Keys to a Future Majority: Getting to Work, the Socratic Method, and Persuasion

Reporter: Mr. Harrison, with all that's going on in the world today, why did you decide to focus on this (Bangladesh)?"

George Harrison: "Because a friend asked me to help."

From a press conference for the Concert for Bangladesh, posted in a diary at The Daily Kos

The first show that I successfully volunteered for with Music for America was a huge rock festival on Randall’s Island in NYC, in July 2004. I was excited to see how MfA worked, and how I would work with it. I went online and read up on all of MfA’s “issues”; I was familiar with most- the insane War on Drugs, the skyrocketing costs of education and healthcare, reproductive and civil rights, and the importance of youth participation- but I wanted to get MfA’s take on each, which basically meant looking at the issues in terms of youth and culture.

The next day I made my way to the venue and met with the other volunteers. I was the only male volunteer, and at the ripe old age of 25 probably the oldest. We gathered up our materials and made our way through security and inside the massive grass and dirt fields that housed the festival. I was pretty nervous as we setup our materials and arranged the stacks of voter registration cards. Even though I usually don’t have any problems talking with strangers I generally don’t like going up to random people and trying to get them to talk politics with me. I’ve always been politically focused, and I’ve always felt contempt or boredom from many of the people I’ve tried to talk politics with, so I wasn’t exactly excited when I was given a clipboard full of registration sheets, a box of issue cards, and was asked by the volunteer coordinator to go out, along with four of the young women, to the long line that had formed outside of the grounds to talk with kids and register as many as possible. The girls didn’t seem as nervous as they jumped at the opportunity to go, which emboldened me a little, given my macho older-brother ego- I wasn’t about to let a couple of younger girls show me up!

I felt awkward at first as I started going up to random kids, most of whom were under 25, punk rockers, and, I could tell, not very interested in politics, but I pushed whatever nervousness I had to the back of my mind and tried to convince them to register to vote and to pay attention to my political spiel for a few moments. As I worked through the crowd I felt more confident with each attempt. I always knew I had an inner car salesman that was pushed to the recesses of my mind by my guilty conscience. But now my conscience was quiet, and the salesman came out in full force. I started getting more registrations than I could handle and had to get a couple of the girls to take care of that while I talked to someone about the evils of the drug war, the Iraq war, the price of education, or any other issue that I thought they might be interested in.

As I went from kid to kid, I started to realize that there was another reason why as peer-to-peer (P2P) messaging had much more potential to affect their thoughts and behaviors, besides the benefits I mentioned in the last section. Because I was able to gauge the reactions of the people I was talking to, because I could alter my appeal based on their reactions, and especially because I knew a bit about persuasion and especially the Socratic Method, I felt that I was able to impact the thoughts and behaviors of these kids in ways that a traditional media outreach campaign could never dream of.

The idea behind the Socratic Method is that instead of telling someone what you’d like them to learn or think, you ask them leading questions which help them to move towards the position you want them to take, or the knowledge you want them to posses, on their own. So, for example, instead of going up to a young person and telling them about the issues that I wanted to educate them on or the reasons that they needed to vote, I would show them the different issue cards and try to gauge where there interests lay, ask them questions, and try to get them to come to their own conclusions.

I don’t have data from my activities to back up this claim, but nonetheless I felt that I was having a much bigger impact than almost any broadcast media campaign could have. There is a good amount of research and experimental data (source) which shows that a Socratic-like Method is the best way to persuade someone, but this method is only useful when the person doing the teaching or persuading can modify the questions being asked depending upon the responses of the person who is learning or being persuaded. As powerful as broadcast media may be, they are not useful for this type of communication, and thus will always have less ability to persuade than in a P2P encounter. A broadcaster cannot alter his or her behaviors or arguments in response to feedback from the person tuning in to the broadcast. The only media where the Socratic method can be used are those that allow for direct connections between individuals, otherwise known P2P communications, such as the telephone, two-way radio, and the internet. But, I would guess that the Socratic Method will always work best in a true face-to-face encounter, since within each of the forms of P2P communication something is lost (either a sense, for example hearing without seeing or smelling, or a dimension, such as time) that would take away from the total experience. While research has shown that different media have different persuasive abilities, those that require more interaction on the part of the person being persuaded are much more likely to have a longer lasting impact. There is an abundance of psychological research that validates my belief that the ancient Socratic Method of teaching and persuading, which almost by its very nature must be done in a face-to-face encounter, is the most effective method for making a longer lasting impact on the person being persuaded.

