Win Hearts, Then Minds

There’s a saying that’s attributed to the Dalai Lama: in the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher. It’s a nice idea. But when people don’t share our values, it’s hard for us to tolerate theirs. This week, we bring you a favorite episode with sociologist Robb Willer. We discuss the common mistakes we make in trying to persuade others of our point of view — and how to break out of our echo chambers. Then, Kenji Yoshino answers your questions about how we hide our true selves.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Imagine you had a dispute with a neighbor. It could be something trivial. Maybe he's playing music too loudly late at night, and your kids cannot get to sleep.

• 0:15Shankar Vedantam?

  The way we usually resolve these problems in daily life is to knock on our neighbor's door, explain the problem,

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Can you turn it down?

• 0:22Shankar Vedantam?

  and try to find an amicable solution. If all goes well, you discover you have similar tastes in music. You swap playlists while getting him to keep the volume down at night. Maybe you take over soup when he's unwell, and he helps you on a cold morning when your car needs a jump. Now, imagine that this dispute takes place on a platform like X, formerly Twitter. Instead of talking to your neighbor, you throw open your window and tell all the people on your side of the street that your neighbor is a jerk. Upset and offended, he throws open his window, which opens onto a different set of neighbors and tells those people that you're crazy.

• 1:06Shankar Vedantam?

  Soon, you're yelling at each other, but really talking to completely different sets of people. Every escalation is met with reprisal. Each of you is certain the other must be dim-witted, malevolent, or unhinged.

• 1:23Shankar Vedantam?

  On social media, especially when it comes to political disagreements, this is often what passes for discourse. Platforms like X have called these shouting matches "engagement", but common sense suggests that they are really a prescription for disengagement.

• 1:42Shankar Vedantam?

  Today, we bring you a favorite episode about why we are often unable to get through to our political opponents and how we can learn to do so.

• 1:51Shankar Vedantam?

  Breaking through the echo chamber this week on Hidden Brain.

• 2:08Shankar Vedantam?

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• 2:49Shankar Vedantam?

  Principal knows your star employees have their work quirks. Principal also knows how much those employees mean to your business. You need them. They need benefits. Work with Principal so they can help you help your team with a retirement and benefits plan that's right for them. Principal Life Insurance Company, Des Moines, Iowa. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. Science consistently tells us, learning starts with motivation. That's why SNHU offers over 200 flexible, affordable, online programs to help you get where you want to go. Take classes that spark your curiosity, shape your skill set, and prepare you for what's next.

• 3:32Shankar Vedantam?

  A degree can help move you forward, no matter what motivates you. Start yours at SNHU.edu/brain. There's a saying that's attributed to the Dalai Lama. In the practice of tolerance, one's enemy is the best teacher. It's a nice idea. But in reality, when people don't share our values, it's hard for us to tolerate theirs. We tell ourselves they must be close-minded, illogical, immoral. They are different from us on a fundamental level. We belong to one group, they belong to another. At Stanford University,

• 4:17Shankar Vedantam?

  Rob Willer studies how most of us go about persuading our opponents and why our favorite technique is strikingly ineffective. Rob Willer, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

• 4:31Shankar Vedantam?

  Rob, you were the prototypical angry young man in your college days. I want you to tell me about a conflict you once had with your roommate, Russ.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I can, I actually have a couple of stories along these lines. So in this time of my life, maybe from like 19 to 21, the central axis of conflict for me was around sleep. And I remember one morning, my friend Russ was waking up. He had a job at, you know, a copy center. And he was, you know, just doing what somebody does in the morning, talking to another one of our roommates and hanging out, drinking coffee, getting the day going. It's like 9:30 in the morning or something. But I've been up late, working at a restaurant, second shift, and, you know, I'm sleeping in. And I can't sleep, right? Because of this noise coming from the living room at this unacceptable time of the morning. And I just came rushing out of my room,

• 5:23Speaker 02

  like immediately inflamed, you know, dropping epithets and, you know, cursing. And I remember like Russ was so caught off guard. He's like the sweetest guy, my roommate. And he just was like, [BLEEP] you.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  And I remember I got so mad that I took this whiteboard that we would use to write messages to each other, and I like slammed it against a wall.

• 5:48Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  This is just completely out of control.

• 5:54Shankar Vedantam?

  Sometime later, Rob had another run in with a different roommate. This one changed the course of his life.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  I was a junior in college. I was sharing a house with my friend Jim, my roommate. And he was up in the morning making eggs for breakfast, as one does. It's like 10:00 in the morning or something. It's not even that early, but I was a night owl. I would, you know, work late, hang out with people late at night, sleep in in the morning. And, you know, he's Making a lot of noise, right? With like the frying pan and so on. My bedroom is just off the kitchen. My first approach to this, to conflict resolution here, or to resolving the situation, was to throw a shoe against the door, which I think is, it's considered an international signal of please be quieter, you know? And uh.

• 6:44Shankar Vedantam?

  Wait, you were inside your own bedroom and you threw a shoe at your own bedroom door to tell him to pipe down?

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. So, so that didn't work because it couldn't be decoded as I intended it. So then I came out of the bedroom, you know, just immediately angry, already turned all the way up to 11. And I'm like, you know, you need to not make all this noise so early in the morning, you know, you know, probably cursing and whatnot. And he's totally taken aback and himself upset about this. And now we're in this heated argument and I slammed the door behind me. Can't go back to sleep because I'm all worked up now. And the whole exercise is self-defeating at every level.

• 7:30Shankar Vedantam?

  Rob thought back to this altercation with Jim when one of his social science professors gave him an interesting assignment. It was to mark a turning point in his life.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, so it was its great assignment. And my professor, Professor Michael Lavalia at University of Iowa, he had us first write an essay, a short essay about a recent conflict we'd been in. And to just go off on the person we were in a conflict with, you know, just, just render our perspective as vividly as possible. So I did that, uh, you know, defending all of my choices in this situation as, as one does. And then the catch was, after we turned this in, he said, okay, the second short essay assignment is for you to now write the exact same essay, the same, about the same conflict. However, you're supposed to write it from the perspective of the person who you were in the conflict with. And that the best version of this, you would actually simulate as accurately as you can what they would have written

• 8:25Speaker 02

  if they had gotten this assignment. So you're totally in their first person perspective. And so I did that. And for me, honestly, it was a pretty revelatory experience.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  So I sit down to write this essay. And now I'm writing an essay from my roommate's perspective. And it's coming out, of course, completely differently. So now I'm talking about how I woke up one morning. I was hungry for breakfast. And so I went and started to mix some eggs on my stove. And halfway through making them, there's a loud noise on the wall from apparently inside my roommate Rob's bedroom. I don't know what this is. I ignore it and continue. And I'm about done making my tasty, healthy breakfast when, all of a sudden, this mad person comes storming out

• 9:26Speaker 02

  of Rob's bedroom ranting at me about how I'm being too loud when I'm really just making eggs and maybe whistling or something. And I start engaging back. You know, I'm, next thing I know, I'm in an argument out of nowhere with little to no provocation on my end. And so that's the essay I wrote, the second essay, the one from my roommate Jim's perspective. And this might seem silly for people who take the perspective of other people more readily or have in their lives. But for me, this was like a pretty revelatory experience because I, for perhaps the very first time in my entire life, had really, really deeply and authentically taken the perspective of somebody else when it was hard.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  You know, when I was sure I was right, when I had a bunch of emotion and righteousness invested in my side. And I had gotten over that for the purposes of getting an A on this assignment in college and embrace the other person's perspective. And then I saw that they were right, you know, and I was wrong. Or at least it was at least 80/20 that they were right. And that was a first. You know, I was a kind of angry young man type around that time, as you can guess from the story. And that was a needed and revelatory lesson for me.

• 10:42Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, there's an emotional power to this exercise, which I'm not sure people might anticipate experiencing. But when you do this, it's not just that you start to see things from another person's point of view, but the story itself feels like an entirely different story.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. Yeah, it's not just that you're getting out of your head into somebody else's, but you're accessing entirely different information, maybe. So as I'm simulating what it must be like to make breakfast, I'm in a completely different world. Now I'm guessing at the experience that Jim's having, but I'm now seeing, hearing and thinking things that I couldn't have known when I was locked in my own perspective.

