How to Persuade a Trump Voter
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room.
In his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt offers a useful metaphor to explain why reason so rarely prevails in political debate:
“[T]he mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant.”
In this analogy, the rider is our conscious, rational mind while the elephant is our gut-level feelings. Although the rider seems to be leading, the elephant is actually taking them for a ride.
We like to think our rational minds make decisions based on objective analysis of facts. In reality, however, most of our opinions are intuitions that we rationalize with logic and evidence collected after the fact.
This is a major reason why talking with Trump voters can be so frustrating: usually we’re talking with riders, not elephants, and those riders have little if any control over what the voter believes is right or true.
The truth about truthiness
Stephen Colbert may have been joking when he coined the term “truthiness,” but the word captures a fundamental facet of human psychology. That is, we find it almost impossible to disbelieve something that…