First of all, a method that utilizes questions and other methods that push the person being questioned to come up with their own answers should be much memorable for that person. Cognitive Psychologists have consistently demonstrated something termed the “Generation Effect” in memory studies, whereby those memories that you generate on your own are stronger and longer lasting than those that you simply try to memorize. For example, if I was to give you a basic category (for example: “bird”) and asked you to come up with a word beginning with the letter R that fit into that category (i.e. “Robin), you would be much more likely to remember that word after a few days than if I simply told you to remember the word “Robin.” And so, there is a much better chance that the person I was talking to about different political issues would remember those issues if they came to the thoughts on their own than if I was to go up to them and told them what issues they should care about.

The Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion

Similarly, the most accepted psychological model for measuring persuasion is known as the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). The model postulates that the ability to persuade someone is directly correlated with the extent that a person will elaborate upon the persuader’s message. The ELM assumes that there are two paths to persuasion- a direct path, whereby the person actively engages in the persuasion process, and a peripheral path, whereby the person is persuaded by some other object or information while they receive the message (an example of this would be a pretty woman in a beer commercial). The direct path is much more difficult than the peripheral path, but using a questioning, Socratic-like, technique definitely makes it easier, and working with MfA made it much easier.

The ELM assumes that there are two main factors in persuasion, and working the crowd with MfA’s message in my head, and the issue cards in my hand, I felt that I was, in many cases, able to accomplish both of the steps. The first factor in persuasion is the motivation of the person being persuaded to process the persuasive message. I saw quite a few motivations amongst people that I talked to, and I could alter my approach depending upon what that motivation was. Some kids were motivated by the issues themselves: some thought the drug war was stupid, some were worried about the war in Iraq, some had just started college and couldn’t believe the costs, etc. Other kids that I talked with were motivated by peer pressure, either because we were working with a band that they liked, because their friends were signing up, or, when I found a belligerent young man, by my attempts to goad them with taunts such as “What, are you scared?” or “so, you like allowing Christian fundamentalists to tell you what to think, listen to, wear, etc.” There were also some kids who were motivated to do what they felt was right, but whom had never been so much as asked to participate- these were the easiest to persuade to register and hopefully vote, but they were also probably the least likely to be found. These observations seemed to go along with the three motivations that the ELM observes: a personal connection, such as the issues that effected them or the fact that we were working within a social scene that they chose to engage in; peripheral cues, i.e. the bands we were working with, supporting evidence, and even the attractiveness of the person doing the persuading (MfA, luckily, attracted a good amount of pretty, young women as volunteers); and, in rare cases, a “need for cognition,” which basically means the need to make sense out of events one sees in the world.

The second factor in persuasion is the ability of the person receiving the message to actually receive the information. Because MfA kept their messaging pretty simple, this was usually not a big issue, though MfA was particularly situated to effect the ability of the kids we talked to process the message. First of all, the people doing the persuading were peers of the people being persuaded, which made it much more likely that the message would be given using the language and social norms that both understood. Second, because MfA was at, literally, thousands of concerts that summer, there was a pretty good chance that the message would be repeated to the person, which can make it easier to process a message. But, even if the kids I connected with on that day never saw another MfA concert, I was pretty sure that many of them had both the motivation and the attention to allow me to persuade them.

I spent the rest of the day working the crowds, collecting registrations, and doing my small part in changing the future direction of the country. I now could see with my own eyes that Mike, and the persuasion research, was right: a P2P campaign, when done right which MfA’s communication campaign certainly seemed to be, was extremely effective.

Later in the day, as the concert was winding down, I was working the crowds on the festival grounds with a shy young woman who asked me to help her find some registrations. As we walked around I would spot someone who I thought I could persuade and I’d beeline over to them—either because they looked bored and would pay attention to me for longer, because I sensed that they might be a bit more aware of politics, or, as happened very often because I just had a “feeling” that they’d respond to me. Each time I would try to find their motivations, attempt to get them to answer questions, and try and assist them in coming to the decision that they needed to participate, and vote for the issues that affect our generation. As the young woman I was working with and I headed back to the MfA table with a stack of filled in forms and signups on the MfA list the girl looked at me and said, very earnestly: “Wow Alex, you’re really good!” Even though I could sense that I was better skilled at this whole persuasion thing than most, I still wasn’t completely sure that she was right. But regardless of whether I was actually good, it sure felt good.