• 11:31Shankar Vedantam?

  When someone believes the world revolves around them, we think they are selfish, unkind or oblivious. Yet all of us are born with a subjective view of the world. It's only natural to see things from our own perspective.

• 11:49Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, the effects this has on our political conversations and how understanding what happens inside our own minds is the first step to changing someone else's mind. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 12:18Shankar Vedantam?

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• 12:52Shankar Vedantam?

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• 13:36Shankar Vedantam?

  Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain.

• 13:48Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Think back to the last disagreement you had with someone. Maybe it was a fight with your partner or a coworker over the thermostat setting, or a more serious argument with a relative over politics. Did the disagreement go well? Or did it end with both sides feeling frustrated and misunderstood?

• 14:13Shankar Vedantam?

  Chances are, it's the latter.

• 14:19Shankar Vedantam?

  Rob Willer used to have many experiences like this. When he was a kid, his family moved from Kansas to South Carolina. It was something of a culture shock, and Rob was pretty sure that everyone around him had the world completely wrong.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  I had grown up in Lawrence, Kansas, and my parents were super progressive, secular folks. And I was living in this very progressive college town in Kansas. And then got splashed down in South Carolina in 1988, Columbia, South Carolina. It was a real shock to be suddenly in a middle school that had only been integrated less than 20 years earlier and in a place where the scars of the Civil War, they're right on the surface. They're not far away.

• 15:08Shankar Vedantam?

  Did you find yourself getting into arguments and conversations with people around you?

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure, for sure, including with history teachers, with peers. I mean, To me, it was totally shocking to be taught a history of the Civil War that was just strikingly at odds with the one I was raised to understand.

• 15:25Shankar Vedantam?

  In high school, you had a friend named Andy, and you would often get into arguments with him about the Confederate flag. How did these go? What did you try and do in these discussions with Andy?

• 15:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the meaning of the Confederate flag was a topic of some debate in Columbia, South Carolina at this time, because the Confederate flag was flying above our state Capitol in Columbia. People would debate a lot. What did this mean? Was this OK? And I was inclined to debate just about anyone on this topic and wound up debating with my friend Andy, who we were actually on the debate team together. And I would advocate for how the flag needed to come down, that regardless of what people

• 16:16Speaker 02

  might associate with it, that it was a symbol of racism, of racial domination, and if it ever had a time, that time was certainly gone. And Andy would say the opposite. He'd say, "That's not what it means to me, and that's not what it means to the people I know and people in my family. It's a symbol of our history, and we lost the Civil War, and it's this kind of sad thing deep in our history, and this is a way for us to maintain some pride around that." And then I would come back and say, "Well, but the flag went up there during racial integration battles in the 1960s. It didn't go up in the 19th century." And we would go back and forth in this way.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  The thing is that I never convinced Andy, even a little bit, or probably anyone else, I ever debated on this subject.

• 17:08Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, it's almost like you were imagining that this was an actual debate, where there was a judge, a neutral judge, who would listen to both arguments and then decide which person had the better argument.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Exactly, a godlike figure that simply wasn't there. And I got this idea in part because I was on the debate team and was, every other weekend, I was engaging in many, many debate rounds with people from all across the state. And so it wasn't ridiculous for me to think that a way to debate effectively would be to... To win on the facts, on the logic of your argument, and to destroy the other person's argument. Because in the culture and structure of high school debate, that was pretty much rewarded.

• 17:55Shankar Vedantam?

  The other thing that I think is worth pointing out is that in a debate, you know, you could get points for how passionate you are. So in other words, the more fervently you argue your point of view, that could tell a neutral judge, you know, this person really cares about the argument, put in a lot of time and heart into the argument, I'm going to give a few more points for the passion that this person is demonstrating. Of course, this passion doesn't go very far when it comes to convincing our opponents as opposed to some neutral judge.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. And in a way, I think that while I really, really value the experience I had in debate of having to think really, really hard about holes in my opponent's argument, and then passionately and as logically as I could expose those holes and make stronger, make a stronger argument response. I also was just like, weekend after weekend, year after year, getting my reps in on my perspective, you know, and how to prosecute it passionately and intensely. And I wasn't getting really any reps in on understanding someone else's perspective. So I was, you know, coming out of high school, I was, I was still on the ground floor on that journey.

• 19:04Shankar Vedantam?

  When you get to Cornell University and you're in graduate school, you decide to try and organize students into a union, graduate students into a union, and you start to recruit people to the cause. I'm wondering if you can tell me how you went about doing this, and whether you learned something different than your exploits as a high school debater?

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this was a fascinating experience at a number of levels. So I was working as a union organizer, trying to organize graduate students on campus into, into a union for teaching assistance and research assistance. And my position involved striking up conversations with graduate students and trying to get them involved and interested in the union. And sometimes I'd be going to the English department, sometimes I'd be going to the math department. So I remember on one occasion, I, you know, I go to the English department, and I strike up a conversation with a woman who's a PhD student in English, and she was a Marxist theorist.

• 20:07Shankar Vedantam?

  Rob quickly assumed that he would have no trouble persuading the young woman to join the union. She was a Marxist, and Karl Marx was surely the patron saint of the working class. But to his surprise, the conversation wasn't going well.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  I'm explaining what we're trying to do, the benefits that it could offer graduate students, in my view, and the evidence for unionization, and I'm just making my case. But I can tell it's not connecting. She seemed sort of distant, maybe about halfway through this kind of boilerplate spiel. And I was like, what do you think? You know, what do you think about all this? And she was like, well, I'm trying to think of this from a Marxist perspective. I'm kind of curious how Marx would think about this. And I was like, okay, that was not the conversation I thought I'd be in, but I can do this. Okay, so there's different Marxist views on union organizing.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  One is that it is just a Band-Aid you slap onto the status quo that only makes things look superficially better, but, you know, pushes off the inevitable communist revolution that's going to bring a utopian workers collective to, you know, to power. There's another version of Marxian thinking that says, no, this is consistent with reforming capitalism and addressing the harms of unregulated market economies, and unions are actually really helpful, you know, and consistent with Marxist critiques of the status quo. And I was like, I'm a little more of the latter persuasion, but I can understand either perspective. What do you think? And now we're talking about whether one should take a more extreme or more moderate version

• 21:47Speaker 02

  of a Marxist perspective on the union. And we get there, you know, she winds up being a supporter of the union. But for me, it was, you know, one of these initial experiences of figuring out, like, you're going to have to get into potentially a very different headspace. You know, in each conversation, that might be an entirely different headspace in order to have productive conversations.

• 22:14Shankar Vedantam?

  Rob managed to win over the Marxist. But it was an early signal to him that ultimately she didn't join the Union for his reasons. She joined the Union for her reasons. Sometime later, Rob met another graduate student, this time in the math department.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  We were losing math. You know, like, we were doing badly in math and it was becoming a pretty anti-Union department. And I was even hesitant to go back there just because I'd had bad experiences. And this really nice, advanced graduate student was like, hey, you want to go for a walk and we can talk about this? And I was like, yes, I would love to get out of this space and into another one. That'd be great. Because it was sort of intimidating because I had this sense that people maybe didn't want me there. So, we go for a walk and we just very, very carefully go through all of the different reasons for and against unionization, the main ones. And one thing he's emphasizing is uncertainty and how whenever he's seen uncertainty left

• 23:16Speaker 02

  over, that he kind of has a conservative response of not changing things too much because things aren't going that badly for him. And so, you know, where he's not sure what would happen from unionization, that's kind of points on the board for the status quo.

• 23:29Shankar Vedantam?

  But when he initially said that the status quo might be better, didn't you feel inclined to argue with him to sort of say, no, no, no, of course not, you're wrong?

