The thing that makes this kind of threat particularly pointless, is that saying “I am on your side on all these other issues, but on this thing you are just wrong” is probably way more persuasive to people.
Lets say you are a big fan of a leftish politician like Jeremy Corbyn (JC). Someone you know to be generally on the political right tells you that they hate JC, and that in fact the awfulness of JC is WHY they are on the political right. You probably just dismiss them. But now someone comes to you who agrees with you on all kinds of policy positions, but that they tell you they dislike JC for such-and-such a reason. That seems more likely to generate a real update.
The thing that makes this kind of threat particularly pointless, is that saying “I am on your side on all these other issues, but on this thing you are just wrong” is probably way more persuasive to people.
Do you know concrete cases where this has worked? The way I’ve seen this play out on public fora is that the conciliatory tone is interpreted as weakness and taken as a signal that it’s cheap to go all-out on attacking the person for the heresy of arguing against the movement.
I guess the big difference is whether we’re talking about one-on-one conversations or social media.
someone comes to you who agrees with you on all kinds of policy positions
sounds like you’re having an actual two-way conversation with a person, while the original
someone says something like “The left went crazy and drove me to the far right!”
sounds like a thing someone would write on twitter as public engagement.
If you get one tweet’s worth of attention from other people, you don’t have space to build rapport. Things you can say that read as signal instead of noise sort of reduce to “I’m visible in your space and with you on the movement” and “I feel things have gone so off-rails with the movement that I’m defecting from it wholesale”.
Yes, I was thinking primarily of real life conversations with a person you already know. Where I have seen this play out as I described. Although, obviously I did not try out the counterfactual.
I have no kind of data on this, but my feeling is that it carries over to social media, at least for famous-ish people who have already had the space to build rapport. As a topical example, some right wing people in the USA (Tucker Carlson I think) seem unhappy with Trump’s recent Iran policy. My suspicion is that for MAGA types someone like this going “off script” and being against the war is significant, more so than if they encountered someone saying (for example), “Yeah, I supported Trump in his first term, but after the Capitol riots I became a Democrat.” Part of that is because the “I joined the other side over X” has to be something old, in the past, where opinion has hardened and in any case its in the past, but part of that is also the inherent implausibility of the “Side switch” bit. The previously-Trump-supporting person who turns against him after the capitol riots isn’t going to fall in love with all kinds of Democrat coded policies they previously hated.
To evaluate this, you need to have known that person in the past. I know some people who say stories like “I was always X, but recently I have suddenly switched to Y”, but I also knew them a few decades ago and their attraction towards Y was always there, so that hearing about them switching to Y came as no surprise to me, or rather only the specific timing was surprising.
People seem to be quite bad at knowing what made them do what. Many of their beliefs are just post-hoc rationalizations.
The thing that makes this kind of threat particularly pointless, is that saying “I am on your side on all these other issues, but on this thing you are just wrong” is probably way more persuasive to people.
Lets say you are a big fan of a leftish politician like Jeremy Corbyn (JC). Someone you know to be generally on the political right tells you that they hate JC, and that in fact the awfulness of JC is WHY they are on the political right. You probably just dismiss them. But now someone comes to you who agrees with you on all kinds of policy positions, but that they tell you they dislike JC for such-and-such a reason. That seems more likely to generate a real update.
Do you know concrete cases where this has worked? The way I’ve seen this play out on public fora is that the conciliatory tone is interpreted as weakness and taken as a signal that it’s cheap to go all-out on attacking the person for the heresy of arguing against the movement.
I guess the big difference is whether we’re talking about one-on-one conversations or social media.
sounds like you’re having an actual two-way conversation with a person, while the original
sounds like a thing someone would write on twitter as public engagement.
If you get one tweet’s worth of attention from other people, you don’t have space to build rapport. Things you can say that read as signal instead of noise sort of reduce to “I’m visible in your space and with you on the movement” and “I feel things have gone so off-rails with the movement that I’m defecting from it wholesale”.
Yes, I was thinking primarily of real life conversations with a person you already know. Where I have seen this play out as I described. Although, obviously I did not try out the counterfactual.
I have no kind of data on this, but my feeling is that it carries over to social media, at least for famous-ish people who have already had the space to build rapport. As a topical example, some right wing people in the USA (Tucker Carlson I think) seem unhappy with Trump’s recent Iran policy. My suspicion is that for MAGA types someone like this going “off script” and being against the war is significant, more so than if they encountered someone saying (for example), “Yeah, I supported Trump in his first term, but after the Capitol riots I became a Democrat.” Part of that is because the “I joined the other side over X” has to be something old, in the past, where opinion has hardened and in any case its in the past, but part of that is also the inherent implausibility of the “Side switch” bit. The previously-Trump-supporting person who turns against him after the capitol riots isn’t going to fall in love with all kinds of Democrat coded policies they previously hated.
To evaluate this, you need to have known that person in the past. I know some people who say stories like “I was always X, but recently I have suddenly switched to Y”, but I also knew them a few decades ago and their attraction towards Y was always there, so that hearing about them switching to Y came as no surprise to me, or rather only the specific timing was surprising.
People seem to be quite bad at knowing what made them do what. Many of their beliefs are just post-hoc rationalizations.