How to Win a Political Debate in 5 Easy Steps | Joshua Thompson | TEDxWWU

it's April 2016 which means we are currently in the middle of one of the greatest spectacles on the face of the earth and that would be my clicker not working that's a pretty big circle there we go oh let's try this again the United States presidential election but now by this time we've been inundated with political ads and candidates screaming at each other and Facebook posts with everybody just going nuts and at this point if you're a normal person that's how you feel but if you're me you're like please sir could I have some more I absolutely love politics I love watching politics I love to talk about politics and I really think it's a travesty in this country that politics have become such a taboo topic it's something we don't want to talk about we don't want to talk about it at family gatherings we don't want to talk about it at bars when you're enjoying an adult beverages we just kind of steer away from it and that's that's really sad it's something that we should engage in we should talk about and we shouldn't be afraid to talk about one thing that's lost in our politics is civility we seem to come from a place of ideology and when we come from this place of ideology there's something that's lost and that's fast and it's important to remember that facts do matter when we're talking about politics it's important to know your facts but what I'm going to propose to you today is that there's actually something a little more important and that's psychology psychology matters we can use principles of psychology to come up with a new approach of discussing politics really the kind of takes ideology out of it and really makes us focus on one and listen to what other folks are saying right and so the title of my talk is how to win a political debate in five easy steps and just in my title alone we see one of the major problems within politics and that's these first three words how to begin that's a problem because we seem to view politics as a sum game it's a game of wins and losses how can we want up one another how can we just fight it out to the death almost it's almost like Thunderdome you know two men enter one man leaves it's really kind of nuts so I'm going to change that not just how to debate in five easy steps you can really use this for just about any argument I feel and so I came about this one day after scrolling through Facebook and I saw this post from will call him Facebook guy and it was about the hashtag Love Wins now I'm sure most people here know what that hashtag means but if you don't it was created through social media during the the whole debate over same-sex marriage marriage equality and it was in support of this so I'm looking through Facebook one day and Facebook guy has this big long post about hashtag Love Wins about how it's hateful it's hypocritical it's just awful it's persecuting people for their sincerely held beliefs and how basically allowing members of the LGBT community to be legally married it's just going to destroy the world right you know so I kind of step back for a minute and thought about it and I was like you know I am just I'm not going to troll this dude today but then after considering it and after reading his post again and just take into account who I am I was like yeah that's dumb of course I'm totally controlling right and it was a really simple thing to do I just did it with two little hashtags and though I couldn't actually see him through the interweb I can tell by his response that this was his reaction he really didn't like it that much you know and so that brings me to the first step and that is push the buttons right and I know that kind of sounds a little counterintuitive but and to hear me out on that cognitive psychology tells us that we tend to remember things more when they have an emotional content right if we're in a state of arousal we're going to pay attention to what's going on around us whether we realize it or not we just our arousal leads to focus so and you can see this with wordless number sequences written narratives autobiographical memories just about anything if it comes with an emotional context we're going to pay attention to of whether we realize it or not so all I had to do with Facebook guys just challenge his beliefs which I didn't really do I mean I just posted two snarky little hashtags and that was enough to do it so I've got his attention I've got him around which then leads me just not to step two but actually through the bipolar model of political cognition now in the context of political learning we have this model the bipolar model and when people see bipolar most of the time they think of mental health and in that condition by polar disorder but with this what I mean is bipolar meaning a continuum from one side to another and bipolar we're talking about emotions right and then when I say political cognition that's just the way we learn about political issues that's how we process them how we code them and how it goes into our memory and then we can recall it and what the bipolar model says is that you take an emotion on that continuum from either negative to a positive and that emotion that you have is then going to lead to an attitude right either negative or positive it goes again but then that attitude is going to lead to your level of involvement so you've got your emotion your attitude has informed that's going to affect how much you pay attention what level of involvement are you going to have with what's being said what the argument is or just what the political issue is and then that is going to lead to learning that's going to lead to what you learn right so overall what this model says you take an emotion you give it an emotional context that's going to affect your attitude which is then going to affect how much attention you're willing to pay which is then going to affect learning right and now this actually leads me to step two so I got Facebook guy little riled up just by challenging his beliefs and saying facepalm so after you do that you then hit them with your argument and you give them a well-formed logical fact-based argument and you can see this principle and marketing all the time you know imagine you're sitting there watching television you're watching The Real Housewives of some random city wherever they happen to be on Bravo this season you know then a commercial comes on you hear music in the backgrounds of each each each so you know then you see this really hot couple running down the beach which is only heterosexual but you know that's another talk for another day and they're on the beach and then you see them in a bar dancing and you know they're sipping cocktails and stuff so they've gotten aroused through that and then after that they hit you well this is actually going to cost you ten thousand dollars you get all the best quality inclusions you know in seven days so they get you they rule kind of draw you in with the emotional components of it they hit you with their argument and so how this applies to to my little debate with Facebook guy is that you know I got it round up I challenged him and I hit him with my argument and I gave him the argument first I started out with all of the different ways that allowing members of the LGBT community to be legally married had absolutely no impact on his life whatsoever right and doesn't impact his