survey wasn't capturing that feeling in people? Like, like they were answering as though they needed to exist within the political environment and not in this hypothetical, and not that they were merely trying to persuade.

0:07:45 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:08:07 Lindsey: Well, I mean, the the questions they were responding to is which strategy would be more persuensive. So they had them sort of take that, take that perspective of of a policymaker, like for a particular reason, they're trying to have them imagine that they're in sort of like this high status position. And we'll come back to why that's important. The question, the literal question that they are answering here is which do you think is going to persuade more people?

0:08:12 Thomas: Okay. Okay, cool.

0:08:28 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. And so they, they got these sort of lay intuitions about which thing is more persuasive. And what they're going to argue in the course of this paper is that our intuitions are wrong about all of these things, at least under certain conditions, which is interesting, right? This is kind of a counterintuitive thing. So what they say is that the reason that these things like expressing uncertainty and, you know, bringing up past mistakes and things, the reason they say that they can be persuasive is that they communicate a speaker's receptiveness. Or in other words, they suggest that the speaker is receptive to opposing views, is more open -minded, has intellectual humility, and uses objectivity to arrive at their beliefs instead of using some biased process to arrive At their beliefs.

0:09:12 Lindsey: So the paper's main contribution to literature is that they're doing this sort of new theoretical synthesis. So they're going to review a bunch of findings from the research on persuasion toward the point of supporting this theory that signaling receptiveness is really persuasive, at least under certain circumstances. Next, before they start reviewing literature, they talked about this question of why acts of receptiveness would be persuasive. And there are two ways they say that receptiveness could persuade people.

And understanding this requires just a little bit of background in this area from psychology, or this model from psychology called the Elaboration Likelihood Model, or the ELM. The ELN is a model of attitude change, or persuasion. And it suggests that when we're listening to an argument, we may be processing that argument really deeply, or as they would say, we might be elaborating highly on that argument. So like by thinking carefully about the quality of the argument's logic and evidence and considering counter arguments and so on.

Or we may process the argument sort of in a more shallow way with less elaboration and thought, either because we don't know enough about the content area to evaluate the quality of the arguments being presented, or maybe because we're just not very motivated to think deeply about the argument, right? We might not be particularly interested or personally invested in that topic. The ELM predicts that the kinds of arguments that will persuade someone depends on their level of elaboration when listening to the argument.

So if you're trying to persuade someone who is thinking really deeply about your argument, you're better off using very strong, central arguments that logically lead to the conclusion that you're arguing for, right?

If you're trying to persuade someone who is either unmotivated to think deeply about your argument because of lack of interest, or maybe unable to do so because of lack of of expertise in the topic, persuasion is much more likely to be affected by sort of these like simple heuristic positive or negative cues about the speaker or the argument.

Like if I'm trying to persuade someone to go try out a new restaurant that I think is great and there's like a really discerning eater and they've eaten a lot of places in town and they're really engaged in like making a good decision on where to eat, I should give them strong arguments about the quality of the food and the service, right? And the appropriateness of the price and the ambiance and stuff. But if their engagement in that is low, because maybe they don't really care about, you know, maybe they're not a foodie like

0:09:12 Thomas: Okay, right.

0:11:31 Lindsey: I am, those central arguments are less likely to be persuasive with that person. So I would be better off doing things like credentialing, like saying, I'm a huge foodie, I know you would love this food, right?

0:11:42 Thomas: Interesting.

0:11:43 Lindsey: Or referencing like the popularity of the restaurant, right, that's a heuristic people use for quality. Or maybe like saying like Bill Murray ate there once, right?

0:11:52 Thomas: I'm in.

0:11:53 Lindsey: Yeah, same. So yeah, so when elaboration is low, persuasion is more likely to be predicted by these sort of heuristic cues that signal someone's trustworthiness or their credibility, their likability, attractiveness operates through this mechanism. How polished?

0:12:09 Thomas: Okay, everybody be more attractive. Number one. Easy. Yeah.

