Trump, Conway and the Amygdala Hijack
How to communicate when words and reason are failing.
I was struck by something after listening to Jake Tapper’s half-hour long interview of Kelly-Anne Conway.
It’s easy to listen to her words and get caught up in the fact that it’s a non-stop torrent of horse shit. But it’s critical to recognize that her logical arguments are secondary to her intended message.
Conway’s speech is an emotional assault — she’s constantly moving between a motherly, caring mode and dark mentions of tragedy, crime, sadness, hopelessness, and violence.
Her style of communication isn’t one where you’re meant to be able to understand the argument. That’s one of the reasons she talks so fast.
A good portion of Americans will have trouble parsing the literal meaning of her sentences because she moves so quickly. The ideas come too fast — by the time they’ve understood one sentence she’s off to the next one.
“Word-darts poisoned with stress hormones right into the lizard brain of the audience”
Meanwhile, her audience’s amygdala is getting juiced every time she slips in a reference to terror, death and suffering. Stimulating the production of norepinephrine, adrenaline and cortisone. And when your amygdala is active, it makes it even harder to understand what they’re saying.
This is what people are talking about when they talk about Trump talking *through* the media — he is able to just get these word-darts poisoned with stress hormones right into the lizard brain of his audience, which is the huge number of people who have CNN on in the background — just to have something to break the silence at home, or playing on a screen behind a cash register in an airport gift shop.
I think Tapper did an ok job of holding her accountable for her lies, and misstatement. But to understand that you have to listen to the whole thing — something that took me several tries, because a half-hour is a lot to invest. And you have to actually think about it.
After a half hour of rapid, constant lying my brain was just worn out — and I test in the 99th percentile for verbal fluency.
One of the great truths of life is that we only directly perceive a small portion of the world that we experience.
We get a very limited set of data and the brain fills in the gaps. Even as educated, involved people, often don’t understand a lot of what’s going on. We listen for clues and keywords in speech, and we judge the reactions of people we trust to tell us what’s important. We even start to prefer things just because we see them a lot.
Trump’s entire strategy, and his team, is making use of these preconceptions and exploiting the cognitive biases that underly our experience of the world.
He’s using the tricks the same way a con man does — peppering his speech with an endless barrage of emotional cues designed to exploit your cognitive biases and convince you that he knows what he’s talking about in any moment, and that his opponents are very, very bad people.
If you are an educated person, you look at Trump or Conway and wonder how anyone could be fooled when a simple analysis of the facts reveals the many, many flaws in their arguments.
But the thing to remember is that there are a great many people who only ever choose candidates or positions based on an emotional assessment of social cues.
“There isn’t an argument to be won.”
No amount of arguing will convince someone who processes political information emotionally — they don’t even hear the content of the argument. Their decision is about what feels right.
So if we want to defeat Trump, we need to fight on the same battlefield. We need to tap into that deep, emotional level of communication.
If you look at the punches that land in the Tapper/Conway interview, you’ll see they are in the places where he manages to emotionally overpower Conway:
When he is deeply and morally offended when he talks about the journalists who risk their lives.
When he drives home the point at the end that the president is just plain lying like an not-mad-but-dissapointed Dad.
It’s not his words that win those moments. It’s that the ground truth of his belief shows up and it’s so vital and true that Conway’s onslaught can’t unroot it.
There isn’t an argument to be won in these conversations.
The only way to win against someone with this style is to plant yourself firmly on your home ground. Find the part of all of this that you care most deeply about. Find the place where you are unshakeable.
“Radiate the conviction of your lived experience.”
Root yourself in that depth of feeling and communicate that emotion when you speak. Don’t try and win the argument with facts. Get the other person to feel what you are feeling in their gut.
But the feeling can’t be anger — that will just cause an amygdala hijack and stop the discussion in its tracks.
Get people to understand how this affects you. Personally. Emotionally. Radiate the conviction of your lived experience. Be serious and be open.
If you’re angry, it’s usually because you’re hurt. It’s because you’re wounded. It’s because you’ve lost something. It’s because something is unfair.
Your bare humanity. Deep and selfless. Vulnerable and betrayed. That is the feeling that will carry the day.
Show, don’t tell.