family its job his income his finances his home his safety nothing no impact on your life in if you you know if you if it does have an impact on your life and maybe there's some deeper questions you need to be asking and so you know he was kind of like me I'm not really sure so then I hit him with all of the ways that not allowing members of the LGBT community to get legally married had a very profound negative effect on millions of people right and so the tactic I use there as I hit him with a pocketbook issues right can you talk about money that's something people can understand and they're going to pay attention to so I explained to him the ways it affects a couples you know car insurance health insurance mortgage inheritance rights income taxes 401k retirement all of these ways that not allowing same-sex marriage really hurts a lot of people right so then you know issue like all money is these dollar signs you know he's kind of starting to come around a little bit you know it's something I hit him with step three and that's make it personal turn it around give them something that they can cling to something that they can relate to and this kind of goes to research involving the framing effect I recently did a couple of studies with some undergraduate Ras looking at the framing effect and what we really find is that when you give a persuasive argument that someone can reach out to that they can connect with it that they can feel that that's going to affect attitude that's going to change your attitude a little bit so I've gone through our guide and riled up by hitting with my argument and then I will just imagine how it would make you feel if or some trait about you that you cannot change this innate you have no control over you were denied basic human rights not to mention basic dignity that comes along with that little piece of paper you know and so he was still yeah I could kind of see and turning a little bit a little more you know so that brings me to step four and I really think this is the most important step and that's appeal to a person's sense of morality now when you hear the word morality a lot of times we think about specific behaviors and normal behavior a lot of times it's in the context of religion and spirituality and all of that but there's really so much more to the idea of morality now moral foundations theory takes into account motivation it draws from cultural anthropology sociology biology psychology of it pulls in a lot of things and what moral foundations Theory tells us is well there are five different dimensions of morality they're basically two main foundations the individualizing foundations you see here really deal more with social justice equality how we treat one another how we avoid doing harm to other people while the binding foundations more deal with adherence to traditional values submission to Authority how we should behave according to group norms and this is like I said drawn from a number of different disciplines and brought together and to one you know core idea the interesting thing about these two foundations in reference to politics is that liberals tend to be more in line with individualizing found while conservatives tend to be more in line with the binding foundation and you can see this just in our political candidates today and just the whole rhetoric of what we've got going on in our political contests right now but there is one little discrepancy in this in this Hartmann care although liberals do score significantly higher and harm and care than conservatives conservatives score well above the average right and people who consider themselves moderates they they're about the same across all foundations but is that farming care so if you can appeal to a perfect sense of harm and care if you can kind of sway their motives which is going to sway their attitudes and this is something I'm looking at in my thesis we're looking at if we frame political arguments can we shift moral motifs right and so in the context of my little debate with Facebook guy what happened here is I told him the story of any Windsors and I'm sure a lot of us know that Edie Windsor is the lady who brought the case forward to the Supreme Court that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act so I explained to him her story and how she and her partner had been together for I don't remember something like 50 years a really long time and when her partner died she was hit with all of these inheritance taxes and all and since though she was legally married in the state of New York it wasn't recognized with the federal government so she basically went bankrupt due to this and was having to sell out all of her possessions all of her partner's possessions just to pay that inheritance tax so again you know I get facebook money issues you see dollar signs people can understand that so I go through getting riled up hidden with my argument make it personal appeal to his sense of morality and then the final step and this is just really be sincere and be open-minded we really need to recognize in the political context that there are differing views and that those differing views don't necessarily make us opponents and that when you just yell at each other and you can bring ideology into it it really something's lost you're just yelling past each other and we're not really trying to hear each other and understand each other and so you know your political views may be different from mine but to you your views are no less valid than mine are valid to me and we need to understand that that about people so be open-minded when you're talking about these things and so to kind of sum up after about a six-hour Facebook ordeal that just never seemed to end I'm not sure if I just warned him down or what really happened but I finally got him to publicly it hit and by publicly I mean from Facebook which is pretty public that though I had not swayed his sincerely held beliefs I did give him something to think about he could see my point you know and that he was going to have to go pray about it and I really I hate to use the word victory after what I've said about something lost but but it is the way our politics go today it was kind of a little bit you know and that's what it takes is little victories and after a while you have these little victories you win the battle and you can change hearts and minds so what I want to leave you with today is don't be afraid to talk about politics get out there engage talk about it that's the only way things are going to get changed as if we openly discuss it just take a different approach to it think about psychology and think about how that person that you're talking to actually works how they tick you know don't bring in talking points in ideological stuff which half the time is not fact they just really try to hear people and engage and get out there and discuss these things and most of all vote vote in this country we don't really have a lot of voice and a lot of people think that your vote really doesn't matter but your vote matters that is the one true way you can raise your voice and get out there engage and change the world thank

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 172,852

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Global Issues, Politics, Public Policy

Id: bvvD9qXD2o0

Length: 17min 56sec (1076 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 27 2016