0:12:12 Lindsey: Yes, right. Right. Yeah. Right. And it's also influenced by superficial characteristics of the message itself. So if it sounds really complicated or it's presented in a really polished way, that can operate as a cue to argument quality if somebody's not paying attention to the actual content of the argument itself. Right? So Hussein and Tormala argue that depending on the circumstances, cues that the speaker is receptive can act through both of these routes. So sometimes it can operate to increase the engagement in the message, and sometimes it can operate by enhancing perceptions of the speaker as a credible and trustworthy source, right? So in some circumstances, acts of receptiveness can increase audiences' message involvement, right? So they're going to think more deeply about the argument if it's portrayed in a receptive manner. And as long as your arguments are actually strong, that will be a persuasive advantage, right. If your argument is terrible, then receptiveness, if it increases involvement, can actually hurt your persuasiveness, because people will attend tend more to the fact that your argument is terrible.

0:13:18 Thomas: Yeah, you don't want them to notice your arguments.

0:13:20 Lindsey: Yeah, exactly. Right. You want to sort of operate in that more peripheral space if your argument ist bad. In other circumstances, receptiveness can increase the likability and the trustworthiness of the speaker. Right? And both of those perceptions are associated with increased persuasiveness.

0:13:26 Thomas: Interesting.

0:13:36 Thomas: So this is interesting because it feels to me like maybe that's Trump's demagoguery is he's kind of doing the opposite of this. He's like, he doesn't have any arguments. So it's constantly like, believe me, I'm the butt just signaling that he's the person you should trust or whatever. And he likes such and such thing and hates such and such thing. Hmm.

0:13:52 Lindsey: Yes. I think that's right. I mean, I think I think a lot of Trump's approach to to things is to operate in that more peripheral realm. He credentials constantly, right? He's the best. He's this, he's that. It's like, it's nothing, nothing in his persuasive technique is really about logical arguments leading to a particular conclusion in a solid way or evidence. You know, it is all sort of these more peripheral cues.

0:13:57 Thomas: Yes. Yeah. And To Take a second, it's probably, probably not what you planned on talking about, but if you remember, there was the whole uh Dilbert asshole Scott something, right? And His whole shtick in the beginning, I love how people who like Trump had to find all these other things to say about him rather than just like, yeah, I like him and what he's doing. Like they had to find out, his whole thing was like, he obviously loves Trump and wants to, you know, Trump to be president, but it felt like he couldn't quite come out and say it, so he just kept talking about how good he was.

0:14:28 Lindsey: Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

0:14:49 Thomas: Like he's an expert persuader. He went on Sam Harris. Trump is amazing, best at persuasion I've ever seen. And even Sam Harris was like, yeah, I don't really think he's very good at, he hasn't persuaded anybody, he's good at. So I think it's interesting to look at that because I I guess I'm wondering, Considering, turning it into a question about the paper, Trump seems to be using this technique, sort of the inverse almost of the technique you were outlining, to Be persuasive in a certain way to people who aren't really going to look at his arguments and just, it seems like, want to latch on to his persona and his credentialing kind of techniques. Techniques.

0:15:26 Thomas: But That's, so in some sense, you could say he's really good at, I don't know if persuading is even the right word, but he's really good at, well, I guess I'll say, persuading those people who are already kind of like him or with him, uh, and really bad at persuading anyone who actually disagrees with him or thinks critically about his arguments. So is this technique, is it, is it just a numbers game, like here's a technique you can use that's like going to possibly persuade the most amount of people, even though we know that means like, okay, well, some people you're not getting it all and other, you know, is that what it is, like we're trying to hit the best batting average here?

0:15:00 Lindsey: Yeah, Mm-hmm. Yeah Yeah.

0:16:00 Lindsey: One thing that I would say is that I don't think that these authors would argue that yourself as receptive is the only way to be persuasive, right? Trump's whole thing is like sort of radiating this just superhuman level of confidence, and confidence can be persuasive as well, right. It's just, this is one strategy toward being persuasive, I guess, is receptivity, but not the only way. There's another piece in that, I think that will intersect with some of the findings that we talk about later, because they talk about some circumstances in which expressing uncertainty can help you, and then other circumstances in which expressing certainty can actually help you and uncertainty can hurt. And so it's possible that Trump, again, is sort of operating in this space where certainty is helping him more than and harming him, I guess, right?

0:16:47 Thomas: But I don't think he's ever talking or caring about the people who are looking at his arguments, so I feel like the certainty basically always helps him with that core group of people. Yeah.