• 23:36Speaker 02

  Oh, definitely. So I would come back and say, yes, but there's pretty consistent empirical evidence that you're going to get gains in wages and benefits here. You know, look at campuses X, Y, and Z. And he would come back like, okay, but we also got a 3% raise last year. You know, we just got health insurance a couple of years ago. So I kind of feel like in this case, the status quo is giving me what I need and I don't know where all this extra money is going to come from on campus. And at the end of the conversation, we basically agreed that we did disagree, but that we disagreed less than when we started, that he was a little more positive towards the unionization and that I was more respectful in understanding of why somebody wouldn't support it, in particular based on the sort of risk calculation.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  We came to see each other's perspectives and a key part of it was that I changed my mind a little bit in the conversation.

• 24:30Shankar Vedantam?

  As a union organizer, Rob learned his goal wasn't to win a debate. It was to actually change someone's behavior.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  It was definitely different from the kind of persuasion that I had been taught to embrace through high school debate. But it was way more effective. It was way more interested in the other person and it was just really inclusive. You can't afford, when you're organizing a union, to write somebody off or write off their perspective or not try to have a productive conversation. You're trying to get everybody on board. And so there's a pragmatism to organize labor circles that I hadn't really encountered in my political background, which was more about debating, you know, for that mythical godlike neutral third party that, you know, that just wasn't there.

• 25:18Shankar Vedantam?

  One of the things that I'm observing from what you just said is that when we have debates with people and we argue with people, we're not actually just trying to have them come over to our side, to our point of view. We want them to come over to our point of view for our reasons. And one of the things I'm picking up from your conversations with, you know, various people is that as you were talking to people, you were almost indifferent. If someone says, you know, I'm going to weigh Marxist theory and figure out a path to join the union, great. If someone in the math department says, I'm going to do a cost benefit analysis and that's how I'm going to join the union, you're fine with that as well. So in some ways, you're less interested in the motivations and the reasons that people have. And as you said, much more pragmatic about the end goal.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's exactly right. I wasn't going to convince the English graduate student to not embrace critical Marxist theory. I wasn't going to convince the math graduate student to be less analytical. Like, those were givens. I had maybe 30 minutes to go from where they're at to them seeing my perspective on this issue or at least, you know, considering agreeing with me. And that meant meeting them where they were and paying them that respect.

• 26:29Shankar Vedantam?

  Rob realized his first job in trying to persuade someone was not to marshal all the arguments at his disposal. It was to find some way to make a connection with the other person.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  I think that for me, these conversations would go better if I had something I could tap into from my own background, my own personal experience, that would allow me to sort of build that bridge to their perspective. The way I often think about this is that empathy or perspective-taking, it's like a bridge you build between people and the blocks that you're using to build it are pieces of your own experience. You can say, "Oh, you know, I know about Marxist theory, too. Let's talk about this." You know, or, "Oh, I've actually engaged in a cost-benefit analysis on this, too. You know, let me know what you think of what I did. Here's what I came up with." And when you've got those blocks, it goes a lot easier, once you figure out where you need to be building towards.

• 27:23Shankar Vedantam?

  That wasn't the hardest part, though. Rob realized that when he was trying to persuade people, he needed to have conversations with them. Conversations where he wasn't doing all the talking.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  It really is helpful to establish some sort of basic respect, a basic emotional connection of like, "I'm respecting your perspective, and I have enough intellectual humility to be also listening to you." And also that I'm open to persuasion in this conversation as well. Because if you signal really early in the conversation that you're not open to changing their mind, you're asking a lot for the other person to be open to it. And if there isn't a power imbalance that dictates that they have to, they're going to withhold that openness if you're not showing it as well.

• 28:16Shankar Vedantam?

  There are many reasons it's hard to come across as open. When we care passionately about something, it becomes hard to see things from other points of view. The more we care, the harder it becomes to see that our perspective is just our perspective, not the only perspective.

• 28:36Shankar Vedantam?

  Second, many of us unconsciously assume that others know the same facts and information that inform our views. We forget other people have been exposed to different information, sometimes radically different information.

• 28:54Shankar Vedantam?

  To make things even more complicated, what our opponents believe is not just about the information they've received. Their beliefs are also shaped by their unconscious drives and motivations. If we don't know how they came to their positions, we might never understand why they believe what they believe.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  That's right, yeah. And so if you're debating with somebody about an issue you disagree with them on, where you'd like them to come over to your side, but your arguments are entirely in terms of your moral worldview, you know, your background, your ideology, your cultural perspective, and you're making those kinds of arguments, and they have a different background, a different ideology, you know, a different worldview, you're essentially asking them to really be someone they're not, you know, like to not just agree with you on the thing in question, but also to change their deeply held moral values, for example. But asking somebody to give up their moral values, you know, people are willing to fight and die for their values, right? Like, people really, really are invested in not changing their minds about that.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  So if the argument you're presenting to them requires them to change their values, you are taking on a much bigger task than just changing somebody's mind on minimum wage law. And you could prosecute your case better if you made an argument that could fit with their values rather than challenge them.

• 30:15Shankar Vedantam?

  So there's something of a dilemma here, Rob, which is when we feel really passionately about something, when we're really upset about something, or we're in disagreement with someone, and that could be a romantic partner, or a coworker, or even a political opponent, the angrier and more upset we get, the harder it becomes for us to see things from another person's point of view. And you're saying that's precisely the point at which we need to see things from another person's point of view if we're going to have any effectiveness. There seems to be a real dilemma here, a paradox.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there is. And it's a very difficult thing, because it's exactly those people who are motivated to change the views of others who then have this motivation that can get in the way. Why? Because they can become angry at the person they're talking with. They can become impatient. And these are all understandable reactions. There's nothing wrong with feeling strongly about something. It's a good thing, I think. I feel strongly about a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff makes me angry, too. It's kind of, what do you do then? You know, and what goal are you trying to pursue? And if the goal is persuading somebody, you may need to down-regulate that emotional reaction and focus on getting into that person's head in order to construct an argument that would be persuasive to them.

• 31:30Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, we ran an episode featuring the research of the psychologist and neuroscientist Kurt Gray. And he talked about the importance of moral humility. We talk a lot about intellectual humility, the idea that we may not know everything and that we might be wrong about the things that we think we know. But moral humility is about emotionally accepting that the feelings of the people who think differently from us are valid. You talk about this idea, too. Tell me about your notion of moral empathy.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, so one thing that we find in our research is that people whose political worldviews are rooted in their moral values, who really deeply moralize their perspective on some political issue, they are the ones that especially struggle to understand the perspective of people who disagree with them and to understand that the most persuasive appeal would be one that might not be persuasive to them. That does mean you're wrong if you have that kind of moral investment. But it does mean that it's going to be hard to connect.

• 32:32Shankar Vedantam?

  Can you talk about sort of the role of our own emotions here? In some ways, partly, you know, we're so angry and so upset and so outraged about things that it becomes very difficult for us to say, you know, what do I have in common with these people on the other side of the barricades?

• 32:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, once you have a strong connection to your political identity, it becomes very easy for you to trigger this, for you to experience this emotionally laden frustration, even contempt for the people on the other side of the political divide, people that have a rival political identity. And when you realize you're in an interaction that is connected to those identities, you now import, and they may too, all of this baggage from all the thinking you've been doing about how frustrated you are with these other folks. And so you're not just having a conversation about, you know, school zoning or whatever you think you're discussing. You're bringing all this other stuff into it, too.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  You're also thinking about gay rights, and you're also thinking about race in America, and maybe economic inequality, and immigration, and what you saw last night on MSNBC or Fox News, and what they probably saw. And once all that stuff is brought into the debate, things get really, really difficult to resolve in a constructive way.

• 33:55Shankar Vedantam?

  Connection and moral empathy are prerequisites for persuasion. If you want to change hearts and minds, you have to understand what's in those hearts and minds to begin with. Most of us try to bypass this requirement, focusing only on what's inside our own heart and our own mind. When we come back, strategies we can all learn to become more persuasive. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 34:29Speaker 03

  With the Discover Cash Back Card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5% cash back at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases. That's 5% cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply. See discover.com/five for details.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's premium wireless is $15 a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores. That means no small talk. Crazy weather we're having. No, it's not. It's just weather. It is an introvert's dream. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch.

• 35:18Speaker 04

  Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan. $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only. Then full-price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.

