The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [87]
The learned members had a thoroughly modern appreciation of how words open the minds that open doors. In persuasion, the task isn’t to offer a balanced view, but to win people over. To do this, what matters is how you jigsaw the facts to the picture you wish to present, and frame it to fit listeners’ views. But it is a process, and each step should be contrived to bring them with you.
Engage trust and this is tantamount to loyalty, according to hostage negotiation expert Mitchell Hammer:
Various studies have shown that when we say we trust someone, we are less critical, we require less information, we share more aspects of ourselves, and we give people the benefit of the doubt.
Language can be an incantation to trust, inducing a cooperative frame of mind without advertising to listeners how the mood has been achieved. Social workers talk to clients of “our” strategy to reduce debts. Similarly, police negotiators increase feelings of immediacy, by using present over past tense, and language to imply a cooperative relationship already exists:
“This” not “That”
“These” not “Those”
“Our” not “My”
“Here” not “There”
“We” not “I”
The underlying message—“We’re in this together”—resonates subliminally, summoning the sense, delightful in any conversation, of a moment shared.
And the more positive, the better. Mine your situation for opportunities to say yes. Don’t browbeat like chef Gordon Ramsay, for whom “Yes?” seems to be a full stop. (Actually, the question mark is debatable: He yaps it like an order.) Rather, find things the other person can nod to and you begin to establish a pattern of agreement.
Start from his needs, and repeat what he says: “So you want a new car?” gets your first yes. Impregnate possibility in every sentence. Say “Let’s,” “We could,” “Would it work if. . . ?” Conversely, to evade responsibility or downplay a situation, use distancing language: “Due to funding problems”; “Collateral damage was sustained”; “An accident has occurred”; “It has come to my attention that your daughter has crashed our car.”
To conserve your power of influence, exert it sparingly. The wizard Merlin bewitched the king with his prophecies. But when the king begged Merlin to peer into the future for fun, according to chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth, he refused:
Mysteries of that sort cannot be revealed . . . except where there is most urgent need for them. If I were to utter them as an entertainment . . . then the spirit which controls me would forsake me in the moment of need.
Merlin, or rather Geoffrey of Monmouth, was clairvoyant enough to see that scatter wisdom like poppy seed, and the oracle becomes a clown.
The “spirit” that made Merlin’s prophecies credible was the king’s urgent need to credit them when in dire straits. So whatever your situation, how your listeners feel about you matters more than what you say, because conversation, like poetry, works not by convincing but by stirring. Emotion nixes reason every time. Experiments by psychologist Drew Westen discovered that presented with a bad argument by a politician whom they like, partisans’ brains go out of their way to “turn off the spigot of unpleasant emotion”:
The neural circuits charged with regulation of emotional states seemed to recruit beliefs that eliminated the distress and conflict. . . . And this all seemed to happen with little involvement of the neural circuits normally involved in reasoning.
Irrational? Sure. On the other hand, without passion, can we be ethical? Feeling is the ultimate judge of our deeds’ merit, not the chopping blade of logic. And since we all feel before we think, of course feelings have the power to drive our thoughts where our beliefs would send them. This is why the most persuasive argument in the world is what we want to hear, from someone we enjoy listening to. Lawyer Clarence Darrow averred:
“The main work of a trial attorney is to make the jury like his client.”
So don’t try to change someone’s mind: use what is there. Learn what he likes.