0:16:56 Lindsey: Right. Yeah. And I mean, I guess the other thing about this is that a lot of time, like the concept that we're talking about when we say persuasion here is about changing people's attitudes from one position to another position. And you mentioned a second ago that Trump, I don'T know that Trump is really doing that, right. He's maybe persuading people to follow him. But that's a little different than the the kind of persuasion that they're typically looking at in these articles. I don't think that he changed anybody's mind, you know, about being a leftist to being on the right through anything that he said.

So I don't know. Is he that persuasive? I don't know. But then maybe we can come back to this at some point. I was reading this, one thing that occurred to me is that our new governor, Glenn Youngkin, is actually pretty good at some of the stuff that they talk about in this article. Like the Way that he ran his campaign was very much from a place of signaling receptivity. And I do think that he persuaded a lot of people that were not sort of hardcore Republicans that it was better to vote for him than the nominee. So yeah.

0:17:16 Thomas: Yeah.

0:17:43 Thomas: Interesting. Interesting. I Already forget who that was, you should know, it's your state.

0:18:07 Lindsey: McAuliffe. Yeah. It was a real bummer. So anyway. Okay. Okay. So that's their argument, right? There's all these effects in the literature that have been demonstrated in the past. They think that the thing that unites these four mechanisms that have been demonstrated to be persuasive are this underlying receptiveness cue or signal, right. They make this argument by synthesizing findings about all four of these different behaviors and to make this case, right. So the four behaviors that they focus on are the ones that we introduced earlier.

They review literature on conveying uncertainty, acknowledging mistakes, highlighting drawbacks of your argument, and asking questions in the course of your argument. Let's start with conveying uncertainty or doubt about an opinion. They posit that the reason that conveying certainty can work as a signal of receptiveness is that it suggests that you understand that your knowledge isn't definitive and that you're open to updating your view based on other perspectives and new evidence.

So the first thing they do, and they do this with each of the four mechanisms they discuss, which I think is interesting given that this is a review paper rather than like a primary research paper, is that they directly test the assumption that conveying uncertainty does actually make the people perceive a speaker as more receptive, right?

You know, the past evidence they're going to review is showing that convelying uncertainty is persuasive, but it it hasn't necessarily been established that conveying uncertainty actually causes people to see someone as more receptive. So they establish that at the beginning and then they review the evidence. So, they recruited an online sample of 200 participants. They presented them with a message that outlined a plan to reopen the economy during COVID.

And the message that all participants saw was identical, except that half of them saw a message that included two expressions of uncertainty, like, "I can't be entirely sure, but I believe leave that X." The other half saw a message with those expressions omitted. After reading the message, participants then responded to the following two questions about the speaker. So how open -minded did you find the speaker to be?

And by open -mindered, we mean you find the speaker open to new information and open to opinions and perspectives that differ from his own. The second question they answered was how receptive did you fine the speaker. And by receptive, we mean you find the speaker to be interested in or willing to listen to new ideas or different ways of thinking about the issue.

And they found that participants who read the message with the statements of uncertainty rated the speaker to be significantly more open -minded and receptive than those who read one without those statements. So, of uncertainty are perceived to be more receptive. So now, what's the evidence that statements of uncertainly are actually persuasive? And they review a few studies that speak to this point.

So in one, the researchers had participants read a detailed restaurant review describing a meal that they had at a local restaurant and offering a reading of that restaurant based on that experience. And they manipulated two things about the review, the expertise of the reviewer. So one of them, they were told, was written by a renowned local food critic. And the other one was written supposedly by a community college administrator. Administrator.

0:18:07 Thomas: Yeah.

0:21:15 Lindsey: Yeah, so I thought so too. It actually showed up in multiple studies that it was, I

0:21:16 Thomas: That's A Weird, like control person To pick, is It Trying To just be like the most neutral thing, like you wouldn't really Think they would be one way or the other, like an expert. Yeah, I don't know.

0:21:25 Lindsey: Guess. I do not really understand the choice, but it works as a person who is not an expert in food reviews, I suppose. They manipulated expertise. The second thing they manipulated was whether the review had expressions of certainty or uncertainty. So the title of the review was either a confident four out of five or a tentative four out of five. And then within the review itself, it had a couple of expressions of certainty or certainty. Other than the expertise of the review and the expression of certainty or uncertainty, the reviews given about the restaurant were identical. And importantly, it contains strong arguments about the quality of the restaurant. So So like detailed information about the quality of the food and the price and the service. So after reading one of these reviews, participants then rated the restaurant based on the information they read. And so what did they find? If participants read the review by an expert, they rated the rest of the restaurant by the restaurant more highly if the expert expressed uncertainty rather than certainty. So yeah, so expressions of, I

0:21:33 Thomas: Huh.