• 35:29Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. The popular Christian prayer, the prayer of St. Francis, offers the following suggestion. It is more important to understand others than to be understood by others. That's good advice, and not just from a spiritual point of view. It turns out to be psychologically insightful when it comes to our ability to influence others. At Stanford University, Rob Willer studies the psychology of persuasion. Rob, we've looked at how we're often ineffective when we try to ram our ideas down other people's throats. But you run experiments where you measure what effects forceful arguments have in helping us to recruit allies. Can you tell me about this work?

• 36:12Speaker 02

  Yes, so some of the work that we've done on this has focused on the tactics used by activists that are agitating for social change on some kind of a cause. And what we found in our experiments is that people tend to have negative reactions to what we describe as extreme protest tactics. So this would be like the destruction of property, extreme disruption of the flow of everyday life for people, and certainly the use of violence. So when activists engage in even a relatively small amount of this form of activist behavior, it tends to put people off. So observers who are kind of watching protesters, trying to figure out how should they position themselves on this issue?

• 36:56Speaker 02

  Will they be persuaded by the protesters or not? When they see those kinds of tactics, they tend to view the protesters as less moral. They disidentify with them. And they not only are not influenced by them, they can exhibit a sort of negative influence pattern where they turn away from the positions and policy platforms of protesters.

• 37:16Shankar Vedantam?

  So in one study, you posed a scenario about animal rights protesters. Volunteers read an excerpt that said activists had broken into a cosmetics testing lab, drugged a security guard, ransacked the place, and spray painted messages on the walls of the building. They also freed hundreds of animals. How did volunteers respond to this story?

• 37:35Speaker 02

  So volunteers were turned off by activists who engaged in these extreme—I mean, this is in some ways just about the most extreme activist tactics we've ever presented to participants in studies. They were turned off, saw these activists as more extreme, and turned away from animal rights as a cause that they supported. However, if those same activists were portrayed in another condition of the experiment as not engaging in these sort of violent tactics, but instead engaging in peaceful, nonviolent resistance, the reaction was very different. They were not seen as extreme, and it didn't lead to this negative influence effect.

• 38:13Shankar Vedantam?

  So in other words, people were not rejecting the activists because they necessarily disagreed with the cause, but because they disagreed with the methods?

• 38:21Speaker 02

  That's right. And we've tried really hard in this research to, whenever possible, control for the message, control for what policies are being advocated for by activists, and only experimentally study and vary how they're making their case, what sorts of tactics they're engaging in, because that's the thing that we were interested in.

• 38:41Shankar Vedantam?

  So in another study, you had some volunteers read about a Black Lives Matter protest. Some volunteers heard activists protesting against racism, others heard about activists who used a chant in an actual protest. I want to play you a little clip.

• 38:56Speaker 05

  Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon. Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon. Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon.

• 39:05Shankar Vedantam?

  The protesters are saying "pigs in a blanket fry 'em like bacon," a derogatory reference to police as pigs. Now, saying angry things about the police doesn't seem as extreme as drugging a security guard, but what effect did this language have on potential allies?

• 39:21Speaker 02

  So in this research, we found that that kind of language had a similar effect, just in terms of also creating this negative influence effect. It wasn't as large of an effect, if I recall correctly, but it was, it did tend to turn observers away from, from the cause of, of police reform.

• 39:39Shankar Vedantam?

  It seems that there's a dilemma here in some ways, which is that I think protesters feel, just like we often feel in interpersonal arguments, that the more passionately we make our argument, the more likely we are to persuade someone else. I think at the level of groups, we also believe that the more passionately we pursue our cause, the more likely we are, not just to convince our opponents, but to attract allies to our cause. And I think your research is suggesting that that might not always be the case.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. We call it the activist dilemma to really describe, you know, these many dilemmas that activists face in trying to take effective action in the world. We found that when we surveyed a small sample of self-identified activists, that they tended to think that the more extreme protest tactics would be more persuasive to bystanders, not less persuasive, as our research had found. Why did they think that? Well, perhaps because those protest tactics matched their own, you know, viscerally felt, you know, motivations better. And so for them, that was maybe a more relatable set of protest actions, as you say, oh yeah, that'll be more persuasive, that that reaction makes sense.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  That's how you should protest this issue that's totally outrageous. And that's not to say they're wrong. They may be very right about the flaws of the status quo. I tend to agree with many, many activists on these things. But the challenge is that certain tactics do turn off potential supporters in a way that can be, on the whole, counterproductive for a cause.

• 41:06Shankar Vedantam?

  You say that one way to become more effective at persuasion is to employ something that you call moral reframing. And you've run studies where you test the effectiveness of messages that use moral reframing. Can you explain what it is and what the studies have found?

• 41:23Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah. So, moral reframing involves recasting an argument for a political position that you're advocating for in terms of the moral values of the people that you're talking with. And so, this might seem incredibly intuitive, like, of course, you should frame your argument in terms of the values of the person you're trying to persuade. You know, after all, if you were trying to sell a car, let's say, you would talk about the value of the car for the person you're trying to sell the car to. You know, you'd talk about its reliability, you'd talk about its good features. You wouldn't talk about how excited you were to get their money and all the stuff you wanted to spend it on. You would easily transcend your perspective to get into the perspective of the recipient.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  But with politics and, you know, religion, these things that we have deep moral investment in, we really struggle to do this.

• 42:12Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering if you can give me some examples of ways that people on different sides of the political spectrum pick a couple of hot-button issues. What are ways in which people can speak to someone from the other side using the moral frameworks of their opponents rather than their own moral frameworks?

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah. So, one of the first issues that we took on with this research was same-sex marriage. And we were interested in whether the typical arguments for same-sex marriage that are made, that are in terms of values like social justice, fairness, equality, that maybe they're not as persuasive as they could be with conservatives because they don't, they don't target deeply-held conservative values. And maybe you could make more persuasive arguments that tapped into things like loyalty and patriotism, these more like uniquely conservative values. And so, we tested this by presenting conservatives with either fairness and equality-based arguments

• 43:09Speaker 02

  on, you know, in support of same-sex marriage, or these very different arguments in terms of patriotism. So, this argument said, things like same-sex couples are proud and patriotic Americans, they share the same basic hopes and desires as all Americans, like other proud Americans, gay couples peacefully build lives together, buy homes, and contribute to the American economy and society. And what we found was that conservatives who heard that patriotism and loyalty-based argument were more supportive of same-sex marriage afterwards. It reduced polarization on same-sex marriage and in favor of the liberals' position on it.

• 43:49Shankar Vedantam?

  Rob also tested his strategy of moral reframing on the other side of the aisle. He gave liberals an argument about increased military spending. But this argument wasn't a traditional one about patriotism and protecting our borders. Rob and his colleagues presented an argument that focused on more stereotypically liberal values like equality and social justice.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  And it said things like, through the military, the disadvantaged and the poor can achieve equal standing. And being in the military means having a reliable salary and a future apart from the challenges of extreme poverty and inequality. And so this argument really tried to say that you could see the military as a vehicle for upward mobility for people that struggle to access the kinds of resources and experience that they can gain through the military. It's the kind of argument that might persuade a liberal. And we found that when liberals heard this argument, they supported high levels of military spending more.

• 44:46Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering whether you ever get pushback on this, Rob. Do people who feel very passionately say, you know, Rob Willer is telling me that I need to tone down what it is that I'm saying, that I need to actually look at things from the point of view of my opponents, and these are people whom I not only disagree with, these are people whom I despise?

• 45:04Speaker 02

  Right, yeah. No, we've definitely gotten pushback on this research. I think sometimes people mistake my motivation as one that's critical of your average protester or activist or is interested in doing tone policing. And it's really not the motivation that brings me to the research. Instead, I am very interested in what kinds of tactics and strategies for achieving social change are more or less effective. And I'm also really interested in ways in which it can be really complicated and more complicated than you might think from just reading like our first paper on extreme protest tactics.

• 45:45Shankar Vedantam?

