People Aren’t Vulcans
Why You Need More Than Facts to Persuade
By Patrick Faucher
Researchers, clinicians, decision-makers, managers, and communicators are prone to a common error that has broad implications for knowledge translation (KT) and implementation science:
Too often, we assume that people (ourselves included) are linear, critical thinkers, and that simply rolling out the facts in a clear and concise manner (poster, practice guideline, presentation, meeting, etc.) is enough to persuade them to think or act in a prescribed way.
It’s not.
Last month, I started watching Star Trek Discovery (great show, you should check it out. Also, I’m about to nerd out a bit, but stay with me). The protagonist, Michael Burnham, was born to human parents, but raised under Vulcan ideology. Vulcans, like Spock and Tuvok as you may recall from series past, are known to value logic and reason while suppressing all emotion.
The series follows Michael, who is in a constant tug-of-war between the principles of her Vulcan upbringing and her more human tendencies, like impulse and feelings. She’s at her best when she finds balance between her two strengths, logic and emotional intelligence.
As KT professionals, it’s important to be grounded in the science, the logic. But it’s equally important to contextualize that evidence to the person we’re trying to persuade, regardless of whether they’re a patient, doctor, researcher or decision-maker. We need to anticipate their thoughts, fears, interests, pressure points, etc, and find the balance between appealing to their logic and emotional selves if we want our message to truly resonate.
Facts Aren’t Really That Important
Sticking with the TV theme, every time I see the Donald pontificating at a rally of some sort, I’m reminded of an article from Vox, about how Trump understands what many miss: people don’t make decisions based on facts. Instead, the article suggests, we’re “guided by our emotions and deeply held biases.” Emotions, it would seem, often trump logic.
In fact, our emotional selves often encourage us to ignore facts that don’t conform with our worldview. Trump even coined a clever phrase for any fact that threatens his existing mental models — Fake News. And fake news these days is a hot seller.
How Do You Build a Case Using Facts People Refuse to Hear?
In an interview for the Economist, Shane Parrish (a former spy and founder of the company behind one of my favourite newsletters, Farnam Street) contends that we as communicators need to remove the blind spots in our understanding of the world.
“It’s so easy to think ‘they just don’t get it’… We twist what people say to fit our worldview without trying to understand what the world looks like to someone else. When we understand how someone sees the world, a lot of their actions and beliefs start to make sense.”
We can do this, he argues, by creating richer mental models — cognitive tools that help us explain the world to ourselves and understand how other people think. The first step toward that is listening.
“While we might try to convince ourselves that we’re listening, it’s hard not to fall into the trap of listening to refute or reply.”
In many ways, persuading someone is not so much a linear exercise in logic or debate, but more of a negotiation.
Negotiation: Understanding, Not Persuasion
As I touched on in a previous post about effective content beginning with empathy, reaching people in a meaningful way starts with understanding their context and drivers.
With roots in behavioural economics, behavioural psychology, and happiness studies, Nobel Laureate (Economics) Daniel Kahneman has an intimate understanding of why we do the things we do. In the video below [38 seconds long], he shares insights that form the basis of many of the mental models I use daily in my work:
“Negotiation is not about trying to convince the other guy. It’s about trying to understand them. So again, it’s slowing yourself down. It’s not doing what comes naturally because trying to convince them is applying pressure. Arguments, promises, and threats are always applying pressure. What you really want is to understand what you can do to make it easy for them to move your way. Very non-intuitive. That’s a surprising thing when you teach negotiation. It’s not obvious. We are taught to apply pressure and socialize that way.”
In this interview, Daniel touches on several elements relevant to this post on persuasion, such as how:
- Our intuitive views and ready-made answers get in the way of clear thinking;
- We often simply adopt the beliefs of the people/sources we trust; and,
- Daniel, like the rest of us, is “much more likely to believe fake news on [his] side than fake news on the other side.”
The Power of Empathy
These concepts are beautifully exemplified by the work of activist and film-maker Deeyah Khan. Arguably some of the most extreme of oppositional views are held by members of white nationalist or Jihad groups, whose beliefs are so strong that they are willing to kill to uphold them. In White Right: Meeting the Enemy and Jihad: A Story of the Others, Khan uses empathy in an effort to understand why some of these men hold so much hatred towards certain people in order to get to the real underlying stories that have shaped their lives.
In an interview with Vox, Khan says “ I never believed I would remain friends with any of these white supremacists, that some of them would walk away from their movement after we interacted. But that’s what happened, and I still can’t quite believe it.” Without attempting to persuade, or convince — but simply to understand — Khan caused a significant shift in at least one person’s perspective.
Twisting the Facts
On several occasions, I’ve heard people contend that evidence and scientific inquiry play a more prominent role in the sciences, and that health care practitioners and researchers are less likely to be guided by their emotions. As such, a more linear, logical approach to communicating with them is needed.
My experience would suggest these professionals aren’t much different than the rest of us (even though we are often tempted to treat them like Vulcans). They still go home at the end of the day to their families. They still have hopes, fears, and priorities. They are, however, decidedly better at formulating an argument to dismiss new evidence as being not relevant to their situation, or poke holes in the evidence itself.
Take this study on how highly intelligent people are able to bend evidence to fit their worldview, as explained by Tali Sharot in her article Why Facts Don’t Matter:
“Scientists discovered that those with stronger quantitative abilities are more likely to twist data at will. When volunteers in that study were given data about the effectiveness of gun control laws that did not support their views, they used their math skills not to draw more accurate conclusions, but to find fault with the numbers they were given.”
This type of defensive behaviour pops up in situations like when a select few family doctors defend their markedly higher antibiotic prescribing rates compared to those of their peers, or when scientists are confronted with new evidence that threatens their own body of research. Communicating effectively with these audiences requires an understanding of their underlying emotions and drivers. Facts alone simply aren’t going to cut it.
Real People. Real Emotions. Real Feelings.
Making a logical appeal — one solely based on facts — isn’t the best, or even an effective strategy, to persuade someone to think or act in a particular way. That’s because emotions play a big role in decision-making — in fact, they may be the motivating factor behind every decision we make (skip a third of the way down to the story about EVR, a man who had brain surgery to remove a benign tumor, and how it affected his ability to make decisions).
So the next time you create a KT tool, remember there’s a human on the other side of it. Making it easier for your audience “to move your way” isn’t as simple as pointing them to the logic behind your statement. It’s about understanding them, their perspectives and lived experiences, the sources of information they trust, their need to feel heard, the time they have to absorb your message, and even anticipating in what ways they might push back or reject the evidence.
To get there, the first step is to listen.
About the Author
Patrick Faucher is the Creative & Strategic Services Lead at CHI. A communications strategist with over a dozen years experience, he specializes in creating content engineered to build awareness, understanding, engagement, and adoption through an approach rooted in design thinking (rapid prototyping) and behavioural insights (nudging).