0:22:30 Thomas: Which Is weird In a food thing, what

0:22:34 Lindsey: Know, yeah. But yeah, expressions of uncertainty from an expert were persuasive. But

0:22:38 Thomas: Do you have exam, like what would that look like for that? Yeah.

0:22:41 Lindsey: The expressions of uncertainty, yeah.

0:22:43 Thomas: Like, well, I don't know, but uh, this food's the best, and the way it just seems weird, I don't like, I guess I'm having a hard time understanding what that Would be. Oh.

0:22:50 Lindsey: So, Actually, that's very close to what they did. So they were like, you know, I can't, I can't be sure based on just this one experience with a restaurant, but tentatively I give this place a four out of five stars based on what I did experience, right? Yeah. As Opposed to, I can confidently rate this place as a four out of four Stars. Yeah, yeah.

0:23:01 Thomas: Okay. That makes Sense. Gotcha. Right.

0:23:08 Lindsey: Okay, so expressions of uncertainty from the expert were persuasive. But interestingly, participants rated the restaurant more highly if the non-expert expressed certainty than if they express uncertainty.

0:23:19 Thomas: The Greatest Is the greatest restaurant. Yeah, that exactly, that really, that really fits. Yeah.

0:23:26 Lindsey: It's tracking so far, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. So expressions of certainty from a non -Expert were more persuasive and the apparent reason for these opposite effects is surprise, they argued. So a a statement from uncertainty from a local food critic is a little bit curious, as is a statement of complete certainty from someone with no particular expertise in local dining. So the authors of this original study argued that this surprisingness increases people's engagement with the arguments presented in the review. And given that the review did contain strong arguments that increased engagement and increased persuasiveness. They ran another study after this one to confirm that that was the mechanism. So they ran pretty much the same study, but they manipulated the strength of the arguments in the reviews in addition to the expertise and the statements of uncertainty. And they found that the expressions of uncertainty only helped the experts' persuasiveness if the arguments were strong. If the arguments were weak, then they actually became less persuasive, right? And

0:23:27 Thomas: Wow. Hmm. Hmm. Yeah. It makes

0:24:34 Lindsey: Again, yeah, they argue because it's increased engagement, they're reading more carefully to try to understand why this person is expressing uncertainty, right, and Vice versa for the non-expert, right? Like, these suggest that if you have expertise in an area relevant to the topic that you're talking about and you have a strong argument, expressions of uncertainty about a conclusion can be engaging to your audience and thereby increase your persuasiveness by getting them to think more deeply and engage more. The next study they describe also shows that expressions of uncertainty can increase persuasiveness, but through a different mechanism.

So this time, this study is illustrating that uncertainty can improve perceptions of the speaker. So in this study, the researchers had participants read one of three versions of a prediction by climate scientists about the effect of climate change on sea levels. Yeah, so in one version, the scientists gave a precise estimate of how much sea levels would rise in the next 100 years. So they said it would rise four feet over the next hundred years.

In the second prediction, the scientists give an estimate and gave a worst case scenario. So, they said sea levels will rise about four feet, but could rise as much as seven feet. And in the third prediction, the scientist gave an estimate, and also included the best and worst case scenarios. So, they said sea levels would rise about four feet, but could rise as little as a foot or as much as seven feet.

0:24:34 Thomas: Sense. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

0:25:53 Lindsey: And after reading one of these three predictions, they measured how much participants believed the message about climate change, and also had them rate how much they trust the things scientists say about the environment, which I thought was an interesting question, because it's a general question. It's not how much do you trust this scientist, but how much do you trust the things that climate scientists say about about the environment. The researchers found that participants expressed the strongest belief in that third prediction, the one that said about four feet, but as little as a foot or as much as seven feet, and that the reason that they believed that message more was explained by their increased trust in scientists. So providing the full range of values instead of just giving the one estimate or just giving one estimate in the worst case scenario was perceived as more trustworthy, trustworthy, and therefore was more accepted, right? An interesting finding. And importantly, right, statements of uncertainty in this study are not working through increased engagement in the argument necessarily. They're working through improved perceptions of the speaker, right.