  Some years ago, Rob had the chance to put his own research to the test. He was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and had parked his car on campus while he went on a trip to the East Coast. The morning after he flew back to California, Rob went to retrieve his car from the parking lot. There was just one problem. He couldn't find it.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  And I could not remember if I had even driven it the day before because I was kind of tired and running errands. And I just wasn't sure where my car was and whether it had been stolen or whether I had just left it somewhere. And the car was so old and, you know, just rundown that it seemed unlikely it was stolen, you know? It seemed more likely I had left it somewhere, even though that's a very spacey thing to do. And I remember I went to like the local grocery store and I was like, hey, did you guys tow a car from this parking lot by any chance? And the person was like, you're telling me you don't remember if you parked your car here yesterday?

• 46:45Shankar Vedantam?

  The absent-minded professor here.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd use that crutch, you know, of like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absent-minded, you know, they're like, oh, yeah, I had a roommate that was like you. And I was like, could you just tell me if you towed the car?

• 46:57Shankar Vedantam?

  They hadn't towed the car. Rob had no idea where it had gone, and he had little time to think about it. He was scheduled to teach a class in Germany for a week and a half. Rob went on his trip and reported the car stolen, planning to take care of it when he got back. But when he returned home, he discovered that the police had been trying to contact him. The stolen car had been found and had been dropped off at an impound lot in Oakland. Rob hitched a ride with a friend and went to the lot.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  And it's just this kind of Mad Max dystopian scene. You know, like, all these cars are, like, falling apart. It's all barbed wire. And it's very razor wire. It's very intense. And I go in, there's behind like two inches of bulletproof glass is this person that's working at the impound lot. And I ask him, you know, about my car. He's like, yeah, we've got your car.

• 47:52Shankar Vedantam?

  Rob's car was in terrible shape. It was falling apart, missing a catalytic converter, and, for some reason, there was an empty bucket in the backseat. Rob had no time to ask questions. He was ready to leave the automotive purgatory. But when he went to fill out his paperwork, the clerk delivered some bad news. Rob owed $600, the fee for holding his decrepit car at the lot, for days on end.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  It just doesn't seem fair. You know, like I was out of the country. I don't know if this helps at all. And he's like, yeah, it's going to be $600. And I was like, you could keep the car. Would you keep the car? Would that be, would that neutralize my debt? Because it's, to me, it's not worth $600, especially in this condition. And I remember the guy was like, yeah, we'll keep your car, but you would still owe us $600.

• 48:43Shankar Vedantam?

  Rob's blood was boiling. He felt the way he did all those years ago, an exhausted young restaurant worker, angry at his roommate for intruding on his sleep. But this time, instead of throwing a shoe, Rob stopped.

• 48:59Shankar Vedantam?

  He thought for a moment. He considered what it might be like on the other side of that bulletproof glass.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  And so I asked him, I was like, what percentage of people like freak out right now in this conversation? And he said like 70% of people.

• 49:16Speaker 02

  And I was like, cool, all right.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  You know, the reason I was interested in that was because at this time, I was teaching Introduction to Social Psychology, and I was giving this essay assignment to, you know, hundreds of students every year. But it also made me very interested in, you know, at what rate do people make the right choice here, you know? And, and when he said 70%, I was like, okay, I'm going to do my best to not be in that group, you know?

• 49:46Speaker 02

  And I turned to my friend and we start trying to strategize. What are we going to do? You know, like, is my car drivable? If it's not drivable, could we sell it from the parking lot of the impound lot? You know, like, what, what are we going to do to solve this dilemma? And, and the guy behind the glass starts looking up like the blue book value for the car and, and quoting us, you know, what we could expect and giving advice on towers. And he's like really helping us. And I was like, oh, wow. You know, like, some of this is because We connected when I didn't do the easy thing that I was so emotionally tempted to do of unfairly going off on this guy and downregulated that and was a decent person instead. And he reciprocated and was really decent back. And it was me learning this lesson even a little bit more.

• 50:31Shankar Vedantam?

  And what happened to the car eventually?

• 50:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I donated it to charity. But yeah, it was so easy to break into. It was surprising that it had taken that long to be actually stolen.

• 50:44Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  And also, they had left my San Francisco Giants foam finger in the car. I guess they were A's fans.

• 51:00Shankar Vedantam?

  When Rob Willer is not negotiating with people about impounded cars, he's a sociologist at Stanford University. Rob, thanks so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 51:10Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 51:18Shankar Vedantam?

  Do you have follow up questions about strategies for working through difficult conversations or engaging with people who disagree with you? Have you discovered techniques that help you get across to folks on the other side of the political spectrum? If you'd be willing to share your thoughts, comments, or questions with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at [email protected]. Use the subject line engaging. That email address again is [email protected]. When we come back, a brand new installment of Your Questions Answered, a recurring segment where we pass the mic to listeners. This week, legal scholar Kenji Yoshino responds

• 52:03Shankar Vedantam?

  to your questions about identity and the parts of ourselves that we cover from the people around us. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  With the Discover Cash Back Card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5% cash back at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases. That's 5% cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply. See discover.com/five for details.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's premium wireless is $15 a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores. That means no small talk. Crazy weather we're having. No, it's not. It's just weather. It is an introvert's dream. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch.

• 53:15Speaker 04

  A $45 upfront payment for three-month plan. $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.

• 53:25Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you ever been out with a new group of friends, enjoying a meal together, when someone starts talking about music? Suddenly, all your friends get very excited. It turns out their musical tastes are very different from yours.

• 53:48Shankar Vedantam?

  They like rock music, and in particular, a band you've never heard of. Everyone seems to be naming their favorite song or telling a story about a time they got to see the group live in concert.

• 54:00Shankar Vedantam?

  You, by contrast, have a deep and abiding love of Broadway show tunes.

• 54:10Shankar Vedantam?

  And so you sit there quietly wondering, should I tell them how much my musical tastes differ from theirs? Or should I just nod and smile along, hoping this topic passes by quickly?

• 54:22Shankar Vedantam?

  We've all been in situations like this, where we have to decide whether to be transparent or keep our cards close to the vest. Sometimes, these moments are trivial. It's very unlikely your friends will stop talking to you because of your passion for the Phantom of the Opera or Wicked. But other times, we have to decide whether to reveal more sensitive parts of who we are. In a recent episode, we talked to Kenji Yoshino, a legal scholar at New York University. He studies how our decisions to soften or edit how we present ourselves to others can impact us and those around us. That episode was called "Dropping the Mask." In this edition of our recurring segment, "Your Questions Answered,"

• 55:07Shankar Vedantam?

  Kenji returns to the show to answer your questions on how to tap into our most authentic selves, even when doing so feels difficult. Kenji Yoshino, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

• 55:20Speaker 06

  Thank you so much for having me back, Shankar.

• 55:24Shankar Vedantam?

  Kenji, you use the sociological term "covering" to describe the behavior of hiding parts of ourselves from those around us. Can you remind us what covering means and how it can present itself in our day-to-day lives?

• 55:38Speaker 06

  Of course. Covering is a phenomenon of downplaying outsider attributes to make sure that the people around us can be more comfortable with us. So that could be modulating or editing or downplaying aspects of your identity that are outside of the mainstream in some way so that others can be more comfortable around you. It can range from the example that you gave of just social manners of feeling like, I'm a total outlier here. And my musical taste, should I reveal that or not? But it could also touch on issues that are what we think of as civil rights-type identities. So a woman who doesn't talk about having children

• 56:20Speaker 06

  or an African American who straightens her hair, that kind of activity as well.

• 56:27Shankar Vedantam?

  How is covering different from what is sometimes called passing?

• 56:31Speaker 06

  I'm so glad that you asked that, Shankar, because this is something that comes up over and over again as a misconception or confusion between the two terms. And I totally understand why the two terms might seem like they would merge into each other. But the big difference between passing and covering is that when you're passing, people literally do not know that you belong to the group. Whereas when you're covering, people know you belong to the group, but nonetheless ask you or pressure you to downplay or edit or mute it. And the reason I think this is so important is that only certain groups in our society have the capacity to pass, but everyone has a capacity to cover.

• 57:15Speaker 06

  So even the groups that are not able to pass with regard to that identity can often experience enormous pressure to mute or downplay or edit their identity so that they're more acceptable to the people around them.

• 57:30Shankar Vedantam?

