Being Nice To People Is an Underrated Tactic
People are more likely to agree with you if you aren't a jerk
American politics, and especially activist politics, celebrates confrontation. As online discourse has grown, the confrontational style has grown with it, as the combination of anonymity, lack of regulation, and the dynamics of social media has amplified that style of discourse. But beyond that, confrontation plugs into a historical narrative about how historically oppressed groups achieve change. Street demonstrations, protests, sit-ins, getting arrested, sometimes using violence; nobody, it is said, achieves change unless they stand up and force people to listen to them.
But here’s the thing: there are people in this world who are actually paid to persuade people. My profession, for one, although not only my profession- there’s also, quite obviously, the advertising industry. And when people who are paid to persuade people try to persuade people, they use a broad spectrum of tactics, including, among other things, being nice to them.
Since the point is more obvious with advertising, let me take my own profession first. Everyone knows about the tough side of lawyers. A person uses a copyrighted work and gets a letter from Suem & Screwem LLP threatening them with millions of dollars of damages and legal fees unless the infringing use is immediately ceased and desisted from.
But have you ever seen a good trial lawyer in front of a jury? Generally, the sharks turn into puppy dogs- and NOT only with the jurors. Jurors want you to be nice. They hate mean lawyers. Even when a lawyer does spirited cross-examination, they try to be formally respectful, using people’s titles and such. And one way to really, really make a jury hate you is to be nasty to ordinary citizens who simply saw something differently or something inconvenient for your client.
Johnny Cochran, one of the greatest trial lawyers in the history of Los Angeles, knew this. In the OJ Simpson trial, there was a 74 year old witness named Elsie Tistaert, an old white lady, who testified as to the time Nicole Brown Simpson’s body was found. This wasn’t great testimony for OJ Simpson, because it put a time limit on how late the killer could have been at the condominium, and if you were Simpson’s defense team, you would have wanted that time to be as late as possible so that you could float the theory that the murders took place while Simpson was already on his flight to Chicago, giving Simpson an alibi.
But at the trial, Cochran was extremely nice and deferential to Tistaert. He knew that whatever the value of trying to open up an additional theory, it wasn’t worth beating up on a nice old lady who did nothing wrong and just called the police to report a crime scene. The jury would have hated Cochran if he did something like that, even with all their predispositions to OJ Simpson. If you are mean, ordinary people don’t like you. Cochran, who spent much of his life persuading ordinary people both in court and in the civil rights movement, understood this.
The best trial lawyers I know all adopt at least a somewhat less confrontational style when taking depositions or conducting trials. It’s not Perry Mason, but you catch more flies with honey, and people tend to humanize almost anyone who is in their physical presence (this is another reason, of course, for all the meanness on the Internet- people wouldn’t say half this stuff when they are face to face with someone). You don’t want the jury to start feeling sorry for an adverse witness because the big bad lawyer with all the fancy degrees and fancy suits is beating the witness up with those big words and tricky questions.
Advertising works much the same way. How many advertisements ever antagonize the viewer or reader or listener? National Lampoon, the humor magazine, once put a picture of a guy pointing a gun at a dog’s head on the cover, with the headline: “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog”. The joke was precisely that nobody markets to you like that! Advertisers try to be your friend, to depict your friends, and to convince you that you can trust them and trust their products or services. Indeed, there are whole areas of advertising that are off limits- for instance, airlines never advertise their safety records. Even if it may have been true at some points in history that some airlines were safer than others, “buy your plane ticket from us or you will die in a crash” is not effective marketing. The consumer will turn against you.
And yet so many people who want to persuade others on the Internet have absolutely no desire to be nice to other people. Indeed, oftentimes being nice to other people, sometimes in the form of trying to understand them, draws a ritual condemnation. For instance, consider how “economic anxiety” became a sarcastic code word on the left, being juxtaposed next to a photo of some racist right wingers at a rally or something. Ha ha ha, they are expressing their “economic anxiety”.
But here’s the thing: a lot of voters really are economically anxious, including, specifically and importantly, voters who voted for Obama and then voted for Trump. Now some of these voters, perhaps even most of these voters, might also be racist. But they weren’t so racist that they were unwilling to vote for a Democrat: heck, they were willing to vote for a Black Democrat! So what’s the point of consistently mocking their economic concerns? Certainly not to persuade them! And not only that, remember the “don’t beat up on Ms. Tistaert in front of the jury” principle: you are also turning off other, ordinary people, when you beat up on folks whose factories closed and whose relatives are hooked on opiates.
There’s all sorts of responses to this argument, from the notion that these folks are unpersuadable (obviously not true if they voted for Obama) to the notion that it would compromise one’s ideals to try and persuade them. But of all the compromises one can make to one’s ideals, being nice to people seems pretty low on the list. Indeed, it seems especially low when you consider it is exactly what we do in our personal lives. Seriously, if there’s someone at your workplace who has different political views than you do, do you constantly utter condemnations of their politics? Or do you hold it in and try to get along? The same with relatives. The same with random people you meet in various situations. People make this particular “compromise of their ideals” all the time, because they recognize that it isn’t really a big imposition to be nice to people you meet even if you don’t like their politics.
So why does it become a big “compromise” when someone asks you to do it online? I suspect the answer is this: people who are Extremely Online think they are big agents of social change. They think they are the successors of the civil rights protesters who really did confrontational things like lunch counter sit-ins. Obviously, no civil rights leader ever said “let’s consider the views of this white guy at the lunch counter before we do this”— that would be ridiculous. But the reason that would be ridiculous is because there had been enormous planning for the carrying out of a protest, delivering a careful message. If you are doing that, you really are doing real world activism, and you’ve already weighed the costs and benefits of particular tactics.
But what people say and do online isn’t a product of the same careful calculus. A lot of it just consists of unplanned interactions with random strangers where the moment the stranger says something that the person disagrees with, out come the accusations and condemnations and sometimes worse (doxing, etc.). This sort of thing is only going to make people hate you.
Back to my copyright lawyer. The lawyer sends that cease and desist letter because she has made a careful calculation to protect her client’s rights. But what happens next depends on the situation. If it’s some blatant infringer, what usually happens is either the recipient backs down or there’s a lawsuit. But if the recipient has a defense, something else often happens. The recipient hires a lawyer who writes a letter back. And then they get on the phone. And in that phone call, both clients’ perspectives are fully aired and the lawyers try to see if they can work something out and avoid a lawsuit. And this works because each lawyer drops the performative BS and has a civil conversation with her counterpart. I’ve been in such conversations where one lawyer said to the other “you really should think about legal doctrine X, because we have a really strong argument on that issue” and the other lawyer said he would take it back to his client, and then the case settled soon thereafter. This is how you actually persuade people.
I think that being nice is actually the secret weapon in politics. The snarky Internet brutally mocks anyone who has a different opinion, but successful politicians don’t do that. At town halls and forums, they listen as voters express views that they fundamentally disagree with (and sometimes even think are crazy). But they hear them out and then explain to the voters what the politician’s position is and why it will help them. If one side or the other decided to adopt the branding of civility on the Internet, and convinced its supporters and activists to make it stick, it would be a great asset for them.