0:26:55 Lindsey: And trustworthiness is one of those peripheral cues that people use as a heuristic when the argument or when the elaboration is low, right when they're less engaged with the argument.

0:27:04 Thomas: Well. It was there in this, was their argument because it sounds like there's just a statement, okay?

0:27:09 Lindsey: Yeah, I'm trying to remember if there was more around that statement. They were pretty much just reading that prediction. It's my memory, But I could be wrong about that. Yeah, so that's interesting. All, so summarize this one point. Expressions of uncertainty can enhance your persuasiveness, especially if you have a strong argument and you can credential your knowledge or expertise in a relevant domain. Right. And sometimes that's driven by engagement. Other times it seems to be driven by perceptions of the speaker. I mean, I think that there's some maybe practical implications of this one, right.

0:27:17 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:27:40 Lindsey: I mean, there's a lot of topics in which it might be important to signal that you as a speaker have arrived at your conclusion in a careful, trustworthy way, um, if you're talking like to a conservative family member or something, right, might be important to signal that as a way of engaging that person uh deeply in what you have to say about the subject, it might open them more to that, um, you know, alternatively, it could, it could just serve as a as a signal that you are a credible source of information, right, don't know, does that seem practical to you, yeah.

0:28:07 Thomas: I think so, I was just thinking like I feel like Fauci does this pretty well, like I feels like he's pretty open been with the the times that they've been uncertain about stuff, um. Again. I guess there's no accounting for people who've been inoculated against you, it.

0:28:12 Lindsey: Mm- -Hmm. That's True, yeah, I mean that's a whole other layer of complexity to add into this stuff, but yeah, no, Fauci occurred to me too as somebody who does pretty well in communicating uncertainty, um, we have a local meteorologist that has a weather column, and he's the absolute best at doing this, like never makes overconfident claims about how much snow we're going to get, everything that he had, he says has a confidence interval around it, and it's great, and people love him, so important with predicting the weather.

0:28:45 Thomas: Like it would work for me, like I love to have that confidence interval of, you be this, could be this, and here's the sweet spot in the middle, that You know, is our prediction, hmm.

0:28:52 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly, no, it definitely works for me too, um, very much appreciate it, and it does, I think it, at least for me, it does operate through like increasing my trust in the source, because, you know, that is actually the most accurate way to present that kind of information is to present it as sort of a confidence interval, right? So second act of receptiveness they talk about is acknowledging mistakes or that one has been wrong in the past. And so they open the section with a couple of illustrative examples.

So they say that, you now, a speaker could say that they used to think differently about the issue under discussion, but they've changed their minds and now think that they're wrong, and that could signal receptivity. Or if a speaker presents some evidence during a talk that they are giving and an audience member challenges the way that they interpreted their evidence, the speaker has two options, right? They could double down, or instead they could acknowledge the validity of that alternative interpretation and sort of concede that, you know, maybe their interpretation was an error. The authors say that moments like this signal openness to contradicting views and to updating one's position based on evidence.

And that, in turn, it's likely to signal speaker receptiveness. Once again, they test their assumption directly. They get another sample of 200 people. They present them with a message. Again, this is a message again about reopening during the COVID pandemic. Supposedly, it is delivered by the Prime Minister of Spain.

And in the address that's being delivered, either the Prime Minister acknowledges two mistakes in the past, like says things like, I know in the pass I've said that opening up small stores was a bad idea, but I think that opinion was a mistake, and then having people rate the receptiveness of the speaker, and again, yes, acknowledging mistakes had a significant and fairly large impact on perceptions of receptiveness, so inclusion of past mistake did was perceived as more receptive, but but is it persuasive?

It's the main thing. So lots of studies suggest that admitting mistakes is persuasive in a variety of different situations. And they use like really varied examples here. Some of them are very interesting. So for instance, one study had participants read reviews recommending a particular brand of headphones. It's a made up brand, I checked.

0:29:27 Thomas: I Feel.