  In our last conversation, Kenji, you told me that everyone covers and that precisely because all of us cover to some extent, this is an idea that can help to unify us, that we can look at the decisions that other people make to cover with compassion rather than criticism. What do you mean by this?

• 57:50Speaker 06

  We did a study with Deloitte and we found that 45% of straight white men reported covering. And on the one hand, I want to contrast that with the 79% of black respondents or the 83% of LGBTQIA+ individuals who reported covering. But this 45% statistic has always remained with me, Shankar, because it suggests how universal the covering demand is.

• 58:18Speaker 06

  So when I looked at that data point, I thought, well, how on earth do straight white men, ostensibly the most privileged cohort in our society, have to manage or modulate their identity? And the data was there, so we had answers. So among the top ways in which those individuals reported covering were things like age, religion, mentor, physical disability or illness, socioeconomic status, and even veteran status. And so, once you see that, it really becomes a universal project of human flourishing. This is not an us versus them dynamic where my capacity to be more open, authentic about

• 58:58Speaker 06

  myself diminishes anyone else's capacity to be open and authentic about themselves. So oftentimes, when I frame this, people hear it as an inclusion project or an us versus them project, and they respond by saying, well, I'm a straight white man, but I had to cover the fact that I came from a very straight and socioeconomic background, so why aren't I included in this paradigm or this idea? And I always say to them, of course, you are included in this idea. There's nothing that would bar you from being included in this. In fact, a pure rigorous analysis of what covering is, which is, again, asking people to downplay an outsider identity so that others around them can feel more comfortable

• 59:42Speaker 06

  around them, would exactly apply to the person who could be an investment banker today as a straight white man, but grew up in a trailer park and feels like he has to manage that in his day-to-day interactions with others.

• 59:55Shankar Vedantam?

  Let's turn to the listener questions. A few listeners wrote in to ask about how covering relates to imposter syndrome. Have you noticed an overlap in these psychological experiences, either anecdotally or in your research, Kenji?

• 1:00:10Speaker 06

  Absolutely. I think that these ideas are very allied to the idea of covering. So I think of imposter syndrome as, you know, I feel like I am an imposter in my job. So let's say I'm a law professor and I feel like I don't deserve to be one. I feel like everybody else around me is unbelievably competent and good at what they do. And I'm simply not up to scratch. And so I have to fake it till I make it. Right. And that sort of gets at exactly the same concern that I'm trying to get at with covering. Because I think we have to ask the question of which is the more healthy community? Is it one where I feel like an imposter and I keep that to myself?

• 1:00:51Speaker 06

  Or is it the environment in which I say, I do feel like an imposter? And I share my concerns with others. And they, more often than not, in my experience, share back to me, oh, that's how I feel as well. Or that's not how I feel now, but that's how I felt when I was just starting out. You know, as you were just starting out, if I'm, you know, new to the scene.

• 1:01:12Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:12Speaker 06

  So I think it's pretty obvious, at least to me, that it's a much healthier organization or society in which we can all be candid about who we are. And, you know, the vulnerabilities that we have, because that is just part of the human condition. To be human is to be vulnerable. To be human is to sometimes feel like you're an imposter. To be human is to sometimes feel the need to cover.

• 1:01:37Shankar Vedantam?

  So the United States is facing a lot of governmental upheaval and political tensions at the moment. And this has led families and friends to sometimes find themselves on opposite sides of the political divide. Quite a few listeners wrote in about that experience, including listener Claudia, who finds herself avoiding the topic of politics with friends who do not share her views.

• 1:02:00Speaker 07

  But I feel very strongly about politics and what is happening in the United States right now. In fact, I feel it's really a major part of my identity. And even though those friends kind of know, because they know me, that I must be liberal, I never talk about that. I never bring it up because...

• 1:02:29Speaker 07

  I just can't face upsetting people. And I feel badly about that. I feel inauthentic because of that.

• 1:02:41Speaker 06

  I really appreciate the honesty and the obvious passion that Claudia is bringing to this. So I first want to thank you, Claudia, for that question. And note that you're certainly not alone. I get this over and over again. And in some ways, it has pushed me to try to think more deeply about this. Because my original answer was, if you're dealing with this at the organizational level, that organizations have a very legitimate interest in asking people to tamp down their identities with regard to politics. So just to elaborate, I came down to that conclusion by asking myself this question

• 1:03:26Speaker 06

  of, are there forms of covering that are actually beneficial or good? And my thought was, well, of course there are. Like, if I showed up, you know, at your organization tomorrow, Shankar, and was rapidly obnoxious to everybody, and you said, Kenji, you got to knock it off. You're driving everyone to distraction. And I said, well, I just happen to be an incredibly obnoxious person. And you told me that I could uncover my authentic self. So what's the problem? And so, obviously, some forms of covering are not only neutral, but actually beneficial to the smooth functioning of an organization or a society. So then the million-dollar question becomes, if I'm admitting that some forms of covering

• 1:04:09Speaker 06

  are good and some forms are bad, then how do we winnow out the good from the bad? What is the touchstone that we would use? And my touchstone has always been community or organizational values. As we get more and more polarized as a society, could we find a way, even if it's not my workplace, if it's my social group, to find a way to speak to each other across these divides? Because, as Claudia was saying, it is a core part of many of our identities. We feel inauthentic when we leave that aside, and we rub elbows or engage with people without divulging that about ourselves. And ultimately, it really prevents us from seeing the common humanity that we all share, despite really sometimes acrimonious disputes about our politics.

• 1:04:52Speaker 06

  So I'm all for this idea that covering your politics is a form of covering. And I'm increasingly of the view that we should find ways to uncover with regard to our politics so that we can actually have a bit of a detente in the polarized environment that we're seeing now.

• 1:05:12Shankar Vedantam?

  We've talked a lot about how covering can be used to minimize the parts of our identities that may reveal our lack of power. A listener named Louise wrote in to ask about that idea. Louise works in a job in which she interacts with people from very different socioeconomic backgrounds, from high government officials to citizens who are struggling to make ends meet.

• 1:05:34Speaker 04

  And I think in every conversation I have, I kind of put forward different aspects of my identity as a way of trying to like narrow the power differential to create a connection with someone, even if it means masking something that I feel is my authentic self, I still may do it because I want the other person to feel comfortable in that situation. So I'm just wondering about the nuances of how you use identities and what, whether covering is about the kind of really trying to mask marginalized identities only, or can be about just differential power in relationships.

• 1:06:16Shankar Vedantam?

  What do you think, Kenji? Can covering be used as an empathetic strategy to help others feel safer within a certain kind of environment?

• 1:06:25Speaker 06

  Absolutely. And this goes back to the not all forms of covering are bad, or even if, and this will take the previous analysis one step further, even if it is a harm and I experience it as a privation to my identity to have to cover, it's a competing goods analysis. So being my authentic self is a good, and I heard Louise saying that. But empathizing with others and creating a welcoming environment for others is also a good. So there may be times where she would feel, oh, I'm actually modulating my own identity in ways that I'm not perfectly comfortable with, but I understand why I'm doing it. I'm doing it in order to increase the comfort of the person that I'm speaking to, in particular

• 1:07:07Speaker 06

  if there is a power differential between me and that other individual.

• 1:07:12Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, I think especially when it comes to dealing with small children, all of us do this almost automatically, right? We don't speak to a three-year-old, you know, as if you were an adult. You actually try and speak to the three-year-old in a way that makes the three-year-old feel, you know, maybe, you know, I, this other person, this very large human being actually understands me. We sometimes, you know, get down on our hands and knees to get down to the level of the three-year-old. And all of those are, in some ways, forms of covering, right? We're covering the fact that I am basically four times as big as you are and eight times as old as you are, and I have very different interests, and I'm suppressing all of that in order to make a connection with you. And I think at an intuitive level, all of us understand that's exactly the way to behave.

