What If Listening Isn’t the Key to Persuasion – BCB #119
Also: a tool for examining the social fabric of your neighborhood, and experiments in improving comments sections.
Listening may not change minds like we thought it did
We’ve been telling ourselves a story about resolving differences for a long time, on playgrounds, in political forums, and everywhere in between. The story goes that if you really listen to what the person you disagree with has to say, then they will listen back — and you’ll be able to more effectively persuade them of your perspective.
But what if listening weren’t nearly as crucial to persuasion as we’ve been led to believe? A recent study suggests that it might not be. Researchers set up nearly 1,500 10-minute, one-on-one video conversations about whether or not people who immigrated to the United States illegally should be eligible for in-state college tuition at state colleges. On each call, a person secretly working with the researchers either shared a persuasive narrative about an undocumented immigrant, or practiced high-quality, non-judgmental listening, or did neither or both.
Our study found that sharing a persuasive narrative without listening, meaningfully and durably reduced prejudice and changed policy attitudes. Adding listening to these persuasive conversations improved perceptions of the persuader. Surprisingly, however, adding listening did not facilitate persuasion, nor did listening itself have any lasting direct effects. This may be because participants processed the persuasive appeal even when they were not listened to: they learned just as much from the conversations when they were not listened to, even though they liked the persuader less and felt more defensive.
The idea that people can be persuaded whether or not they feel they were listened to dovetails with recent work on the science of persuasion. In his book Persuasion in Parallel, political scientist Alexander Coppock argues that new information usually causes people to change their views at least a little, even if the information they’re presented with opposes or undermines their preexisting views. Strikingly, people he studied tended to decrease or increase their support for an issue by a similar amount regardless of whether or not they agreed with the information presented (that’s the “in parallel” part).
But just because someone’s views are changing doesn’t mean that they’ll feel more of a sense of kinship with their opponents. As Coppock explains:
There is some subtlety here, because we need to consider two different outcomes. One is influencing someone’s attitude toward a particular policy. The other outcome is affective. How does the person being influenced feel afterward? How does that person feel about me, the influencer? It is true that people do not like being persuaded. They dislike the messenger. They want to stop listening. They argue back. That’s a side effect of persuasion.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t listen. Conflict resolution, after all, doesn’t necessarily rely on persuasion. There are many other authentic and effective ways to build understanding and collaboration among those who disagree with you, like working towards shared goals or physically moving together. Listening may not persuade, but persuasion alone doesn’t solve conflict anyway.
How trusting is your community?
It’s no secret that trusting your neighbors and feeling a sense of kinship and community can work wonders when it comes to overcoming polarization. The Aspen' Insitute’s Weave: The Social Fabric Project has scored every neighborhood in the United States on its social trust. Their interactive tool that makes it possible to see how your community ranks, as well as learn about trust-building activities across the US.

The tool measures social trust based on three criteria:
Trusting Behavior - whether people take action to support the community. Annual surveys and census data ask if people are involved in local groups and clubs, from religious to civic to social. A neighborhood’s score includes whether people volunteer or donate to local causes, attend community events, and vote in local elections.
Trusting Intentions - whether people feel good about the community. Annual surveys and social media data indicate if people feel trusted and are following organizations, news, and events where they live. A neighborhood’s score also captures how often social posts in the area express care for others and the community.
Trusting Spaces - whether people have places to connect. A neighborhood is rated on the number of places that allow people to engage with others, from public parks and gardens to houses of faith, barbershops and salons. From coffee shops and bars to rec centers and libraries.
When you input your zip code, it tells you what your neighborhood’s strongest and weakest trust traits are. The hope is that from there you can start to think about how to add to what your community is doing well and help it improve where necessary to weave a more sturdy social web in the place where you live.
A few ways to actually make comment sections less terrible
Earlier this year, communications professor Talia Stroud presented the results of a series of experiments that sought to answer the question, how can changing the way online platforms are designed improve our interactions on them? Her answer is hearteningly simple: actually, yes! As the Council on Tech and Social Cohesion made clear in a recent newsletter collecting many evidence-backed ways to make a better comment section, tweaking a platform’s architecture can make the discourse it generates less noxious.
For example, in one experiment, Stroud found that when comment sections on news sites replaced the “like” button with a “respect” button, users engaged with the content and each other in a less partisan way. In a few cases, the “respect” button led people to be more willing to click on comments expressing politics that differed from their own.
In another, her team partnered with 24 newsrooms to test out a tool called Coral, which uses AI to help moderators identify harmful comments and boost good ones. Simply turning off comments didn’t solve the problem of toxicity—instead, it led to lower engagement and a worse user experience. By contrast, they found that using Coral led to a decrease in the toxicity of online comments and better engagement, and made it easier for journalists to interact with readers.
The Council on Tech and Social Cohesion suggests a few other tools that could be used to improve and preserve the health of comment sections. TrollWall is an app that uses AI classifiers to identify and hide toxic comments. Jigsaw’s Perspective AI offers a Harassment Manager, “an open source codebase for a web application that allows users to document and manage abuse targeted at them on social media.” And Disqus’s Toxicity Mod Filter is another option for publishers who want to do a better job of sniffing out harmful comments.
Of course, the folks at Tech and Social Cohesion point out, no single quick tech fix can fully address a human problem, and each contains its own drawbacks and biases. As Lisa Schirch of the University of Notre Dame highlights, it's crucial to ask three questions: What does the design allow you to do, prevent you from doing, and persuade you to do? Many of the experiments presented here may not directly challenge the conflict-inducing incentives of social media companies, despite the fact that prior research has shown that quality content leads to long-term engagement growth. Maybe we as users need to advocate for these features more often and more forcefully?
Quote of the Week
Rival stands selling Trump and Kamala merch have set up next to each other at a busy intersection in Tustin, CA but the interactions may not be what you expect. Steve and Sandra have become friends and are taking the time to actually listen and get to know each other. In between, they have a sign that says “We both ask please be nice.”
Interesting data but persuasion is not the same as conflict resolution. As someone who has a background in classical rhetoric and has been teaching Nonviolent Communication for 20 years, I could say a lot about this but briefly persuasion also has an emotional element (regardless of the “facts”), which is why story telling can be so effective, but if both parties are not heard and feeling connected it is unlikely that any change (be it beliefs or strategy) will “stick.” I have seen this repeatedly in mediation and coaching sessions.