0:30:57 Lindsey: And within that review, they referenced a previous brand of smartphones that they had bought and either described that decision as mistaken or successful. So they either said that, you know, I bought this, these headphones and they were crappy or they were good. And then they recommended this current brand of headphones.

0:31:13 Thomas: Like that would work on me, uh. Don't know if it would be for the same reason, but to me that just suggests, oh, they have a little more information, like if you just saw someone who was like, these headphones are good, versus someone who's like, I tried these, they suck, these ones are good, that just signals they know, like literally they know more headphone brands at A minimum. You know.

0:31:31 Lindsey: One? You know, It could, and I had that same kind of idea when I was reading their summary. So I went back to the original review and actually read the reviews that they presented here. And both, like, first of all, they standardized the reviews a lot, and both of the reviews are pretty detailed, um, they go on about like, yeah, you know, I had these headphones, and I don't know, there's a lot of information the reviews that could convey their experience or knowledge about headphones, um.

0:31:57 Thomas: Okay.

0:31:58 Lindsey: So. Literally the only detail that's different is that when there's, when they say I bought this other brand in the past, um, whether they said that that brand that they bought was crappy or good, yeah. Um, yeah, so

0:31:58 Thomas: Oh.

0:32:08 Thomas: Okay, okay, but Again, does that really, I mean, it's not your fault if you bought a crappy brand, right, or is it, I mean, is that, what is it, are we supposed to take this as though people are seeing that as like a mistake the buyer made?

0:32:23 Lindsey: Don't Not, not mistaken the sense of like blame, but they're arguing that it taps into a similar mechanism. Is that like, mean, it, is it is a mistaken purchasing decision? I bought this brand of headphones, they turned out to be bad, right? The review ends with this person saying that they recently decided to upgrade their headphones, went with the second brand that they're reviewing, and were very satisfied. Found that participants who read the review referencing a past mistake were more likely to choose that brand of headphones over another brand as a prize for completing the study. So that was their DV. They were like, you get a prize für completing the studie, you can have this one or this one, here's a review, you, yeah, Um, that's, that's pretty interesting, right? Just that one detail of that past purchase being a mistake or not seemed to have persuasive power for this, um, in the situation. All

0:32:24 Thomas: Okay. Oh.

0:32:58 Thomas: I Like That okay.

0:33:10 Thomas: I mean, is this the equivalent of the old, what in every debate, uh, debate, a lot of the Christians would be like, I used to be an evolutionist. I used, I, oh man, I worship Darwin every day, I pray to Darwin. They don't really know what atheists do, so they come up with their own version of it. Yeah.

0:33:19 Lindsey: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Or like Mike Warnkey saying like, I used to be a Satanist drug addict and I was a pimp and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, conversion narratives are very persuasive. One thing that surprised me very much about this paper is that they don't talk about conversion narratives in this section, which feels like the most prototypical example of this effect. Really not sure why they didn't review that area, but there's a large literature showing that yes, if you give a conversion narrative that that is highly persuasive, yeah, yes.

0:33:34 Thomas: Yeah. Mm -hmm, hmm, Interesting. Yeah. So, You could have been like, "Oh, I used to be a big fan of brand X," to quote the Jack Nicholson and Batman, and you're like, "But then I, you know, that I found this other brand of headphones in their way better." And that would you think that would be effective as well? Is it a different, do you think it's a different mechanism there or kind of the same mechanism?

0:34:17 Lindsey: I think that Hussein and Tormala would say that it's the same mechanism. I mean, unless there's something about, I mean you know, because I'm not a persuasion researcher, so maybe there is something different about the conversion narrative. But I looked up a couple of things when they didn't mention it, and in terms of the arguments that other people have made, in terms why those work, it sounds like the same mechanism to me.

0:34:17 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Cool.

0:34:36 Lindsey: So yeah, I don't know. Okay, so this study, I think this one is interesting, I think you'll like this one, but it's a little bit different in terms of the context. So they looked at the persuasive consequences of people learning that a product was made by mistake. So participants, yeah, so participants read a sort of a story about a music producer who added the sound of his breathing to a song, which enhanced the music. But in one condition, the story said that the producer did this intentionally. And in the other, they were told that he did it by mistake, but both conditions, they weren't told that. He left it in because it sounded good, right? Additionally, they we're either told that the person who who produced the song was an expert. So he was a hip hop producer working in the recording industry or not an expert, so once again, a community college administrator taking a music production class.

