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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 8, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
How to Change Minds: Notes from the FBI Hostage Negotiators Handbook
Continuing last week’s glimpse into the satisfactions and challenges of relationships, we’ll talk about loving and being loved by people with very different beliefs, sacred tenets, and styles from our own.
Chalice Lighting
We light the fire of Truth and ask to be clear, wise, and humble enough to admit when we don’t know. We kindle the warmth of community and ask for open heartedness and patience. We are grateful to the Spirit of Life and ask to learn the secret to loving and being loved.
Call to Worship
Lao-Tse
If there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.
If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.
If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbors.
If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.
If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Meditation Reading
Thich N’hat Hanh
Let us be at peace with our bodies and our minds. Let us return to ourselves and become wholly ourselves.
Let us be aware of the source of being, common to us all and to all living things.
Evoking the presence of the Great Compassion, let us fill our hearts with our own compassion – towards ourselves and towards all living beings.
Let us pray that we ourselves cease to be the cause of suffering to each other.
With humility, with awareness of the existence of life, and of the sufferings that are going on around us, let us practice the establishment of peace in our hearts and on earth.
Amen.
Meta Meditation
May I be free from danger.
May I be mentally happy.
May I be physically happy.
May I have ease of well-being.
Sermon
HOW TO CHANGE MINDS:
NOTES FROM THE FBI HOSTAGE NEGOTIATORS HANDBOOK
This is a question I hear over and over. “How do I talk to my fundamentalist family about being a unitarian universalist?”
We all have family members who think very differently from the ways we do. This sermon is a series of suggestions and some crucial bits of information about how liberals can talk to conservatives. We not only have family whose religious beliefs are more conservative than ours might be, we have family whose politics are more conservative. How can we talk to them? How can we listen, love, and stand our ground?
Hard Wired
The news from science about changing a person’s mind through rational discourse is this: When someone feels something strongly, you can talk yourself blue in the face and not make a dent. You can post the wittiest and most cogent memes on Facebook, you can email jokes and facts and charts and not make a dent. You won’t make a dent in them and their memes won’t make a dent in you. We almost can’t help it. Study after study is showing that the very brains of liberals, conservatives and moderates are wired differently. In a study at University of Nebraska, the scientists follow people’s involuntary responses, including eye movements, when they are shown scary, neutral, pleasant or disgusting photos. It turns out that conservatives react more strongly to the pictures which might create fear or disgust. John Hibbing, of the University of Nebraska, says conservatives are more attuned to fearful or negative stimuli. So the conservative focus on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, and wanting the widespread availability of guns may go with an underlying threat-oriented biology. I heard a white woman on tv say the other day, in a frantic tone “I’m not living without guns!”
John Jost from NYU drew a lot of backlash from conservatives when his studies seemed to show in 2003 that conservatives have a greater need for certainty and an intolerance of ambiguity. Their funding was looked into, but so many peers were finding the same results that it makes everyone safer. The correlations between the body’s reactivity and political ideology are so striking that they can predict a person’s political views from simply watching the eye movements they make when seeing the aversive photographs. There is a common sense evolutionary imperative for threat-oriented wiring. Conservatives also tend to be happier, more emotionally stable. Liberals a bit more neurotic. Being sure of things, having strong ideas of what’s familiar and an aversion to what’s strange or icky keeps you happier, apparently, than being open to new experiences, being bothered by inequality and fretting about the suffering of others. I’m not saying conservatives don’t fret about the suffering of others. They just have a more certain, rule oriented plan for what should be done. I think, since there seem to be almost even numbers of those on the right and left, that nature decided we need people with their foot on the gas and people with their foot on the brake, in terms of social change or systems of belief.
Moral Code
It’s hardwired. The only way to change someone’s mind is to show them that their behavior or practice is counter to their own moral code. Not counter to your moral code, their own. But other studies show that the moral codes used are different. In a study by Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek University of Virginia, liberals cared more about fairness and compassion. Conservatives cared about those two sets of moral imperatives too, but also measured things in terms of respect for authority, the purity and sanctity of ideas and institutions and in-group loyalty. Those last three were less important to liberal’s thinking, although I think liberals could give conservatives a run for their money in the purity/sanctity section if they had talked about boycotts. We like to be pure in where we get our chocolate and consumer goods. I am flummoxed because Target is on the list of “good on guns” but it’s also on the list of companies implicated somehow in the burning of the rain forest. Purity is hard to achieve. We are also purity nuts about recycling. In Berkeley, where we were in an Air BNB for a month, there were five bins. One for yard waste, one for clean paper, one for dirty paper, one for glass and one for plastic. The host finally just said, “Oh, don’t worry about it. I’ll sort it when you leave.”
Steps to Change
Talk about the FBI hostage negotiators about this. What they know is that arguments are emotional. It is rare that someone you’re arguing with will change their mind due to a rational argument. Negotiators have diagramed what they call the Path to Behavioral Change.
Behavioral Change Stairway
Listening is the foundation that supports each step.
