This one is basically asking me to distill a seemingly lifetime of work into a blog post.    Let’s say upfront that I am going to speaking in sweeping generalities.  Human behavior is complicated, nuanced, messy, and at times unpredictable. 

Attitudes or Behavior

I find it important to mention there is a difference between changing someone’s mind and changing someone’s behavior. When talking persuasion, it is incredible how often they are conflated.   Often in the short-term transactional power politics, changing behavior is the goal; coercion is often the means. 

But for this blog challenge, we will assume we are talking about opinions. 

In most cases, I believe – and this may be blasphemy for most in the political world – we can’t change minds.   Only the target can change their own mind; as political practitioners we are trying to influence the process.   

Zone of Acceptance

It matters where someone starts on any topic, belief or attitude or how strongly held their opinion is.

If a person starts off with strongly held opinions, you’re going to have a hard time changing their opinion.  Franky, it may be impossible.   With strongly held opinions, it requires a trusting and personal relationship, and to have a trusting and personal relationship requires time and effort.  Without that, true opinion change is rare.    There is some interesting work (ignore that one scandal though) being done in the field of deep canvassing, and again that takes a lot of time and effort.

If a person has a weakly held opinions about a subject, they often acquiesce to the leaders of the group’s signals.  This is why the school of fish metaphor works.   If the opinion is not of great importance to the person, the groups we identify with and the cues from trusted leaders matter – a lot.

If a person has no opinion on the matter, they will pay attention to recency and somewhat still to trusted leaders.  If it is a new subject preferably get there first with a trusted leader.  But with no opinions, trust is likely less of a factor than frequency and recency.  Propaganda works.

Direct Assaults

One way not to persuade people is to challenge them directly.  This often leads to a boomerang effect that when the subject is directly challenged, they spend more time coming up with better arguments to refute. 

Same with calling people “idiots, knuckle-draggers, racists, dummies, etc.”  We are all guilty of it, and it is really counter-productive to persuasion. 

More often, rather than a direct, full frontal assault, we are better off trying to increase motivation and shaping the path / environment.

Trust

 As you read, you notice the importance of trust – especially in partisan politics. 

Without trust, there is no persuasion.  How many times has a news story been believed or discredited solely on the trust of the source?    

We observe it all the time in polling. We believe the polls we ‘trust’ and discount the polls that are ‘partisan hacks.’ 

Our agency has been conducting on going research into how energy policies are received by conservatives. It is clear that source plays a huge deal. If the policies are advocated by the “Global Green Commies”, it won’t get far. In fact, it won’t get heard at all.

Conclusion

Almost everything about this subject can be taught by parents of teen-agers. 

First, the difference between changing minds or behavior.  Does a parent care if a kid has a deeply held belief in the importance of a clean room or does that parent just want the damn room cleaned – even if it is under the threat of massive grounding? 

If the teenager, for whatever reasons, has deeply held beliefs that his room is his space and keeping a clean room is stupid, calling him a troglodyte leading to slammed doors is unlikely to change his mind or his behavior. In fact, this little ingrate will likely sit in his room and write a list of the top 10 reasons why a clean room is leading to the deterioration of America. In this case, you may want to enlist the person he is crushing on to share with him that a clean room is super attractive and indicates a responsible person.  If that doesn’t work, threaten to take away the car keys or turn off the wifi until the room is clean.    

If the teenager, for whatever reason, has loosely held beliefs about a clean room, enlist the help of their friends, coaches, YouTube influencers, etc.   Best to make a clean room the norm and have those cues received from multiple sources, only to see it all reversed when he walks into his friends’ messy rooms. He will likely flip flip back and forth depending on the accumulation of cues seen most recently.

But the absolute best way to convince a teenager the importance of a clean room is to get there before they become teenagers. Early, repeated, consistent signals that a clean room is normal, important, and that the behavior is expected.   Spend time with them, associate a clean room with other positive experiences.    Develop a relationship around a clean room.

But even then, with all these strategies, it still maybe freaking impossible to get a hard-headed teenager to change their opinions or behavior.     

Once the opinion / behavior is set and coercion is no longer available because they moved out and pay for their own car & wifi, the teenager/young adult will have to change their own mind when they decide the time is right, if ever.