0:34:36 Thomas: Huh. Okay.

0:35:29 Lindsey: And then the participants were given the choice to either listen to the song described in the passage or listen to a song that they already knew. And if the song wasn't produced by an expert, participants were more likely to listen to it if they read that the breath sounds had had been added by mistake. Yeah.

0:35:44 Thomas: Huh. Interesting, huh.

0:35:46 Lindsey: Right. If the song was produced by the community college administrator, though, they were not more likely to listen to the song regardless of whether the breath was added intentionally or by mistake? With the expert, you know, the mistake seemed to add to the intrigue, right? It should be called the you got chocolate in my peanut butter effect, I think.

0:35:59 Thomas: Right. Right.

0:36:03 Lindsey: Yeah, so this study is, I know the kind of mistake they're looking at here is a little bit different from the other ones. But I think it's important because they add in that expertise domain. And it suggests that at least in some circumstances, the acknowledgement of the mistake is only persuasive if you've already established your competence in a relevant domain. So like it, you know, it intrigues people that this person made a mistake when they are an expert in music production, but not when the person is a novice. And you know that mirrors the effect that we talked about earlier with the restaurant reviews. So I don't know, what do you, you think about that one? It's a weird one, it was the odd one out.

0:36:36 Thomas: Uh, Yeah, I don't know what to make of that, um, seems like kind of quirky Yeah. I don't know how to like universalize from that necessarily, necessarily, yeah.

0:36:42 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, like, they, you know, they make a case that this is actually operating through a similar mechanism. I mean, um, one, one way in which it's similar, potentially, is that the mistake is kind of piquing interest and engaging people more in the story, so that would be kind of similar to the, to the previous one, and also, you know, the fact that you get the effective expertise suggests that, like, like, this can be, like, the mistake can be interesting to people as long as they already have confidence that you're a good music producer or you're competent in whatever domain. So, you know, in terms of those mechanisms, I do see the parallels. But, yeah, it's definitely an odd one out. Right. A couple of other studies here. So, in one study, participants came in, spent 30 minutes doing a task, and then the experimenter comes in and informs them that actually that was the wrong task. They were supposed to do something else.

0:37:16 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:37:35 Lindsey: And the experimenter either assumed responsibility for that mistake or said it wasn't their mistake. And then asked, yeah, and then asked the participant if they would retake the study with the correct task.

0:37:34 Thomas: Man, oh, I like this, okay.

0:37:47 Lindsey: Yeah, participants were significantly more likely to agree to that request if the experimenter assumed responsibility for their mistake, and yeah, and they also rated the experimenters more trustworthy and friendly if they admitted to their mistake so I like that one, too.

0:37:53 Thomas: Interesting, yeah.

0:38:02 Thomas: Yeah.

0:38:02 Lindsey: And, yeah, finally, there's several studies that they summarize here that have shown that implicitly acknowledging an error by conceding to a counterpoint that someone brings up or updating a view in response to a correction does similar things. So it also enhances persuasion and it seems to do this by enhancing perceptions of the speaker as more trustworthy and intelligent and things like that, right? Is interesting. So, to summarize, right, when and why is it, it persuasive to admit to past mistakes?

Admitting mistakes can be effective for persuasion, especially if you've already established yourself as competent in the relevant domain. The evidence also suggests that the strategy can work to increase persuasiveness because of enhanced perceptions of the speaker, right? They're more likable, they're more trustworthy, and so on. The authors also consider it very likely that this mechanism could could also work through that sort of like peaked interest or surprisingness factor, because it's kind of surprising when people admit mistakes rather than trying to cover over them.

And that that surprising information increases attention, but that hasn't been directly tested. So they don't, you know, make that case really strongly. I think the advice here is that you should always have an Andrew Was Wrong segment. It's very important. We

0:39:09 Thomas: Yeah.

0:39:09 Lindsey: Should probably probably add one to this show.

