Friendship is my theory of change

How persuasion actually works (Relationships series Part 5)

Elizabeth Oldfield

Mar 28, 2024

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Detail of two hands touching from the Sistine Chapel — Detail from the Sistine Chapel

A great faith position underlines much of how we navigate our plural common life. We are told, explicitly and implicitly, that in the market place of ideas, all people need is to hear what is correct and they will change their mind. An argument with merit can shift someone’s beliefs, even if it is delivered only once, by any old messenger, poorly communicated. The way we persuade people is by marshalling the best arguments and evidence and then communicating them as loudly, forcefully and often as possible. If the audience don’t immediately accept the idea, the fault lies with them. This faith lies at the heart of bad campaigning, bad evangelism and bad political and theological “debate”, by which I mean, sadly, most of all of those.

Can you think of a time you have changed your mind, on something big? On religion, or politics, questions of identity, climate change, or anything with political and personal implications? Think back. I’m sure ideas and arguments were not irrelevant, but who delivered them? Who introduced you to them? Someone you respected and liked, maybe even hoped to become like? Were you, in fact, friends, or closer, with someone who thought differently?

I thought so. The idea that in the marketplace of ideas the right ones will thrive through some kind of mechanistic exchange is patent nonsense. It is not how people work. If we actually paid attention to why people believe what they believe we would see the huge, glaring, completely obvious mechanism. Relationships. As Sarah Stein Lubrano says: “It is people who change one’s…views, and for the most part, it is specifically the people we like, respect, and even love1.”

We are social creatures, the scientists tell us. It should have been obvious. Far from being rational actors, objectively assessing every new piece of information on its merits, we mainly adopt the views of people we trust and admire. Crucially, they tends to be those we sense might trust and admire us, because a need for affirmation and a terror of social exile are strong drivers. Ozan Varol puts it, “When your beliefs are entwined with your identity, changing your mind means changing your identity. That’s a really hard sell2.” Robert Higgs agrees that in the main ideas are chosen for one’s self-image and group belonging: “the kind of groups to which a person chooses to belong is closely connected with the kind of person he takes himself to be — a matter of prime concern to the typical person.3

This means most of us end up with the ambient world view of the group we feel most strongly aligns with our self-image and (crucially) where we feel most welcome, most seen. Of course we do. My tradition says the same thing in different, older language - God is relationship and we are made in God’s image. A trinitarian anthropology, is the technical phrase. Designed for love. Designed for each other. An interconnected body, even. Most of the great wisdom traditions are sceptical of the whole idea of an individual. They tell us we are not really a lone person “thinking for ourselves” at all, but interconnected.

This reality means that most popular persuasion strategies are useless. Telling people they are wrong doesn’t change their minds. Telling them that “people like them“ (i.e. their centre of belonging and identity) are wrong, or hateful, or faithless or stupid will have the opposite effect. Remember the basket of deplorable? Or when someone called “TERFs” dinosaurs and suddenly T Rex emojis started popping up on all the gender critical Twitter accounts? If you are trying to persuade someone, and you express contempt or disdain for their core identity or the beliefs of the group they find belonging in (no matter how justified this seems) you might as well go home. You will have just strengthened their commitment to preexisting beliefs. You have failed to do the hard work of listening and understanding and meeting your audience where they are.

Rather than acknowledging this failure, people who are in theory engaged in the work of persuasion tend to congratulate themselves. The high of self-righteous rage bonds their own group, strengthens their own self-identity as the one who is right. Look at those idiots get slammed! It is the instinct in any online mob, and it exists in us all. This feeling is pleasurable, dangerously pleasurable. The rush of rightness increases our image of the people with the “wrong” belief as stupid or irrational, emotional and unbiblical, bigoted, naive, or whatever the story we are telling is. It helps steady us after the cognitive dissonance of encountering another view. It is a drug, one our current information environment has deliberately got us all hooked on. And so the divide gapes wider.

The alternative to this pointless, performative “persuasion” is slower and more human scale, but truer to the kind of creatures we are. Friendship. When I ran a Westminster think tank, I made this a central plank of our strategy. Yes, we needed robust research, compelling arguments and effective communications (especially that last one) but most of all we needed to know people and be known. Think tanks are always trying to change minds, and I could see how ineffective the research alone, no matter how brilliant, even combined with excellent communications, usually was for that task. I could also see that every major strategic breakthrough we had ever had could be traced back to a chain of relationships, a series of people saying: you can trust these guys. They are sound. They make sense. They are not the enemy, and they might even be a friend.

A chain of testimony, in fact, which bridged from where we were to where our audience was, and reassured them we were enough like them to be trusted. That we were not trying to undermine their sense of self, or destroy their centre of belonging, but would in fact take the time to listen and speak their language.

All of this, of course, takes soul work. It does not come easy. None of our formation or education has prepared us for it, and few people model it. Those that do risk being exiled by their “own side”, who feel betrayed by this attempt to bridge divides. I have felt this, as I have attempted to walk my own vocational path. It has required laying down a measure of the safety we all find in our tribes and being willing to be misunderstood.

Those that seek to build these friendships also risk, of course, having their own minds changed, their own self-identity questioned. Becuse friendships are a sacred thing, and when we go after them for instrumental reasons alone something deep is transgressed. You can smell it, so it won’t work. Real friendships, real relationships can only exist in reciprocity, when we are as willing to listen as to speak. They require us to seek out the good in the other. And for all the aforementioned reasons, everything in us resists this. It feels like existential threat. We might even have been told it is immoral, depending on our theory of justice. Spiritual core strength, a stable sense of self and and regular rest and refilling are prerequisites. Maybe it is because this is part of my calling that I have fought so hard for all these things, why I still need them so badly.

It isn’t everyone’s calling, should not be asked of everyone and may not be possible for all of us. Certainly not in every season of our lives. Our past traumas and temperament will make it easier for some than others. Sometimes we will just need to express rage or grief, and give up on trying to persuade.

When we can do this work, we see how friendships that cross even the deepest divides are magic. They soften our hearts and humble us in humanising ways. When we are able to create forms of belonging and affirmation across divides, which do not rely on agreement, yes, people change their minds, but they also just change. They become more fully human. More fully alive. Hatred is harder, and that is good for us all. Friendships like these can be places where that most radical love, which pursues strangers and enemies and makes them friends, is imaged. Friendships like these, and I believe this down deep in my bones, are how the world is healed.