I See You III: On lenses and persuasion

I've been loathe to do this next post because I'm wary of turning this into a social psychology blog, or even worse, a blog on lenses. I am very much aware that by no stretch of the imagination could I be considered a psychologist. The more I talk about lenses the more I feel like our contemporary glitterati who seem to think that a soap box (whether it come in the form of an Oscar nomination, a hit pop record or God-forbid, yet another reality show) gives them license to punditry. I still adhere to the old school notion that "expert" is not a title one may give oneself and yet by waxing on about psychology I fear I am betraying that belief. And yet, in true irrational fashion, I will proceed to give one more uninvited thought on the issue and hope that the real psychologists out there will grant me pardon.

My last post debated the merits of communicating your own lens versus trying to apply others'. However, I didn't touch the logical preceding question of the feasibility of changing lenses in the first place (which the former question assumes).

All one needs to do is watch the current debt-ceiling debate to see that the idea of persuading other people to see the world as you do is an uphill task. Indeed, if the last thirty years of increasingly polarized American politics are anything to go by, our own lenses seem to get only more deeply enmeshed and others' more difficult to grasp with time.

However, I think the ray of hope lies in the fact that people have lenses rather than a lens. Even though they often have common roots, I believe we have different sets of underlying assumptions - each constituting a lens. Each lens determines how we interpret the world but is applied in different situations. Of course, we also have assumption that guide when a given set is employed... Ultimately these lenses might be connected to some meta-root, one lens from which all the others arise. Nonetheless, they take on such drastically different forms that for all intents and purposes it makes sense to think of people as having multiple, distinct lenses - what I will dub the multiple lenses theory.

Some amazing work has been done in social psychology that lends credence to the multiple lenses theory. Most interesting, are experiments that have succeeded in manipulating which lens participants apply to give differing results.

One of my favorite is an experiment was carried to demonstrate the effects of stereotype threat but I think it sheds light on the power of lenses as well. A cohort of Asian American females were given a math test. Before the test however, they were randomly assigned to three groups and "primed" to apply either their race, gender or neither to their identity. By giving them images and phrases associated with Asian and Asian-American culture, they primed the first group's "Asian-American" identity, reminding them of it and increasing the likelihood that they would then think of themselves and the task as "Asian-Americans" (whatever that means). The second group's "female" identity was similarly primed, by providing a series of images and phrases that reminded the participants that they were "female" and the last group experienced no manipulation. Then they all sat the math test.

You may have already guessed the outcome: participants primed to feel "female" performed statistically significantly worse than their peers while those primed to feel "Asian-American" outperformed their peers. When they saw the world as "females", stereotypes like 'Women are not that good at math' negatively affected their performance whereas when they saw the world as "Asian Americans" stereotypes like 'Asians are math geeks' boosted their performance. The exact mechanism by which stereotype threat (and lift) occur deserve their own post and so I will not go into details here, suffice it to say that these women had different ways of approaching this math test, different lenses with which to interpret their immediate world, that the experimenters could manipulate to significant ends.

Let's zoom out for a second - even though it appears to be painfully difficult to get people to learn new lenses or abandon old ones, it is not very difficult to get them to switch between the ones they already hold.

The multiple lenses theory is something that good orators have used for thousands of years and more recently so have good marketing execs! These days if you receive mail from any non-profit what once was a description of organizational goals, achievements thus far and fiscal efficiency is not likely a vignette about a developing world entrepreneur/AIDS orphan/old woman able to collect Medicare with reference to the person's family, a picture of them smiling and possibly a direct word of thanks. It's brilliant social psychology. We have a lens with which we view charitable giving and that varies from person to person, much more reliable is the lens with which people view an individual in dire need. The vignette is an attempt to "prime" you, to get you to use your individual person in need lens, rather than your organization trying to meet bottom line lens - because the former significantly increases the likelihood that you'll open up your wallet.

Zooming back in, you can use the same approach to settle arguments with people who view an issue through a different lens. Rather than trying to persuade them to learn your lens, pay attention to the rest of their lives. Identify in what areas and under what circumstances they see they world most similarly to the way you want them to view the question at hand and then figure out how you can prime them to use that lens in the issue at hand. Take your boss who thinks that the financial payout from "massaging" the numbers on your tax forms is the most fiscally responsible way forward. Applying the multiple lenses theory would involve looking for areas of said boss' life where he displays a strong moral compass against serious odds, or a value for "fair play". Maybe its how he makes sure he's home for his kids no matter what, or how he reviles poor sportsmanship in a tennis match. You'll be a lot more successful at "priming" him to get into those modes of thinking, or lenses, than selling him your own. If social psychology is anything to go by, you don't need to come up with far-flung metaphors linking the balance sheet to his children's well-being (he'd probably see that coming a mile away, in which case your moral quandary would be solved by not having a job at all!). If numerous psychology experiments are anything to go by, you just need to get him thinking like a dad, or a tennis player and introduce the issue as close to him being in that mode as possible. Go into his office with the papers, take a look at the picture of his kids on his desk and mention how cure they are, ask him how he balances being a good dad and a career. Allow him to wax on about how important priorities and taking care of "what matters" are and then introduce the tax discussion, being careful to use some of his lingo about his family as you explain why you think sticking to the numbers is important!

The use of priming under the multiple lenses theory isn't full proof - an improvement, even a statistically significant improvement still follows an approximately normal curve and there's no guarantee you won't make up the leftmost tail. Still, try it - I'd bet all my psychological training you'll have significantly higher odds of success...but that isn't saying all that much.