Many thanks to LN for translating this essay from Invandring och mörkläggning:

Sunday Chronicle: If you want to change people’s minds, you have to talk to their elephants

by Karl-Olov Arnstberg
August 7, 2022

The American psychologist Jonathan Haidt is one of the most interesting thinkers of our time. This year, the publisher Fri Tanke has published in Swedish his 400-page popular science study of morality: The Righteous Mind.

One question that Haidt twists and turns is how we make decisions and act. He notes that most people distinguish between reason and emotion. This goes back to the Greek philosophers. They put reason first and despised emotionally driven people. A man who controls his emotions will live a life of reason and justice and can expect to be reborn in an otherworldly heaven of eternal bliss, while the man who fails to control his emotions will be reincarnated as a woman — at least if Plato is to be believed.

Haidt likes metaphors and describes the divided mind as a rider on an elephant. He chose an elephant instead of a horse because elephants are so much bigger and smarter than horses. The rider is your reason and for most of us it seems that reason rules. Or, at least that’s the desirable thing. When we can’t think, emotions rule. Some people are good at keeping their emotions in check and making rational decisions. Others give in to their emotions and things can go either way.

In Haidt’s metaphor of thinking, the elephant is in charge, although he or she may be open to the rider’s persuasion. The rider is very small and the elephant is very big. The task of the rider is to serve the elephant. Haidt writes:

The rider is our conscious reasoning — the streams of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of our mental processes — the ones that happen without our being aware of them but that actually control most of our behavior. The rider and the elephant work together, sometimes less effectively, as we stumble through life in search of meaning and coherence.

Automatic processes govern the human brain, just as they have governed animal brains for 500 million years. When humans developed the capacity for language and reasoning sometime in the last one million years, the brain did not reprogram itself to hand over the reins to a new, inexperienced driver. Rather, the rider was brought in because it added something that the elephant could use. Haidt writes:

The thinking system is not equipped to govern — it simply doesn’t have the power to make things happen — but it can be useful as an advisor. The rider is an attentive servant, always trying to predict the elephant’s next move. If the elephant leans the slightest bit to the left, as if preparing to take a step, the rider looks to the left and begins preparing to assist the elephant in its next leftward movement. The rider then loses interest in everything that is happening on the right side.

The elephant needs the rider, among other reasons, to be able to see further into the future, to see the consequences of the elephant’s actions. In this way it can help the elephant make better decisions in the present. It can learn new skills and master new techniques, which can be used to help the elephant achieve its goals and avoid disasters. And, most importantly, the rider acts as a mouthpiece for the elephant, even if that doesn’t necessarily mean he or she knows what the elephant is really thinking. The rider constructs after-the-fact explanations for everything the elephant has come up with.

Here Haidt adds another metaphor. Now the elephant is a politician and the rider is his full-time press secretary whose job is to present the politician’s views and actions in a positive way, but also to defend the politician. However, the press secretary is not receptive to arguments. Something you will never hear is “Well, you’ve got a point there! Maybe we should reconsider this decision.” A press secretary does not have the power to make or review policy decisions.

The intelligence quotient (IQ) is by far the most important variable in how well people argue. Smart people can be very good press secretaries, but they are no better than others at coming up with arguments for the opposing side. People use their intelligence to support their own arguments rather than to explore the whole issue more fully and impartially.

Returning to the elephant and the rider, the rider is good at finding reasons to justify what the elephant is going to do next. Once humans developed language and started using it to gossip about each other, it became extremely valuable for the elephants to carry around a sort of full-time PR firm on their backs. Haidt writes:

You can see how the rider serves the elephant when people become morally numb. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they constantly struggle to create after-the-fact constructions that justify the feelings. Even if the servant (reasoning) returns empty-handed, its master (intuition) does not change his mind.

What guides the elephant are intuitions, inherited and experiential cognitions. They do not consist of reasoning that leads to a decision. We all make our initial judgments in a flash. Less than a second after seeing, hearing or meeting another human being, the elephant has already begun to lean towards or away from that person, and that leaning influences what it thinks and does next. Intuition comes first. The elephant listens to the rider, but only if the rider says something that the elephant wants to hear. Otherwise, the elephant turns a deaf ear.

Reason is the servant of intuition. Decisions are made by both animals and humans in the same way, by intuition. The constant question for the elephant on its journey through life is how to relate to the information it receives about life from its senses and from the rider. Should it be positive, which Haidt describes as leaning a little closer, or should it be negative and dismissive; that is, leaning away.

Haidt’s metaphorical description of what happens when we feel, reason and make decisions has great explanatory value for those who want to know what happens when people hold on to or change their minds. Imagine a parliamentary debate in which a number of politicians are arguing against each other. There is no chance that any of them will change their minds. The elephants lean away from their opponents and the riders make frantic efforts to refute their opponents’ claims. There is, however, little chance that those of us watching the debate on our television sets will change our minds. A tiny, tiny chance, because here too the elephants are in charge and we do not listen without prejudice. We are adept at finding fault with other people’s opinions but poor at accepting arguments that challenge our own positions.

Haidt writes that we all have confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out and interpret new evidence to confirm what we already hold to be true. People are fairly good at challenging claims that others make, but if it’s your belief, it feels like your property — almost like your child — and you want to protect it, not challenge it and risk losing it.

The chances increase if we discuss the issue with our friends, or if we listen to a debate among a number of friends. Then we are positive. If they are friends whom we respect and admire, then of course the chances are even greater. The elephant rarely changes direction as a result of objections from its own rider, but it can sometimes be guided by the mere presence of friendly elephants, or by good arguments given to it by the riders of the friendly elephants. The elephants are in charge, but they are neither stupid nor despotic. Haidt writes:

But friends can do what we cannot do ourselves: they can challenge us, give reasons and arguments that sometimes trigger new intuitions and thus enable us to change our minds. Sometimes we do this when we ourselves are mulling over a problem — when we suddenly see things in a new light or from a new perspective. Most of us don’t change our minds on a moral issue every day or even every month completely without pressure from others.

Haidt calls riders who are skilled at talking to elephants elephant whisperers, and singles out both former President Bill Clinton and the author Dale Carnegie as skilled elephant whisperers. In his famous book How to Win Friends and Influence People, Carnegie repeatedly urged readers to avoid direct confrontation. Instead, he advised them to “start out friendly,” to “smile,” to “be a good listener” and to “never say ‘you’re wrong.’” The persuader’s aim should be to express respect, warmth and an openness to dialogue before putting forward his or her own point of view. Haidt writes:

It is such an obvious thing, yet few apply it in their moral and political reasoning, because our righteous minds so easily connect the dots. The rider and the elephant work seamlessly together to fend off attacks and throw their own rhetorical grenades. The performance may impress our friends and show our allies that we are loyal team members, but however watertight the logic, it will not change our opponents’ minds if they are also in combat mode. If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political issue, you need to see things from both that person’s point of view and your own. And if you really see it the other person’s way — deeply and intuitively — you may even feel your own opinion change. Empathy is the antidote of righteousness, although it is very difficult to feel empathy if the moral divide is wide.

— Karl-Olov Arnstberg