• 1:07:54Speaker 06

  Exactly. And I think that when we sort of analyze covering, we want to take ourselves through a series of questions. So the first one is, am I covering at all? And we talked about, you know, many different ways in which we can cover our long appearance, or affiliation, or advocacy, or association. Even if we are covering, we might not experience it to be harmful. So the second question is, if I am covering, does it hurt? And we talked last time, I think, a little bit about Margaret Thatcher and how she seemed to cover her gender and her socioeconomic status but didn't experience it as a harm. So, big deal, right? You're just one of the lucky ones if it's a no-harm, no-foul kind of situation. But even if you are covering and it's hurtful, there might be situations where it's warranted.

• 1:08:39Speaker 06

  So you can ask, is there some other overriding good other than my own authenticity that's relevant here? And then if you get to the very bottom, the last question of, yes, I am covering, yes, it hurts me, no, there's no reason to justify this covering, then you're really at the bottom, you know, which is to say, when and how am I going to challenge myself or my society to allow me to bring more of my authenticity to the table? So I want to be really careful here in saying, again, I'm not saying that all forms of covering are bad. What I am saying is that oftentimes people say, well, this is just part of being a human being. What's the big deal, Kenji? We all have to adjust in order to fit into society. So this is universal. And I'm saying, what could the potential be if we could flip

• 1:09:24Speaker 06

  the script on that and say, because it's universal, it has the capacity to unify us around a culture of greater authenticity, so that no matter what our background is, we've all had this experience. We're at the very bottom of that flow chart that I just described. We're recovering where it hurts, where we think that there isn't a justification on the other side, and we often just grin and bear it. What would the world look like if we didn't do that and pushed again, you know, against the idea that we need to engage in this witless conformity simply for the sake of assimilation itself?

• 1:10:01Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Your Questions Answered, a segment in which we bring back researchers we featured on the show to answer listener questions. After the break, Kenji Yoshino will answer more questions about why we cover and offer ways to tap into our authentic selves. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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• 1:12:28Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Legal scholar Kenji Yoshino has spent decades thinking about how people mask their identities in order to conform to both real and imagined pressures from those around them. He's also thought a lot about how we can be ourselves more of the time. Kenji, in our original conversation, we talked about how the US has been described as a melting pot. To varying degrees, newcomers to the country feel pressure to assimilate into the culture. That assimilation often requires covering. A listener named Lexi had a question related to this phenomenon.

• 1:13:02Speaker 04

  A lot of us are, you know, multiple generations down of being a descendant of the melting pot and feel really lost because our specifics of our identities are really, are a mystery to us and elude us.

• 1:13:20Speaker 04

  So what if one really knows and can feel that they're covering a lot, but is very unsure of what they're covering? Because there's not this strong force underneath it of identity to want to break through. How does one uncover what they're covering?

• 1:13:44Shankar Vedantam?

  So it's a very interesting question, Kenji. Can you cover some aspect of your identity that is weakly held? Or not a part of your identity that you yourself understand fully?

• 1:13:56Speaker 06

  This is a really brilliant question. So I want to thank Lexi for this one as well. What I want to say is I think the answer is yes. And I think that the way we look at it is to begin with a false assumption about authenticity. Oftentimes, I think that people think of authenticity as there is this authentic self. Think of like a marble statue that's underneath a drape. And all I need to do if I'm covering is to whip off that drape, you know, off of my authentic self, and the statue will be there. And it's fully resplendent glory. And I will be able to show the self that I have always known existed to the rest of the world.

• 1:14:40Speaker 06

  What Lexi is pointing out is that that is not true for her. And in fact, I would want to offer that that's not really true for anyone. That ourselves are so fluid, so narrative and structured, that even over the course of a very short period of time, what we experience in ourselves to be the authentic core of who we are can actually change and morph over time. So this idea that we fully know ourselves and that ourselves are stable is a very strange assumption, that kind of statue under a drape assumption. Because where would the entire tradition of, say, you know, Western psychoanalysis be if that were true?

• 1:15:25Speaker 06

  Right? I don't fully know myself. You don't fully know yourself. And what Lexi is saying, perhaps simply more honestly than the rest of us, is that there are parts of herself that she doesn't understand. Or no. So, does the concept of covering still make sense if you yourself don't know what's underneath the drape? And I think that it can. And here's why I think it can. I think it can because I like to think of covering not as an adjective that modifies the noun performance, but as an adjective that modifies the word "demand." So I'm actually not interested in looking at other people and psychoanalyzing them and try to figure out whether they're covering or not, because the same behavior can be

• 1:16:09Speaker 06

  seen in two people, and one of them could be covering and one of them could not be covering. So it's pointless, and in fact, perhaps invasive and insulting for me to eyeball somebody and think I know exactly what's going on inside that person's head. So I actually don't like to think about covering that way as modifying a performance. I like to think about covering as modifying a demand. So my question is, when I look at the environment, does the environment seem inhospitable either to authenticity in general, or does it make a covering demand that says, say, in a male-dominated workplace, "You can be a woman in this workplace, but only if you cover any difference that you might have with regard to your parenting responsibilities, or we want you to be as

• 1:16:51Speaker 06

  tearless, or aggressive, or as analytical as the stereotypical male." And of course, many, many women are naturally that way. That's not the point. The point is that this demand is being made oftentimes reflexively, without any kind of justification behind it. So when we think about covering demands rather than covering performances, I think we get some traction on this problem of saying, "I actually don't need to know who I am," in order to say, "Actually, that demand seems really illegitimate to me, and the whole process of finding who I am is going to be much facilitated if those demands are retired."

• 1:17:28Shankar Vedantam?

  Covering is often a survival strategy that arises from the societal norms we face. This next question comes from listener Anne, who helps survivors of sexual abuse navigate life and work.

• 1:17:42Speaker 04

  There is such a recoil around the disclosure of sexual abuse that this holds the strategy of covering tightly in place for sexual abuse survivors. It is also true and well researched that healing and recovery comes through being acknowledged, accepted, and given the recognition that this thing that happened and this story lived with was no- Fault of the survivor. I wonder when our society, which causes so much sexual abuse, will also have the courage and opening to hear about it. Do you have any thoughts on this?

• 1:18:16Shankar Vedantam?

  I think Anne is getting at something of a catch 22 here, Kenji. It's important that we discuss topics like sexual abuse, but people who've experienced abuse don't always feel safe talking about it. How do we navigate this tension without putting, in some ways, additional pressure on the most vulnerable people who are the victims?

• 1:18:35Speaker 06

  Yes, it's a really deep problem. And I want to, again, thank Anne for that and to thank you for framing it as a catch 22. So if someone sort of recoils or has a negative reaction or stigmatizes being the victim of sexual assault in some way, that sends a really clear signal about how you're supposed to behave. But if you don't challenge it, then the covering demand will never go away. So how do we cut that cordial knot? I think the answer, Shankar, is allyship of just understanding that people who watch the covering demand transpire can intervene as allies, even if they haven't had the experience themselves.

• 1:19:16Speaker 06

  So very often, I see people reacting and thinking, well, this is a stigmatic comment made about sexual abuse, but it's not for me to intervene as an ally because I have not experienced this myself. So I don't really have standing or the kind of authority to step in and say, that wasn't great, what you said. Could you please rethink or rephrase that? But if you think about what the alternative is, which is then you're sort of stepping out of the field and forcing individuals who are themselves actually the victims of sexual abuse to speak up for themselves, then I think the case for allyship gets a lot stronger. So a lot of the work that we encourage people to do at my center is to say, please step in as an ally,

• 1:20:01Speaker 06

  but be smart about how you intervene. So say, I want to be careful because I'm not directly affected by this, but that comment didn't land well on me. For X, Y, Z reasons, can you please reframe or explain your comment? And so if we have like a whole sort of army of allies stepping in to not call people out, but to call people in on these covering demands that they're making, then I think we can make some real headway without unduly burdening the people who are most directly affected by those covering demands.

• 1:20:35Shankar Vedantam?

  As you know, Kenji, the Trump administration earlier this year ordered the end of DEI frameworks within federal and federally funded workplaces. DEI, of course, stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Listener Erin had a question on this shift in policy.

• 1:20:52Speaker 05

  In light of the current administration's shift away from DEI initiatives, have you observed or heard anecdotally any changes in how people experience or navigate covering in professional or social settings? For those of us who feel especially vulnerable right now, whether due to marginalized identities, neurodivergence, or simply the high personal and professional stakes of authenticity, what strategies or sources of encouragement might help us navigate these spaces while staying true to ourselves?