0:39:10 Thomas: I Love it. Yeah, this works, again, like, kind of on average. These effects happen on average. And then I just wonder if there's specific groups of people, I guess, depending on their preconceived notions that will penalize you more heavily or something, you know, like if, if Nancy Pelosi admits a mistake, the right is just going to run all over it. Um, so, I, and again, I guess it's not as though we, anyone sold this as, here's what will persuade everybody, but I guess it's just like a guess, it's just good to keep in mind that this inoculation against reality, I think, trumps most of this, right? Well,

0:39:11 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:39:51 Lindsey: I mean, you know, the, the people who are going to be running all over Nancy Pelosi, like, their goal in listening to what she says is not to be persuaded. They don't go into that situation open to persuasion. They're looking for things that they could trumpet out to their readers as, you know, examples of her being a, a buffoon, right? I, you know, I wouldn't, I,

0:40:10 Thomas: So were these people, like, there, did, do you think the test subjects' goal was to be persuaded, or just, just not, not to be persuaded, right?

0:40:20 Lindsey: I you know given the things that they were examining here, I don't think there's any reason to suggest that they would come into that lab situation resistant to being persuaded.

0:40:29 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. That's all, I all I meant to say is, I, I, I wasn't sure if this whole thing should be taken with a grain of salt, that the subject needs to want to be persuade it already. Yeah.

0:40:30 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:40:39 Lindsey: Yes, that's absolutely true, but, right, what some of these things are suggesting is that if you, if you use these kinds of techniques, that can increase people's openness to being persuaded, even if they come in with some resistance, right? Appropriate to put caveats around all this stuff, but

0:40:53 Thomas: Right. Well, uh, Lindsay has persuaded me that there's so much more of this stuff to talk about that. I think we're going to do a part two on this. It was looking a little, as we're looking over, uh, your, your notebook there, Lindsay, it's a little bit too much for for just merely a one -parter. So hopefully it'll be worthwhile to get that part two and get even more possible tools for persuading people like, you know, your COVID denying family members, for example.

0:41:18 Lindsey: Sure.

0:41:19 Thomas: So that's it for part one. Let's, I can't wait. I can't wait to hear what's in store for us for part two. You want to give us any little teaser or? All

0:41:27 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. So the next two mechanisms we're going to talk about are highlighting drawbacks and asking questions and how those affect persuasion.

0:41:37 Thomas: Right. Well, looking forward to that. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks Thanks so much, expert Lindsay Osterman. And look, I've made mistakes in the past by not being a patron donor to Serious Inquiries Only.

0:41:42 Lindsey: Thank you.

0:41:50 Thomas: To come clean on that. That's my mistake. I used to not be a patron to Serious Inquiries Only, but now I am, and I highly recommend it.

0:41:58 Lindsey: Me too.

0:41:59 Thomas: It's just a great thing to do to support the show that you love, the Lindsey Osterman you know and love. Support patreon.com/seriouspod, don't be like

0:42:10 Lindsey: I'm not completely certain of that, but I think you should become a patron.

0:42:11 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah, like there's probably other good things to do as well, but like we're pretty sure this is a good thing to do, is be a patron of patreon.com/serious pot.

0:42:23 Lindsey: Did we just double our patrons? I think we did.

0:42:24 Thomas: Yeah. There's the numbers, yeah, or we could have done the the other thing, which is like, so how do you do the Trump, Trump version? Just be a patron. It's the best. The absolute best. Patreon.com. It says pod. You're an idiot if you're not doing it. It is the best! Do it! It is best! I don't know, I don't how to do that style of communication.

0:42:49 Thomas: That's not really... It doesn't come natural to me.

0:42:49 Lindsey: I've found that Very persuasive. No.

0:42:53 Thomas: I'm an idiot who knows nothing. Go do this! No, I guess you don't want to, like, come out and say that. But you just want to come across as not an expert. Or what was... I don't know. How do do you this is actually a good, like, lesson in the day's episode, so how would you do that? How would you that second appeal, Lindsey? Yeah.

0:42:58 Lindsey: No. Just Yeah. Okay. Uh, so, um, see, so I think you have to start with saying that you're a community college administrator. Yep.

0:43:17 Thomas: Oh, well, I gotta get back to my community college administrating over here. I gotta just, that's all I do, all day and day out, administrating for community colleges. Uh, definitely go to patreon.com. Okay, that's awesome. See everybody next time.

0:43:26 Lindsey: Definitely.

0:43:44 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com/seriouspod. The second best thing you can do, is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, follow me on Twitter at Serious Pod. If would like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook .com slash groups slash SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.