Behavorial Change |
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| Influence |
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| Rapport |
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| Empathy |
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Active Listening |
The first step is active listening. When a Republican is talking to a crazy liberal, or a liberal is talking to your wacky uncle who listens to Rush, the first step in changing someone’s mind is active listening. So you would say “tell me more.” You would say “How did you come to this view?” As they talk, you don’t evaluate: “hm, that’s a good point,” or “I’m not sure your facts are straight….” You just say small encouraging things. “hm.” Or “I hear you.” You might ask open ended questions, like I mentioned before “How did you come to that view?” “What do you think about the front runners?” “What policies really feel important to you?” You can also just, without being weird about it, repeat the last phrase they said. If they say “I just think this is the stupidest group of leaders we’ve ever had.” You could say “the stupidest we’ve ever had?” Using pauses can be extremely effective. When the Moonies and I were talking about their beliefs, sometimes all I would need to do was stay quiet after they had said something and let their words hang in the air. “You say Mr. Moon takes away your sins before he marries you? How does he do that, exactly? By dabbing some wine on your photographs Hm.” It also can help to name the emotions you hear. “That sounds like it was upsetting.” “That makes you mad.” “It doesn’t seem fair to you.”
It’s hard for even the most passionate and committed person to carry on a one-sided argument. You are listening, and not only that, you are showing them that you are listening. This is a rare enough experience for anyone to being to open things up between you.
Empathy is the second step of the ladder to change. This doesn’t mean making understanding noises or saying an understanding phrase. This means really having empathy, emotionally relating, to the other person’s perspective. This is what the active listening is for, partially. To actually ask the questions which will help you get to a place of understanding.
Rapport, when the other person feels in their body, their mind and their spirit, that you understand, when they begin to actually feel you with them, is the next step. See, this is hard. I rebel at this point. I don’t want to look at the places in me that actually relate to their fears, phobias, suspicion of the stranger, “disasterizing” about the future, cruelty to the suffering, what I see as lack of communitarian spirit. Without getting in touch with those places in you, conversation is not going to be fruitful. If you are a conservative talking to a crazy liberal, you may need to get in touch with the places in you that feel for other people, that want to help, that can face suffering and the reality that it isn’t always the person’s fault who is suffering, the idea that the world is big and overwhelming and our country might not be the greatest country there ever was, that we might have bad decisions, greed and cruelty in our history, that some of us are victimized by others, that security is an illusion, etc.
After rapport is established, then comes influence. It is at this point that you might be able to influence the thinking and feeling of another person. Since empathy, though, you are open to their influence as well. Our mistake is that we try to jump right into influencing other people. Things seem so clear to us. The facts seem to make our conclusion so obvious. One problem is that it seems everyone has different facts.
It used to be that people thought facts were supposed to be – you know, factual. When JFK debated Nixon, though, he later confessed that he just made up the statistics he cited. Made them up. They sounded great. Now it seems that people will say things with great authority whether they are true or not.
It used to be that media outlets had to give both sides of an argument. They had to seek out viewpoints on all sides, facts which supported all sides, present them to people so they could decide. During the Reagan administration, the Fairness Doctrine was abolished. I think that was 1987. In 1988 Rush Limbaugh started his radio show. These days, most people watch Fox news or MSNBC. They get red facts and blue facts. They hear about red issues and blue issues. You have to really work to hear both sides. Reasoned and civil discussions are not the style. It is easier and more fun for people to mock one another, to imagine that the people on the other side are ridiculous, crazy, clowns! All this does is to make you feel energized and good in a nasty way about your own side. I’m not asking us to stop that, but you have to understand that we can’t ask those who feel differently to stop their emails, jokes and memes either. It sounds like a lot of listening is recommended. And love even though they may not be able to see how right you are.
Your religious conservatives have a scripture they rely on. They are in a paradigm that is like a train track. They can see you here, where they are, or over there, wrong within the paradigm. You are in the field beside the track, waving from wild territory. My father says, “But, Meg, the Bible says….” I nod and say “yes it does.” He’s not wrong. I say “I don’t go by what the Bible says all the time.” “But it’s bread, it’s the word, it’s the authority,” he says. I smile with as much love as I have in my heart and say “I know you believe that.”
“In terms of their personalities, liberals and conservatives have long been said to differ in ways that correspond to their conflicting visions. Liberals on average are more open to experience, more inclined to seek out change and novelty both personally and politically (McCrae, 1996). Conservatives, in contrast, have a stronger preference for things that are familiar, stable, and predictable (Jost, Nosek, & Gosling, 2008; McCrae, 1996). Conservatives – at least, the subset prone to authoritarianism-also show a stronger emotional sensitivity to threats to the social order, which motivates them to limit liberties in defense of that order (Altemeyer, 1996; McCann, 2008; Stenner, 2005). Jost, Glaser, Sulloway, and Kruglanski (2003) concluded from a meta-analysis of this literature that the two core aspects of conservative ideology are resistance to change and acceptance of inequality. How can these various but complementary depictions of ideological and personality differences be translated into specific predictions about moral differences? First, we must examine and revise the definition of the moral domain.”
“Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations
Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek University of Virginia
How and why do moral judgments vary across the political spectrum?
To test moral foundations theory (J. Haidt & J. Graham, 2007; J. Haidt & C. Joseph, 2004), the authors developed several ways to measure people’s use of 5 sets of moral intuitions:
- Harm/care
- Fairness/reciprocity
- Ingroup/loyalty
- Authority/ respect
- Purity/sanctity
Across 4 studies using multiple methods, liberals consistently showed greater endorsement and use of the Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity foundations compared to the other 3 foundations, whereas conservatives endorsed and used the 5 foundations more equally.”
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