• 1:21:38Speaker 06

  So I want to be careful about this. I have so much to say because I am a lawyer and we run the only center that I know of on diversity, inclusion, and belonging out of a major law school. Or one of the few, I should be careful to say. So I first want to respond to this idea about DEI and how DEI has become a newly regulated field. And how the federal government has withdrawn support for DEI. So the executive orders, you know, the first one issued on January 20th shuts down DEI initiatives in the federal government.

• 1:22:18Speaker 06

  And that, of course, the president has authority to do because he sits on top of those workers. So it's the largest employer in the, in the United States. I don't want to undersell that at all, but I want to say that that is where the president's power is at, it's acme. When we get to the, you know, private sector or to universities, the capacity of executive orders to shut down diversity, equity, inclusion practices is much diminished. So I want to just make sure that we're all aware, like, of course, we need to comply with the law, but we shouldn't over comply when, you know, our values are being impinged on by those laws. So I'll leave the legal piece of it, you know, at that.

• 1:23:02Speaker 06

  But moving to the more kind of social piece of it, regardless of whether it's legal or not, I think what we're experiencing in this country is an enormous backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion. And that can often result in people feeling less safe to express kind of marginalized, you know, identities in the workplace. And I guess to that, you know, I'd say, you know, two things. I mean, one is that your capacity to either express your own identity or to express support for another person's identity is still perfectly legitimate, legal, you know, socially acceptable.

• 1:23:40Speaker 06

  Because really, the kind of crosshairs have been placed not on DEI absolutely, but rather on the more institutionalized forms of DEI. So when, you know, as a matter of institutional policy, a university or an employer says, you know, we're going to promote individuals, you know, of, from underrepresented groups by giving them, you know, a bump or a thumb on the scale, right, in the promotion process. That's really what's being attacked. My capacity to support a colleague, you know, against a probrious comment that's been made against them, that's still perfectly acceptable. So I should still be able to fully challenge those covering demands. And the final thing, second and final thing that I'll say about this is that I also

• 1:24:24Speaker 06

  think that this hearkens back to an earlier change, Shankar, that you and I had, which has to do with the universality of the covering demand. So that, I think that oftentimes when people feel chilled and say, you know, expressing their neurodiverse identity in the workplace, that that is because someone thinks, well, how come you get so much solitude for that identity, simply because it's a DNI identity? Whereas I don't get any kind of support for the fact that, you know, I'm the first generation of my family to go to college, or, you know, I, you know, came from a lower socioeconomic background.

• 1:25:06Speaker 06

  So simply because I tick the boxes of being a cisgender or a straight white man, like you think that I've never suffered anything in my life and all lights turned green for me all the way down the highway and that, you know, I'm always on the side of being an ally rather than somebody who has something to manage or cover myself. And I think we can all do ourselves a huge amount of good to say, let's just take it away from the DEI lens, which I think increasingly has just become associated with a zero-sum game of if I get a bump, then you get disadvantaged, which if you're talking about something like a university class is actually true, right? If you have a set number of people who can be admitted and one person gets a bump, then anyone else who doesn't get the bump gets disadvantaged.

• 1:25:49Speaker 06

  But covering isn't really like that, that if I can actually be more authentic, let's stick with the example of being neurodiverse, if I can actually be more open about that, and then someone says to me, well, why can't I be open about these other aspects of my life that I feel like, you know, there's no reason why society should force me to downplay these aspects of my identity, right? And I should be able to articulate them in our community. My answer to that is absolutely, let's have that conversation. Like, there's enough authenticity out there for all of us, and all of us are enriched when we don't sort of limit our aspirations or our identities on the basis of kind of what ...conformity. So I think we really need to move past this kind of melting pot

• 1:26:34Speaker 06

  ideal, which only ever worked for certain segments of society in the first place, to say it's actually more of a mosaic, you know, toss salad kind of approach, right? Where we say, actually, we all come into the society in these different ways and these different starting points. And the huge glory of American society is that there's so many stories and so many identities that people are bringing to the table. And so why would we want to shut down any one of those stories in the name of this kind of witless conformity?

• 1:27:08Shankar Vedantam?

  So in the course of this conversation, Kenji, I think I've come to see how subtle and nuanced the idea of covering is and how it comes in so many different guises and so many different shapes. We got a question from listener Eliana, who emigrated to the United States from Colombia when she was 20 years old. Here's what she told us.

• 1:27:29Speaker 04

  I felt very self-conscious that people would ask me where I was from. And as soon as I said I was from Colombia, they would assume that I was a drug dealer. So I remember vividly wanting to learn English as quickly as possible and with the least amount of accent as possible, so that people could not tell that I was an immigrant from Colombia, from Latin America.

• 1:28:00Shankar Vedantam?

  What do you think of this, Kenji? Is learning to speak a new language without an accent, can that be a form of covering?

• 1:28:07Speaker 06

  Again, it really depends on the experience of the individual. So what I didn't hear her say, but what I intuit from the fact that she called in to express it, right, is that she experienced that as some kind of harm, right? And it really goes back kind of beautifully to the catch 22 point that you referenced, because I view the real culprit here to be not Eliana, who's covering or not covering, but rather this assumption that people who are from Colombia are drug dealers. So it's that stereotype that we want to re- Retire. So obviously, there's nothing wrong with, you know, learning to speak sort of perfectly assimilated, you know, English. I don't think there's anything wrong with

• 1:28:48Speaker 06

  that. But I do worry that if people assimilate in those ways, then the underlying covering demand and, you know, illegitimacy of that demand never gets called out and challenged, right? So I want people to be able to rebut the idea of just because I say I'm from Colombia, it's kind of a ridiculous thing to think, right? But I understand where she's coming from, because I've seen these kinds of stereotypes myself of, oh, you must be a drug dealer. It's that that we want to contest. And I just want to note that the more we assimilate, the less that underlying demand is going to be contested.

• 1:29:23Shankar Vedantam?

  This last question comes from a listener named Jane, who writes, how do you help other people discover that they are covering and masking their true selves? I think this is actually a subtle and difficult question, Kenji, especially given the course of the conversation we've had. What do you think?

• 1:29:41Speaker 06

  I'm so glad that this question has come up, because oftentimes, people say, well, do you want me to go collar the nearest person in my life and say, you know, I don't think you're being truly authentic, or really truthful about, you know, the way you're presenting yourself to the world? And I absolutely am not recommending that. So I want to disassociate myself from that, you know, approach as vehemently as I can. But the thing that we can do is something that I will borrow from the incredible, you know, Harvard Business School professor, Amy Edmondson, who writes about psychological safety. And she defines psychological safety, you know, in the team context, is a team climate marked by mutual

• 1:30:22Speaker 06

  respect and interpersonal trust, in which people feel comfortable being themselves. So the way you get somebody to uncover, it's a little bit like asking a bird to eat from your hand. You know, you don't like force feed the bird, right? You just create the environment around the bird, so that the bird feels safe enough to do something that might otherwise make it feel quite vulnerable. So it's really about creating the surround sound around individuals, which might actually include, right, sharing your own Stories so that people know that this is an environment in which those stories are, you know, welcomed and cherished, right? Rather than sort of derided as wise as person bringing a personal matter into a professional environment, for example. So creating the environment around the person

• 1:31:05Speaker 06

  that makes it safe if and when they choose to share, to lean into their authenticity.

• 1:31:16Shankar Vedantam?

  Kenji Yoshino is a legal scholar at New York University. He's the author of Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights. Along with David Glasgow, he is co-author of Say the Right Thing: How to Talk About Identity, Diversity, and Justice. Kenji, thank you so much for joining me again today on Hidden Brain.

• 1:31:34Speaker 06

  Thank you so much for having me back.

• 1:31:46Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

• 1:32:05Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is turning 10 this year, and to celebrate, we're hitting the road. Join me as I share seven key insights I've learned in the first decade of the show. Go to hiddenbrain.org/tour for more information and tickets.

• 1:32:24Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

• 1:32:40Shankar Vedantam?

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