Everyone knows politics is a cynical game: to last a week in office, you need to compromise, tell half-truths, bribe voters and have a friends-with-benefits relationship to your principles. (People who deny this tend to end up offering further evidence for it: "I reject the cynical view that politics is inevitably or even usually a dirty business," said – well, it was Richard Nixon.) So there was palpable surprise among political scientists the other day when two of them, David Broockman and Daniel Butler, published a heartening study: one good way for politicians to win converts, it concluded, is for them to state their beliefs honestly. And this was no artificial lab-based experiment. It involved real American voters and politicians. First, voters were surveyed by phone; then they got a letter from an elected official, supporting a policy the voter disagreed with. The result wasn't a hardening of views. Instead, voters grew a bit more likely to hold that view themselves, and their overall opinion of the politician didn't change for the worse.
It's the sort of finding to restore your faith in humanity: just be honest, don't pander, and you'll get a fair hearing. Democracy works! Well, maybe. There's a more jaded way to read the results. Voters actually received one of two different letters: one made a detailed argument for a politician's stance; the other, a glib and vague one. (The policy was good because "it would have a positive impact". Right, thanks.) In a rational world, you'd expect the detailed argument to carry more force. But no: the vague non-argument proved just as effective. You can persuade voters a policy's good, apparently, by "explaining" that it's good because it's good.
That wouldn't surprise Ellen Langer, the Harvard psychologist who in 1978 showed how easily we're persuaded by non-explanations. She got researchers to try to jump a photocopying queue. Sometimes they used a decent excuse: "May I use the Xerox machine because I'm in a rush?" Almost everyone agreed. Sometimes they used no excuse, and far fewer complied. Then they used a pseudo-excuse: "May I use the machine because I have to make copies?" Compliance shot back up to 93%. People didn't need a persuasive argument; they just needed the queue-jumper to say "because", then emit further sounds where an argument should be. (To be fair, the effect disappeared when researchers wanted to copy a bigger stack of pages.)
The lesson often drawn here is that we're mindless automata: Robert Cialdini, the leading psychologist of persuasion, compares humans to female turkeys, who'll bestow affection on stuffed polecats, if they've been wired to make the "cheep-cheep" noises of chicks. You might alternatively conclude that it shows we reward politeness: by going through the motions of offering a reason, at least you're putting in some effort, showing me a little respect. Either way, it's clear that when you are trying to persuade, how you do it can matter as much as the content. Ask for what you want, but then provide some clearly signalled reasons – or things that sound like reasons. And use the word "because". Why? Because it's a good word to use.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
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